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‘WALKING TOWARDS THUNDER’ by Peter Fox. A Book Review.

September 24, 2019
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, Catholicism & Paedophilia
2 Comments

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Author Peter Fox acknowledges in his book ‘Walking Towards Thunder’  that so many people supported  him, and joined with him, to pressure the then prime minister Julia Gillard to set  up the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses  into Child Sexual Abuse, but there is no doubt that Fox’s  fight to put children’s safety  ahead of the reputation of the Catholic  Church was the catalyst. As has often been stated since, only an atheist, female prime minister would have listened and acted; whatever the truth, the timing was crucial.

What is truly appalling is that a corrupt NSW Police Force destroyed Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox’s exemplary career in order to protect the Catholic Church, its wealth and power in Australia. It’s difficult to fathom that this corruption could even take hold and destroy hundreds of children’s lives in a modern secular country like Australia.

Fox’s empathy for the children abused by Catholic clergy and their distraught families shines through the pages of this book.  The heart wrenching stories are even more soul destroying when no matter what Fox did, there was nowhere to turn to get help for these suffering children, while paedophile priests were shifted around from parish to parish, supported by bishops and archbishops. We now know that paedophile priests passed around the names of children they had abused to other priests so that some children were raped repeatedly by more than one priest and yet the NSW Police and the Church continued to attack Peter Fox and deny this was happening.

Fox’s attention to detail in writing reports and conducting interviews showed him to be an outstanding detective, but this did not save him from the endemic corruption within the NSW police force which allowed the Catholic Church to hide the crimes of its clergy for decades.  Peter Fox writes about the similar ‘brotherhoods’ operating within the Church and police force and how they close ranks to protect reputations at all costs, but these costs were too high for child victims, and for Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox and his family.

The chapter on the NSW commission of inquiry into police corruption with Margaret Cunneen appointed as chief commissioner, will leave readers wondering just how deep corruption is within our justice system. The days of tortuous, seemingly aimless questioning  of Fox, whose health was visibly deteriorating;  a detective  who was doing his job and doing it diligently, is particularly harrowing to read. The intimidation of Fox’s wife in the courtroom during his interrogation is unsettling to say the least; it was devastating for Fox who was well aware of what was happening while he was being interrogated in the dock.

When the Child Abuse Royal Commission was finally announced many had expected the then NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell would abandon the planned  Cunneen NSW Police Inquiry as being a smaller inquiry covering the same matters.  However, the Police Inquiry proceeded.

Around the time the Cunneen Inquiry’s report was being  completed, and the Child Sexual Abuse  Royal Commission was about to begin, George Pell was promoted to cardinal by his Church and a “discreet farewell’ for him was attended by, among other dignitaries, NSW  Attorney General Greg Smith and NSW Premier O’Farrell, who expressed the “greatest respect” for George Pell and his Church.  One can only imagine how this made the victims and their families feel.  And  then O’Farrell made a statement that surely will go down in history as an indictment on the NSW state government which must have been  well aware of the children reportedly raped by Catholic clergy at the time, and in light of Pell’s later conviction for child sexual abuse: “In Australian society the [Catholic] Church always gets priority and central position.”

In my view, after reading ‘Walking Towards Thunder’ the Cunneen Inquiry appears to have been set up solely to destroy Peter Fox, along with the rape victims’ statements he recorded and other documented evidence he had collected.  Documents and statements mysteriously disappeared and police officers giving evidence at the Cunneen Inquiry claimed that those documents and statements never existed, even though victims, journalists and family members all confirmed Fox’s evidence which he gave under cross examination, which I have already noted was brutal.

These are my own assessments after reading ‘Walking Towards Thunder’ and I have no doubt that history will hold the NSW Police Inquiry up for what it was; a sham! The ABC later reported that the four-volume report, three volumes of which had been released by Commissioner Margaret Cunneen SC, uncovered no evidence to show that senior police ever tried to ensure child abuse offences were not properly investigated. History will not be kind to Commissioner Cunneen. We now know that Police did conceal evidence, destroyed or ‘lost’ statements by victims and witnesses, and police had evidence that the Catholic Church was intimidating witnesses and victims so they would not go to the police with their claims.  These matters were all later revealed during the Child Sexual Abuse Royal Commission.

It seems during the time covered in Peter Fox’s book, good priests who tried to expose child sexual abuse by fellow clergy were ostracised in their parishes, honest police were leaving the police force and school principals were driven out of their jobs for trying to protect children under their care. Every one of them paid a heavy price, some tragically more than others.

This is a well written book which may have been enhanced with a reference index notating names, important events and dates to enable the reader to traverse the wealth of information contained in the book.

‘Walking Towards Thunder’ will give readers a close up look at how a hard-working, honest police officer fought the powerful Catholic Church and the NSW police force to protect victims of clergy sexual abuse from further abuse and to stop more children being abused in the future. He and his family have paid a huge price. I have no doubt he will be vindicated. It is also a must read for all victims and survivors of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. Simply by victims revealing what had happened to them, meant they were vilified by people in their own parishes for tarnishing the reputation of their beloved church.  Most of the books about Catholic paedophilia I have read and reviewed, were written by victims and survivors or their families. Peter Fox’s book gives us a clear view of this Catholic scourge from a different angle, thereby revealing just how the Church hierarchy in Australia was able to coverup the rapes of hundreds of innocent children for decades.

-Anne Frandi-Coory 24 September 2019

‘Hell On The Way To Heaven’ by Chrissie Foster – The Faceless Nun; Abuse By Proxy

July 7, 2013
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, Catholicism & Paedophilia
2 Comments

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Father Kevin O'Donnell

Paedophile Father Kevin O’Donnell

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In my blog post dated 2 July 2013 ‘How Catholic Dogma Aided Paedophile Priests’ I wrote about Chrissie and Anthony Foster’s book in which they describe how two of their daughters’ lives were destroyed when they were repeatedly raped from the age of five, by Catholic paedophile priest, Father Kevin O’Donnell.

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Hell on way to heaven

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During the long battle to save their oldest daughter Emma, from more attempts at suicide by drug overdose and self-harm, she was admitted to one psychiatric unit / detox. clinic after another, over the years. Emma struggled, with some success, along with the loving help of her family, to overcome her addictions. It was a one-step-forward and a two-steps-back progress. Try as she might, Emma could not erase from her memory, what Father Kevin O’Donnell had done to her.

Emma was fast running out of psychiatric unit options because of her continual breaking of the units’ rules. However, one day in desperation, her mother found her a placement in a clinic run by the Catholic Church. Although she was hesitant about sending Emma there, she was comforted after being reassured that all the counsellors were professionals. But Emma had only been in the unit for a few days, when she phoned her mother and told her that a woman at her counselling sessions was a ‘practising Catholic and wore a cross’.  Emma was agitated and anxious. This woman was pressuring Emma to admit she was at fault for the abuse she was subjected to. Later that day, Mrs Foster rang the manager of the unit and explained her concerns about what Emma had told her. The manager stated that it wouldn’t have been a qualified counsellor and she had no idea who the woman was. She suggested Emma may have been speaking to a tea lady or cleaning staff.

