Derelict and Delinquent

The men of god have been making the news headlines again. Not for helping the poor, visiting the imprisoned, tending to the sick or anything decent like that. No, for the men of god it is the same old, same old: guided by the holy sperm they are back in the public spotlight for raping the nation’s children.

Reports into clerical molestation of children are all too frequent these days. Ferns, Ryan, now Murphy, the latest to remind us that in our midst lurks a malevolent army of rapists blessed before battle by their leading chaplains and absolved of sin after it. As a society we are forced to endure these reports, our disgust supposed to be assuaged by meaningless apologies from the clerical commanders. Yet the vile leaders like Bishop Magee remain in place, the institution to which they belong still legal.

These never ending reports only tell us that we look at the problem, make recommendations, write about it, wring our hands on television and radio, and end up permitting the institution responsible to carry on, its structure uninfringed, its leadership intact. We know that within the loins of the Catholic Church a beast is stirring, ready to rape again. Yet it remains a legal entity with state approved involvement in our schools.

Child rape and its cover up are endemic within the Catholic Church in Ireland. It should now be banned and membership of it proscribed. At the end of World War 2 the SS was declared a criminal organisation and those who fought in its ranks denied pension rights and other entitlements that Wehrmacht troops could avail of. Not everyone who fought in the Waffen SS behaved disgracefully. But the institution had little in the way of defence against allegations of endemic criminality. By now a powerful case can be made that the church is a criminally perverse institution which contributes nothing to society. It can give no moral guidance. What could it possibly know about moral guiding? Immoral riding is more to its liking. At best its leading figures have time and time again demonstrated that they know not the difference between right and wrong. A less benign but better grounded view would deem them accomplices before and after the fact in the persistent rape of children.

There is plenty of legislation on the books for dealing with the nation’s criminal gangs. Why should the criminal institution that is the Irish Catholic Church be exempt? Why aren’t its leaders hauled before the courts and tried for collusion in the rape of society’s children? There has to be an effective means for dealing with the custodians of child rape. It is not that the bishops need to be interned without trial. There is an abundance of evidence against them that could be used in the Central Criminal Court. They would receive more justice in criminal law than their victims ever benefited from in canon law.

There should be no special privilege for these people because of religion. Religion is nothing but an opinion. That it should have an exalted status over and beyond other opinions which protects it from probing and democratic scrutiny is corrosive of the societal good. When Michael McDowell as Justice Minister told Cardinal Connell in the wake of the Ferns Report that the church’s canon law had all the status in Irish law of the rules governing membership of a golf club he was defending a very important secular tenet. Connell of course was outraged. He wanted canon law to be treated as if it were the law of a separate state.

To the extent that Connell was justified in what he said the Church and its canon law should be treated as a rogue state. It should be pursued like a pariah, its leaders and operatives afforded no cover, given no sustenance.

A priest hunt against all who practice priestcraft should be avoided. Not every cleric is a fiend. There are some, a minority no doubt, who are in the Church because they are motivated by a love of a god who on occasion they believe they see in the person of another in need of succour. They neither participated in nor approved child molestation. They may not have spoken out when they should have but the anonymous pressure of the group can be stifling and it would be punitive to select these clerics out for anything other than mild rebuke.

The vile cabal of bishops and their lewd but lesser lieutenants are what needs to be hauled before an Irish Nuremburg for their crimes against the humanity of our children. Figuratively they should go to the gallows where the drop will bring them to their own moral level. Derilect and delinquent their place in society is apart from it.

Posted in: Clerical Child Abuse