AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
ALAN HOWE HERALD SUN FEBRUARY 17, 2014
IF there is a Heaven, William Booth is in it. A pawnbroker by trade, Booth was converted to Methodism in 1844 and took to it with evangelical enthusiasm.
Falling out with the Methodists, he moved to London where he was struck by the wretchedness of life for so many after the Industrial Revolution. While industrialists had made fortunes, millions were without hope, without work, undernourished and living in disease-infested slums.
A practical man, Booth imagined a Christian response to this squalor. He’d keep preaching the word of his God, but he and his army of volunteers would feed the poor, help find them work and house pregnant, unmarried women who in those days — and until recently — were scorned by their communities and churches.
By the 1880s, his Salvation Army was finding missing people to reunite families, rehabilitating prisoners, detoxing alcoholics and accommodating the homeless.
Booth brought dignity to shunned people who lives had slipped from their control and for whom no one else — much less the organised religions — cared. …
That brand today is in tatters. Cunning paedophiles, knowing the Salvos’ children’s homes would provide a steady supply of vulnerable innocents, aimed at them. Several infestations of them coalesced into debauched tag teams of wicked men and, unusually, some women, to arrange forced, sometimes violent, sex with children in their “care”.
Evidence presented at the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Responses to Child Sexual Abuse about the conduct of some Salvos has been chilling. If it is to be believed — and the Salvos have been paying compensation, so someone does — then they have had officers who truly despised the children entrusted to them.
Evidence heard so far has boys — hungry, shoeless and regularly beaten — being raped by Salvation Army captains, before being sent to other adults’ homes to be further exploited.
One of the Salvation Army officers was Lawrence Wilson who is alleged to have seen the boys as a kind of currency to be used throughout the dark underworld of bisexual paedophilia.
The Salvos have paid out $1.2 million in compensation for his victims. So far.
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