I have no doubt some - perhaps even much - of what is recounted in this story is true, especially what people are quoted to have said. But journalists often get into an assignment with prejudices that shape how they cover the story and what they choose to report. That is why news accounts are almost always only partially true, or relatively true, generally subjective and hardly objective . That is very much the case here, where every line and word is weighted to put the Church in the worst possible light. And on this issue, secular media has chosen to be the Church's judge, jury and executioner.
New York Times Magazine says Irish
are turning their back on the Church
because of the sex-abuse scandals
By JAMES O'BRIEN
February 10, 2011, 8:54 PM
This weekend the
New York Times Magazine led with a hard hitting article outlining the clerical abuse crisis in Ireland, and the fall-off in religious belief as a result.
It quotes Father Mark Patrick Hederman, the abbot of Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Co. Limerick, as saying the Church is indeed in deep trouble.
Hederman said, “Ireland is a prime example of what the Church is facing, because they made this island into a concentration camp where they could control everything. And the control was really all about sex. They told you if you masturbated, it meant you were impure and had allowed the devil to work on you. Generations of people were crucified with guilt complexes. Now the game is up.”
[What a bizarre claim to make - both if it is true, and if it is untrue!]
Between 1974 and 2008 Mass attendance in Ireland was cut in half. The Irish, says the Times, are turning their back on the Church which was once the foundation of their country, its special place enshrined in the constitution.
The article looks at the abuse victims and also the country’s reaction to wave after wave of abuse scandals which emerged within the Irish Catholic Church.
The piece reports that Ireland is the country with the most reported cases of sexual abuse within the church. In second place comes the United States. However, Ireland has approximately one-hundredth of the population of the U.S.
Ireland published two reports, the Murphy and the Ryan reports, which investigated the systematic sexual abuse of children by members of the Church. The reports revealed thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings throughout Ireland's independence. ['Systematic' is hardly the right adjective. 'Not uncommon' is more appropriate. as the figures I have looked up will show. Far from the
'thousands' claimed here.]
In the past two months Chapter 19 of the Murphy Report detailed the crimes of “Father Filth,” former priest Tony Walsh. He was shielded by the Church as he continued to abuse.
Also, a letter has been unearthed from the papal nuncio. He told the Irish bishops that the Vatican had "serious reservations" about reporting clerical sexual abuse.
Grainne O'Sullivan, a 32-year-old graphic designer, was one of the many people in their twenties and thirties who have grown up in a mostly secular Ireland, and outraged by the revelations. That is why she, along with a web developer named Cormac Flynn and a civil servant in Cork named Paul Dunbar, set up a website called CountMeOut.ie in 2009.
She told the “Times,” "When I saw the reports, I thought, ‘I can’t even pretend to be part of this club anymore.’” [EEEWWWWW! Sanctimony is the first recourse for the weak of faith!]
They established the website as “a way of protesting, using their own process against them.”
Over several months 12,000 downloaded the “Defectio ab Ecclesia Catholica Actu Formali” from the site.
Last August the Catholic Church changed the Canon Law. It is now impossible for Catholics to leave the church. [IS THIS TRUE? I haven't the time to check this out properly just now.] Since then the website has suspended its service but is still active in the debate on Irish identity.
Nonetheless, Ireland and the church remain intrinsically linked. Ivana Bacik, a senator for the Labor Party, is a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state. She said, “In no other European nation — with the obvious exception of Vatican City — does the Church have this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of State.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Irish school system. Novelist Colm Toibin attended a Christian Brothers school until he was 15.
He told the Times, “At times it didn’t feel like there was a line between sexual abuse and corporal punishment. Every Friday one of the brothers would take a boy in front of the class, and whichever way he hit you he’d always put his hand on your testicles. We would laugh, but in fact you were in a permanent state of fear.
“I would vomit in the morning before going out to school. They would hit you across the face if you got a sum wrong. I suppose they did teach me to read and write and for that I should be grateful, but I’m not.”
Clerical sex-abuse scandals have been uncovered in the United States, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, Italy and many other countries, but in Ireland the “stakes for the Vatican are tangible.”
Ninety percent of schools in Ireland are under church patronage. Also, all public hospitals are run by the church which means procedures such as abortions and vasectomies are either illegal or problematic.
The Vatican is now trying to implement damage control in Ireland by sending the Apostolic Visitation, a group of top clergymen from outside of Ireland, to investigate the abuse scandal, the training of priests and the running of parishes.
Fr. Sean McDonagh, a leader of the Association of Irish Priests, has suggested that the Vatican “should begin by scrutinizing Rome’s own handling of sex-abuse allegations.”
