Archive

Tag Archives: paedophilia

THE PRINCE – Faith, Abuse and George Pell. by David Marr

March 2, 2021
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, Catholicism & Paedophilia
Leave a comment

*******************************************

The Prince   by David Marr, reveals a cleric at ease with power and aggression in asserting the conservative prerogatives of the Vatican. He charts Pell’s response – as a man, a priest, an archbishop and a prince of the church – to the scandal that has engulfed the Catholic world: the sexual abuse of children.

The author initially explores the life of George Pell, from his childhood and family life, his time as a seminarian, through to his rise as the most senior cleric of the Catholic Church in Australia.  Pell achieves his ultimate ambition to become a Cardinal and is eventually promoted by Pope Francis to glorified accountant for the Vatican.  Pell’s obvious skill at accounting has saved the Church in Australia many millions of dollars in compensation to victims of clerical abuse via Pell’s establishment of the Melbourne Response in which victims were dissuaded from reporting to police and awarded paltry sums in compensation. This extremely effective solution would not have escaped the attention of the Pontiff which had the added benefit, for a limited time, of silencing growing numbers of victims.

Pell allowed the payouts of meagre sums to victims while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the establishment of a Catholic university, other buildings and renovations. Pell’s treatment of the families of victims and of victims themselves is heart rending. In one case, the parent of a young victim was so distraught, they cried and berated Pell for allowing the abuse to happen and his response was : “Have you said your hail Marys?” However, by then the tide was turning.

The last few years have been very difficult for Pell, not least because of his realisation that the Catholic Church can no longer escape secular scrutiny no matter how much he has tried to shield the church and its wealth from the scandal of the sexual abuse of children. This book paints a portrait of a man with an inflated ego and an over-riding ambition for absolute ecclesiastical power over Catholics in Australia. A portrait of hypocrisy which allowed a man to sexually abuse children  while making him blind to the suffering of children and their families.

Pell was convinced that most of the world’s problems could be solved by ensuring that Catholics adhered to the rule of Canon Law of which he was an expert. In his mind, Catholics were becoming too lax in their views regarding marriage, the sins of homosexuality, abortion and contraception. He obviously did not consider clerical paedophilia a sin.

With the revelations worldwide of Catholic clergy paedophilia and homosexual relationships among Catholic clergy, celibacy has to be one of the biggest cons ever perpetrated by the Catholic Church.  “Abortion is a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people” stated Pell, which was ridiculed around the world and I believe, turned even more Catholics away from their church, especially women.

David Marr explores the possibility that Pell’s lust for power sublimates his instinctual sexual desires. He loves the pomp and ceremony of High Mass, the luxurious gowns and head gear. More compensation for celibacy and the suppression of sexual desire?  Marr writes: “Everything about this man suggests the struggle against sex has come at a terrible price. I wonder how much the strange ordinariness of George Pell began sixty years ago when a robust Ballarat school boy decided as an act of heroic piety, to try to kill sex in himself?  How much empathy was crushed along the way? How ignorant has it left him of the human heart? The gamble priests take struggling with sex is that they may live their whole lives without learning what it is to be an adult in the real world, the world outside the (Catholic Church).”

There can be no doubt that Pell’s claims of being unaware that hundreds of children suffered sexual abuse at the hands of his Catholic clergy, especially in Ballarat in Victoria, were untrue. His professed ignorance of the moving of paedophile priests and brothers around parishes following complaints by parents and teachers was laid bare by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse.

In Australia, politicians and the Police force were breaking away from the power of the Catholic Church, and there is no doubt that Pell’s stature within Australia took a terminal hit. Pell’s appearance during the Royal Commission tarnished his inflated reputation in Australia and prompted more of Pell’s victims to come forward. This time police were prepared to listen and to take action.

Pell hid terrible secrets of his own. The nation’s most powerful Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, was eventually jailed  for child sexual assault. which was uncovered and judged in a “trial that convulsed the nation.” Then there are the allegations by several boys that Pell had sexually abused them, and too many of the boys had such similar stories to tell, it is difficult to believe that Pell is as innocent as he claims he is.

In recent years, thousands of cases of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, particularly in Ireland and the USA were being exposed by main stream media; three harrowing inquiries held in Ireland,  the explosive documentary, Spotlight and  “the first, best exposé of how the Catholic Church covered for paedophile priests” published by the Boston Globe in early 2002.

This 3rd edition of The Prince encompasses some relevant testimonies from the Royal Commission,  which dramatically altered the once high status of George Pell and his Catholic Church in Australia.  Marr comments on the brutal and effective questioning of Cardinal Pell by Commissioner McClellan on the bench and Gail Furness QC on the floor at the Royal Commission. This left the cardinal floundering for answers at times.  In one such round of questioning, he made the now infamous statement in answer as to whether he knew of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy and the consequential shifting of paedophile priests between parishes, particularly in the case Gerald Ridsdale, Pell replied: “It’s a sad story, but it wasn’t of much interest to me.”