A few months before she died at 26 years of age, from an overdose of her medication, Emma refused to see or talk to her mother. Chrissie Foster was hurt and bewildered. She was devoted to her daughter’s welfare and recovery, as was Mr Foster and their extended family. In the past, Emma had written many notes and diary entries, declaring how much she loves her family and how supportive of her they always are. But, she adds, her mother is the one she loves the most; she is always there for her.  That’s why Mrs Foster found it difficult to understand why Emma didn’t want to talk to her. She was hopeful that it meant Emma was trying to stand on her own two feet, and this could be a good turn of events.

Following Emma’s death, Mrs Foster had the heartbreaking task of packing up Emma’s belongings from her bedroom in the house she had loved, had decorated and furnished herself.  Loose sheets of paper were lying about all over the place. After collecting them up in a bundle, Mrs Foster sat reading the many notes Emma had jotted down in her neat hand writing.  A few of the diary notes covered her stay at the Catholic unit. She writes about the counselling sessions she attended and how traumatic they were because the counsellor was very critical and angry:  Why had she not run away? Why had she not told anyone about the abuse at the time? Why didn’t she call out?  Emma wrote: I told her I was five or six, he had all the power. Emma also wrote that she was made to feel it was her fault she had been abused. Anyone who has read Chrissie Foster’s book will know how those options would have been impossible for Emma given her age, the school environment in which the sexual abuse took place and her Catholic upbringing.  But most of all, they would have been impossible because Kevin O’Donnell was a paedophile with over 50 years experience. His victims describe him as an old man who was  frightening and angry. He continuously told them they were evil while he raped them.

Mrs Foster could not stop thinking about this ‘practising Catholic’ who was posing, unchallenged, as a psychiatric counsellor.   She believed no psychiatric unit in the 21st Century in Australia should be employing untrained counsellors. The woman obviously wouldn’t believe a priest was capable of sexually abusing children.  The ‘counsellor’ had intimated to a troubled Emma that she held priests in the highest esteem but despised the victims who claimed that priests had sexually assaulted them.

A distraught Mrs Foster phoned the Catholic Psychiatric Unit on a Sunday morning to enquire after a counsellor.  To her shock and horror, the helpful receptionist informed Mrs Foster that there was a nun on duty 24/7 to talk to patients.  So it was a nun who was employed as a professional counsellor at the unit and who was responsible for turning Emma against her mother. Emma had said to another person not long before her death, that the abuse was her mother’s fault, her own fault, and that the counsellor had angrily told her that Father O’Donnell had not raped her.

It becomes clear in Chrissie Foster’s book ‘Hell On The Way To Heaven’ how much Emma’s stay in the Catholic psychiatric unit affected and undermined her inner resolve to overcome her addictions and get her life back on track once again.  The years of addictions and self harm had taken their toll, but Emma was making progress, albeit slow. However, once she was coerced into severing ties with her family, and to rely completely on the unit for all her support,  she had come full circle; under the control of staff who preached Catholic dogma. Her fragile psychiatric condition could no longer put up a fight. She died alone in the house her parents had helped her buy with her share of the compensation money the Catholic Church had finally awarded to her and her family, after years of legal battles.

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Anthony and Chrissie Foster

I know full well, from my time as an observant and devout Catholic child, the esteem and reverence in which most nuns hold priests. They too believe that priests are representatives of God himself upon this earth, and can do no wrong. Nuns are true brides of Christ.

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-Anne Frandi-Coory 7 July 2013  …  Read more here: How Catholic Dogma Aided Paedophile Priests

How Catholic Dogma Aided Paedophile Priests – and ‘Hell On The Way To Heaven’ by Chrissie Foster

July 2, 2013
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, Catholicism & Paedophilia
18 Comments
Hell on way to heaven

Emma and Katie Foster 

.Updated 2 November 2016

*****Chrissie Foster, author of  Hell On The Way To Heaven has just been nominated for the 2017 Victorian Local Hero award

At the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses To Child Sexual Abuse, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, made the astonishing statement that “celibacy has worked well for the Church…… men do not need a sexual outlet…..”

He went on to say that if priests couldn’t cope without sex, they were quickly defrocked.  Why were paedophile priests not instantly defrocked, but sent to poor parishes like Ballarat and Doveton, for instance?

Chrissie&AnthonyFoster1

Chrissie and Anthony Foster

Well, I also want to know why thousands and thousands of girls and boys worldwide, over centuries, have been raped by Catholic priests? Celibacy is the biggest joke the Catholic Church has played on us…priests have mistresses, visit prostitutes and rape children!

 Jesus, if he existed at all, was not a celibate; in fact he married twice. Even the most saintly man finds celibacy difficult!

Former PM Tony Abbott, while LNP Leader of the Opposition, a failed Catholic priest, threatened to demolish the Royal Commission by withholding extra funding. It took an atheist female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to set up the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses To Child Sexual Abuse.

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I have just finished reading  Hell On The Way To Heaven by Chrissie Foster.

Mrs Foster’s story was highlighted when there was a push in Victoria for an investigation into the sexual assault of hundreds of children throughout the state of Victoria by paedophile Catholic priests and Brothers, over several decades.

In the book, Mrs Foster describes how the lives of her two young daughters, Emma and Katie, were destroyed by a paedophile priest. They were both raped at around 5 years of age by Father Kevin O’Donnell who was then aged in his seventies.  Emma and Katie were raped repeatedly over several years and eventually Emma killed herself with an overdose of drugs. She had attempted suicide many times over the years.

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Father Kevin O'Donnell

Paedophile priest Father Kevin O’Donnell

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Katie tried to drown her memories of what Kevin O’Donnell did to her with alcohol and now suffers from severe brain damage.  When Katie was 15 years old she was hit by a car driven by a drunken driver while crossing a road after a drinking binge.  The resultant brain damage left her with no short term memory. The memories of her repeated rape by O’Donnell are the clearest and she lives with them everyday. If that isn’t hell, well I don’t know what is!  The book is harrowing reading because of what a Catholic priest did to these innocent young girls and the hundreds of other boys and girls he raped and sexually assaulted over a period of some 50 years.  There is also evidence that he had young men calling on him in the early hours of the morning for sex. Whether or not he had sexually assaulted these young men when they were boys, we will probably never know.

Mrs Foster blames herself for blindly following her Catholic faith which she believes prevented her from recognising the early signs that her daughters were being sexually assaulted by this beast.  But the really devastating truth about the sexual assault of hundreds of children is that the Catholic Church did nothing to stop it. Over the years several children and their parents complained to Bishops, including George Pell, and other priests, about Kevin O’Donnell’s behaviour, but they were not believed.  Or O’Donnell was shifted elsewhere. One priest told a worried parent to keep her accusation quiet.

