"Liberal" and Green Support for Paedophilia? [Part 4]

The Irish Church and the Sexual Revolution (plus "Conclusion")

Mary McAleese, former President of Ireland

Part [4] of "Liberal" and Green support for Paedophilia? is a continuation of Part [1], Part [2] and Part [3] and ends the article.

(6) The Irish Church and the Sexual Revolution

There were no equivalents in Ireland to the USA’s Father Paul Shanley or Belgium’s Bishop Roger Vangheluwe and Cardinal Danneels.(See Part [3]) Obviously there were cases where children were sexually abused by Irish priests or religious. However no clerical abuser gave public lectures to clergy and laity in which he defended sexual relationships between adults and adolescents (as Fr Paul Shanley did). And there was no Irish catechism like the Belgian “Roeach” containing drawings of naked children who were making statements like: “Stroking my pussy makes me feel groovy,” “I like to take my knickers off with friends” etc. In Belgium, after Alexandra Colen made futile attempts with other parents to get the catechism withdrawn, she decided to sever all ties with the Catholic education system and set up a homeschool together with other parents, so that their children would be educated in a Catholic environment.

In Ireland Catholic traditionalists often expressed frustration with the inadequacy – and inanity – of post-Vatican II religious teaching in schools, but they were not faced with THAT type of problem.  The saga of Bishop Brendan Comiskey and “child- abuser” (more correctly adolescent-abuser) priest Fr Sean Fortune is relevant here. Brendan Comiskey had to resign as Bishop of Ferns in 2002 following claims that he had not dealt adequately with allegations of abuse made against Fr Fortune. In his resignation statement he said that he had tried everything in his management of Fortune but found him “virtually impossible to deal with”.  When Fortune committed suicide shortly before facing trial, he left a note in which he claimed that hehad been raped by Bishop Comiskey! So we are NOT talking about the kind of cosy friendship that existed between Cardinal Godfried Danneels and the paedophile Bishop Roger Vangheluwe in Belgium. (Alexandra Colen writes:  Mgr Roger Vangheluwe, the pedophile child molesting Bishop of Bruges, was the supervising bishop of both institutions – the Catholic University of Leuven and the Seminary of Bruges – whence came the editors in chief of this perverted “catechism” textbook.)

However from the 1960s – and especially after the Vatican II – the Irish Church was buffeted by waves of change which it proved unable to cope with. Most of the problems related to sex. In July 1968, in his sensational encyclical Humanae Vitae (‘On Human Life’) Pope Paul VI went against the advice of his own commission and proclaimed that the act of love must always be open to the possibility of procreation. ‘Natural’ methods of fertility control could be used but in Mary Kenny’s words the Pope’s ruling could be summed up in the phrase, ‘Give God a sporting chance’ – the pill and other forms of artificial contraception were out. This created a great furore. Many Catholic couples had been the pill in anticipation of its approval and many priests were coming to the view that the case for contraception, responsibly used, was reasonable. However conservative members of the hierarchy notably Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin and Bishop Cornelius Lucey of Cork came out strongly in support of the encyclical. 

As in other countries, this controversy worsened the conflict between liberal and conservative parties in the Church that was to have momentous consequences. Subsequently there were two referendums in 1983 and 1995 to amend the Constitution in order to allow divorce, the second of which saw a narrow victory for the divorce lobby – and this is often cited as marking the end of Catholic Ireland. (Following the ‘yes’ vote, Conor Cruise O’Brien declared that Ireland was at last ‘a fit country for Protestants to live in’.) . The prominent feminist nun (and distinguished historian) Margaret McCurtain, spoke out for personal choice and for the division of Church and State on issues like divorce. There was an ongoing bitter controversy for decades concerning abortion. However where allegations of child abuse by clerics are concerned, the issue of homosexuality is the key one and this is what links developments in Ireland to those in Belgium, the USA and indeed worldwide.

Ireland may not have produced a cleric like Fr Paul Shanley who flaunted his homosexual lifestyle and gave lectures to clergy – and Bishops – on the joys of same. However in “Goodbye to Catholic Ireland” (pages 355-57), Mary Kenny details how some “liberal” Irish priests began to stretch the boundaries of  what was acceptable in the area of sexual relationships.  She quotes as a characteristic example of the new liberal tone among the clergy a strong article in the Furrow in 1979 about the pastoral care of homosexuals written by Redemptorist priest Father Ralph Gallagher.

“Father Gallagher questioned in this ground-breaking article, the traditional Christian view of homosexuality as being ‘contra naturam’: the theory he said was undergoing serious review. ‘Many debates on homosexuality reveal prejudice, fear and unsupported statements rather than the elements of reason and freedom which, theoretically are the basis of ethical analysis  … Homosexuals should not be judged to be immoral any more than a blind person if prenatally the visual tracts are not complete.’  …Some of the unhappiness of homosexuals was, in part, the fault of the Church. ‘The alienation and loneliness of many homosexuals have been contributed to in no small way by the attitude of society and of the Churches.’ We should be cautious in our use of scriptural texts about homosexuality ….Ralph Gallagher warns his fellow clergy; we must challenge the notion that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil or ‘imperfect’. Homosexuality must be seen as part of a proper understanding of sexuality ‘in its wider sense’. And this wider sense was arising because sex was no longer simply about procreation: birth control had altered perspectives. ‘We must take cognisance of the changed emphasis on procreation in a theological understanding of sex. It can no longer be regarded as the single dominant norm by which all sexual behaviour is judged. The reality of personal sexual encounters is too wide to be compressed into the univocal notion of procreation.’

Mary Kenny comments that Hugh Hefner had said that after the pill, sex was about recreation, not procreation – and now here was a Redemptorist using (perhaps unconsciously) the ideas of the founder of Playboy magazine as source text. Father Gallagher himself had been deeply impressed by a letter from a homosexual who had struggled with his orientation and who wrote, ‘The most important thing that happened to me was the realization that homosexuality was natural for me and from God.’

Kenny comments [ my emphasis]: “As the 1960s slogan had it – if it feels good, do it! What feels natural is natural. The crucial change that the 1960s had brought about was this shift from reasoning to feeling.”

The development of feminism within the Catholic Church also led in some very strange directions. The Furrow began to show the influence of feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether. ‘Patriarchy’ within the Church was the target and the idealised image of the Blessed Virgin as a role model was inextricably linked with the asceticism of the Church fathers. (As per Wikipedia:  “In 2005 Ruether presented to an audience at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles her view that "Christianity is riddled by hierarchy and patriarchy” and that this created a social order in which chaste women on their wedding night were "in effect, raped by young husbands whose previous sexual experience came from exploitative relationships with servant women and prostitutes."  ….. "modern societies have sought to change this situation, allowing women education, legal autonomy, paid employment and personal freedom. But the sexual morality of traditional puritanical patriarchal Christianity has never been adequately rethought." ⁾ 

 According to an article in The Furrow by Helen Sheehy in 1985 we needed a complete revolution in the male-dominated Church. ‘Todays sexual ethic promoted by a male celibate Church finds no answering chord in the hearts of many women . Feminist theology seeks to re-image God.’  This new image was not to replace Father with Mother: we really required freedom from God. ‘Ruether maintains that that the substitution of a female for a male image only serves to perpetuate a parent-child relationship to God, which she deems to be inimical to autonomy. Behind her thinking lies a valid desire to dismantle a patriarchal system of government in the Church.’  

According to Mary Kenny: “Behind Ms Ruether’s thinking, also was Freud, who considered the concept of God a form of infantilism, and Sartre, for whom ‘autonomy’ was the purpose of life. There were many other articles on these lines and they indicated how the cookie was crumbling.”

