Jackie Brown Meets Bugsy Ratzinger

Is Quentin Tarantino a Catholic? The latest sequel of sordid revelations in the Vatican’s pedophile priests collusion and cover-up campaign is reminiscent of a scene from ‘Jackie Brown’ where crime-don Samuel L. Jackson opens the trunk of his car to show Robert de Niro a corpse:

“Who’s that ?

That’s Beaumont.

Who’s Beaumont?

An employee I had to let go.

Wha’d he do?

He put hisself in a position where he was going to have to do ten years in prison, that’s what he did. An’ if you know Beaumont, you know ain’t no goddamn way he can do ten years. An’ if you know that, then you know Beaumont’s gonna do anything he can to keep from doing them ten years - including telling the Federal Government any and every motherfuckin’ thing about my black ass. Now that, my friend, is a clear cut case o’ him - or me. An’ you best believe it ain’t gonna be me.”

When German weekly magazine Der Spiegel opened the trunk of the popemobile last week, in Beaumont’s place it found the allegorical remains of Fr. Gerhard Gruber, the vicar-general of the archdiocese of Munich in 1980 when Pope Benedict – then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger –approved a proposal to allow pedophile priest Peter Hullermann to return to full pastoral duties where he had unrestricted access to – and influence over young boys.

"Take the Pope out of the firing line"

Hullerman had been accused by three sets of parents in Essen of sexually abusing their sons, including forcing an 11-year-old boy to give him oral sex. Initial questions about Ratzinger’s failure to protect children by ensuring that Hullerman was barred from working with minors were fuelled by allegations of complicity, and as pressure on the Pontiff increased, church authorities issued a statement placing exclusive responsibility for the decision to reinstate Hullerman on Father Gruber.

Der Spiegel however had a copy of a letter from a friend of Father Gruber saying that he had been pressured by Church officials last month to sign a prepared statement accepting full responsibility – to “take the pope out of the firing line”. A clear cut case of him – or Ratzinger, and we all know from Ratzinger’s past record of evading responsibility for his role in covering up for pedophile priests how Gruber ended up in the trunk of the popemobile (right).

"Rejoicing" the protection of pedophile priests

In another astonishing episode, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, author of a 2001 letter congratulating a French bishop for colluding with a pedophile priest who was later convicted for the repeated rape of a boy, also ended up in the trunk of the popemobile. Hoyos revealed last week that Pope John Paul II had approved the letter and authorized him to send a copy to bishops all over the world as an example of how to resist pressure to report offending clergy to the civil authorities. 

Father René Bissey was given an eighteen year prison sentence for the repeated rape of one boy and the sexual assault of ten others. His bishop, Pierre Pican had known about the abuse but refused to report Bissey to the police. Pican was sentenced to three months in prison for failure to report Bissey’s crimes. 

Cardinal Hoyos (left) was head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, and a colleague of Cardinal Ratzinger. He wrote – with the approval of the Pope, he says, – to Pican, praising him for covering up for the rapist priest: “I congratulate you for not having reported the priest to the civil authorities. You have done well, and I rejoice at having an associate in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all the other bishops of the world, will have chosen prison rather than speaking out against his priest-son”. Hoyos added that he would be sending a copy of the letter to all the bishops’ conferences “to encourage the brothers in this very delicate area.”

Excommunication the price of Cooperation

In another clear cut case of him or me, the Vatican responded to the horror generated by the revelations about Hoyos’ letter by issuing a press release claiming that this was another example of why it was necessary to bring all these cases under the “competence of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith” to ensure a “rigorous and coherent management” of abuse cases. The truth is that the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith responded to its new responsibility by issuing a letter – signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – to bishops and cardinals warning them that such cases should be referred in secret to the Vatican and that breaching the pontifical secret – by, for example, reporting pedophile priests to the police – carried penalties up to and including excommunication.

So, we have an Archbishop, a future pope, who – knowing that a priest had admitted to sexually abusing young boys – allowed him to take up a new posting where he was free to take advantage of other young boys; and a high-ranking Vatican cardinal (a close colleague of the same pope) who writes and distributes a letter congratulating a bishop for refusing to take action against a priest who has repeatedly raped a young boy and assaulted ten others.