Emma and Katie were attending a Catholic school in Victoria when Kevin O’Donnell was the priest in charge of the local diocese. His control was all-encompassing; the local church, local schools, principals and teachers. His commands were law. As Mrs Foster puts it, this was the perfect setup for a paedophile. Without the knowledge of parents, O’Donnell could call into any classroom he liked, request a particular child to go with him on some fictitious errand. Or he would simply walk amongst the children on the playground until he sighted a child who would fulfil his loathsome needs.  He would then take that girl or boy to a locked room at the back of the school hall or a disused Church cottage, and do whatever he liked with them. That was of course after they drank the drugged can of coke he offered them. He was cunning and experienced. To ply these very young children with alcohol would alert their teachers by smell and behaviour, that something was amiss. The children would all have to return to their classrooms after this disgusting excuse for a human being was finished with them. Mrs Foster and her husband, Anthony Foster, never found out what drug O’Donnell used to subdue their daughters, although a doctor did suggest that it was probably some form of valium.

If teachers complained about O’Donnell’s behaviour and his practice of taking children out of classrooms during school hours without parental consent, they bore the brunt of O’Donnell’s foul temper and some even lost their teaching positions. If nuns issued complaints to the Church hierarchy, they were ignored. There was nowhere else to turn; Father Kevin O’Donnell had the diocese and parish in his tight grip. Even when some parishioners were told of O’Donnell’s offending, they refused to believe it and so O’Donnell was able to continue sexually assaulting children with impunity.

Mr Foster is an atheist who had promised to bring his children up as Catholics and send them to Catholic schools as part of the marriage agreement with his future wife, a devout Catholic. Mrs Foster believes it was her own upbringing as a Catholic that allowed her to trust so much in priests. After all, weren’t they the representatives of God here on earth?  Weren’t priests placed in the Catholic community to protect children and support parents?  Even when she thought O’Donnell’s behaviour odd, Mrs Foster believed that he was always right in all things. He took his instruction from the pope who was infallible. To disobey a priest was a mortal sin.

You will be in disbelief, as were the Fosters, at some of the tactics used by the Catholic Church to exonerate itself from any blame for paedophile priests, such as the entrenched loophole in the truth called  Mental Reservation, or mentalis restrictio in the Latin. It is a theological strategy dating back centuries.  In effect, the idea of truths ‘expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind.’ e.g. A priest could answer with lies, obfuscation and ambiguity in court, under oath, but then under his breath tell Jesus that he lied to protect the Church.  This follows Canon Law, but not perjury laws of the Australian Legal system. Survivors of Catholic paedophilia who witnessed Pell and other clergy give evidence,  believe that George Pell, his priests and bishops, used Mental Reservation  time and again to protect paedophile Christian Brothers and Catholic priests, including when answering questions at the Melbourne Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses Into Sexual Abuse Of Children.

I have often wondered over the years if my mother had not been such a devout Catholic, would she have been able to overcome her traumatic childhood? She never stopped praying to God and relying on priests and nuns to help her through all the difficult times. And there were many of those.The Catholic Church always seemed to let her down when she most needed its support. Perhaps if she hadn’t been so indoctrinated, so reliant on a non-existent god, she may have sought some other avenue of support, like professional counselling. When you are in the Catholic system, it is very difficult to get off the treadmill. The spectre of committing a sin, with the prospect of going to hell, is a great deterrent for those with a strong faith. If you needed guidance or counselling, you visited your parish priest.  If you were having problems with your children, you sent them to a priest for a talking to.

Mr & Mrs Foster were hopeful of gaining support and empathy when they were finally given an appointment with Archbishop George Pell after numerous letters, and requests to talk to him, were ignored. They asked him to take action against O’Donnell and had prepared a huge file on the suffering of their two daughters at the hands of O’Donnell. But the newly promoted Archbishop Pell was arrogant, evasive and rude, while refusing to believe that O’Donnell was a paedophile. Pell insisted that…  ‘It’s all gossip until proven in court. And I don’t listen to gossip!’ The Fosters would have to go to court before the Catholic Church would give them financial assistance for all the doctors’, psychiatrists’ and hospital bills that were mounting around the disintegration of their daughters’ lives.  Much later they were offered $50,000 for Emma by Pell, but they would have had to sign a confidentiality clause and would not be able to sue the Church. The Fosters turned it down.

Eventually the Fosters did receive compensation after many years pursuing the Church with the help of lawyers. It’s a testament to this couple that their marriage has survived the years of suffering they and their three daughters have endured at the hands of the Catholic Church. Their youngest daughter only escaped O’Donnell’s debauchery because by the time she was at school, he had retired from the parish.  He died before the Fosters and police could take any action against him.  The Church would protect its priests and the reputation of the Catholic Church at all costs. It was clearly evident in Pell’s actions and his  treatment of the Fosters, that the welfare of the victims of paedophile priests was of no concern to him.  In fact one of the official excuses that the Church relied on was that it was unaware of the harmful effect sexual assault had on children and that’s the reason they hadn’t taken any action against offending priests! Their role was to support priests and shield them from State Law.

I can relate to Mrs Foster’s claim in the book that it was only in the years following the shock of discovering what had happened to her daughters, and the loss of her faith, that she realised how brainwashed she had been by the Catholic system. Going to church every Sunday, regular confessions even though she had committed no sin, prayers every night.  Of course total obedience to priests was mandatory under Canon Law, which she faithfully inculcated into her daughters, as her own mother had done with her. By the time she could see her past without the blinkers of blind trust, she was 40 years old. I was 17 and had just entered the workforce when I began to suspect that what I had been taught in all the Catholic institutions I’d lived in, on and off for the previous 17 years, was not based on reality. But it took much longer to throw of the yoke of indoctrination,

I too had it so clear in my mind, that when I went out into the world, I would be looked after by God because I had been such a good Catholic girl. This is what religious brainwashing does to you. You believe everything priests tell you, even if it overrules what your parents tell you. Or even what common sense might tell you!  I can still remember when I was a little girl in class asking the nun if I had to love God more than my own father. She had just told us that we had to love God more than anyone else in the world because he was our true ‘father’. She insisted that was the case. I never stopped thinking about it and even believed I was committing a sin because I didn’t think I could love God more than my father. But I still trusted in God for everything in life.

Through all that the Fosters were suffering, Mrs Foster researched the way paedophiles groom children for their own sexual gratification. She was part of a group that wanted to alert other parents to the dangers by giving them information to help identify the signs children might exhibit if they were being sexually assaulted. Meanwhile the Catholic Church did nothing to inform parents that O’Donnell may have sexually assaulted their children and to seek help if they had any suspicions.  Mrs Foster also used her daughters’ recollections of how O’Donnell was able to lure them away from safe environments. She tells us that no child can know how to protect themselves from a determined paedophile, and Father Kevin O’Donnell was a paedophile with 50 years’ experience.

Mrs Foster did her best while O’Donnell was still alive, to urge Archbishop Pell to defrock O’Donnell so that he could never use his priesthood to harm other children. But Pell would not hear of it, even though O’Donnell had recently been convicted for several counts of past sexual assaults on young boys. At the time O’Donnell was convicted for these particular sexual offences, the victims were grown men. The police informed the Fosters that these were representative charges only as there were so many it would have taken years for them all to be processed and heard in court! The police were anxious to do what Cardinal Pell & his church would not do; get O’Donnell behind bars where he could no longer sexually assault children. The Fosters’ other concern was that when O’Donnell was released from prison, the fact he was still a priest  would enable him to use his position of trust to go on offending.