The fact that The Furrow “a monthly journal for the contemporary Church” would publish such ideas and such authors is an indication that something other than “tolerance” is at work here. In the “About Us” section of its website, “The Furrow” highlights some of its famous contributors over the years. Among them is Mary McAleese former President of Ireland and a much more mainstream figure than a radical feminist theologian like Ruether (who is not listed). However the views of Mary McAleese indicate just what is regarded as “mainstream” in modern Ireland. According to her Wikipedia article (treating the period after she was President): [12]

“In a radio interview discussing her book Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law on 28 September 2012, said she was concerned at the growing number of young men, and in particular young gay men, who take their own lives in Ireland. She said that when the research is broken down, it shows that young gay men are one of the most risk-prone groups in Ireland. McAleese said many of these young men will have gone to Catholic schools and they will have heard there their church's attitude to homosexuality. "They will have heard words like disorder, they may even have heard the word evil used in relation to homosexual practice," she said. She went on to say "And when they make the discovery, and it is a discovery and not a decision, when they make the discovery, that they are gay, when they are 14, 15 or 16, an internal conflict of absolutely appalling proportions opens up". She said many young gay men are driven into a place that is "dark and bleak". McAleese said she met the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Charles John Brown, shortly after Easter to raise with him her concern about the growing number of suicides among young men in Ireland.” [My emphasis]

The influence of the Catholic Church has been in steep decline for the past 30 years or so, yet Mary McAleese sees no contradiction in blaming the Church for the increase in the number of young gay men who are committing suicide! Is this female logic?  Not really – but it is definitely feminist logic!

The willingness of liberal theologians in the Catholic Church to pander to gay and feminist lifestyles and to their ideologies of victimisation has consequences in the real world also. In an interview with the Irish Times shortly after he retired as Bishop of Killaloe, the VERY liberal Bishop Willie Walsh made perhaps the only comment in his episcopal career that had the potential to displease his fellow liberals in the Church and the media: [13]

I’m very nervous about saying this – it’s an issue that hasn’t been faced – but practically all the abuse that I’ve come across has been abuse of boys, and boys of 14, 15 years old. [my emphasis] Now, that raises some serious questions, and if you really went into them you would be accused of mixing up homosexuality and paedophilia. If a priest abuses a 16- or 17-year old, is that homosexual? It’s certainly not paedophilia. Where does the division come? It is a very hazardous area – and there’s no question in my mind that I’m not equating homosexuality with sexual abuse by priests. No, I’m not. But I’m saying that at a certain point the distinction is not that clear.

The reason that “it’s an issue that hasn’t been faced” is that Bishop Willie’s media admirers have no wish to face it. It’s a great pity that the Bishop himself made no attempt to refer to the elephant in the drawing room it until he was safely retired, but better late than never!

 (7) CONCLUSION

Pope Benedict was absolutely correct when he said in December 2010 that:

“In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained - even within the realm of Catholic theology - that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a "better than" and a "worse than". Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today ………

Our modern day liberals and anti-clerics have either forgotten what they and their predecessors were saying in the 1970s – or they are being deliberately dishonest!

Among the details they have managed to forget are:

•     The fact that a pro-paedophile organisation The Paedophile Information Exchange was a member of the British “National Council for Civil Liberties” (now called “Liberty”) until 1983 and was closely association with the gay liberation movement in the UK.[Part 2]

•       The fact that two leading feminist politicians Harriet Harmann and Patricia Hewitt cut their teeth as leading lights in the NCCL at precisely the time that organisation was associated with the PIE. (Curiously enough the NCCL cut PIE loose shortly after Harmann and Hewitt left to pursue their political careers.) [Part 2]

•       The fact that it was only because of the intervention Mary Whitehouse in 1976 that the government-funded gay charity “Albany Trust” did not publish a booklet provided by PIE and the Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) group. The reason the Trustees gave for declining to publish the booklet was that it wasn’t sufficiently “objective”. It is difficult to know what sort of “objectivity” they had expected from the two paedophile groups but presumably they did not want to credit Mary Whitehouse with their change of mind! [Part 2]

•      The fact that the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was a member of one of the biggest gay rights movements in the world – the International Lesbian and Gay Association – right up until 1993. [Part 2]

•  The fact that in 1977, a French petition against age of consent laws was addressed to the parliament calling for the abrogation of several articles of the age-of-consent law and the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France). This was signed by such luminaries as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Glucksmann, Roland Barthes, by the novelist/gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, the actor/play-writer/jurist Jean Danet, writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer Philippe Sollers, pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and also by people belonging to a wide range of political positions. [Part 1 - NOTES]

•  The fact that Fr Paul Shanley the priest at the centre of the USA’s  paedophile hysteria, was for decades a liberal and gay icon who was finally removed from his “gay outreach” ministry in 1979 because of protests by Catholic traditionalists. Because he remained a Catholic priest, his former liberal friends later used his lifestyle to demonise him as a paeophile and to demonise the Catholic traditionalists who had always loathed him! [Part 3]

 It is very strange that former IRA-man and hunger striker Anthony McIntyre’s choose to denounce Pope Benedict on this issue in his blog “The Pensive Quill” (article entitled “Papal Bull” dated 26 December 2010). You would expect him to have some familiarity with the views of Labour Party stalwarts Harman and Hewitt as both had been Secretaries of State in the British Government and the NCCL had been vocal on the human rights issue during the IRA’s 30 year terror campaign. Moreover when a poster on The Pensive Quill referred to the 1977 petition to parliament from several French intellectuals - including Sartre and Foucault -  Anthony McIntyre defended Foucault and minimised the significance of the petition. I tend to assume he would not have done this except in a context where the petition was being quoted to show that Pope Benedict was correct in his description of 1970s attitudes to paedophilia.  Has Anthony McIntyre broken with the IRA only to replace the British Government with the Catholic Church, as the supposed fountain-head of all evil?

During the several years of violence that preceded the foundation of the Irish State in 1922, the Catholic Church was the sole force that united constitutional reformers with revolutionaries of every persuasion. This was a major factor in ensuring the survival of democracy in Ireland. In contrast, during the 30 year IRA campaign in Northern Ireland from 1969, both the Provisional and the Official IRA were anti-clerics whose attitude to Catholic Bishops was not very different to that of Dr Ian Paisley. For operational reasons both IRAs made some effort to conceal their antipathy during the years of terror and violence. Hardly had Taoiseach Albert Reynolds got the peace process under way in 1994 but (former Workers party TD) PatRabbitte felt free to destroy his coalition government by peddling fantasies about a conspiracy between Church and State to protect Fr Brendan Smyth. And now Anthony McIntyre has courageously broken with his former terrorist colleagues but continues to subscribe to a similar type of fantasy!

NOTES:

[12] Wikipedia article on Mary McAleese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McAleese

The Wikipedia article also contains the following:

In 1998, she met the Archbishop of Boston Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on an official visit to the US. In an interview in 2012 she said that Law told her he was "sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President" and went on to insult a junior minister who was accompanying the then president. "His remarks were utterly inappropriate and unwelcome," she said. McAleese told the cardinal that she was the "President of Ireland and not just of Catholic Ireland". At this point, a heated argument ensued between the two, according to McAleese.

By any chance did Mary McAleese express to Cardinal Law the same kind of “compassionate” views that she articulated in 2012, and could it be that it was that kind of “compassion” that annoyed the Cardinal?

[13]  extract from “The Bishop Who Speaks His Mind” , by Kathy Sheridan, Irish Times, 6 November 2010. Article is behind Irish Times firewall but can be viewed at
http://www.irishsalem.com/individuals/Politicians%20and%20Others/bishop-willie-walsh/bishopwho-speakshismind-06nov10.php

"Liberal" and Green Support for Paedophilia? [Part 3]

The Catholic Church and Baptising the Spirit of the Age!