Rev. Donald Cozzens, an American priest and respected moderate voice on Catholic issues told the Times, “I’m not aware of any major diocese in the world that has not had a sexual abuse scandal, and I believe part of the problem lies with the very structures of the church. I don’t want to say change would require a different Pope or even a different culture, but it will require radical openness.
“We have to take an honest look at all the things that are in play. Is mandatory celibacy wise or even theologically sound?”
The two reports on abuse published in Ireland run to over 2,500 pages. The Ryan report examined the abuse which took place in institutions, while the Murphy report focused on the abuse that took place in the Diocese of Dublin. The details are graphic, violent and gruesome. [Once again, the obvious failure to describe the actual extent of the abuses. And by the way, every act of sexual abuse is necessarily 'violent and gruesome' because it violates the human being in his/her most intimate, instills terror and horror in the victim, and often becomes physically depraved.]]
The Times article describes that parts of the reports “read like a cross between Charles Dickens and Dan Brown: ‘I was beaten and hospitalized by the head brother and not allowed to go to my father’s funeral in case my bruises were seen’ and ‘I was tied to a cross and raped while others masturbated at the side.””
Pope Benedict’s plan for rebuilding the Catholic Church in Ireland as well as the visitation from outside Ireland includes prayer, fasting and engaging in “Eucharistic adoration.” The Times article asks, “Do the church authorities get it?” [It's the Times that does not get it that the Church uses spiritual as well as practical means to combat and redress evil!]
They illustrate this point through Marie Collins’ case. Collins was abused, during the 1960s, when she was 13-years-old while in hospital.
She said, “I had no idea what he was doing, but I knew it was wrong. He might abuse me one night, then give me communion in the morning.”
Now 64, she spent years dealing with depression, anxiety and agoraphobia. When she finally spoke out about the abuse in her late thirties she was told that “she may have tempted the other priest.”
She eventually wrote to the then Archbishop of Dublin Desmond Connell. She was told not to “ruin his life.”
With help from the police her abuser, a Father McGennis, was imprisoned. The publication of the Murphy Report proved that the church knew about McGennis’ behavior over the years. Collins wanted the church to be held accountable.
Last year it was revealed that Cardinal Sean Brady, the head of the Irish church, participated in the 1975 cover-up of the notorious Fr. Brendan Smyth. He was not forced to resign. Collins said, “That means the church here in Ireland is being led by a man who will not be accountable.”
Referring to Pope Benedict’s Pastoral letter and rebuilding the church she said, “Prayer and adoration of the eucharist is fine…but we have had the Pope on a number of occasions saying how shocked he is by revelations of abuse around the world. It’s hard to take that seriously when we know that as Cardinal Ratzinger, in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he saw the abuse reports.”
She continued, “I don’t practice as a Catholic anymore. It’s so hard to reconcile what the men at the top do with what Jesus preached.”
Here's my little effort for the day, tracking down relevant figures from Wikipedia (which footnotes the facts scrupulously):
WHAT THE IRISH GOVERNMENT REPORTS
TELL US ABOUT THE ABUSE SITUATION
IN IRELAND FROM 1962-2004
There were actually three Irish government reports into abuses committed by priests and religious in Ireland.
All three reports 1)gathered information about complaints and the names of the alleged offenders, and 2) documented the response of the dioceses concerned to such abuses.
But investigation and substantiation of the charges was not part of their mandate, so their numbers only records the number of complaints made and the number and names of the accused.
The Ferns Report, 2005
It investigated abuses committed by priests and religious in the Diocese of Ferns. It has a current population of about 100,000, and 120 priests and religious serving the diocese. From 1962-2002 (40 years), 'more than 100 complaints' - which usually means over 100 but less than 110 - were presented against 21 priests, 6 of whom had been dead by the time they were accused.
If we assume that each of the complaints represents a different victim, 100 victims in a population of 100,000 does not seem 'significant', but 21 priests out of 120, if we assume the same number of priests over the 40-year study period, and that all 21 named priests were guilty of at least one offense, that's a pretty high rate of offenders - one-sixth of all priests in the diocese.
But the worst offense in the diocese was the attitude of its earlier bishops who were documented to be more concerned with the reputation of their priests than about the fact that they offended nor about making things right for the victims.
The report does acknowledge that the bishops' attitudes changed over the 40-year period as more information about pedophilia became available.