When O’Donnell was retired he was sent to live in a unit close to St Mary’s Church in his former parish of Dandenong. He began officiating at Mass on Saturdays. When complaints were made to Father Noel O’Brady that children were visiting O’Donnell at his unit, he took those complaints to the archdiocese.  The ‘appropriate authority’ instructed Father O’Brady that  ‘It’s not happening on Church property…we’re not responsible.’  O’Donnell was supported and protected by the Catholic Church until he died.  It couldn’t have done this if he had been laicised. Obviously the Church knew what O’Donnell had been doing for decades, and right up until the end of his life, his welfare came before the hundreds of children whose lives he had totally destroyed. Many have committed suicide, many will never come forward, most continue to suffer.

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I urge all parents who send their children to a Catholic school or intend sending their children to one, please read Chrissie Foster’s book ‘Hell On The Way To Heaven’ if only to be aware of the telling signs that your child might be vulnerable to sexual assault and to ensure that what happened to her beautiful girls will never happen again.

Think clearly and make sure you know what is contained in the Catholic Catechism the schools use to instruct the children in Catholic dogma.

-Anne Frandi-Coory … read more here about ‘Hell On The Way To Heaven’ 

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Visit: Royal Commission Into Sexual Abuse Of Australian Children

Royal Commission Into Sexual Abuse of Australian Children

September 20, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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Updated 6 February 2017 – From today and over the next three weeks archbishops from every state (except Tasmania) will take the stand. 

Some statistics from the Royal Commission on first day of proceedings involving archbishops of Australia,  in just 5 Dioceses here in Australia:

Figures much worse for religious orders: 20.4% Marist Brothers, 21.9% Salesians, 22% Christian Brothers 40.4%, St John of God.

“The following five archdioceses or dioceses with priest members which had
the highest overall proportion of priests who ministered in the period 1950
to 2010 and who were alleged perpetrators: 


a. 11.7% of priests from the Diocese of Wollongong were alleged
perpetrators
b. 13.9% of priests from the Diocese of Lismore were alleged
perpetrators
c. 14.1% of priests from the Diocese of Port Pirie were alleged
perpetrators
d. 14.7% of priests from the Diocese of Sandhurst were alleged
perpetrators
e. 15.1% of priests from the Diocese of Sale were alleged
perpetrators”.

The disturbing figures were revealed by senior counsel assisting, Gail Furness, SC. She also revealed that the Holy See had refused to hand over documents involving Australian priests accused of abuse.

“The royal commission hoped to gain an understanding of the action taken in each case,” Furness said. “The Holy See responded, on 1 July 2014, that it was ‘neither possible nor appropriate to provide the information requested’,” she said

“Children were ignored or worse, punished. Allegations were not investigated. Priests and religious [brothers] were moved. The parishes or communities to which they were moved knew nothing of their past,” she said. “Documents were not kept or they were destroyed. Secrecy prevailed as did cover-ups.”

Read more here: Clerical Paedophilia; Centuries-Old Timebomb

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The Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children by Catholic and other religious clerics is now underway in Australia.

‘Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses Into Sexual Abuse Of Children’ will carry out its investigations throughout Australia. The Chairman at the Inquiry is Justice Peter McClellan.

Thanks to the courageous work of PM Julia Gillard’s team, the Inquiry began its work in April 2013.

On 7 May 2013 Cardinal George Pell admitted that the Catholic Church covered up hundreds of cases of sexual abuse of children. The Church did this to protect the reputation of the Church, its wealth, and its priests.  Since he made that statement, Pell has been given refuge at the Vatican so that he has not taken the stand in these proceedings, which to many victims, is a travesty of justice!

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Below is a book which is a must read for anyone interested in the proceedings of the Inquiry:

‘Hell On The Way To Heaven’ is written by Chrissie Foster, mother of two daughters who were raped by a 70+ year old Catholic Priest, Father Kevin O’Donnell. He died before justice prevailed. It’s a heartbreaking story. Chrissy Foster tells us that she was so indoctrinated by Catholic dogma she couldn’t see the signs that her daughters were at risk of sexual abuse by this paedophile. Father O’Donnell had total power over his diocese and the Catholic school the girls attended. He was free to wander among the children at any time and free to take them out of classes when he chose.

It is believed that this paedophile sexually molested and raped hundreds of boys and girls. The Catholic Church did not warn the community that there had been complaints against Kevin O’Donnell spanning 50 years.  O’Donnell was eventually defrocked by the Catholic Church but boys continued to visit him at his unit. When George Pell was informed by parishioners about O’Donnell’s continued association with children, he replied that it was no longer anything to do with the Catholic Church!

For everyone’s sake in our community, so this never happens again, please take the time to read this book.

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An Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church is long overdue in Australia.

The stress and heartbreak that the victims of sexual abuse, and their families, go through is horrendous. I do not believe that the Catholic Church even comes close to understanding this. If it did, would the Vatican have allowed this abuse to go on for centuries? Perhaps it’s not a question of understanding and empathy. It’s most likely all about power, wealth and status. I believe that the number of reported abuses is just the tip of the iceberg, because research has shown that is the tendency with all forms of sexual abuse. It can take half of a victim’s lifetime, or more, to just gain the strength to talk about the abuse. To quote Chrissie Foster: “It takes 40 or 50 years for children to talk about what has happened to them, and it just never stops”.

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For more details see: How Catholic Dogma Aided Paedophile priests

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Chrissie & Anthony Foster

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It one such case, two of Chrissie and Anthony Fosters’ daughters were raped by a Catholic Priest. In an article about the Fosters in Catholica, March 2011, the writer refers to the abuser as “A Holy Roman Catholic Priest”.  I think this is indicative of the mentality of the Catholic hierarchy, in that they choose this highly inflated title to describe a paedophile. It sends a message that this rapist continues to be treated with respect by his peers and the Vatican!

Chrissie and Anthony Foster are the parents of three daughters, two of whom were raped as little girls by a paedophile priest, Kevin O’Donnell. One of the daughters eventually took her own life in despair after a long period of self harm. The second daughter who was raped, after a similarly long period of self harm, walked in front of a speeding car while intoxicated and today requires round the clock nursing care that will continue for the rest of her life.

Mrs Foster has written a book ‘Hell on the Way to Heaven‘ in which she cites six bishops who failed to take decisive action following several parents’ complaints regarding Kevin O’Donnell. It is difficult to comprehend why Cardinal Pell is still in Office given what has been presented in Mrs Foster’s book. “Cardinal Pell has more front than Myers Department Store and it will probably wash over him like water off a duck’s back”.  Read Mrs Foster’s book and judge for yourself, the failure of these six bishops to protect children from sexual abuse by Kevin O’Donnell.  Cardinal Pell appears to bury his head in the sand over this issue, and still there has been no effective inquiry.

