Clare’s blog, aka rantspace

Cardinal Pell is, as we all know, all over the pages of the press again – this time for a “badly worded” letter (his words) that just happens to have come across as denial of an abuse victim’s allegations and the ongoing problem with the priest in question. You can read about it in more detail here and here and here. Quite apart from the questionable plausibility of his claim that though church lawyers had the tape evidence of the incident being non-consensual from 2005 they didn’t happen to mention it to him, to have dismissed the claim a) on the grounds of consensuality, and b) on the offender’s word, is both stupid and immoral. By 2002, when Anthony Jones brought his complaint to the church for the second time, church authorities had absolutely no excuse for accepting an alleged offender’s word unquestioningly. (And it must have been unquestioning, because it was directly opposed to the church’s own internal investigator’s assessment.) Moreover, it would appear that to Pell consensual homosexual sex between priest and parishioner is ok – which flies in the face of 1) his own conservative anti-gay stance, 2) the clearly understood power imbalance between clergy and parishioners, and 3) the priest being supposed to be celibate.

(Aside: How come politicians who support homosexuality and/or abortion bills get threatened by Pell with denial of communion, but a gay priest doesn’t?)

But what we must not forget is that this wriggling out of negative publicity on abuse issues is not the first time Pell has had to do so. It’s only a few years since he flatly denied that the church ever imposed gag orders (confidentiality agreements) on victims settling abuse claims – a denial he also had to make excuses for when the Daily Telegraph printed a double-page spread showing photos of the very gag orders Pell denied existed. His excuses then had a similar ring: the lawyers didn’t tell me, I really meant well, look at all I’ve done for abuse victims.

I know of at least one other instance, in 1994, when Pell’s assistant wrote to a victim denying prior knowledge or earlier correspondence with a victim of a De La Salle brother, but the then-head of the De La Salle order said that Pell had previously contacted him after receiving the complaint.

And further back still, when Gerald Ridsdale was at the height of his abusive career (for details, see his entry in my perpetrator list), Pell declared he knew nothing of Ridsdale’s activities, despite the abuse being common knowledge, and Pell sharing the presbytery – where many of the abuses happened – with Ridsdale for a year. Ridsdale has been convicted of multiple counts against 47 boy victims. Presumably Pell was either blind or stupid, or he turned a blind eye.

(Note: A fuller treatment of the Pell/Ridsdale links can be found here.)

How many times can one man be proven to have lied when he said “I didn’t know” and “I meant well” before Rome decides he’s a liability?

I invite anyone who has clear evidence of Pell’s duplicity to post it here as a comment.

Not a title that narrows it down very much, really, when we’re talking about the church! But in this case, it’s about the arrogance of conservative members of the worldwide Anglican communion (about 1000 in total, a quarter of whom are bishops), who are at present in a meeting in Jerusalem which will probably see them deciding to boycott the next Lambeth Conference. There’s a nice article in The Age which more than adequately demonstrates their arrogance. Here are some excerpts, along with explanations of the arrogance for those who aren’t attuned to seeing it:

1) Peter Jensen asserts that the conference members are “the true keepers of the authority of the Bible.”
Arrogance: To suggest that just because they think (oops, sorry – know) their interpretation of the bible is right, that they are somehow “the true keepers” of its authority! Surely it’s God who is the keeper of scriptural authority??

2) Jensen also says “the Christian church has a constitution which is the Bible…it’s as if you’re a member of a [club] and you decide to break the rules…That’s understandable to the man on the street, surely.”
Arrogance no.1: Jensen and his conservative cohorts, again, are asserting that the rules they decide are the right ones actually are.
Arrogance no.2: [Unspoken translation] “Even the idiots who are just ordinary people can understand this when I’ve explained it so clearly, can’t they?”

3) Jensen said the church would not reunite until the current divisions over human sexuality were resolved. “There is no reason why we should leave the Anglican Church because we have not shifted. It is others who have shifted.”
Arrogance no.1: Knowing that because they’ve believed it for years, they must be right. (Supporters of slavery justified that from the bible, too, until Wilberforce and others worked on persuading them to a new viewpoint, which they finally found more biblical.)
Arrogance no.2: The assertion that if unity is to be restored, it’s “those others” who will have to return to the conservatives, rather than finding ways to compromise or move forward amicably. (Even given their assumption that they’re right, it’s still not the way forward in a contentious issue to just keep telling the other party that they’re wrong and they have to change!)

This all leads to another blog entry (as yet unwritten) about the need (or not) for definition of who’s “in the club” and who isn’t, and – with regard to the church – who makes the definition and how.

It has been posited that, given the existence of god is unprovable, religious belief is caused by our own internal needs – suggestions often made are a fear of death, or an inchoate longing for something outside/beyond ourselves and our known world. But I’d like to run with a proposition made in a recent Mensa magazine (if only I could find the damn thing I could tell you by whom, and in which issue!). And that is, that belief in god is driven by a need for control. Control of ourselves (doctrine of heaven and hell gives motivation, and defined moral code gives method), but also control of events around us (propitiate things/people more powerful than us, and they hopefully won’t do bad stuff to us) and people (an established hierarchy allows control of lower ranking people by higher ranking people).