Cardinal Godfried Danneels - "Liberal" Prelate

Part [3] of "Liberal" and Green support for Paedophilia is a continuation of Part [1] and Part [2] which comprise the first 4  sections of the full article.

(5) How “Liberal” Ideas on Paedophilia were Taken Up by Some Catholics (including Bishops) in Belgium and the USA

(A) “The Fall of the Belgian Church” Article  by Alexandra Colen 24 June 2010  [10]

[ As per Wikipedia: 
“Alexandra Maria Catherine Colen (born on 9 July 1955 in Dublin, Ireland) is a Belgian politician. She is member of the Belgian Federal Parliament for the Vlaams Belang party since 21 May 1995. She holds a PhD in linguistics, and is known for her advocacy of strict Catholic ethics.

She is married to Paul Beliën, the editor of the conservative-libertarian blog The Brussels Journal.

Within the Vlaams Blok and its successor party Vlaams Belang, Colen is seen as leading the religious conservative (essentially Catholic) wing of the party—although some critics and observers believe she is comparatively more libertarian than other figures within the party.” ]

In Belgium, today [24 June 2010], police searched the residence of the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and the crypt of the Archbishop’s cathedral in Mechelen. They were looking for evidence of cover-ups in the ongoing investigation into widespread pedophilia practices within the Belgian church in the decades during which Cardinal Godfried Danneels was Archbishop. Danneels retired in January of this year.

Police also confiscated 450 files containing reports of pedophile offences by members of the clergy, that had been submitted to an investigation committee which was established within the church to deal with pedophilia cases.

Since the revelation in April that Cardinal Danneels’s close friend and collaborator, Mgr Roger Vangheluwe, the Bishop of Bruges, had been a practicing pedophile throughout, and even before, his career as a bishop, victims have gained confidence that they will be taken seriously, and complaints have been pouring in, both to the courts and to the extra-judicial investigation committee of the archdiocese. The new archbishop Mgr. André-Joseph Léonard, has urged victims to take their case to the courts.

His predecessor, the liberal Cardinal Danneels, who was very popular with the press in Belgium and abroad, was Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and Primate of Belgium from 1979 until 2010. The sympathy for pedophile attitudes and arguments among the Belgian bishops during this period was no secret, especially since 1997 when the fierce controversy about the catechism textbook Roeach made the headlines. The editors of Roeach were Prof. Jef Bulckens of the Catholic University of Leuven and Prof. Frans Lefevre of the Seminary of Bruges. The textbook contained a drawing which showed a naked baby girl saying: “Stroking my pussy makes me feel groovy,” “I like to take my knickers off with friends,” “I want to be in the room when mum and dad have sex.” The drawing also shows a naked little boy and girl that are “playing doctor” and the little boy says: “Look, my willy is big.”

The drawing also showed three pairs of parents. Those with the “correct” attitude reply: “Yes, feeling and stroking those little places is good fun.” This “catechism textbook” was used in the catechism lessons in the catholic schools, until one day I discovered it among the schoolbooks of my eldest daughter, then 13 years old. On 3 September 1997 I wrote a letter to Cardinal Danneels, saying:

“When I see this drawing and its message, I get the distinct impression that this catechism textbook is designed intentionally to make 13 and 14 year olds believe that toddlers enjoy genital stimulation. In this way one breeds pedophiles that sincerely believe that children actually think that what they are doing to them is ‘groovy’, while the opposite is the case.”

I told Cardinal Danneels that, although I was a member of Parliament for the Flemish-secessionist party Vlaams Blok, I was addressing him as a Catholic parent “who wishes to remain faithful to the papal authority and also wishes to educate her children this way.” I insisted that he forbid the use of this book in the catechism lessons: “This is why I insist – yes, the days of meekly asking are over – that you forbid the use of this ‘catechism book’ in our children’s classrooms.”

Today this case, that dates from 12 years ago, assumes a new and ominous significance. Especially now that I know that Mgr Roger Vangheluwe, the pedophile child molesting Bishop of Bruges, was the supervising bishop of both institutions – the Catholic University of Leuven and the Seminary of Bruges – whence came the editors in chief of this perverted “catechism” textbook.

Monsignor Vangheluwe not only entertained pedophile ideas, but also practiced them on his 11-year old nephew. Hundreds of children who were not raped physically were molested spiritually during the catechism lessons.

After I started my campaign against the Roeach textbook, many parents contacted me to voice their concerns. Stories of other practices in the Catholic education system poured in. There were schools where children were taught to put condoms over artificial penises and where they had to watch videos showing techniques of masturbation and copulation.

Because Cardinal Danneels refused to respond to requests to put an end to these practices, I and hundreds of concerned parents gathered in front of his palace on 15 October 1997. We carried placards with the text “Respect for parents and children,” and we said the rosary. Cardinal Danneels refused to receive a delegation of the demonstrators. “I shall not be pressured,” he said in the libertine magazine Humo on 21 October 1997. The Archbishop’s door remained closed when we demonstrated again on 10 December 1997.

When we demonstrated at the palace of the Bishop of Antwerp on 19 November 1997, Mgr Paul Van den Berghe received a delegation of mothers that included a local councilor from the Christian-Democrat party and myself. Mgr Van den Berghe, who was the Episcopal supervisor for education, listened to the mothers, wept and promised to investigate the practices in the sex education and catechism lessons. He also announced this intention in a declaration to the press.

He must have been reprimanded by his colleagues, because on 24 November, after a meeting of the Bishops’ Conference, in a press release to the press agency Belga, the Bishop of Antwerp announced that, in spite of his promise, there would be no investigation. Today we know that one of the colleagues present at the Conference was the child molester Vangheluwe, which makes that incident, too, very unsavory indeed.

On 18 February 1998 we were at Cardinal Danneels’s door again, myself and a group of parents. Again the door remained closed. So on 18 March 1998 a group of two hundred parents went to the Papal Nuncio, the ambassador of the Vatican, in Brussels. But the Nuncio, who was a friend of Danneels, also refused to meet us. He had, however, alerted the police, who had several water cannons at the ready just around the corner.

Meanwhile Danneels’s friends in the press started a campaign against me. “Colen continues to pester the bishops,” was the headline in Gazet van Antwerpen. One evening Toon Osaer, Danneels’s spokesman at the time, phoned me to tell me that as a Catholic I had to “be obedient” to the bishops. In Humo Danneels insinuated that I was “conducting my election campaign.”

On 5 January 1998 the daily newspaper Het Volk interviewed Patrick Vanhaelemeesch, a catechism teacher in the diocese of Bruges and one of the co-authors of Roeach. He gave some details about the illustration concerning masturbating toddlers in the catechism book. He said that the illustration was intended to convey the message that “toddlers experience sexual lust.” Vanhaelemeesch revealed that the committee of bishops had mentioned this illustration in an evaluation report of the catechism book. The report stated: “The presentation of the sexual-pedagogical attitudes is rendered ridiculous in the eyes of the pupils by the text balloons.” According to Vanhaelemeesch this criticism “indicates that the bishops had no objections at all to the message conveyed [i.e. toddlers experience sexual lust], but feared that the pupils would not take it seriously.”

When I had exhausted all possibilities and it was clear that the Belgian church did not want to hear the parents, I decided to sever all ties with the Catholic education system. I took my five children out of school and set up a homeschool together with other parents, so our children would be educated in a Catholic environment.