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The Fosters are driving the push for an inquiry into sexual abuse by clergy in Victoria.  As quoted in the Waverley Leader September 13, “Two signatures stand between an inquiry into the alleged sexual abuse of two Oakleigh girls, and other alleged victims by Victorian clergy”.  Labour MP, Anne Barker handed the proposed terms of reference for an inquiry to Attorney-General Robert Clark, recently. If Mr Clark and Premier Ted Baillieu, sign  the four page document, a Royal Commission of Inquiry will be launched.  The Terms of Reference state that: “Since 1993, more than 65 clergy who have served in Victoria, have been convicted of abuse”. These figures are staggering. But the Catholic hierarchy have stipulated that they will not deviate from its ‘Melbourne Response Programme’ which was implemented 15 years ago. However, going on past experience of the way the Catholic Church has protected its paedophile priests, we must have nothing less than a Royal Commission of Inquiry, which would be  totally outside the influence of the Vatican. Mr Foster believes A  Royal Commission is the only way to expose the secretive behaviour of the Church, and bring it under full scrutiny. A decision is pending. Let’s hope that in the event of a Royal Commission of Inquiry in Victoria, other states will follow suit.

-Anne Frandi-Coory 20 December 2011

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See  previous posts:  Clerical Paedophilia         /    Irish PM Blasts Vatican

‘Banished Babies’ by Mike Milotte – A Book Review

July 25, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
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The book ‘Banished Babies’ by Mike Milotte, is about babies born in Ireland to unmarried mothers.   But we now know, banished babies were also born to illegitimate mothers in  New Zealand, Australia, America and England. More countries where this practise took place may yet come to light.  Australian Banished Babies want an apology. You might say “But this happened last Century”.  The thing is, the wounds left in these heartbreaking cases, never heal.

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See Adoption: The Open Wound That Never Heals

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‘Banished Babies’ were those babies taken from their unmarried mothers at birth.  I believe that the word ‘taken’ in this instance is a misnomer. It should read ‘ripped’, because that’s how it felt to the young mothers. I know this personally from my own mother’s case. This ‘baby snatching’ as others call it, was not for altruistic purposes; rather it was following Catholic dogma issued by the Vatican’s Office of the Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly Office of the Holy Inquisition).   It was certainly not for the welfare of the infants, or their mothers.  No.  It was to remove these babies from their mothers who were seen by the Catholic Church as sinners who had to be punished. In the nuns’ minds, indoctrinated by the Church, the babies themselves were being saved from the clutches of satan and were ‘sold’, mostly to wealthy American couples, who, it was stipulated, had to be of the Catholic Faith.  It was strictly enforced by the Church, that neither mother or infant would ever be able to trace each other, and this caused even more heartbreak decades later.   (See my post about Philomena Lee). Large sums of money were exchanged for the privilege of ‘buying a newborn’, donation being the euphemism used. Ironic, isn’t it?  So much of that wealth the Church received, is now being paid out to even more victims of the Catholic Church; in the form of compensation  to  thousands of families whose children were sexually abused by paedophile priests.

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For all the mothers and babies who never found each other

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Between the end of WWII and 1965 more than 2,200 Irish infants were adopted out of the country, mostly by hopeful parents in the U.S. All the adoptive parents were, by mandate of the church in Ireland, Catholic. Until the late 1990’s and the work of Irish journalist Michael Milotte this was a fact known to few in Ireland and fewer in the U.S. In Ireland Milotte’s work, emphasising both the emotional and physical brutalisation of the birth mothers and the country’s loss of vital human capital, led to a great furor.

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In 2001, the Washington Post reported:

Milotte, a senior reporter for the Irish television network RTE, says life was particularly hard for the mothers in these convents, which were largely self-sustaining thanks to the women’s labour but also received public funding. In some cases, he says, the priests and nuns received money from the adoptive parents, who paid “confinement and medical costs” associated with their child’s birth.

“Where did the money go?” he wonders. “It sustained the people who ran the institutions in a manner they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.”  But money likely wasn’t the primary motivator, he says. Rather, there was a demand for children, and many of the nuns believed they were doing God’s work by sending some of Ireland‘s social outcasts to a better life in the land of opportunity.

“They thought they were doing good,” says Milotte in a phone interview from Dublin. “The fact that people might have rights didn’t enter into their thinking. They thought they knew best. If, in doing the best thing, there was an opportunity to make money, that was all the better.”  In those postwar days, it was not uncommon for Irish children to be adopted by U.S. military and government employees living abroad, Milotte says.

The birth mothers of these children spent their pregnancies and post-natal, pre-adoption lives in varioushomes, often convents, for girls and women who were seen by the conservative Catholic culture as shame-worthy moral degenerates. The horrific conditions that these women underwent was recently dramatized in the movie the Magdelene Sisters.

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Milotte spoke with NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling upon release of his book Banished Babies in May of 1998:

Many of these women were seen as the next thing to prostitutes, and were very often told that when their identities became known. Even when girls got pregnant, very often they didn’t get married even if — because there was the stigma attached to having had sex before marriage. So even where a relationship endured, the child would be given up for adoption. And it was all done in secret.

I am one of those kids given up for adoption. It was in that interview in May of 1998, two days after I returned to Chicago following my mother’s funeral, that I learned of the controversy. I have always known that I was adopted, that I was a ‘true Irishman’, and I had always been proud and honored by the distinction. In the days immediately following my mom’s death I told my Dad that I had never for a second doubted who my ‘real’ parents were, that he and my mom were the only ones who can lay claim to me. I feel no different today.

None-the-less, as the NPR story continued I found myself getting information that I’m sure even they didn’t have.

ZWERDLING:  Here’s one of the most curious aspects of this story.It’s hard enough for most women to give up a baby for adoption during the first few hours or weeks of its life. But church officials forced the young mothers to stay in their convents and raise their own infants for at least one year or more before adoptive families could come and get them.Reporter Mike Milotte says he’s turned up cases where young women changed their minds after their babies were born and tried to leave the convents. (This also happened to my mother in New Zealand). But the nuns sent guards to capture the women and bring them back.For her part, Mary O’Connor says, she knew she’d have to give her baby away. She felt she literally had no choice. But by the time the nuns came to take her son, she’d been raising him for 17 months. Then one evening, O’Connor says, a nun told her, “Get him ready. We’re giving him away in the morning.”

O’CONNOR: So she just carried it over to the convent. There was two parts, like there was a hospital part where the children were kept and then there was the convent part. And the child was brought over to the convent part. And there was three steps up. You went in the side door and there were three steps up. And they went to the top of the steps and they said, “Just say goodbye now. That’s it.”

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-Anne Frandi-Coory 25 July 2011

For more about my mother’s lost children & the heartlessness of the Catholic Church:

  ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar? – A Passionate Quest to Find Answers for Generations of Defeated Mothers’.

Ireland’s PM Blasts Vatican’s Response To Sexual Abuse

July 21, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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Update: May 2015 …Pope Benedict has since been stood down, and Pope Francis has been elected. Time will tell if anything will change. 

