Unwanted, Abusive and Harmful

According to Enda Kenny, the Vatican attempted to frustrate this Inquiry within the last three years. But 1997 was not within the last three years. Not a word of the Report accuses the Vatican of having attempted to frustrate the Inquiry or anything else. The Taoiseach has lied to the Dáil.

More broadly, like Blessed John Paul the Great, the then Cardinal Ratzinger unreservedly condemned the war in Iraq. Iran has had an arrangement in place for several years whereby the Vatican would mediate in any dispute with the United States should, as is now mercifully most unlikely, that matter ever really come to a head. Benedict XVI is, as John Paul II was, a great admirer of Pius XII, under whom the Holy See had quite warm relations with the State of Israel, which was not at that time imposing military law on the Catholics of the West Bank, nor occupying that part of the viable Palestinian State created on both sides of the Jordan at the end of the British Mandate, nor bombarding the Catholics of Lebanon.

Well, we cannot have any of that, can we? So the Pope’s moral authority must be destroyed by absolutely any means whatever. Lest, having been right on Iraq, he prevent a war against Iran, and possibly even bring about the reunification of Palestine on both sides of the Jordan while securing the sovereignty and integrity of Lebanon. All that, and he does not agree that the world has too many proles and darkies in it. Nor that femaleness itself is a medicable condition requiring powerful chemical or surgical intervention. Nor that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the mother’s body. He might even dare to ask whether it is the whole of a woman's body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?

From The Times of London to The New York Times, we cannot be having any of that. Instead, we must all join in protest behind Peter Tatchell, who would lower the age of consent of 14 and thus legalise almost every act of which any Catholic priest has ever been so much as accused, but who is reliably signed up to female reproductive (if not total) insentience, to XX Syndrome and the drastic measures required to counter it, to ridding the world of proles and darkies, and specifically to ridding the world of Levantine proles and darkies. So, that’s all right, then. Isn’t it?

There is no call whatever for any sort of apology from Tatchell, who wrote in The Guardian (26th June 1997) that: “The positive nature of some child-adult relations is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of 9 to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that no all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.” Last year, David Cameron offered Tatchell a peerage.

Nor is there any call for any sort of apology from Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, who ran the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was passing resolutions in support of the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, and when it was publishing calls to legalise and destigmatise sex between adults and children. Nor from Stephen Fry, author of The Liar and The Hippopotamus, both of which glorify sex between men and teenage boys, exactly the acts that have brought scandal on the Catholic Church. Nor from successive Chairmen and Controllers of Channel Four, in its dramatic output a relentless, publicly owned campaigner in favour of such acts.

Nor from Germaine Greer, author of The Boy, a book-length celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male both by men and by women. Nor from Richard Dawkins, who in The God Delusion describes having been sexually abused as a child as “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”. Nor from Philip Pullman, whose famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12, and who has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels. Nor from Geoffrey Robertson QC, who made his name defending the Schoolkids’ Edition of Oz and whose wife made hers writing explicit depictions of teenage sex. Nor from everyone, or even from anyone, who has rushed to defend and to laud Roman Polanski.

Nor from those in any way involved in Internet pornography, the principal, and highly commercial, sexual abuse of teenage boys in the world today. Nor from those who have taken us to war in Afghanistan, in defence of the endemic abuse of such boys, an abuse to which, whatever else may be said of the Taliban, they were very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we have installed in their place actively colludes in it as surely as in the heroin trade.

Nor from the numerous Social Services Departments that ran 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. Nor from the Police, who long ago stopped enforcing the age of consent from 13 upwards; as with their non-enforcement of the drugs laws, one really does have to ask for whose benefit that is. Among many, many, many others.

What’s that you say? They do not purport to be moral authorities? Really?