I sent a letter to all the cardinals in the world to inform them about the contents of the Roeach textbook. “Please be assured that this Dicastery will give your report all due consideration, answered Mgr. Clemens, Cardinal Ratzinger’s personal secretary, for the Congregation of the Faith in Rome; Cardinal Gagnon from Rome appreciated “the just battle which you are conducting”; “The matter which you raised is very important,” wrote Cardinal Arinze from Rome.

I received letters of support from cardinals from all parts of the globe. “I share your concern. It is important that you do not leave the matter uncontested,” wrote Cardinal Meisner of Cologne; “You have good reasons to be concerned,” wrote Cardinal Wamala of Uganda; “I feel strongly enough to write to Cardinal Danneels in the hope that he may enlighten me,” wrote Cardinal Vidal of the Philippines; “If I have the opportunity to discuss with Cardinal Danneels the matter you have drawn to my attention, I ill do so,” wrote Cardinal Williams of New Zealand; “I shall try to do something in order to help you,” wrote Cardinal Lopez Rodriguez of Santo Domingo; “I am aware that your concerns have been brought to the attention of Cardinal Laghi, Prefect for the Congregation for Catholic Education,” wrote Cardinal O’Connor of New York.

On 27 February 2010 the daily newspaper De Standaard wrote that these letters “enhanced Rome’s perception of the weak church leadership in Belgium.” Hence, the liberal Danneels was replaced by Mgr Léonard. Rome hopes that he will be able to restore the church in Belgium. I share this hope. However, it is a pity that it has taken so long. The damage that has been done is greater than anyone could have imagined.

=====================================================================

It's nice to see that, despite the indifference/hostility of Cardinal Danneels, the action taken by Alexandra Colen and her supporters did have some effect. According to the Wikipedia article on the Catholic Church in Belgium

In 1998 it was reported that a catechism textbook for Belgian children called Roeach 3 showed comic-book-style pictures of toddlers asking sexual questions and engaging in sexual play. The Belgian Catholic hierarchy stated that the textbook was intended for adolescents, and that the pictures were meant to convey the idea that young children experience lust, a prevalent theory in contemporary psychology. Nevertheless, the textbook was withdrawn after public protests by Catholics, which elicited media coverage as well as support from Church officials around the world. [My emphasis]

The editors of Roeach were Prof. Jef Bulckens of the Catholic University of Leuven and Prof. Frans Lefevre of the Seminary of Bruges. The name "Roeach" refers to the Hebrew word Ruach, meaning "spirit" or "breath".

There are obvious parallels between the disaster that befell the "liberal" Catholic Church in Belgium and its counterpart in the USA. See in particular the observations of Father Joseph Wilson below - in his article "The Enemy Within" - concerning Fr Paul Shanley. However - unlike Fr Shanley - Cardinal Danneels survived the scandal that consumed his paedophile friend the Bishop of Bruges Roger Vangheluwe. (Perhaps the Cardinal was too useful an idiot?) A likely reason is that Danneels' successor Mgr Leonard was a conservative who had already taken over when the scandal broke - and the media preferred to denounce him rather than the very accommodating cleric who had been their favorite for decades!

The mild treatment of Danneels by the media is even more astonishing in view of the following - quoted in the Irish Times article Belgian Cardinal 'covered up abuse'  on 29 August 2010   

The former head of Belgium's Catholic Church urged a sexual abuse victim to delay a public statement on the case until the bishop involved resigned, it has emerged.

Belgium's De Standaard newspaper yesterday carried transcripts of a meeting Cardinal Godfried Danneels held with Bishop Roger Vangheluwe and a sexual abuse victim of the bishop in April 2010.

"It is true this meeting and conversation took place, and that the transcript is correct," a Church spokesman confirmed. Cardinal Danneels's spokesman Toon Osaer said the cardinal had not covered up anything and had openly spoken about the April 2010 meeting following Dr Vangheluwe's resignation two weeks after the conversation took place.

In the transcripts, the cardinal suggested the victim should make no public statement about the abuse until the bishop retired the following year. "It might be better to wait for a date in the next year, when he is due to resign," Cardinal Danneels told the victim, according to the transcripts. He told the victim he believed a public announcement would not serve the interests of the victim or the bishop, the transcripts said. "I don't know if there will be much to gain from making a lot of noise about this, neither for you nor for him."

Dr Vangheluwe resigned after admitting having abused the victim for a number of years, both as a priest and a bishop.Cardinal Danneels retired in January and has been questioned as a witness in an investigation into sexual abuse by the Church in Belgium.

There may well be a valid humanitarian reason for the advise given by Cardinal Danneels to the victim of Bishop Vangheluwe. Still if the Cardinal was a conservative he would have been savaged by media and politicians. Instead they preferred to direct their anti-clerical hatred at his successor Mgr Andre-Joeeph Leonard!

(B) Father Paul Shanley and “Liberal” American Catholics

Paul Shanley was both a priest AND a promiscuous homosexual who was a great hero to American liberals and gays - until it suited their purposes to throw him to the wolves !

During the late 1960s and the 70s Father Paul Shanley was part of the Church's outreach to gays in the Boston Archdiocese. He "outreached" so far that he adopted their lifestyle hook, line and sinker. He openly denounced Catholic teaching on sexual issues and could hardly be accused of hypocrisy as he lived his life in accordance with his professed ideas. He was furiously denounced, for so doing, by Catholic traditionalists and the Boston Church built up a huge file on him. Finally in 1979 he was removed from his "Gay" ministry to the fury of his gay and liberal friends. No other action was taken against him and he remained a priest 

As per Wikipedia:
“Shanley first gained notoriety during 1970s as a "street priest," catering to drug addicts and runaways who struggled with their sexuality. His writings included "Changing Norms of Sexuality". During the 1980s, Shanley served as pastor of St. John the Evangelist in Newton [Massachusetts]. In 1990, he was transferred to St. Anne's in San Bernardino, California. While there he and another priest, John J. White, co-owned "a bed-and-breakfast for gay customers 50 miles away in Palm Springs".

“Shanley had earned "the nickname the hippie priest for his long hair and outspoken views, including his public rejection of the church's condemnation of homosexuality." He attended a conference on sexuality [February 1979] where the founders of NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, conceived the idea of such an organization. However, Shanley was not a part of the 32 individuals at the meeting who caucused to form the group, according to a Catholic priest and Protestant minister who were.”

The pusillanimity of the Boston Archdiocese was to have lethal consequences for itself and for Father Shanley. If Shanley had been dismissed from the priesthood under pressure from traditionalists, he would have become a liberal martyr and a permanent icon for gays. However he remained - officially - a clergyman and as such became a victim of the wave of anti-clerical hysteria that swept America from the mid 1990s onwards - in the form of the Retrieved Memory movement (itself a follow-up to the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria of the 1980s). In 2002 he was accused of regularly raping four 6 year old children on a weekly basis, 20 years previously. All four accusers knew each other and all claimed they had suddenly recovered their memories having repressed all knowledge of the rapes for decades. There was a ferocious media assault on the Church led by the Boston Globe - with the full support of the "liberal" National Catholic Reporter. (The file that had been built up on Shanley, was used as evidence that the Archdiosese "knew" he was a child molester; the fact that it largely consisted of denunciations by conservatives of his gay antics was ignored!) 

The media onslaught had the unintended effect of bringing to light some unpleasing facts about the accusers and the authorities dropped two of the four - including Gregory Ford the man who started it all. A third dropped out after facing tough questioning during a pre-trial hearing and eventually only one case - that of Paul Busa actually made it to court in January/February 2005. During the trial Busa again managed to "forget" the relevant details about one of his allegations (perhaps he felt unable to face cross-examination on that issue?) but nevertheless the jury convicted Paul Shanley on the other charges and he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. There can be no doubt but that the vile behaviour of the "liberal" media - including the National Catholic Reporter - was a major factor in the jury's decision.