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vatican

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Pope Benedict XVI’s letter relating to the Cloyne Report has infuriated Ireland’s Prime Minister and the Irish victims of paedophile priests.  People from several countries have been hoping for constructive comments in the letter from the Vatican regarding sex abuse scandals, but they will once again be disappointed. ><

Pope Benedict XVI

>< Vatican-approved cover-ups of the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests, have been going on for centuries in parishes and schools.  My own great-grandmother, then 14 years old, was raped by a Catholic priest in Rome in the 19th Century.  She was sent off to London to have the resultant baby while the priest’s name was protected. I’d hate to imagine how many other girls might have suffered the same fate because the Vatican turned a blind eye.   The Vatican has never put children’s welfare first in these horrendous scandals.  Foremost in the Vatican’s responses to thousands of allegations of abuse, is to protect the Catholic Church at all costs, then the abusing priests.  Some see the present Pope’s position as difficult because he was formerly the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Once The Holy Office of the Holy Inquisition), which makes, and enforces, doctrinal laws. See previous post:  The Case of the Pope; From a legal perspective.

>< It is sickening to me, to see and hear the pope expressing love for ‘God’s children’ while allowing their  torture and rape to continue.  I use the word ‘allowing’ deliberately, because that is what the present Pope is doing, and what his predecessors have done;  the Vatican’s secrecy and  inaction have ensured the abuse continues.  The scandals that first emerged in Canada and Australia in the 1980s, followed by Ireland in the 1990s, the United States this decade and, in recent months, Benedict’s German homeland, are but the tip of the iceberg.  And no-one has even begun to examine accusations coming out of Africa where many paedophile priests are sent for their protection from Western countries’ legal systems.

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Comments regarding the Pope’s letter and the Cloyne Report: Maeve Lewis, head of  ONE IN FOUR victims’ group, stated that the Pope “passed up a glorious opportunity to address the core issue in the scandal; the deliberate policy of the Catholic Church, at the highest levels, to protect sex offenders, thereby endangering children”. “The Pope speaks only of failures in the Irish church and neglects the role of the Vatican. If the church cannot acknowledge this fundamental truth, it is still in denial”.  She said she was “astounded” at the Pope’s previous assertion that  ‘the roots of clerical sexual abuse lie in the secularization of Irish society, the falling off of religious devotion, and failures to adhere to canon law.’

“This shows a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics of sexual violence and creates little hope that the church will ever respond effectively to the problem.” Author and survivor Andrew Madden said issues highlighted by him and others in a letter to the Pope had been ignored.  He said there had been no responsibility taken by the Catholic Church, regarding the sexual abuse of so many children, and its protection  of paedophile priests.   Mr Madden  goes on to say that Pope Benedict has repeated his apology for the hurt caused to those abused but then states that the Church’s only  role has been its failure to ‘deal with criminal and sinful acts’.  According to Mr Madden, the Catholic Church didn’t fail to act; it acted very clearly to protect itself and left the abused children to fend for themselves. Another survivor, Marie Collins said she welcomed the order that church leaders should co-operate with police, but she said there had been no mention of the Vatican’s role in the cover-ups which allowed the abuse to continue.  [In fact it is not an ‘order’ but a ‘guideline’].

Alan Shatter, Justice Minister in the Irish parliament also lashed out at the Pope, saying:  “We should never again tolerate a foreign state issuing directives to members of the hierarchy and other clerics in this state to violate Irish law by concealing reports of child sexual abuse and not reporting such allegations. Nor should we ever again tolerate a foreign state requiring that an oath of any nature be taken by an adult or child to maintain a veil of secrecy over incidents of sexual abuse.” The latter was a reference to a case involving current Cardinal Sean Brady, who in 1975 swore two young children to an oath not to reveal their abuse. The Cloyne report into Catholic clerical child abuse in Ireland released on Wednesday 20th July, will identify 19 Catholic priests who allegedly sexually assaulted children in the 1990s.

The report into abuse allegations in the Catholic diocese of Cloyne, has been approved for publication by the Irish government. The report, known officially as the Commission of Investigation Report into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, will be published by Ireland’s minister for justice, Alan Shatter, and the minister for children, Frances Fitzgerald. The last Irish government agreed to extend the Murphy commission’s remit to include Cloyne, as well as the Dublin archdiocese. The commission’s Dublin report found widespread clerical abuse and cover-up in the Irish capital which was devastating for the Catholic Church. It also found child protection practices in the Dublin diocese to be ‘inadequate and in some respects dangerous’. The commission was later asked to investigate the handling of sex abuse allegations in Cloyne by church and state authorities between 1 January 1996 – when the church’s first-published guidelines, its Framework Document, came into play – and 1 February 2009. Minister Alan Shatter said the report’s findings were unambiguous. “We cannot correct past wrongs perpetrated on our children, but we can take action to prevent, insofar as is possible, the wrongs of the past being perpetrated on our children in the future,” he said.  “We cannot depend on the undertakings of others to correct failings and introduce robust and effective structures of protection. The Cloyne Report  irrefutably confirms that some who, in the past, gave such undertakings, acted in bad faith,” the Minister told Parliament.

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Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has launched an unprecedented attack on the Catholic Church,  saying the relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again following the Cloyne report. The Vatican chose to focus on the interests of the Church rather than the children abused by its clergy and shielded by its leaders. The Catholic News Service reports Mr Kenny accused the Vatican of adopting a “calculated, withering position” on abuse.   He said that “the Irish people, including the very many faithful Catholics who – like me – have been shocked and dismayed by the repeated failings of Church authorities to face up to what is required; deserve and require confirmation from the Vatican that they do accept, endorse and require compliance by all Church authorities herewith, the obligations to report all cases of suspected abuse, whether current or historical, to the state’s authorities.”

“The revelations of the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic . . . as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism . . . the narcissism . . . that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”

PM Kenny said the Cloyne report told “a tale of a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children”. He said although the report had shown the need for the Vatican “to get its house in order”, it also revealed how the State had failed victims too.  “For too long Ireland has neglected its children,” he said.  “This is not Rome. This is the Republic of Ireland 2011, a republic of laws,” Mr Kenny said.

The Prime Minister was speaking during a Government motion on the report that “deplores the Vatican’s intervention which contributed to the undermining of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish bishops”. It expresses “dismay at the disturbing findings of the report and at the inadequate and inappropriate response, particularly of the Church authorities in Cloyne, to complaints and allegations of child sexual abuse.” >< Italy, another predominantly Catholic country, has a similar tale to tell.

See Post:  Paedophilia in Italy

Most recent post: 

Clerical Paedophilia; Centuries Old Time Bomb

The Vatican Advises On Sexual Abuse

May 18, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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The Vatican has advised bishops around the world  of the importance of co-operating with police if complaints have been laid about specific priests raping and molesting children. Bishops were asked to develop guidelines for preventing sex abuse by May 2012.

How can Bishops prevent sex abuse by following ‘guidelines’ unless the priest under suspicion is reported to police immediately and is barred from performing official duties while under investigation?  Neither of these necessary actions have been insisted on by the Vatican.

The communique from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly Office of the Holy Inquisition) made no provision to ensure the bishops actually follow any guidelines, and victims groups immediately denounced the recommendations as “dangerously flawed” because they stress the exclusive authority of bishops to determine the credibility of abuse allegations.  And we all know where that has led.  It seems that this is another release from the Pope to lull the faithful into a false sense of security regarding their children in the hands of priests, while nothing has changed!

