By Way of Comparison

With lots of links, Martin Meenagh writes:

In recent days, wild allegations, and frankly mad chains of causation, have been constructed around Pope Benedict. I don't think that I have anything to prove on my attitude to the disgusting things that were done by men breaking their vows, who were often protected by Bishops who were also in a deranged relationship with their duty. However, I do intensely dislike the stupidity of some of the assault. England seems particularly gripped by antipapist feeling. This has been true in its past, when the country is under pressure, and has been a strand in its identity since 1533. It emerges at times of great pressure, like the 1850s or 1730s, often when the English people realise that someone is undermining and impoverishing them and fail to see that the culprits are their own elites.

However, it now seems clear that Josef Ratzinger, when a cardinal, was involved in a process that extended the time in which victims of sexual violence could bring claims beyond that offered in England. He also appears to have relied on Bishops who corrupted their office to carry out his instructions, without realising that they would not do so. Indeed, he seems to have had no wider power over the bishops leading one billion Catholics. I'm not surprised; most Bishops don't listen to their own diocese, or indeed anyone other than those whose approval they seek. Bishops, not popes, are a major part of the problem that the modern Church faces.

The final allegation is that the then-Archbishop Ratzinger also seems to have approved, on a busy day, the request of an abuser to stay for therapy in a priest house in his diocese in the nineteen eighties (when such things were thought to work, without chemicals). Memoranda purporting to show Josef Ratzinger's name in a 'cc' field have since been referred to, though no proof that he ever actually read them has been offered.

By way of comparison, Ms Harriet Harman, the present Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the House of Commons, was at the time a legal officer for the national council on civil liberties, to which the paedophile information exchange was affiliated, according to this report. Patricia Hewitt, late of the Labour Cabinet, was the head of the National Council. Ms Harman, a fervent abortionist, attempted at one time to water down child pornography laws. Given her position at the heart of the British government--and emphatically not to dismiss the allegations against the pope, but to put them into perspective--why is the Times hounding him and not her?

The hysterical attacks on the Pope, and on Catholicism, rest on a thin material foundation of causation and a deep well of sad and horrible abuse. This poisonous well is the consequence of letting abusers serve within the church, and the church should take its lumps for it; but another, equally poisonous well feeds those waters too. The constant attacks on the church are being made by people who mention nothing of the United Nations or the Social Service industry's shameless record of child abuse and family destruction. They are being promoted by coalitions of people who have a hatred of one of the few things that can actually challenge this murderous, value free world that global corporatism has built. The full hypocrisy of the attacks is sickening; people who want the age of consent lowered to 14 and who aggressively promote their agenda want the sickening abuse of young men by older ones, which constitutes most of the cases, to be the cross on which the church is nailed.

I should repeat something for the avoidance of doubt. I think that the Church should have isolated and handed over to the authorities anyone involved in an abuse of position against a child; I also think that some of the orders and dioceses involved in this scandal, which is multifaceted and which does not just stem from sexual abuse but also from the arrogance of power and the physical maltreatment of the young, should have their assets liquidated and handed out to genuine victims. I think that a whole body of nineteenth and twentieth century thought, which held that the Church was a near perfect instrument and which ignored that it was run by fallen people must now be reviewed in a spirit of humility.

That does not mean, however, that I will promote a lynch mob mentality by vicious secularists against an eighty year old man and nor should any of my readers.

My one consolation is that the church always grows under tribulation.