The case against the now defrocked (in 2004) Paul Shanley was based entirely on Repressed Memory evidence; yet RM was being heavily attacked by 2005 and that kind of hysteria seemed to be going the same way as had Satanic Ritual Abuse a decade before. On the contrary, the conviction of the former Father Shanley served to revive a dying witch-hunt. In January 2010 the Massachusetts Supreme Court dismissed Paul Shanley's appeal and re-affirmed the validity of Repressed Memory.

Extract from an article by Father Joseph Wilson entitled "The Enemy Within" in the Catholic World Report, 4 July 2002  [11]

.... I was in the seminary 1977-1986. The theologate from which I graduated was the Dallas seminary. The vice rector in charge of the collegians there-- under whose influence the college wing of the seminary deteriorated dramatically, discipline eroded, sexually scandalous situations proliferated and good men abandoned their vocations in disgust--left the priesthood a year after I graduated, to "marry" the President of the Dallas Gay Alliance. He thoughtfully invited the seminarians to the festivities. He had been our Moral Theology professor (he studied for his doctorate in moral theology at the local Methodist university), in whose class we used Father Andre Guindon's text, The Sexual Language. This was a fascinating work, in the pages of which I learned, for example, that gay sex is in some ways preferable to straight sex because it is more innovative, expressive, playful.

It is interesting to look back and see how many of the men in that seminary left, either before or after ordination, to embrace an active homosexual lifestyle, often with each other. I actually had the experience, while there, of sitting through a lecture by Father Paul Shanley, the Boston priest who was recently arrested in California. As you know, I would hope, the Boston chancery office had a file of 1,600 pages on Father Shanley, including the diaries in which he described teaching kids how to shoot up drugs, and letters from all over the country protesting the lectures he gave in which he actively promoted pedophilia as helpful and healthy. The lecture he gave was for the Priests of the Dallas diocese and for the 3rd- and 4th-year seminarians--I was sitting directly behind the then-Bishop of Dallas, Thomas Tschoepe, who laughed and joked his way through a truly vile presentation.

This, ..... was part of my formation for the sacred priesthood. (Along with all of the other stuff: In my 1st year of theology almost all of our textbooks were paperbacks written by Protestants. Our text on the Eucharist was written by a British Methodist. That was not in Dallas, by the way; it was on Long Island) these stories could be multiplied literally ad infinitum. It was and is typical in this country that young men presenting themselves for formation are subjected to situations which undermine their faith and morals. That is not because the seminary is wired for cable TV. It is because the bishops of this country permit it to be so. .....

The New York Times described Paul Shanley as "a defrocked priest who became a lightning rod for the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church". However they left out a lot. Like Cardinal Danneels, Fr. Paul Shanley had been a darling of the Catholic Left but suffered a much uglier fate. When Shanley was released in July 2017 after 12 years in prison, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League issued a statement Catholic Left Goes Mute on Paul Shanley  [emphasis is mine]

....Boston-area media outlets such as CBS, NBC, Fox 5, New England Cable, and WHDH have all labeled him a pedophile. This is inaccurate: he had sex with children, adolescents, and adults. There was one proviso—they had to be male. Not to even mention his homosexuality is a cover-up.

Shanley is a creature of the Catholic Left. They helped to shape him ideologically and support him organizationally. Now they have gone mute.

Known as the “hippie priest,” the left-wing Shanley argued in the 1970s that “homosexuality is a gift from God and should be celebrated.” He certainly celebrated his homosexuality. But he didn’t stop there. In October 1977, he contended that “not even incest or bestiality” could cause psychic damage........

The Catholic Left has long pushed the Church to relax its teachings on sexuality. This idea was fermented in the 1960s and took root in the 1970s. In other words, Shanley is their boy. Indeed, he served as chaplain to Dignity, the dissident Catholic left-wing organization. As I once told a leader of Dignity, Shanley would never be chosen as chaplain to the Catholic League, but he was a good fit for his group.......

To be fair, Shanley himself has been treated unjustly. Though there is a mountain of evidence showing that he was a practicing homosexual and abuser, his conviction was based on an accusation citing “repressed memory.” This is a fiction: as many prominent psychologists and psychiatrists have shown, the more serious the offense, the less likely it is to be repressed......

We hope Shanley finally makes peace with God. We also hope that the Catholic Left stops saying that the Church’s “sexual repression” caused men like Shanley to do what he did. No, it is precisely the abandonment of restraint—advocated by the Catholic Left—that brought about the homosexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

NOTES:
[10] from “The Brussels Journal”   The Fall of The Belgian Church

[11] from article “The Enemy Within – a Parish Priest Cautions His Would-be Defender” by Fr Joseph Wilson  in Catholic World Report, 4 July 2002 

Afterthought!

HOWEVER it is also worth reading this article by Joann Whyijewski, one of Shanley's non-Catholic left-wing defenders! Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film

It begins: I don’t “believe the victims”.

I was in Boston in the Spring of 2002 reporting on the priest scandal, and because I know some of what is untrue, I don’t believe the personal injury lawyers or the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team or the Catholic “faithful” who became harpies outside Boston churches, carrying signs with images of Satan, hurling invective at congregants who’d just attended Mass, and at least once – this in my presence – spitting in the face of a person who dared dispute them.......

She also writes about Father Gordon MacRae, politically conservative and not a critic of the Church but the Church abandoned him anyway!

The Reason Why - The Catholic Church and I (and Fr Paul Shanley)

Father Paul Shanley as a young priest, c 1970

Paul Shanley, released from prison July 2017

This is a discussion I had with Tim Cavanaugh of the online American libertarian magazine  Reason.com  ("Hit and Run" blog) in 2005. Mr Cavanaugh (presumably of Irish extraction?) was defending a liberal - or renegade - Catholic priest Father Paul Shanley who was initially adored by secular anti-clerics for flouting traditionalist Catholic values - until it suited them to use his anything-goes sexual antics to demonise the Church. The article entitled False Witness is dated 23 February 2005; I wrote to Tim Cavanaugh and an interesting discussion followed that drew in other readers including Jon Ihle.

In February 2005 Paul Shanley was convicted of the 1980 rape of a male minor, a conviction based entirely on "Recovered Memory" evidence. One blogger wrote that the opinion on the Catholic blogosphere appears to be that Shanley is a scumbag who was convicted on the only occasion on which he was innocent. That was certainly my view at the time. However others - like Catholic League president Bill Donohue - believed Shanley to be guilty although it appears that Donohue now accepts he was in fact innocent of that particular charge. [1]

The following extract from the  Wikipedia article on Paul Shanley helps to explain why "liberals" (both Catholic and secular) admired the man and traditionalists loathed him.

Shanley first gained notoriety during the 1970s as a "street priest", ministering to drug addicts and runaways who struggled with their sexuality. His writings included Changing Norms of Sexuality.During the 1980s, Shanley served as pastor of St. Jean the Evangelist Parish in Newton. In 1990, he was transferred to St. Anne's in San Bernardino, California. While there he and another priest, John J. White, co-owned "a bed-and-breakfast for gay customers 50 miles away in Palm Springs".

Shanley had earned "the nickname the hippie priest for his long hair and outspoken views, including his public rejection of the church's condemnation of homosexuality." He attended a conference on sexuality where the founders of NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, conceived the idea of such an organization. However, Shanley was not a part of the 32 individuals at the meeting who caucused to form the group, according to a Catholic priest and Protestant minister who were.

The article False Witness and associated comments from the "Hit and Run" blog follow.

