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  The Silence That Kills: the Pope, the Church, and Paedophilia

By George Michelsen Foy
Psychology Today
April 5, 2010

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shut-and-listen/201004/the-silence-kills-the-pope-the-church-and-paedophilia



Silence is a personal balm; finding silence is a way to stop the noise, both auditory and informational, that jams the radar which allows us to navigate life in the sweetest fashion.

But silence can also kill. It can maim, and destroy lives.

Witness the "culture of silence" of the Catholic church, and the way the current pope, Benedict XVI, defends and perpetuates it.

I don't need to go over the facts, they are well enough known. Hundreds, possibly thousands of children were sexually abused by Catholic priests in the U.S. Their crimes were veiled by the silence of the confessional, the muteness of ritual, the victim's feelings of shame.

When paedophile priests were busted, they were sent to a faraway parish, the damage they had done hushed up. The same, it appears, was true in Germany, Italy, and other European countries.

The current pope, when he was a powerful cardinal in charge of dealing with the sex abuse problem, threatened priests who spoke up on the matter with excommunication.

Let's not forget that this same Pope Benedict in the 1940s was a member of the Hitler Youth. He says that, given his time and generation, he had no choice but to join that Nazi organization.

But don't we always have a choice? Admittedly, speaking up at times can be dangerous, even lethal. Good men and women have fallen silent instead of protesting injustice when the alternative meant imprisonment, torture, death, and harm to their families.

Still, we're not talking about ordinary men here. We're talking about priests whose job and duty it is to stand for, embody, and protect a higher moral order. If they do so-this is what the priests teach us-they get to go to heaven for ever and ever.

So why did Benedict-then Joseph Ratzinger-choose silence instead of speaking up against Hitler's regime, though it might have cost him his life?

It is of course true that Ratzinger was a teenager at the time, not yet a priest. (See image above.) But our moral topography is usually well carved out by the time we're fourteen or fifteen, and it's tempting to draw parallels here.

For example, did Ratzinger go along with the Hitler Jugend for exactly the same reason he has tried consistently to impose silence on those who sought to shed light on the paedophile infection that has poisoned the Holy Roman Church?

Is it because, far from embodying a higher moral order, Joseph Ratzinger's default mode is to defer to the dominant power structure, whose philosophy always is: Make whatever compromises are deemed necessary in order to stay in power?

For that is the secret of a killing silence: it is almost always imposed by a power structure. The twenty million killed by Stalin in the Ukraine and elsewhere, the twenty million-plus slaughtered in Mao's China, the six million-plus victims of Nazi oppression, the half million killed in America's colonial war against the Philippines, were not only victims of criminal ideologies: they were murdered by the silence with which those regimes hid and justified their acts.

It is vital to remember that what is important here is the unholy alliance of silence and repression. The ideology with which a power structure cloaks its actions is for flavor only.

A poem based on writings by a German pastor (and concentration camp inmate), Martin Niemoller, famously recounts:

"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew..."

And Martin Luther King said, "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

In the holiest of Catholic services, April 4th's Easter mass at St. Paul's in Rome, a top cardinal reaffirmed the pope's unassailability while denouncing outrage against priest paedophilia as "petty gossip." The Pope himself said this about the scandal: Nothing.

The Catholic church, under Pope Benedict, is continuing to defend the culture of silence that allowed and concealed the inhuman crimes paedophile priests committed. In doing so, it is aligning itself with the murderous silence of power structures everywhere.

 
 

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