And this argument makes quite a lot of sense to me, particularly given the illogicality of some christian doctrines. Take, for instance, the idea of justifying why bad things happen to christians. If the world is purely random, there’s no dilemma, of course. But if there’s a loving all-powerful god in control, then there IS a dilemma. A god who requires that we do good automatically implies that those who do good are looked on more favourably – otherwise why bother? But a god who then allows those who do good to suffer, and has the power to intervene but chooses not to, is fundamentally inconsistent. A common explanation for that inconsistency is that we don’t understand all god’s purposes, and if we did, we’d understand why the bad thing (anything you nominate) happened. But that argument presupposes that we don’t really understand what defines love. That if only we saw the reason for something, it would make us say “oh, ok – I thought that was a non-loving action; now I see it’s actually loving”. Yet being able to recognise loving actions from non-loving is at the heart of christianity. We cannot be expected to act in a loving way (as is required by christianity) without understanding what “a loving way” is. And it doesn’t make sense to suspend that understanding when analysing our concept of god.

Take an example suggested by my uncle in a recent conversation. Remember Sophie Delezio – the little girl severely burned by a car crashing into her preschool, and later knocked flying on a pedestrian crossing? If Superman had been flying overhead when she was about to cross that road (the second incident), it seems highly likely that he would have swooped down and caught her up out of the way, thereby preventing a further round of suffering and operations for her. (We’re assuming, here, that Superman has the power to see all that would come out of either his action or non-action.) Our instinctive grasp of what would be a loving action is a protective action. Christians would probably say “ah yes, but god knows everything; he may have seen that it would be good for her to suffer”. Come again?? I thought god didn’t want us to suffer? Oh, that’s right – I forgot! Some good may come out of our suffering, such as helping others. Which is, of course, assuming that god is incapable of bring about good without making us suffer. A strange limitation for a supposedly limitless god!

Or another example – a friend of my uncle (the same one as previously mentioned) who was in a car accident, who now thanks god for [His]* protection of her, because her spinning car had a lucky escape from hitting a pole that probably would have killed her. But my reaction is – what sort of half-assed protection is that anyway? If god was out to protect her, why not prevent the accident entirely?

It seems to me that the only justification for believing in a god who can totally protect us but doesn’t, is in order to feel some measure of control over events – either directly or vicariously. And if someone wants to believe that, then they’ll find every possible logical or illogical argument to back it up when it’s called into question.

But getting back to the idea that christianity is intrinsically about control… Establishing moral codes is about control of society. Prayer is about control of events. Obedience to god is about control (through minimisation) of bad stuff happening. Conversion is about control of what our life after death will be. And church hierarchy is about control of those within the system.

And if this is so, then what alarms me is that it may be – by definition – impossible to eradicate exertion of control in church systems. And if you can’t eradicate control, you can’t eradicate abuse.

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*Footnote: I don’t believe in a male god, nor do I ascribe a capital letter to god’s pronoun; however, I do use such a term in the context of referring to the conservative christian construct of god.

Further note: The friend of my uncle, mentioned in the fourth last paragraph as being thankful for god’s protection in a car accident, is now – about 2 years later – suffering from a fatal brain tumour.  Personally, I would rather have gone quickly in the car accident!  And her church is praying for their own sinfulness because “the devil is attacking them”.  In other words, in order to justify a doctrine of a protective god, bad happenings have to be ascribed to either our own badness or some evil external agency.  See how a doctrine of an all-powerful, all-loving god leads to a) the necessity of a devil, and b) self-criticism?

Okay, so it’s not possible to limit the number of the Church’s most heinous sins to seven! Though I guess this one actually comes under the wider heading of no. 3 (see blog entry 30/4/08), it’s almost bad enough to give it an “8th sin” listing on its own – re-employing an abusive priest. Now in this instance (see The West Australian, p.3, 5/5/08 and Townsville Bulletin here) the abuse was confirmed “on the balance of probability” by an internal church investigation, the victim was offered compensation, and the priest had long since resigned from the priesthood, since when he has been working as a uni professor (not an unusual career move for an ex-priest). Criminal charges failed to proceed due to the age of the complaint.

But now the church employs him as director of their welfare agency, with duties including counselling child abuse victims, in Townsville – far removed from Perth, where the abuse happened and the victim lives. And the Archbishop of Perth says he can’t do a thing about it; it’s the Townsville archbishop’s decision. Well, sure – it is. But a) doesn’t Queensland have Child Protection laws, and b) how does anyone hold the Townsville archbishop to account for his choice?

And therein lies the fundamental problem of dealing with the church – they are widespread enough to make it very difficult to find out if an abusive priest has simply been moved somewhere “out of sight, out of mind” of the victim, and they are very nearly completely non-accountable. When even other archbishops can say “I can’t do anything about it” (whether true or not), what hope does a victim have?

Oh, and perhaps it’s just coincidence that the guy’s brother-in-law is WA’s Attorney-General…

Not necessarily in order of magnitude…

1. Abuse of power
2. Oppression of women
3. Concealing/protecting/tacitly encouraging abusive clergy
4. Demonising abuse victims who complain publicly
5. Enforcing a code of submission to church authority
6. Promoting internal myth as absolute truth
7. Self protection — including such things as a) maintaining public status by lies and political pressure, b) the accumulation of money for the furtherance of the organisation rather than the relief of the poor, and c) silencing questioning members by accusing them of lack of faith.

These cause the spiritual death – not of the church (I’m not sure that such an organisation has much spiritual life to start with!) – but of its adherents who suffer the effects of the sins.

Clergy abuse victims get criticised for going to court, but what else are they to do? In this case, the church made an internal investigation of child sex offences, but failed to refer the matter to police, thereby hiding a serious crime. In another case, the diocese (Catholic), in spite of appearing to support the victim’s claim, says “it’s not our policy to pay compensation”. But the Towards Healing program for compensating Catholic victims is a national one, and individual dioceses should be working on victims’ behalfs to ensure they get some redress through the program.

But when churches continue to hide crimes, and refuse justice and redress to victims, those victims have no other option but to seek justice in civil or criminal courts. And people wonder why we lose faith in the church!