“There’s nothing that will make a child safer today or tomorrow or next month or next year,” said Barbara Dorris, outreach director for the main U.S. victims group Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests.

The sexual abuse of children continues:

The communique is being issued at a time when the sex abuse guidelines of the U.S. bishops have been put into question after a Philadelphia grand jury earlier this year indicted a high-ranking church official on child endangerment charges for allegedly transferring predator priests. Four co-defendants — two priests, an ex-priest and a former Catholic school teacher — are charged with raping children.

The grand jury found “substantial evidence of abuse” committed by at least 37 other priests who remained in active ministry at the time of the report. Philadelphia’s archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, initially insisted that no archdiocesan priests in ministry had an “admitted or established allegation” against them. But he later suspended two dozen of the 37 priests. The archdiocese says many of the 37 were accused not of actual molestation but of so-called “boundary issues,” including inappropriate touching or sharing porn with minors — the latter a canonical crime in and of itself.  These are mere “boundary issues”??

How about this for a pathetic excuse: It was explained by a spokesman that the Vatican didn’t make reporting abuse cases to police mandatory because different countries have different laws which bishops must abide by. The Vatican states such a binding  rule would be problematic for priests working in countries with repressive regimes.  Who would the leaders of repressive regimes be more harmful to, the abusive priests or the abused children?

If this is the Vatican’s idea of a ‘transparency drive’, perhaps the Vatican hierarchy needs to look up the meaning of transparency in the dictionary, that’s if they possess one.  The newly published guidelines also outline the different ways that abusive priests can be disciplined by the church’s internal courts [my emphasis]. In “very grave cases”, (aren’t they all grave?) the pope may issue a decree dismissing a priest from the clerical state.   You mean the ‘E’ word?  But this has never yet happened, has it?

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The Vatican Speaks

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The following statement has to be the most idiotic the Vatican has ever released in relation to paedophile priests:

The pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone risked new controversy by claiming that paedophilia was linked to homosexuality. “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia,” he told a news conference in Santiago.   Can we please have the names of these many psychiatric experts, and are they all Catholic?  What about the thousands of ‘celibate’ priests who have raped hundreds of thousands of girls and boys?  Still more questions than answers.

Perhaps The Church’s fantastical teachings has made it easy for priests to delude themselves into believing that they weren’t really having sex with their victims.  It was women, those evil temptresses they had to avoid, as I write in  Catholic Dichotomy of Females.  I cannot believe that the problem is solely down to paedophilia or homosexuality.  It is much more psychologically complicated than that.

More…Vatican, Is It The Gay Men’s Club?

&   Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

&    Paedophilia In Italy

&    Kiss Of Betrayal

Vatican – Is It The Gay Men’s Club?

March 16, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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The cover of Panorama: “The Wild Nights Of Gay Priests”.

Is it any wonder that the Vatican, in light of its failure to immediately report sexual abuse by Catholic clergy to criminal investigators, is known as ‘The Gay Men’s Club’?
Apparently, Cardinal Sean O’Malley has a list of suspected paedophile priests in Boston which he refuses to release. The unreleased list, possibly 40 names of  offending priests, is included in a record of the minutes from a March 2010 meeting of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council.How can the Vatican  therefore, allow these men to continue working around vulnerable children in  positions of trust?   It also means these men are not receiving help for their predilections.

Anne Barrett Doyle of Bishop-Accountability.org called the number of undisclosed priests “staggering.” She accused O’Malley of purposely delaying to protect church officials responsible for monitoring the priests.  And also, if past actions by Bishops are anything to go by, so the accused can be sent on safely to another parish in Africa somewhere.  The church has said compiling the list is a complex task. It cited concerns about due process for accused priests.  What I would like to know is:  what about the children?

Many gay priests have been exposed by Panorama magazine frequenting gay clubs and actually having sex with gay partners.  Being gay is not the issue here.  It is the hypocrisy of supposed men of God, claiming they are celibate.  If there is so much opportunity around for gay sex, one has to wonder why these men have joined the priesthood.  It may be that the Catholic religion allows them to believe that if they are not having sex with women, then they are not having sex.  Perhaps it is as simple or as psychologically complex as that.

Panorama magazine is owned by Catholic Prime Minister and media baron, Silvio Berlusconi.  Its reporters have film of priests attending gay clubs and having gay sex.  One of the priests  is later filmed saying Mass!  http://italia.panorama.it/Le-notti-brave-dei-preti-gay  – can be translated into English via Google

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See previous posts:

Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

Last Judgment and Babies

Paedophilia in Italy

Kiss of Betrayal

Nuns: An Endangered Species?

February 3, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
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The Abbess was of noble blood

Catholic Sisters of Mercy; four biological sisters.The nun on the right was the closest Anne Frandi-Coory came to a mother figure; her face is the one she remembers as an infant in a Catholic Orphanage nursery. (see ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’ below.)

But early took the veil and hood

Ere upon life she cast a look

Or knew the world that she forsook

Fair too she was, and kind had been

As she was fair, but ne’er had seen

For her a timid lover sigh

Nor knew the influence of her eye

Love, to her ear, was but a name

Combined with vanity and shame

Her hopes, her fears, her joys, were all

Bounded within the cloister wall:

The deadliest sin her mind could reach

Was of monastic rule the breach;

And her ambition’s highest aim

To emulate St Hilda’s fame

For this she gave her ample dower,

To raise the convent’s eastern tower;

For this, with carving rare and quaint,

She decked the chapel of the saint,

And gave the relic-shrine of cost,

With ivories and gems embost.

The poor her convent’s bounty blest,

The pilgrim in its halls found rest.

Black was her garb, her rigid rule

Reformed on Benedictine school;

Her cheek was pale, her form was spare;

Vigils, and penitence austere,

Had early quenched the life of youth,

But gentle was the dame in Sooth

From: Sir Walter Scott, ‘Marmion’, The Immolation of Constance De Beverley

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My mother was a defeated nun and a defeated mother. She entered a convent to escape the inescapable: LIFE.  (See Previous Post: My Mother Was A Catholic Nun. 

For hundreds of years, young women and girls have been entering convents for various reasons.  Fathers and other patriarchs sent unmarriageable or unmanageable daughters into a cloistered life. Daughters whose mothers had died were also sentenced to this life of imprisonment, with or without their consent.

“A Drama of Science, Faith and Love”

Even Galileo, that illustrious 17th Century  scientist, and devout Catholic, confined his eldest daughter from the age of thirteen (1616)  to San Matteo convent in Arcetri.  His daughter, Virgina was deemed unmarriageable because her father had never married her mother, the beautiful Marina Gamba of Venice. Virginia (Sister Maria Celeste) lived out her life in poverty and seclusion in the convent (Order of St Clare) , as did her younger sister, Livia. Unlike Virginia, very little is heard from, or about, the “silent and strange” Livia.   Virginia  lost all her teeth by age 27  because of her lack of a nutritious diet.  It is worth reading  ‘Galileo’s Daughter’ by Dava Sobel, a gifted author, for more on these remarkable lives.  We know so much about Galileo and Virginia because of the correspondence between the two.  Ms Sobel also covers the horror of Galileo’s life and his banishment to house arrest in Ravenna, at the hands of the Holy Inquisition headed by Pope Paul V.