Brady must go

Meanwhile Cardinal Seán Brady (right) head of the Catholic Church in Ireland continues to serve as the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Brady - who admitted he was part of a church cover-up squad that forced a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old who had testified against notorious pedophile priest Brendan Smyth at a church enquiry to sign secrecy oaths – has rejected repeated calls for his resignation. Smyth later admitted to molesting and raping about 100 children in Ireland and the United States and was convicted and jailed. 

Many of these offenses were committed after the abuse enquiry that Brady was involved in. Brady maintains that he will only resign if the Pope asks him to do so. Another clear cut case of him or me.

And these are the people who lead the Catholic Church? You couldn’t make it up.

Why are these people above the law? Where are the criminal charges against the church officials like Brady who colluded in and covered up for rapist priests and christian brothers and facilitated their transfer to new parishes where they were free to prey on other children?


Please take time to join the Facebook campaign to break the silence and bring Cardinal Sean Brady and the Irish Catholic Church to justice.

/SD is Sean Deeley, a HDEO newcomer - this is his second installment, read the first one here.

Extend the Rule of Law to the Catholic Church

Some ten months ago, Head Down Eyes Open posted a blog about the dark shame of systematic abuse in modern day Ireland as perpetrated by the Catholic Church. This was based on an exhaustive investigation that culminated in the some 5000 page Ryan Commission Report. Despite much deflective actions by the accused, the issue of child rape will not disappear as conveniently as some might want. On the heels of more disturbing revelations that reach to the heights (or depths) of the Vatican, head down eyes-opener Sean Deeley posts a reasonable plea to investigate perpetrators of such serious abuse.

In April 2005, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became a candidate for the highest office in the Catholic Church, much was made of his past links to the Nazis, including his brief membership of the Hitler Youth and service in a Wehrmacht anti-aircraft unit protecting a factory whose workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration camp. His wartime service and his deeply conservative reign as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith – where he was criticized for “theological anti-Semitism” and a series of reactionary positions on women, AIDS and homosexuality – raised questions about the appropriateness of the Vatican’s role in modern society.

Indeed, the sight of the Roman Catholic Church locking the door of the Sistine Chapel on its 115 eligible Cardinals to elect a new Pope and spiritual leader for the world’s one billion Catholics evoked a sense of wonder about concepts such as transparency, equality, democracy and justice in the 21^st Century.

8000 years of celibacy

One hundred and fifteen men – the vast majority between the ages of 70 and 80 years – with a collective experience of over 8,000 years of celibacy (or so we were led to believe), sitting down to pick one old man to provide global moral guidance in a world where women are disproportionately affected by the worst problems facing humanity. In Africa, where a growing number of people look to the Catholic Church for direction, it is women who bear most of the burden of extreme poverty, are more susceptible to infection with HIV/AIDS and now constitute a majority of the infected population; women who must care for the sick and the dying, walk further and carry more – whether it is water, or wood-fuel, or crops – as a result of climate change and environmental degradation; and women who suffer most because of lack of access to education, health services and protection.

Peddling lies about contraception

Membership of the Catholic Church is growing in Africa, where 15 percent of the total population – roughly 135 million people – have been born into or convinced to convert to Catholicism. In 2008, UNAIDS reported that Africa also remains the region most heavily affected by AIDS, accounting for 67 percent of all people living with HIV (22 million people) and for three quarters of all AIDS deaths in 2007. Almost 2 million Africans became infected with the disease in 2007. Globally, 35% of HIV infections and 38% of AIDS deaths in 2007 happened in Southern Africa where roughly one fifth of the population is Catholic. Lesotho – whose population is 70 percent Catholic – has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world at 23.2 percent. In Mozambique where one person in four is Catholic, the epidemic continues to grow—exceeding 20 percent in some central and southern zones of the country.

According to UNAIDS up to ten times more girls than boys aged between 15 and 19 are infected. Many older girls and young women are coerced into having sex with older men as a result of cultural and social pressures. Women are particularly vulnerable due to widespread cultural and social factors which limit their ability to negotiate safe sex, either by refusing sex or by insisting on the use of a condom. Their plight has been worsened by the Catholic Church’s position on the use of condoms to prevent HIV infection: condom use is condemned by the Vatican as part of the “intrinsic evil of contraception”. In 2003, the World Health Organization denounced statements by the Vatican telling people not to use condoms to prevent AIDS because they have tiny holes in them through which HIV can pass. WHO said: "These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million."