Rory Connor

16 April 2019

http://reason.com/blog/2005/02/23/false-witness

Hit and Run Blog

False Witness 

Tim Cavanaugh 

Feb. 23, 2005 3:53 pm

Dear Mr. Cavanaugh,

The attached is from the "Gay" magazine The Guide. Its not that it is the best account of your country's Salem Witch-Hunt (I will send you details of better ones). Its just that they cannot possibly be accused of making excuses for the Catholic Church. (I see they also have an article this month).

Will you defend this lunacy or (more likely) will you ignore it and the questions is raises about anti-clerical "liberals"?

Regards

Rory Connor

[above link is to a May 2005 article from The Guide by Jim D'Entremont as earlier one not available. There is a further article by D'Entremont dated March 2008 here ]

Dear Mr. Cavanaugh,
Summary follows. Plenty of material for an article on the effects of anti-clericalism. It's not so much that I expect journalists like yourself to disagree. What I expect is that you will remain silent and let the Witch-Hunters run riot. You don't actually believe what they are saying but they are attacking your enemies and that's all that counts.

Is that correct?

Rory Connor

[Reply from Tim Cavanaugh]

I never turn down a challenge, Rory! The articles you refer to can be be found  here, and though they're a bit out of date, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick (whose article on this topic I came across just before I got your email yesterday—divine intervention?) covered some of the same ground in covering the actual case against Paul Shanley.

So, in case anybody out there doesn't know, Shanley,  recently sentenced to 12-to-15 years in prison for child rape, was convicted solely on the basis of  recovered-memory testimony; three of his four accusers were dropped as unreliable, and the one remaining accuser had ample opportunity to coordinate his tale with the stories of at least two of the others (boyhood friends of his); no witnesses were able to corroborate any of the accusations, in whole or in part, and to the degree that there was forensic evidence, it would seem to clear Shanley (for reasons too complicated to go into here, and which did not involve Shanley at all, one of the boys actually had his cloacal region examined by a doctor at the time of the alleged crimes, and no evidence of abuse was found); Shanley appears to have had an active and varied sex life, which was widely distorted and misreported in press accounts; he was not actually a member of NAMBLA; nothing in Shanley's 1,600-page personnel file from the Boston Archdiocese supports any of the claims made about him prior to and during his trial... For more information, read JoAnn Wypijewski's  coverage of the case, [2] and since on the internet a thousand-word screed is worth a million pictures, don't miss Alexander Cockburn's post-sentencing hit.

For what it's worth, I have consistently believed, and written, that the real scandal here has been about management; what made the RCC sex-abuse story of 2002 take off wasn't the behavior of accused priests but the loony personnel decisions high-ranking church officials seemed to be making. That applies here as well: If they didn't think Shanley was guilty they should have defended him instead of shuffling him around and then throwing him to the wolves when he got too hot. However, I didn't pay any attention to the details of the Shanley case beyond noting that he had "multiple accusers" and a "30-year history" of allegations, both of which turn out to be largely chimerical.

But hey, way back in 2002 I was warning about the possibility of a witch hunt: When a priest in Baltimore was shot by a guy who claims the priest had molested him, a New York Times reporter astoundingly referred to the shooter as the "victim," and I called bullshit on that. And as it turns out, that Times reporter's name was...Jayson Blair?

And now you know...the rrrrest of the story!

TIM CAVANAUGH

MY NOTES:
[1] This is Bill Donohue's reaction to Paul Shanley's release from prison in July 2017 -"Catholic Left Goes Mute on Paul Shanley"

[2] For a Catholic traditionalist view on Jo Ann Wypijewski, a left wing journalist who defended Paul Shanley when most of her colleagues abandoned him to the Witch-hunters, see article by Phil Lawler "Strange Ally: a left-wing journalists unconvincing critique of Spotlight"

VIEW COMMENTS (33) 33 Responses to “False Witness”

SR 
 23 May 2005 @ 5:02PM
 [anti-Catholic evangelical] Obviously the Black Internationale has gotten to you, Tim. [/anti-Catholic evangelical]


mojoe 
23 May 2005 @ 5:21PM
 Tim,
 I live in the Boston area, and know 2 guys that absolutely, positively swear that this guy molested them also. They aren't interested in testifying because of the embarrassment involved. They've put it behind them (not a pun). And have seen what it's like to testify in these proceedings.

 Also, the media hereabouts reported that the other 3 accusers decided not to testify for the same reason, not that they had been disqualified as unreliable.

 There was another case locally where recovered-memory testimony was used to put away the owners and workers of the Fells Acres Daycare, only to have most of those convictions overturned some time later.

WSDave 
23 May 2005 @ 5:30PM|
I thought all that recovered memory, sex abuse, "satan ate my baby" stuff went out in the 80's. Is everything old really new again?

gaius marius
 23 May 2005 @ 5:40PM
 "I live in the Boston area, and know 2 guys that absolutely, positively swear that this guy molested them also."
 which is fine, mr mojoe. but that doesn't mean the trial of shanley as it happened was not a horrible miscarriage of justice.

Tim Cavanaugh 
23 May 2005 @ 5:42PM
 WSDave, that's why I figured there must really be something to the charges against Shanley. You know: There's no way they'd convict a guy on the basis of voodoo brain science just for the sake of the children! That would be unreasonable!

 What was I thinking?

Rory Connor 
23 May 2005 @ 6:25PM
 Dear SR
 You are absolutely right: The Black Internationale has got Tim! I was a De La Salle Brother from 1966 to 69 and it was the formative experience of my life. My novice master Brother Maurice Kirk was as important as my parents if not more so. (He became head of the De La Salle Order in Ireland and was killed in a car crash on 10 April 1974.)

 In September 1967 at the end of our training a Jesuit priest Father Michael Sweetman gave us a 9 day Retreat (spiritual conference for you pagans). It's true what the Jesuits say: when they control a child's education they have him for life!
 Rory

Jeff
 23 May 2005 @ 6:30PM
The Catholic church scapegoating somebody for the sake of convinience? Unheard of!

Gary Gunnels 
23 May 2005 @ 6:37PM
 Rory Connor,
 I am a heathen thank you very much.

crimethink
23 May 2005 @ 7:00PM
 Gary Gunnels,
 Was he talking to you?

 Or do you have a new housemate? ;-)

SR 
23 May 2005 @ 8:14PM
I'm very gratified that someone recognized the "Black Internationale" reference.


Gary Gunnels
23 May 2005 @ 8:43PM
 crimethink,
 If you read his comments you'll see he was referring to anyone reading his comments who happened to be rational enough not believe in Christianity.


James Kabala 
23 May 2005 @ 9:06PM
A number of people in the Catholic blogosphere take the same position as mojoe: This was a scumbag who got caught by a rare case in which he was innocent. I don't know enough details to say whether that's true or not.

 As for the Jayson Blair anecdote, all I can say is, "Wow."


Gary Gunnels 
23 May 2005 @ 9:18PM
 Sometimes it is very difficult to keep the outside world from invading the jury room. Does anyone know if the NAMBLA claim arose at trial? I doubt the prosecution would raise it (its not in their interest to dispel this rumor), and if the defense didn't, then that claim could have tainted the entire jury pool. Even voir dire might not have rid the jury of this notion if the prosecution or defense avoided or didn't think of it.

The Wine Commonsewer 
23 May 2005 @ 10:09PM
 I'm also too lazy (busy) to go looking but to my recollection the denial of the NAMBLA connection turns on a technicality. He was involved but it wasn't NAMBLA yet because the organization was just getting off the ground. It ultimately evolved into NAMBLA. A nice bunch of folks I'm sure.