The Florentine poet, Dante Alighieri, was exiled from his beloved Florence in the early 14th Century by Pope Boniface Vlll (Cardinal Caetani), with support from the French.  Dante’s only daughter, Antonia, was confined to a convent in Ravenna where he was living at the time in 1320.  Antonia took the name Sister Beatrice, the name of Dante’s beloved.

In this day and age, the numbers of young Catholic women wishing to give up their freedom “for God” is dwindling.

What is worrying is that sexual harassment and abuse from priests and bishops continues, particularly in third world countries.  Rape is common because the clergy believe these nuns to be free from aids, unlike prostitutes. If the nuns’ abuse is uncovered, or they become pregnant, they are the ones to be thrown out onto the roads.

(See previous post  ‘Kiss of Betrayal’)

In an extreme case of double standards, always rife in the catholic Church, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Arizona was excommunicated because she approved an emergency abortion last year to save the life of a critically ill young patient.  Imagine the hundreds of  sexually abused girls and boys who could have been spared lives of misery, if paedophile priests had been excommunicated and reported to police, instead of being shifted around from parish to parish?

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From the pen of  The Ethical Nag:  The Vatican has now launched an “apostolic visitation,” or investigation, of every one of America’s 60,000 religious sisters, accused with having what Vatican spokesman Cardinal Franc Rodé calls “a feminist spirit” and “a secular mentality”. At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for bringing the church to a state of global crisis, even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack from these men.

Not surprisingly, the appeal of joining a Catholic religious order as a career choice is plummeting. Fewer than 4% of North American Catholic women have even considered becoming a nun, according to 2008 data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. And that’s less than half the number compared to just five years earlier.

And no wonder. Dr. Tina Beattie, who teaches Catholic Studies at Roehampton University in the U.K., gives far more disturbing examples of how the Vatican treats its nuns.  For example:

“In 2001, senior leaders of women’s religious orders presented evidence to Rome of the widespread rape and abuse of nuns by priests and bishops, with a particular problem in Africa which has no cultural tradition of celibacy, and where the threat of HIV and Aids means that priests are more likely to prefer sex with nuns than with prostitutes. The Vatican acknowledged the problem and there was a brief flurry of media interest, but this is a scandal which has disappeared without a trace.”

I don’t know whether any Mercy nuns were sexually abused by Catholic clergy when I was a child  in their care, but I well remember the awe and deference the nuns exhibited in the presence of priests, bishops, and cardinals.  Once I understood the hypocrisy and double standard encouraged by the Church’s teachings, I found these displays sickening.

-Anne Frandi-Coory 3 February 2011

Read more about ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’  

Joan of Arc & Pope Benedict

January 28, 2011
CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
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updated 15 November 2013

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Mercy: St Bartholomew's Day, Paris, 1572. 'Ill-fated love affair between a Catholic & a Protestant'. John Everett Millais 1829-96. This is the day thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by Catholics.

Mercy: St Bartholomew’s Day, Paris, 1572. ‘Ill-fated love affair between a Catholic & a Protestant’. John Everett Millais 1829-96. This is the day thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by Catholics.

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Has Pope Benedict gone completely mad? He recently stated via a Catholic publication that politicians should behave like Joan Of Arc!   “With her deep prayer life and total devotion to serving God and the good of her fellow citizens, St. Joan of Arc is a wonderful model for Christian politicians”, Pope Benedict XVI said. “Hers is a beautiful example of holiness for lay people involved in politics, especially in difficult situations. Faith is the light that guided all her choices,” the pope said January 26 during his weekly general audience.  What a load of b…….  This is just another Church smokescreen to hide its vast problems.

Joan of Arc’s real name Jeanne d’Arc, The Maid of  Orléans, France. Clad in a white suit of armour, and carrying her own standard, Jeanne was leading an array of loyal French fighters to battle against the English, who were trying to take possession of her beloved Orléans.  Jeanne and her followers won that battle but on the way to relieve Compiégne, she was captured and sold to the English by John of Luxembourg, and they handed her over to The Catholic Holy Inquisition.  It seems to me,  Jeanne was burnt at the stake because she was leading a French army against the British. It was politics not religion, but a smokescreen was desperately needed.  Easier to torture and murder a young woman if she was found guilty of heresy and sorcery; less public sympathy.  The British didn’t want the blood of a  heroine on their historical hands.

But, and here’s the rub: Recent historical evidence has challenged the traditional account of Jeanne d’Arc. The contention is that Jeanne d’Arc has been confused with Jehanne, the illegitimate daughter of Queen Isabeau of France and Louis, duc d’Orléans, brother of the King. Now, how is Pope Benedict going to fix this problem given the Church’s teachings on the grave ‘sin’ of sex outside marriage, not to mention illegitimate births and the spectre of purgatory?

The Catholic Church ‘forgave’ Jeanne and made her a saint in 1920.  Perhaps the Church has canonised the wrong woman?  Now wouldn’t that cause ructions at the Holy See?

But let’s get back to what the Pope is actually saying in the 21st Century: “Christian politicians should not worry about doing the best for their country, but rather spend their time praying and fighting for their religion,  ie  Catholicism”.  There have been enough religious wars over millennia, and they’re still going on!

Shouldn’t the Pope and the Vatican be spending their time bringing paedophile priests to justice and helping their abused victims instead of pontificating about a brutal and savage murder committed by the Catholic hierarchy in the 15th Century?  I believe that the reason priests have been brutalising children for centuries is that they have never been brought to justice for their crimes.  Instead the Church has “forgiven them their sins” and allowed them to continue to prey on innocents.   These evil priests have been “indulged” by the Catholic Church.

Quote from The Ethical Nag’s Blog:

John Swales was only 10 years old back in 1969 when he and later his two younger brothers as well were first assaulted by

Father Barry Glendinning at a summer camp for low-income kids in Ontario. He told Maclean’s magazine in its December 7, 2009 issue:

“The real failing here is the institutional response to these deviants. Every culture, every occupation, has these issues of sexual abuse. But few have the ability to conceal sexual abuse of children like the Catholic church does.”

In Catholic theology, an indulgence is the full or partial remission of temporal punishment due for sins which have already been forgiven. The indulgence is granted by the Catholic Church after the sinner has confessed and received absolution. The belief is that indulgences draw “House of Merit” accumulated by Christ’s  superabundantly meritorious sacrifice on the cross (what?!) and the virtues and penance of the saints. They are granted for specific good works, prayers,  and what the Church will not openly admit, money.  Lots of it.  We all know many priests come from wealthy Catholic families.  No wonder deviant priests re-offend time and again!

Indulgences replaced the severe penances of the early Church. More exactly, they replaced the shortening of those penances that was allowed at the intercession of those imprisoned and those awaiting martyrdom for the faith.

Abuses in selling and granting indulgences were a major point of contention when Martin Luther  initiated the Protestant Reformation. (1517).