In 2005, it was already clear that the “election” of another septuagenarian aficionado of the Billings Method offered little prospect of advance for the world’s most deprived women. In 1987 Ratzinger had responded to a proposal for education on the use of condoms in an AIDS-prevention campaign calling it “the facilitation of evil". In 2008, 60 Catholic groups wrote an open letter urging him to reverse the Vatican's opposition to contraception which they said "exposes millions of people to the risk of contracting the AIDS virus". His response, during his first papal visit to Africa in 2009, was to claim that the use of condoms to prevent HIV infection actually aggravates the problem, sparking outrage among health agencies trying to stem the spread of the disease.

Protecting child abusers

A widening child sex-abuse scandal in Europe now looks likely to raise further questions about Ratzinger’s suitability to act as a moral beacon for the 1 billion Catholics around the world. In recent weeks, he has been implicated in the Church’s failure to protect children who were being subjected to unspeakable horrors at the hands of Catholic priests who were supposed to protect and care for them. As Archbishop of the Diocese of Munich and Freising in 1980, Ratzinger reviewed the case of Father Peter Hullermann, accused of sexually abusing boys, including forcing an 11-year-old to perform oral sex. Ratzinger approved a proposal to transfer Hullerman to Munich, allowing him to return to full pastoral duties shortly afterward – and to find new child victims. The pope is also accused of intervening to prevent the dismissal of Reverend Lawrence Murphy who is reported to have sexually abused 200 particularly vulnerable young boys at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin where he was responsible for their care.

References in a New York Times report to correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin to Ratzinger warning that failure to take action against Murphy could undermine the moral authority of the Church are chillingly reminiscent of correspondence to Pope Pius XII during the Second World War imploring him to speak out against the killing of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. In September 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, warned Pius that Jews were being massacred in frightening proportions and forms. When Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, subsequently warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral standing, he was told that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews. Yet Pius was already well aware of what was happening: in 1942 Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius about Jewish deportations, and a year later the pope’s Slovakian Chargé d'Affaires reported to Rome that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps.

As head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith between 1981 and 2005 Ratzinger was also well aware of what was happening to tens of thousands of young children who were being sexually abused by Catholic clergy. He was responsible for Vatican investigations into sex abuse between 2001 and 2005. Observers are asking how many of these abuse cases were reported to civil and criminal authorities? And where is the line between the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy and passive collusion in these cases – between cover-up and complicity?

Corrupt Culture of Cover Up

This is the question which Cardinal Seán Brady - head of the Catholic Church in Ireland - is also facing, amid increasing calls for a police investigation to determine whether he committed a criminal offense in 1975 when he failed to report sexual abuse by the notorious pedophile Reverend Brendan Smyth. Instead of informing police about the crimes, Brady and other clergy responsible for the enquiry covered up Smyth’s crimes, forcing a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old who had testified against Smyth at a Church enquiry to sign secrecy oaths. Smyth later admitted to molesting and raping about 100 children in Ireland and the United States and was convicted and jailed. Many of these offenses were committed after the abuse enquiry that Brady was involved in.

Brady admits now that he should have done more, but says he had been following orders from his superiors at the time. He may be satisfied that this line of defense relieves him of any responsibility to Smyth’s victims, but it didn’t work at the Nuremberg Trial of the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust, and it remains to be seen whether or not it would wash with a jury of his peers.

Similar questions are also being asked about the role of the Vatican in suppressing information about pedophile priests and clergy in different countries. Were these decisions to cover up sex abuse taken in consultation with – or under the direction of – the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, or the pope himself? Concern is rising over reports that only a small proportion of cases are ever given full church trials and that even fewer result in priests being defrocked. The same questions about transparency, democracy, equality and justice that marked Ratzinger’s election to the papal office continue to raise doubts about the appropriateness of the Vatican’s place in modern society.