 I don't doubt that Shanley is guilty. I also think the evidence was thin. Too thin for a conviction if it was anything else but a sexual assault case.

The Wine Commonsewer 
23 May 2005 @ 10:11PM
 Meant to also say that (from memory) the Archdiocese of Boston has written records connecting Shanley with NAMBLA around 1979 or 1980 so, no, it didn't arise at trial for the first time.


Tim Cavanaugh
 23 May 2005 @ 11:08PM
Gary and TWC: This claim was not in evidence at the trial, but according to the Wypijewski story, the jury pool showed close to 100-percent awareness of Shanley and the media reporting on the case, so it's a good bet at least a few of the jurors knew about the claim. I'd say his non-membership was more than just a technicality, though he wasn't pure as the unsunned snow either. From the story:

 "By 1977 anyone wanting to report molestation could call an anonymous tip into a hotline instituted by the Boston D.A. Innuendo poured in about hundreds of gay men. It was a year of panic that set the stage for Shanley to articulate his most "deviant belief." In nearby Revere, a police dragnet implicated 25 men and 64 youths in an alleged sex ring. Police detained the young people, or enlisted psychiatrists and priests, to coerce them into cooperating. A group called the Boston/Boise Committee was formed to defend civil liberties. Ultimately none of the men did time, and the district attorney responsible for the scandal was swept from office. Afterward, the committee held a conference to discuss sex between men and teenage boys. Shanley was among the clerics, ethicists, lawyers, activists, and psychologists invited to speak. He told the story of a gay teenager, rejected by his family, who took up with an older man. When the boy's parents found out, they called the police and the man was imprisoned. "He had loved that man," Shanley said of the boy. "And when he realized that the indiscretion in the eyes of society and the law had cost this man perhaps 20 years . . . the boy began to fall apart. We have our convictions upside down . . . the 'cure' does far more damage."

 "At his 2002 PowerPoint show, MacLeish projected a sentence from a 1979 account from Gaysweek that read, "At the end of the conference, 32 men and two teenagers caucused and formed the Man Boy Lovers of North America." The suggestion or assertion that Shanley was among the 32 has been repeated in the press many times since. But Shanley wasn't part of that group, say a Catholic priest and Protestant minister who were."


martin
 23 May 2005 @ 11:10PM
 Repressed memory syndrome or RCC discussion aside, my feeling is, what convicted the guy was the sole witness sobbing and breaking down on the stand. After decades of indoctrination, no juror wants to feel that the obviously terribly affected victim did not get justice and a potential molester might be allowed to roam freely.

 The child sex abuse hysteria should serve as a textbook case of subverting important foundations of justice, such as assumption of innocence, retroactive legislation, due process rights and more. All to the great enhancement of power of prosecutors, social service groups, NGOs and ably pushed along by an often gullible and uninformed media. Sex sells.

 Ending the WOD will be magnitudes easier than halting the sex abuse hysteria train.


martin
23 May 2005 @ 11:23PM
 PS:  Even if Mr. Shanley ever was a member of NAMBLA, that is not what he was at trial for. To all advocating it should make a difference to a jury, you need to seriously check the consequences if such thinking takes hold in practice. Undeniably, especially in molestation cases, it already has.

 Just because a guy was a sympathiser or even a member of the KKK, doesn't mean he is criminally liable for the atrocities committed in their name.

 Looks like Government mind control to me.



TWC
 24 May 2005 @ 12:16AM
 Thanks Tim....
 Certainly this stuff is troubling. But the entire legal system is insane, and when it comes to sex crimes, it's a crap shoot.


Gary Gunnels 
24 May 2005 @ 12:19AM
 martin,
 Having now had some experience with trial work I can tell you that I have a very jaded attitude toward juries. A talented trial attorney can manipulate the fuck out of them.


Rory Connor 
24 May 2005 @ 4:17AM
From my reading of the case Paul Shanley may well have been guilty of sex with underage but ADOLESCENT boys. Consensual sex with a 16 year old youth is a crime, but very different from raping a 6 year old. So why wasn't he charged with his (possible) real crimes?

 In the 1970s Paul Shanley was a Gay and Liberal icon. He was part of the Church's outreach to the Gay community and reached out so far that he swallowed their agenda hook, line and sinker. When he was removed from that ministry about 1980, Cardinal Madeiros (?) was denounced as reactionary.

 Part of the Gay agenda was (and is?) to reduce the age of consent. If Shanley was prosecuted for consensual sex with teenage youths, the trial might have focused on the issue of homosexual priests. Instead the prosecution brought vile and fantastic charges in order to demonise Shanley and the Catholic Church.

 Just a suggestion!

 Rory


Douglas Fletcher 
24 May 2005 @ 4:39AM
What the hell is in the water up there, anyway?


Jon Ihle 
24 May 2005 @ 6:49AM
Everyone here - especially Tim - should know that Rory Connor's aim here is to exonerate the Catholic Church's complicity in widespread sexual abuse by drawing attention to exceptional miscarriages of justice. He's been bombarding my blog and email for over a year now trying to get me to write about this stuff, too. He contacted me because I'm a Jew who occasionally writes about anti-Semitism and he sees the sex abuse allegations, trials, etc. as an anti-Catholic campaign. As you can see from his last comment, his paranoid exculpatory fantasy involves a conspiracy theory about an organised attack by homosexuals on the Church. From what I can tell, his group, Voices Emerge, is struggling with the complete loss of Catholic authority in Ireland, where not only has clerical sex abuse been revealed, but also a widespread longstanding system of virtual slavery for orphans, unwed moothers and other moral undesirables. This is an institutional problem with the Church, but Connor wants you to pay attention to an individual case so that you forget that.


Rory Connor 
24 May 2005 @ 10:25AM
 Jon Ihle is right. I have been bombarding journalists trying to get them to write about a gross miscarriage of justice that bears comparison to the (Jewish) Dreyfus case in France over a century ago. The evidence against Dreyfus was forged but it was not ludicrous. The accusers of Dreyfus had more respect for the intelligence of their audience than the advocates of Recovered Memory which is more like voodoo brain science.

 I know a lot more about the witch-hunt in Ireland than in the USA. However I do know that Shanley was one of the chief whipping boys of the anti-clerical child abuse lobby. Since Shanley is innocent of the charges against him (as even Jon Ihle seems to accept), it is a reasonable conclusion that the entire scandal in the USA is fake.

 I know for certain that our Irish scandal is a fake and a witch-hunt. I have been in contact with a number of the chief accusers and leaders of "victims" groups. One of them told me on the steps of the Catholic Cathedral in Dublin, that there are mass grave in Artane and other institutions run by the Christian Brothers. (This encounter took place in front of journalists and TV crews and was - briefly- reported in the media. His group was picketing the Cathedral after Mass).

 Another gentleman told the Irish Times that he attended the funerals of boys who died after being punched in the stomach by the Christian Brothers. No boy died of any cause while this gentleman was in Artane. I had a sharp E-Mail exchange with him in which I invited him to name the dead boys. Of course he produced no names. I know of several other accusations of this type. I call them "Murder of the Undead" allegations and they seem to be the Irish equivalent of Recovered Memory Syndrome.

 I am not talking about isolated individuals who jump on the bandwagon of a genuine scandal. These allegations come from the leaders and spokes-persons for "victims" groups in my country.

 The Irish Minister for Justice and the Gardai (police) have confirmed that they are unaware of a single murder.

 It is impossible to disprove allegations of child abuse, decades after the alleged events. You cannot prove a negative. However when the people who allege systematic child abuse are also making "Murder of the Undead" type claims, then you know that we are dealing with a new Salem.

