BishopAccountability.org
	Child Abuse: Thin Air on the Moral High Ground By Stephen Hough Telegraph April 18, 2010 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/stephenhough/100007734/child-abuse-might-you-be-implicated/ I found myself recently involuntarily inside the tangle of a multi-forwarded email as one of many CCs, hardly any of whom I knew. The correspondents were discussing (again) the response of the Church authorities to the child abuse issue. Then someone came up with the hypothetical situation of knowing about a guilty priest from 30 years ago and whether it had, by moral imperative, to be reported now. It brought up the further question, so much closer to home, about whether every such case from the past that we might know about (uncles, teachers, friends) should be taken to the police in the present. Before I write any more, I want to make it absolutely clear that I'm not making any excuses for those involved in terrible, disgusting crimes or for those who covered up for them; but it struck me that it's an interesting ethical dilemma when it's no longer 'them' in dog collars, but 'us' and those close to us who might be involved. If you remember your best friend telling you when you were both in high school that her Uncle Joe touched her breast at a birthday party when she was 16 years old but it's now all a joke and forgotten about, should you still try to locate him and have the police arrest him in his nursing home? And what about some of those most vocally attacking the Pope at the present time? Have not some of them supported a lowering of the age of consent to the point which would make legal some of the acts they condemn? And might not some of their friends have had the odd hazy encounter with a 17 year-old on hungover holidays by a suntanned beach, or whilst gyrating in the early hours of a nightclub's heaving dawn? My point is not to change what we are all now beginning to do, but to change the attitude with which it is done, both from the Vatican and the media. The air is simply too thin on any moral high ground for good health; and finger-pointing from both sides makes it hard to clasp hands in cooperation to repair the damage. So what next? A good start might be for the Church authorities to begin apologizing for the past with personal culpability and without excuses – only Christoph Schönborn, the Cardinal of Vienna, seems to me really to have done this so far. And then for the press to do their important job without glee, taking care to separate a (perfectly justifiable) dislike of Christianity from the business of reporting the truth and protecting the innocent.
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