Systematic Suppression of Truth

But while it is difficult to reconcile the Church’s claims about compassion and love with its institutionalized protection of its pedophile personnel and its suppression of the truth, it is incomprehensible that the people who facilitated this evil can be allowed to remain in positions of authority and responsibility within the Church. Surely the criminal justice authorities in modern, democratic countries cannot be satisfied that the Church has been made subject to the law while the individuals who suppressed evidence, swore victims and witnesses to silence, and facilitated the repetition of their crimes remain in office? Unless these officials are investigated and held legally accountable for their actions, the Rule of Law cannot be said to hold sway over the Catholic Church and there will be clergy who feel that they can continue to rape and abuse children with impunity, and officials who will continue to cover up their crimes.

/SD

Blast the Blasphemers

My dear auld sod, Erin go bràgh, seems to be loosin' the run of itself these days. You would think that navigating a country out of its worst sudden-onset recession on record was challenging enough without conjuring up needless distractions. Maybe that's it - maybe our politicians are driven to distraction with the impossible extrapolated percentages they are confronted with these days. Maybe the financial crisis has reignited our fundamentalist streak (Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, right, lighting candles in the holy city of Jerusalem).

In any case, in their collective wisdom, the Irish government is today -- I kid you not -- planning to introduce blasphemy legislation. Maybe it's in solidarity so that folks from Kandahar and Kerbala will feel right at home in Kilalla or Kilorglin. Well, that's one of the few possible reasons I can think of because the government itself doesn't seem to think it needs a reason and as such acts without any real motive - other than the fact that no such law exists.

Hardly a pressing legislative priority one would think (not least at a time when people throughout the country are rightly blasting the clergy off their high pulpits over the recent horrific revelations about child abuse).

Roy Brown, free thought champion and chief representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in Geneva, opined that it was “totally mind-boggling that a European government should even consider such a dangerous idea given that EU countries — now supported by the United States — have for years been fighting tooth and nail at the United Nations in Geneva and New York against almost identical proposals from the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to get a global ban on ‘defamation of religion’.”

Dermot Ahern, one of the sharper pins in the government pack I would have thought, is the minister responsible for pushing through the legislation and argued some weeks back in an oped in the Irish Times that under his proposals, blasphemous material would be prosecutable if it is “grossly abusive or insulting in matters held sacred by a religion,” causes actual outrage among followers of that religion and if there is intent to cause outrage. “Such intent was not previously required;” he noted in his article.

The Cork-based Irish Examiner (best sports journalism in the country as it happens), true to Corkonian introspection, choose to quote its own homegrown political strongman, Micheal Martin, our foreign affairs minister.

It noted that Ireland voted with all other EU countries against a resolution on “combating defamation of religion” at the UN last December. Explaining that vote, Micheál Martin said: “We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief.”

So how come such a swing (and why choose blasphemy for a policy swing in the first case?) in the space of a few months? Though, truth be told, that's not my main concern. I wonder now if some of our best native comedic talent will be curbed in their enthuasiasm for the genre. Tommy Tiernan in particular, has long been a thorn in the proverbials of the Irish clergy: "We used to grow priests in Ireland. We used to grow them from bits of people that we didn't like. But we over-planted. We had an epidemic."

And the Irish Examiner must be thinking along the same lines coz it wound up its editorial plainly and simply: “One man’s blasphemy is another man’s comedy classic.” I'd wager they were thinking of one of Tommy's many hilarious rants against the Catholic Church (see embedded video for a typical stand up Tommy gem -- the jury is still out whether this type of fare could now be considered unlawful or libelous under the new draconian measures).

Good luck to Ahern and company trying to gag Tiernan and fellow travellers. That might be one battle too far even for a minister who wants to tackle Ireland's gangland head on with more emergency legislation that, among other things, will empower the tax collector and security forces, to monitor all mobile phone and email traffic within Ireland. While the reaction to this is understandably fervent in its opposition the blasphemy laws will be the benefactor and probably sneak in unopposed under the Céad Mile Fàilte welcome mat of the highest court in the land.

God help us all (now I didn't mean that in any blasphemous way you understand) but the Celtic Tiger is well and truly slain, if proof were needed!

/PC

"Abuse was the System" - The Dark Shame of Systematic Abuse, Torture and Slavery in Modern Day Ireland

This week the Ryan Commission, which was established 9 years ago to inquire into the systematic abuse of children in Irish religious institutions, issued its 2'565 page report. The findings are simply horrific. Ryan went so far as to say that not only was there systematic abuse but "abuse was the system". 