The Vatican Advises On Sexual Abuse

May 18, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
Leave a comment

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?

><

The Vatican Speaks

><

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

Paedophilia in Italy

September 27, 2010
Catholicism & Paedophilia
Leave a comment

I feel vindicated in writing about the generational sexual abuse in Catholic Lebanese and Italian families which I uncovered during the research for my book ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar?’ . If  paedophile priests were sexually abusing children why would we be surprised when we find fathers and uncles doing the same thing?  At last the abused can speak out about what has been covered up by the Catholic Church, not for decades, but for centuries!

The woman’s testimony below reminds me how complicit nuns were, if not in the sexual abuse, then certainly in the physical and emotional abuse, of children in Catholic orphanages and schools.    My brother wrote a story in his early teens (Hypocrisy of the Catholic Church; my brother’s story) about the time he and our mother were starving,  yet they were  turned away by a fat priest who was on his way to his roast dinner which the pair could smell wafting from the kitchen of the presbytery.

><

 Italian victim & former priest,  Domolo speaks out. Caption above: “We are victims of paedophile priests”

><

The Vatican, under global pressure,  has just raised the statute of limitations for reporting sexual abuse, to twenty years from the time the victim turns eighteen.  However, most human rights activists agree there should be no statute of  limitation as occurs in most western countries.

Excerpts from Associated Press:

VERONA, Italy – Italian victims of a paedophiliac clergy want such sexual abuse declared a crime against humanity, and they launched an international appeal on Saturday during the first public gathering of such victims in Italy.

Organizer Salvatore Domolo, a former victim and an ex-priest, said the group is looking abroad for solidarity because justice for pedophile victims is hard to come by in Italy with a statute of limitations of 10 years.

“Here there is no hope. By the time a victim arrives at the awareness of having been a victim, legal intervention is not possible,”  Domolo said in a country that has long been reluctant to confront the Vatican in its own backyard.

“The complicity of the hierarchy, together with the enormity of the numbers and vast geography of these crimes, should lead us to consider that we are facing a crime against humanity carried out by a political-religious organization,” Domolo told a news conference before the victims met, his delivery bearing the cadence of a homily.  “With this gathering, we want to ask civilian justice to do its duty in full freedom and truth, without being intimidated by the clerical culture.”

The meeting was held opposite Verona’s heavily visited Roman colosseum and advertised with placards outside. Passers-by were free to enter, but few did.

Another will be held in Rome at the end of October, but Verona was chosen for the first gathering because it is the home of a school for the deaf where 67 former students have alleged suffering sexual abuse, paedophilia and corporal punishment from the 1950s to early 1980s.  About 40 former victims inquired by e-mail — but many are still reluctant to come forward, organizers said.

The Vatican has been reeling for months as thousands of victims around the globe have spoken out about priests who molested children, bishops who covered up for them and Vatican officials who turned a blind eye to the problem for decades. In the latest admission, hundreds of victims came forward in Belgium with tales of horrific abuse linked to at least 13 suicides.

While Italian bishops have acknowledged 100 sexual abuse cases that warranted church intervention in the last decade, victims believe the true number in Italy is much higher because the reluctance to speak out in Italy is especially strong.  “This gathering is fundamental because we live in a social situation in which the presence of the Catholic church reduces the possibility of talking about the situation,” Domolo said. “They do it all over the world, but in Italy even more. That we are just now having the first gathering of victims indicates that only in the recent months is something exploding in Italy.”

Domolo, now 45, said he had been a victim of his parish priest from age 8 to 12, and that he was forced to confess “as if I had sinned.   The church has known for 50 years this has been going on but kept it quiet in a disgusting way,” he said.

Domolo was a priest for 15 years. He renounced both the priesthood and his Roman Catholic faith after meeting another victim on a trip to Ireland in 2001. A man named Francesco from Padova, who did not give his surname, told the group he had been abused both by priests and nuns who used punishment as an excuse to touch him inappropriately. “The worst was my family. They refused to believe it was true,” he told the group, adding he has only been able to come to grips with it through therapy.

A 58-year-old deaf woman, who only gave the nickname given to her by the nuns of Verona’s Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf, carefully annunciated her words as she told her story. During her 15 years at the institute, she was only alone with priests once a week for confession. Recalling her first confession, she said she asked the nuns what to say, and they asked her what she had done. “I told them I scratched myself everywhere because I had too much wool clothing. The nuns said, ‘Tell them you touched yourself.”‘

At that, she said, the priest asked her to lift her clothing to show him where. And so it continued, she said, “little by little, week after week. We girls didn’t do anything, and we had to confess. The priests, who sinned, did they ever confess, I ask?”