 Rory


Gary Gunnels
24 May 2005 @ 11:32AM
Rory Connor,
 I've known many, many gay people in my life; I don't ever recall any of them having a burning desire to lower the age of consent laws.

 Even if Shanley is innocent, that hardly undermines the numerous other cases of sexual abuse of children (and nuns for that matter) by RCC priests. Of course, its not like the RCC doesn't have a long and inglorious history of persecuting or victimizing people; thus, the latest revelations are just par for the course.

 Jon Ihle,
 Thanks for the heads up.


dhex 
24 May 2005 @ 12:19PM
 i have to say i was heartened at recent protests at Catholic school closings by parents in carroll gardens and other parts of brooklyn. the direct connection between hush money payouts and budget woes was being addressed directly. (not that there's much of a solution there, unless these parents could somehow double their tuition fees, which is, ahem, unlikely)

dhex
24 May 2005 @ 12:24PM
"it is a reasonable conclusion that the entire scandal in the USA is fake."

 yes, well...we all have to hold onto something.


Altar Boy 
24 May 2005 @ 1:02PM
I went to catholic school for 12 years and had a lot to do with priests, nuns, and brothers. I'm from a very Irish part of town and know hundreds of others who had similar upbringings.

 In all that time and all those people I've heard of 1 case where something sexual might have happened.

 Sure, they were willing to hit you for punishment, but at the time (1960s to 1980s) this was not considered abuse. A lot of them were assholes, and had some other issues, but that doesn't mean they were abusers.

 I understand people who are not Catholics and who only hear the horror stories of catholic school (which I too was all too happy to share with friends at the state college I went to) don't understand the culture and assume all members have the same failings when there are well publicized allegations. The same can be said for any fringe group, such as the Jews or Mormons.

 I would think of all the blogs out there, folks on this one would understand how the actions of a wacky few can unfairly tarnish the reputation of the moderate majority. (e.g. Badnarik)


James Kabala 
24 May 2005 @ 3:12PM
Rory:
 Most of the sexual abuse claims in the U.S. have not been based on recovered-memory syndrome. On the contrary, in most of these cases diocesan archives show that the bishops were notified of the abuse at the time and chose to hush it up.

 The stories you report from Ireland do sound outlandish and Maria Monkish. (For starters, why would dead children be buried in a mass grave instead of returned to their parents? Was this Artane school you mention for orphans?) However, we are talking about two different countries and two different scandals.


The Wine Commonsewer 
24 May 2005 @ 3:13PM
Altar, we do understand that this is a few bad apples in a whole bag full. With the knowledge of the good apples, the gorcery store left the bad apples on the shelf. They even disguised them by putting them in brown shopping bags filled with good apples. They then sent them home to unsuspecting shoppers, some of whom ended up with a rotting bite of the apple containing a worm.

 And that is why everyone here and the rest of America is so outraged.

 Hand me my shootin' iron regards,

 TWC


Jon Ihle
 24 May 2005 @ 4:33PM
Yes, Rory, I do accept that, at the very least, there has been a miscarriage of law in the Shanley case (I'm not in a position know whether it was just, in the cosmic sense). I also accept that cases based on recovered memory are crap. The notion that people forget trauma is fanciful and probably agenda-driven. Further, the instances you describe re: Artane sound nuts and produced by hysteria. But what you can't deny is what the Church has documented itself - and I'm not just talking about sexual abuse, here. I'm talking about the Magdelen laundries and the whole infrastructure of incarceration built around unwed mothers, orphans and juvenile delinquents, wherein these people were mercilessly brutalised. And, of course, I'm talking about clergy who have admitted what they've done and about the Church which has admitted its role in covering for them. It's important to distinguish fact from fiction and to consider these cases individually, but you want to generalise too much from a handful of particulars. What should be important to you is the truth, not just the reputation of the Church.


Rory Connor 
24 May 2005 @ 4:37PM
James
 I agree I have limited knowledge of the scandal in the USA. However the following is a quotation from an article by Daniel Lyons, "Sex, God and Greed", Forbes magazine, June 2003.

 "The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a Philadelphia debunking group, says at least 100 clergy cases involve people who claim they were molested or raped, blocked it out for decades and now suddenly remember."

 Another quote about the lawyer who represents the four "victims" of Paul Shanley. "For Roderick (Eric) MacLeish, sex litigation is a big business. MacLeish says he represents 240 people bringing abuse claims against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston." The Shanley case is described as his "most celebrated current case."

 Daniel Lyons is no Catholic Church acolyte nor is Forbes Magazine. The article is largely concerned with the effects of the scandal on the American insurance industry!

 There are just too many dubious cases. Have they all jumped on the bandwagon of a genuine scandal or is there something rotten about the entire child abuse issue?

 The story is much the same in Ireland. Artane was an industrial school mainly for teenage boys I think. Some would have committed offenses, some were orphans and others were neglected by their parents. The allegation about mass graves is an accusation of mass murder against the Christian Brothers!

 There was an article in the Sunday Independent (on 22 December 2002 I think) which claimed that there had been a "Holocaust" at another school in Letterfrack with bodies buried all over the place. The man who made the claim had been at Letterfrack about 20 years after the last boy died there!

 As I said, "Murder of the Undead" allegations are the Irish answer to Recovered Memory Syndrome.

 Rory


Rory Connor
27 May 2005 @ 8:06PM
Is this discussion closed? I am going to attempt a final comment anyway. John Ihle and myself differ on most things but we both agree that Recovered Memory is crap. Since he is Jewish and I am Catholic this agreement is not ideological but genetic (i.e. we are both Irish).

 Recovered Memory Syndrome is a Freudian fable and only occurs in societies where Freudianism has made deep inroads into the culture. This did not happen in Ireland. The Catholic Church was strongly opposed to Freud's ideas because they represented a threat to Catholic doctrines regarding sin, free will and personal responsibility. (Even atheists should be concerned about the latter two). That is why we have lunatic lies like "Murder of the Undead" but not Recovered Memory.

 Both societies are sick but I prefer the Irish disease. A liar inhabits the same moral universe as the person who is telling the truth; he just has a different attitude to truth. The Recovered Memory brigade are from a different planet altogether. It is possible to repent of telling lies but how do you repent of Recovered Memory?

Afterword re "Recovered Memory"

On 31 March 2020 I wrote the following in a thread on the politics.ie website "Alex Salmond Accused of Sexual Harassment"

I wrote a Blog article recently that accidentally illustrated the problem of "historic" memory. I wanted to reproduce an online discussion I had taken part in - more than a decade before - about the conviction of Fr Paul Shanley but I had difficulty locating it. I was pretty sure I recalled a comment by a blogger that "the opinion on the Catholic blogosphere appears to be that Shanley is a scumbag who was convicted on the only occasion on which he was innocent." When I eventually located the discussion I found that what I was probably remembering was a comment that

" A number of people in the Catholic blogosphere take the same position as mojoe: This was a scumbag who got caught by a rare case in which he was innocent"

My memory failure makes little difference here, but suppose I was a witness in court testifying to something that was supposed to have happened in 2005. It could make a BIG difference if I said that an event had only happened ONCE when in fact it was was a RARE event (i.e. it happened a few times).

Shortly after I started to compose this Blog article on Fr Shanley, I recognised my mistake. However I thought the way I remembered the statement is an improvement on the original so I decided to let it stand. And of course, that's the problem with "Recovered Memory". It's not a mental photo of what happened in the past but a Reconstruction!

[ Also the author of the original quote was NOT a "Blogger". I upgraded him. Another aspect of "Recovered Memory" is to make past events more important than they really were! ]

Rory Connor

10 August 2020