Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Catholic Church really needs to do some work on itself

B'H
There are big problems for the Catholic church in Australia with this latest spat of child abuse cases bursting from the woodwork like maggots from a rotting corpse being dug up after a few weeks in the ground. It just goes to show that you deal with problems now before they get bigger and more rotten by the week, day, hour or minute. Up to 70 % of an order of priests are connected to child abuse. Shocking, but it appears to be that more than a few paedophiles found a literal 'garden of Eden' in the young, very vulnerable children that they had access to unhindered in homes set up to help and 'nurture kids in poor or no family situations. They were able to abuse at will because they were in a position of trust and power within this organisation. Who would believe a little boy of ten or eleven when he says that the priests had taken him away for an orgy of buggery? There is an old saying that 'birds of a feather flock together'. How very apt when applied in this case. These kids with no real family to look out for them were ideal victims. They could be raped and abused with ease and when they became substance abusers because of the abuse, well, they were bad boys to begin with weren't they, telling lies about the priests?? Think about what happened and it makes your blood run cold.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/pell-urged-to-close-order-over-abuses-20121111-296ng.html

Dr Michelle Mulvihill who actually at one time worked for the order in dealing and negotiating with child abuse victims, has apparently stated, over 75% of this particular Order of St John are paedophiles of the worst type who pack raped vulnerable children and possibly killed two boys, apart from the boys whose death by suicide because of childhood abuse is possibly not attributed to the abuse they suffered in a home run by these insidious people. Often these sick individuals will find ways to blame the victims as they are shifted from parish to parish to parish as the Catholic Church protects these vile individuals hiding in the folds of their priestly cassocks. 
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/list-grows-of-abusers-moved-from-parish-to-parish-20121111-296ht.html

One wonders how the Catholic church can produce people like Mother Theresa and people who devote themselves to helping others and then protects the social filth or bottom of the barrel scum like Father David Daniel or a Father Terence Pidoto? It does not make sense.  If we protect this scum in society and allow religious organisations like the Catholic church to defend these evil people, then we are doing a disservice to our future generations.
I think the problem probably lies within the Catholic Church itself. One wonders how an organisation that insists its priests and nuns not marry is able to adequately understand and support 'family' as an institution within its spiritual structure. Catholicism probably should have died a natural death centuries ago. However there is a level of hypocrisy within Catholicism that is astounding when you come to examine its philosophies and theology closely. Most of the Catholics I know are lapsed ones. That tells you something. I went to school at PGC with one Catholic out of the school of 200 boarders. When I saw the film The Godfather I was intrigued by the aspect of Catholic forgiveness. This Mafioso boss goes and garrotes a guy and then goes and confesses to his priest and he is forgiven?? I asked Curly Morris who was our token Catholic at PGC, is that true, you can confess to the priest if you do something wrong and you are forgiven? Yep, she assured me. I somehow never found that an attractive option.
I grew up with the idea of consequences. My late father would have made a very good Orthodox Jew.  If you did something you did it right. If you made a mistake, you went back and corrected it and did it again and again until you got it right. If Dad built a fence, it was built to last and last a long time. If he welded a cattle or sheep crate for the back of a truck, it could properly last a century or more. Dad was not sloppy in his approach. He was never messy. His workshop was amazingly organised and neat. When I researched our ancestor Rachel Aaron I was not surprised to learn that her mother married to Yosef Aaron was descended from German Jews from Hamburg.  The Yeker strain - like attracts like.  My mother is Austrian and also a Yeker. Forgiveness for us in our family might happen on the rare occasion,  but we never forget a slight.  The family also having a strain of Irish Catholics on my father's mother's side must have mixed with some Jews somewhere in county Cork in Ireland because we just do not forget things. My father was fond of telling about two Irish great Uncles who ran a painting business down in Goodiwindi on the NSW Qld border at the turn of the 19th Century early 20th Century. They had a falling out for some forty years of their lives and still ran their painting business together. They communicated through a sister who lived with them and did their housekeeping. She was unmarried. I asked my father, when I was around ten or so, why didn't she just tell them to go to the buggery and elope and what happened when she died, how did they communicate? My father, very tellingly, told me that she knew she had to outlive them both and as for the other, well she also knew that she had to look after them as she was the oldest in the family. The females in the Kirby families tended to be overlooked in the marriage stakes because they were overprotected and needed in the family businesses or to look after the children of the married brothers. Kind of a sad state of affairs, but I have diverged.Let's get back to the Catholic Church and its role and responsibilities.
If you have institutions set up to look after vulnerable and defenseless children, don't hand them over to sicko priests with perverse tastes to administer. Find stable family people = an experienced mother and father who have had experience in raising kids to administer the home and hire suitable staff. It  is like letting a pack of hungry mice or rats take care of a drum of horse feed or a block of cheese.
Maybe priests and nuns should only be occupied in making olive oil, wine, cultivating orchards and such pursuits that do not involve the care of the vulnerable young of our societies.Even when the monasteries and nunneries were close to each other, many did not keep their vows of chastity. Under many of those nunneries have been found the corpses of fetuses and new born children probably strangled or smothered at birth. How convenient for the nuns to be wearing those long flowing robes. I guess they hid pregnancies very well and the priests and nuns could present the facade of chastity etc etc and go about their 'good works' during the day and go hell for leather at night with each other, then go to confession and its all OK  all forgiven and if a pregnancy resulted the babe could be disposed of at birth and thrown into the sewers that ran under the converts. The whole structure of such an organisation is rotten. However, at least they are hanging on to the vestiges of decency and are against gay marriages. That is something to be thankful for and a hint that there is some normalacy in the organisation. Unless some of the gay priests get in on the act and infiltrate the higher echelons of the church and all of sudden the Catholic Church will start to support gay marriage.
We need Torah and Torah values now more than ever in our society.
"Good fences make good neighbours", states the poet Robert Frost's neighbour  in his poem Mending the Wall. This adage is talking more about the setting of boundaries and understanding where we stop and the other person's property begins. Paedophile priests or child abusers do not have personal boundaries where their sexual desires are concerned and do not allow others to have them. They like the vulnerable children because the child does not know yet how to set boundaries or to enforce their personal boundaries when harassed by an adult who uses them for their own purposes. That is the pity. Children need to be healed from abuse and validated in their belief that the abuse was and is wrong. When we protect abusers of another person, WHATEVER age they may be, we hurt the victims more and allow the abuser to be validated in doing what he or she does. The abuser feels powerful and vindicated in his abuse, whereas the abused feels that he or she is somehow the one who is wrong and has somehow 'asked for the abuse' for any number of stupid illogical reasons.
We MUST start to protect the victims and NOT PROTECT abusers. I hope the Catholic church takes note of this.

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