As an Irish citizen I feel an unsettling mix of extraordinary shame and a rasping relief that the contents of this report are now open to public scrutiny. It causes deep shame but could deliver us into a truly modern era, free and healed from the hypocrisy of the Catholic clergy. 

The report investigated the known chronic abuse carried out by religious orders throughout Ireland when they were charged with the care of vulnerable, poor and uneducated children. It paints a dark picture of a priest-ridden country where children were systematically abused and the population systematically turned a blind eye. It portrays a country at the genesis of its independence which chose to hand unaccountable power to the self-declared omnipotent church, perched on its unassailable moral highground, and a State that ignored its own responsibilities to its citizens. A State that covertly colluded with child abusers over some 60 odd years. 

The report churns out horror after horror perpetrated by pervert priests. From forced labour, separation of siblings, young children being lied to about thier parents being dead, brutal beatings and endemic sexual and physical abuse. The investigation categorically tracked down more than 800 abusers in some 200 institutions over 30 odd years. These are most likely a representational ratio from a statistical certainty of a mob of molesters which was so widespread that it touched every community and town in Ireland.

The Irish Times, in a poignant editorial, had this to say: "There is a nightmarish quality to this systemic malice, reminiscent of authoritarian regimes. We read of children “flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead. We read of returned absconders having their heads shaved and of “ritualised” floggings in one institution.

We have to call this kind of abuse by its proper name – torture. We must also call the organised exploitation of unpaid child labour – young girls placed in charge of babies “on a 24-hour basis” or working under conditions of “great suffering” in the rosary bead industry; young boys doing work that gave them no training but made money for the religious orders – by its proper name: slavery. It demands a very painful adjustment of our notions of the nature of the State to accept that it helped to inflict torture and slavery on tens of thousands of children. In the light of the commission’s report, however, we can no longer take comfort in evasions."

The Report's findings will not shock many people in Ireland, merely the fact that they have now seen the light of day. We have all grown up with the untouchable power of pompous priests. In my own school we had a serial abuser. All parents knew and opted to ignore it, to carry on in denial, such was the punitive power of theology over the huddled masses of a nation coming out from under its colonialist yoke. We all heard the stories of young girls, raped and impregnated by uncles or neighbors (or priests on occasion) and sent to industrial homes run by nuns to live out their institutionalized days in servitude to the very people who demonized them.

Ryan goes to some lengths to point out the rays of hope and light. The rare, humane company of a kind priest or nun that maintained the sanity of so many. We don't want to paint a picture of a completely tarnished religious order throughout the country; but in essence that is what it is. So widespread and deeprooted was the abuse that it required thousands of non-abusers to turn a blind eye, a degree of abuse in itself.

The report will have a great effect on Ireland in both a cultural and spiritual sense. Gone is the hubris and abuse of power of the Catholic church and gone forever the remants of reverence and deference that so many Irish communities had for their priests - a trait handed down from the schools and pulpits governed by the very same preachers.

This week I am thinking of Mannix Flynn, a man whose company I kept in Dublin in the nineties after I had read his novel 'Nothing to Say'. Mannix was a great writer and playright whose work brilliantly depicted his days as a former resident of one of Ireland's more infamous industrial schools in Letterfrack, savagely run by the Christian Brothers. Drinking with Mannix one night in Dublin after his biographical one man play James X had received standing ovations, he said something to me like: I was abandoned and brutalized by my country so I have abandoned and brutalized myself (in reference to his hard drinking and drug taking). 

I also remember one of our recently departed writers John McGahern who tried so hard to hold a mirror up to Irish society and to hold its clergy accountable. His own childhood was deeply marked by predatory priests and a family fully in thrall to the Church's twisted morality. He once remarked for instance: "When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody."  And writers like John Banville who wrote movingly on this topic in the New York Times today. Am not sure why writers are providing such solace or reference during these times, but so be it. Maybe the new spiritual void will be filled by people far more worthy.

Finally of course, such a post would be erroneous without mentioning all the victims of abuse who have had to suffer in silence for decades. Those who have had to relive the horrors of their abuse as they cooperated with the Ryan Commission and, maybe worst of all, have had to suffer further indignities and humiliations at the hands of the Catholic church who chose denial, collusion and cover-up as their preferred approach to deal with the victims of thier systematic abuse. Shame on them, it's a legacy from hell.

/PC