Friday 9 April 2010

Motes and Beams

What if there is practically no functioning civil authority, as in some countries where the Catholic Church is active? What if it would be better that there weren't than that there were what there is, as in very many such countries?

What if it is the Dutch civil authority, which has lowered the age of consent to 12, that, and not anything either Catholic or Reformed, being the vision of the Netherlands defended by the likes of Geert Wilders and the late Pim Fortuyn? (The legal situation in the Vatican City State, mercifully meaningless in practice, is an inherited imposition by Mussolini, lest anyone ever suggest either that he favoured the Church or that She favoured him.) What if we are talking about a country with no minimum age of consent whatever, as periodically advocated, in less guarded moments, by Peter Tatchell?

Or what if the civil authority is a British Social Services Department such as ran the homes in which, at the same time as the Church was hushing up sex between men and teenage boys on the part of a small number of priests - and thus, however imperfectly, indicating disapproval of it - such behaviour was absolutely endemic, with major figures in that world publishing academic studies, used for many years in the training of social workers, which presented it as positively beneficial to both parties and therefore actively to be encouraged?

If the then Cardinal Ratzinger really did obstruct the laicisation of an American priest in the 1980s, then at least any such process had been initiated. That would not have happened in the state sector in those days. Very far from it, in fact. And there would have been a lot more than two victims. With, all the while, Harriet Harman campaigning to make their abuse both perfectly legal and socially acceptable.

2 comments:

  1. Well done BBC, making this a bigger story than the election or anything else. Keep those license fees coming in.

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  2. Like the Times and the New York Times, the BBC cannot really believe that the Catholic Church still dares to exist at all, despite so many specific instructions to cease doing so.

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