Both the following articles came out yesterday in the UK Daily Telegraph as soon as Cardinal O'Brien's resignation was announced. One is written by orthodox Catholic Damian Thompson, the other by Brendan O'Neill, editor of the libertarian online magazine SPIKED, who describes himself as "an atheistic libertarian" but criticised opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom in 2010 as 'intolerant and fearmongerin'... What they say about the 'scandal' tends to show that the story is not all that black-and-white, or even grey at all...
Cardinal O'Brien gay sex 'scandal':
A hit job that succeeded beyond
the plotters' wildest dreams
By Damian Thompson
February 26, 2013
Cardinal O'Brien's downfall was carefully planned.
The Cardinal Keith O'Brien Downfall video had been ready to run for ages. The story of three priests and one ex-priest complaining of inappropriate behaviour was timed to break when the Scottish prelate retired at 75 next month. The aim was to expose his alleged hypocrisy.
To quote our blogger Stephen Hough, responding in the comments to his blog post yesterday, "I'm convinced that what he did (if he did it) was harmless enough, but he may not have thought it harmless if he'd caught other priests doing it … at least until this week."
[My P.S.: Someone who has been a friend of the cardinal for over 30 years raised a very pertinent point yesterday: Why did the cardinal's accusers not come out with all this earlier - 1) when he was appointed Bishop of St. Andrew and Edinburgh in 1985; 2) when he was named a cardinal in 2003; 3) when he hosted Benedict xVI during the Pope's state visit to the UK in September 2010, when his first stop was in Edingburgh and Glasgow. All these three decades, not a peep. And suddenly...]
If the scandal had come to light next month, that would have been nicely timed to ruin the Cardinal's reputation just when the media would be running retrospective pieces about him. And, of course, it would throw a spotlight on O'Brien's passionate opposition to gay marriage, effectively silencing the Scottish Catholic Church on this subject, and probably the Church in the rest of Britain, too.
What no one could have guessed is that Pope Benedict would resign, meaning that Cardinal O'Brien would be the only Briton with a vote in the next conclave. The Observer story was brought forward, with devastating results.
The four complainants had the good sense – and, arguably, the courage – to inform the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Mennini, of their claims. (Mennini, it should be noted, is not in the pocket of the British bishops to the extent that previous ambassadors have been.)
[Did they identify themselves to Archbishop Mennini?]
So the Vatican already had a file on Britain's senior Catholic churchman, and Pope Benedict, on being informed of its contents, decided to bring forward O'Brien's resignation as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.
[Was accepting the cardinal's resignation one of the matters discussed between Benedict XVI and Cardinal Ouellet at their last meeting on episcopal matters at the weekend? ]
In other words, the alleged victims of these inappropriate acts were helped by something that the Church's critics have often refused to recognise: Joseph Ratzinger's determination to purify the Church of sex abuse, right up until the last week of his pontificate.
Cardinal O'Brien's decision not to attend the conclave has thrown the Church into disarray: if he judges himself unsuitable to vote, how can Cardinal Roger Mahony, disgraced by cover-ups in Los Angeles, possibly be fit to do so? B
ut the implications in Britain are equally far-reaching. This country is in the middle of a debate about gay marriage in which, given the support of politicians and the media for the innovation, there is a shortage of public figures prepared to speak for the 50 percent of voters unhappy with the measure.
Until now, the Catholic Church has been given a respectful hearing. But today, with its senior clergyman accused of touching up young men after drink-fuelled "counselling"?
We do not, it should be stressed, know that the behaviour actually occurred. What we do know is that, thanks to this grubby scandal, gay marriage seems even more of an inevitability – and the Catholic Church's freedom to oppose it is suddenly looking more fragile.
The manner in which Cardinal O'Brien
has been deposed is more despicable
than anything he's alleged to have done
By Brendan O'Neill
February 26, 2013
What did Cardinal Keith O'Brien do that was so bad? He is alleged to have made inappropriate advances to young men when he was a teacher of priests in the 1980s.
But it is not a crime to make sexual advances to men over the age of 18. It is not child abuse (despite the best efforts of the press to lump O'Brien together with paedophile priests). Nor is what he is alleged to have done perverted in any way.
It can at best be described as stupid – and if everyone in Britain who has ever done something stupid was thrown out of their jobs, the nation would grind to a halt.
Ah, but O'Brien's alleged behaviour makes him a hypocrite, say his exposers in the liberal press as they desperately scrabble about for a PC justification for why they are depicting adult gay interaction as something sinister and sordid.
Perhaps it does make him a hypocrite, given his current stance on homosexuality. But perhaps not. We know nothing of Cardinal O'Brien's inner spiritual life. For all we know he may have spent the past 30-plus years repenting for that "inappropriate" behaviour in the Eighties, before deciding that, on balance, he thinks that homosexuality is wrong and wicked.
People change. People regret. Would we say St Paul was a hypocrite for criticising those who attacked Christians even though he spent his early life doing the same thing?
Now, what do we know about the allegations against O'Brien?
We know they are being made by anonymous individuals, which makes it impossible for O'Brien to defend himself. In normal justice scenarios, it is paramount that the accused knows whom he is being accused by so that he can prepare his defence.
We know the allegations are unsubstantiated, and will remain so for as long as the accusers are anonymous. They therefore linger in that limbo between rumour and truth.
We know the allegations were leaked by someone – perhaps one of the accusers or perhaps someone in the upper echelons of the Church – to the press, which immediately politicised them, allowing them to be used for the ideological end of getting one over on the Catholic hierarchy.
Thus did O'Brien find himself being subjected not only to anonymous accusations but also to a showtrial with a bigger agenda. We know the allegations have been cynically mashed together with recent paedophile scandals, with the Mirror showing Cardinal O'Brien next to "his friend" Jimmy Savile and the New York Times talking about O'Brien's behaviour in the same breath as the Catholic Church's "paedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse".
And so innuendo attaches itself to the allegations against O'Brien; he's effectively accused, not only of making foolish sexual advances, but of being one of Them: a perverted priest, a Catholic weirdo, an abuser of innocent souls.
In short, a man has been ousted from his job on the basis of anonymous claims that found their way into the press and were then blown out of proportion by people with an axe to grind. There is far more immorality in that than there was in O'Brien's original alleged behaviour.
In my view, Catholics have nothing to be ashamed of in this scandal; their cardinal erred 30 years ago – big deal. The people who should feel ashamed are us secularist democrats, who have allowed, or even partaken in, a fact-lite, innuendo-heavy assault on an individual and his reputation, which is unbecoming of civilised public discourse and better suited to the era of Inquisition.
Worst of all, we have allowed reporters to depict gay interaction between adult men as being akin to paedophilia and priestly abuse of children, which is really insulting to homosexuals.