The Ryan Report, May 2009
This studied the record between 1914-2000 of 200 Catholic schools and reformatories run by Irish religious orders. Obviously because of age considerations (who would still be alive and able to take part), the study focused on the years between 1965-2000, during which these institutions were responsible for 25,000 wards.
1500 complaints were received, with 800 offenders named, but the offenders also included civilian personnel of the schools, not just priests. And of the 1500 complaints, only 800 abusers were named (so each abuser would have had to have offended at least twice).
Of the abuses, 391 were sexual (262 boys, 128 girls), 857 were physical (beatings, corporal punishment), and the rest, psychological abuse or neglect.
Not that other kinds of abuse are any less significant, but since the focus of all the news reports has been sexual abuse, we are left with 391 complaints of sexual abuse in a 35-year period.
The Murphy Report, November 2009
This is the Report that sparked all that outrage in the media. It looked at alleged sexual abuses committed by priests and religious in the Archdiocese of Dublin from the 1940s to 2004, at which time, altogether 2,800 priests and religious served in the archdiocese. During that period, 102 priests/religious were named in complaints received by the Commission.
Again because of age considerations, the investigation focused on the period from 1975 to 2004, during which 320 complaints were presented against 46 priests, of which 11 had confessed or been convicted, 1 was clearly a case of false accusation, and two were merely 'suspected' but not accused.
In a 30-year period, 320 complaints averages to 10.7 annually, committed by 43 priests (excluding the falsely accused one and the merely 'suspect'). out of a total clerical population of 2800 - and we arrive at a 1.5% rate of alleged offenses or accusations that is far lower than what it was in the United States (see below).
If we add together the complaints reported by the three government commissions in Ireland, we get a total of 100 from Ferns + 391 in the schools + 320 in Dublin = 811 complaints, not all of them necessarily true - alleged to have occurred between 1965-2004, over a 40-year period. 811 complaints in 40 years averages to about 20 complaints a year.
In other words, the media has simply been allowed to paint the sex abuse scandal as much much bigger than it actually is, and no one has bothered all these months to point it out. And that is the reason none of the reports ever mentions figures - because the figures show how much they have exaggerated the case against the Church.
The lower numbers do not in any way excuse what the rotten 1.5% of priests and religious have done, but to deliberately give the impression that 'thousands' have been victimized is just wrong and dishonest.DIM]
Sure, there should be zero complaints, but humans sin. We should be thankful there haven't been more. pray there will not be more, and not create mass hysteria over a deliberately inflated picture of the situation.
And Irish Catholics, in general - if we go by the alarmism of the New York Times report, and even by Cardinal O'Malley's' reported sense of the crisis - deserve our pity if not enough of them have the sense to look at the figures and not just swallow unquestioningly what their highly anti-Church media tells them.
And just for comparison, here are figures from the United States, which is a much stronger data base because it follows all reported complaints from initial reporting to final disposition in the courts. The study was commissioned by the US bishops in 2002. The figures probably reflect an idea of the extent of the problem in the countries most afflicted by the scourge of priestly pedophiles, with the US for now registering the worst scenario:
The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors
by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States -
the study commissioned in 2002 by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops "to provide the first-ever complete accounting, or census, of the number of priests, deacons and religious against whom allegations of child sexual abuse were made and of the incidents alleged to have occurred between 1950-2002."
The study was conducted by the John Jay College of Criminology in New York City. The full report can be found on
usccb.org/nrb/johnjaystudy/
Some general data from the report:
195 dioceses and 140 religious communities were surveyed;
7 of the dioceses and 30 of the communities did not respond to the survey.
From the responses, a total of 4,392 priests, deacons and religious were identified to have been accused of such offenses.
They represented 3-6% of priests in the dioceses and 1-3% in the communities. The overall percentage of accused in terms of all priests and religious in the US was 4%.
75% of the alleged incidents took place between 1960-1984.
A report to the police resulted in an investigation in almost all cases. 384 of the 4,392 were criminally charged. Overall only 8.7% of those accused ended up being charged.
Of the 384 charged, 252 were convicted - a 66% conviction rate. Some of them had more than one conviction on different counts. Those convicted represented only 5.7% of the total that had been accused. [That number is very significant, because it indicates that some 94% of accusations were not actionable. (It tells us that the overwhelming majority of accusations cannot stand up enough to be prosecuted.]
As of 2002 (before all the massive costs since then imposed by subsequent court rulings), the cost to the dioceses and communities between 1950-2002 was estimated at about $573 million - $501 million for victim compensation and treatment, and the rest for priest treatment and legal fees.
Insurance paid about $289 million of the costs for victim compensation and treatment.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/02/2011 22:28]