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  Words Are Not Enough

By Alan Howe
Herald Sun
March 29, 2010

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/words-are-not-enough/story-e6frfhqf-1225846572414

AUSTRALIA -- PURGATORY would be a busy place. Cosmopolitan, too. It's where Catholics, and many others, believe you are warehoused after you die, possibly with some punishment, before facing God in heaven.

That's presupposing you have not already passed "go" on your way to warmer climes.

I am sure we all test God's mercy - none so much, you'd reckon, as the likes of Middle Eastern suicide bombers and paedophile Catholic priests.

While they might rub shoulders in purgatory, God only knows how their various punishments are measured by He Who Must Be Obeyed.

He is, we are told, forgiving of almost anything.

Handy that. In recent years there'd have been something of a crush of recently deceased Catholic priests seeking redemption and asking for forgiveness for having selfishly ruined the lives of young boys and sometimes even girls in their care.

There has been plenty of sex, too, between the clergy and vulnerable adults, but you would like to think there is a special corner in purgatory, maybe even hell, for those trusted and respected members of the Catholic hierarchy who have preyed on kids under their command.

Over the past few decades there has been a tidal wave of evidence that countless Catholic clergy have, throughout the 20th century, raped and molested kids in their care, or to whom they had access.

Like the spread of European wasps, infestations of paedophiles have been discovered in recent years among the Catholic churches of Australia, the UK, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland and, more recently, Germany.

These black-collar criminals have been treading the well known, and well beaten, paths of paedophilia.

Many would have chosen their "calling" because of the access it would have given them to defenceless children. That's what manipulative paedophiles do.

Many of them will have dedicated years of their lives to win trust while they made their way to positions - in orphanages and community groups, for instance - where access to such kids was easy. That's what depraved, endlessly patient paedophiles do.

They are single-minded in gratifying their degrading and illegal sexual urges as they force themselves upon innocents. Sometimes - they would say regretfully - they have been caught out, and have needed to feign remorse. Wrists were slapped before they were dispatched, pretty much unpunished, on to greener fields where new lambs were offered for slaughter.

That's what the Catholic Church has been doing.

It seems that with events in the past few weeks in Ireland and Germany, there is almost no end to this crisis among Catholics.

And neither will there be while the church wrestles with the notion that its canon law must always be subservient to the law of the land - at least that of any secular country.

In the past few weeks, the crimes of the Catholic Church have added more black marks to souls we once believed would have been stained only by original sin, and they are casting an awkward and lengthening shadow over the Vatican.

The church's response has been legalistic, defensive and unjustifiably meagre.

Indeed, in some countries the debate has been deflected on to another issue, the celibacy of the priesthood. Let's chuck that red herring back right now: Catholic priests being banned from sex and marriage has nothing to do with the paedophiles in their ranks. Some paedophiles are married - it's a handy cover - while others might be homosexual. The issue is that they are paedophiles and need to be identified, prosecuted, punished and excluded from our society.

Paedophiles are unstoppably recidivist. That might not have been common knowledge until the past 20 years or so. Ironically, the organisation that must first have realised it was impossible to treat one and have him (almost always him) re-enter normal society would have been the Catholic Church.

From the 1970s on, the church has been dealing with growing complaints about sexually abusive clergy. Rather than immediately turn its members over to the police - as it was required to do both by law and conscience, if it had one - it preferred to deny the law of the land, cover up the issues, "reprimand" the offenders, and send them on to other diocese.

Too often, the cycle started all over again. The church now knows, and has done for years, how this led to the destruction of even more young lives.

There has been evidence in recent days that this happened in 1980 in the backyard of the then Archbishop of Munich and Freising, known to us today as Pope Benedict.

As Joseph Ratzinger, rather than call in the Munich police, he instructed that Father Peter Hullermann undergo psychotherapy to "cure" his urge to abuse boys.

The psychiatrist said that Hullermann was unco-operative, agreed only to group therapy, and believed he was the victim forced into treatment he did not need. That is the archetypal behaviour of a child abuser.

Dr Werner Huth came to the conclusion that the arrogant Hullermann was untreatable and should never be allowed near children again.

It goes without saying that the Catholic Church, in all its shuddering arrogance, took no notice of this and, while subsequently teaching religion at a local state school, Hullermann showed boys pornographic films and then had sex with them.

He was always going to. By now it was 1986 and he was convicted, fined and given an 18-month suspended sentence.

Even by the standards of the Catholic Church, that should have been the end of it. But when things had calmed down, Hullermann was brought back under its protective wing and set to work once more - this time with altar boys.

He was working as a priest until Monday, March 15. That's just the other day.

While juggling those issues, the Pope was forced last week to issue a pastoral letter to Catholics in Ireland to deal with the church's mishandling of decades of the worst imaginable sexual abuse of young innocents there.

He didn't call the police. He didn't ask for any resignations. He didn't sack anybody. He did, however, say he was sorry to the victims of the thousands of "sinful and criminal" cases of abuse.

But he spoiled it all.

This warrior against modernism in the church had to add that "the program of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted".

Catholic priests have been having sex with kids for decades - the ultimate betrayal - leading the little ones to suicide, but apparently it's all the fault of the Second Vatican Council.

Cut it out.

 
 

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