VansOpinion - CANNON LAW, CRIMES, COVER-UPS AND CHAOS

I was sent a copy of an article written by an American non-Catholic entitled, "The Catholic Church and child sex abuse", which was allegedly published in the BBC News on Monday, 29 April 2002. The identity of the author was not furnished, therefore, I can not properly attribute the writing to a particular person. The content of the writing was found to be sufficiently interesting and informative to warrant my sharing it with you, the readers of vansopinion.com. Since I agree in substantial part with the writer, the article generally reflects my opinion on the subject. While the spotlight at the moment is on the Catholic Church, one must realize that the abuse of children and adults as well, by members of the clergy, transcends religions, denominations and time boundaries.

The Catholic Church and child sex abuse I have not touched on the resounding scandal of the Catholic church because I thought all commentary would be premature and, as they say, subject to revision until the Pope had spoken.

I now realize what a friend called "a wise precaution" was actually a sign of a false assumption on my part, a misunderstanding I share with probably millions of people outside the Catholic faith. A misapprehension, I hate to confess, about the way the Roman Catholic church is run. Which is the notion that the Vatican does not simply symbolize a universal faith but is the headquarters, the GHQ, of a vast army of doctrinal foot soldiers who receive the Pope's Sunday battle orders and carry them out in their own parish in his name.

In the contemporary jargon, one reporter from Rome puts it, "It's the delusion that every priest monitors every word of Father John's Sunday homilies in the service of a micro-managing Pope." Not so. Rather the Pope is like a supreme commander, like Eisenhower, who issues the terms of the strategy - "subject the enemy to defeat in his own land and require the total surrender of his forces" - and then leaves the doing of it - the war, the battles, the tactics - to the commanders in the field who are the cardinals and especially the bishops in each parish.

The heart of Catholicism, its doctrine, is watched over in the Vatican by about a dozen men only. They're the night watchmen, looking out for any breaches of orthodox doctrine anywhere in the world. If they hear of a priest somewhere who wants to change the form of a mass, or proclaims his belief in abortion, then no doubt there will arrive from the Vatican, possibly from the Pontiff himself, a reference back to an early encyclical, or other papal declaration of faith, one of those long thoughtful pontifications on a single theme - concerning marriage, concerning the poor, so on.

The Catholic doctrine on birth control - and so far as this Pope is concerned, the final word - was laid down in Humanae Vitae (Of Human Lives) in 1968. So far as I know there has never been an encyclical concerning paedophilia, or the sexual abuse of the young, although there can hardly be a man alive who so far as priestly abuse is concerned, knows more about it than the Pope. I doubt that a month goes by when he does not receive a report of a priest resigning or being defrocked or exiled by his bishop.

Only a month ago a Polish archbishop, a friend and former personal assistant to the Pope, resigned in the wake of sexual abuse charges. In Australia 51 priests were sentenced in the past nine years. In Canada over 2,000 compensation claims have been filed by Indians alone. The church in Ireland faces, in the words of the Irish Times, "the greatest institutional crisis in its modern history", with the Irish taxpayer contributing about one fifth of $500m required to pay off claims of abuse by over 3,000 victims covering 30 years.

In the past week the Associated Press has reported hundreds of resignations, firings or financial settlements in dozens of countries, most prominently Canada, United States, Ireland, Australia, France, Germany, Mexico, Poland and Britain. It will be news to some of us that in England 21 priests were convicted of sexual molestation in the past seven years. The weird and scarcely believable end piece to this long survey is the note that few, if any, cases have been reported in Portugal, Spain, Lithuania, Switzerland and Italy.

The comparative purity of Italy is tempered by the comment that in such an overwhelmingly Catholic country as Italy, if such things occurred it is almost impossible that a priest would be accused. Now before we jump to the conclusion, which many millions of people have already done, that this is exclusively a Catholic problem the Associated Press is already compiling a substantial record of paedophilia in boarding schools, in boys camps, scout troops, regular grade schools - but the priesthood, plainly, seems to attract men who are wittingly or not inclined to paedophilia. Quite simply the sexual abuse of small boys is a worldwide phenomenon, practiced since time began and will no doubt go on till human time ends.

Why then should the whole topic have sprung at us in America only a few months ago with the shock and violence of an earthquake - an American earthquake? Because of nothing more complicated than television. The televising of the sentencing to gaol of a Boston priest who, it came out, had an appalling record of offences claimed by over 130 men reporting his abuse of them as boys sometime during the past 30 years. And what turned this record into a national and a Catholic scandal was the revelation that the man's bishop, who is now the cardinal in Boston, had time and again, having had reports of the man's misdeeds, simply, quietly, reassigned him to another parish and to another and again and again - and several times had presided over the secret financial settlement of confirmed claims.

I ought to say that this suddenly notorious priest was convicted on a single charge of having fondled one small boy. He was charged at all only because this incident happened during the past five years. All the far more serious charges of abuse fell outside the statute of limitations when legal action can no longer be taken. This period varies from state to state.

The Boston case of the sentenced priest opened the floodgates to hundreds of similar cases in a dozen states and wherever a reporter, or a member of the congregation probed they came on the same story of a financial cover up - payoffs which have drawn ruinously on the coffers of many a parish. In one state a seminary closed for the given reason that it was attracting too few young men to be priests. In fact because it was going bankrupt.

These sordid truths came at us so suddenly and in such a tide that it was only in the past month or two that ordinary people, religious or not, on the outside, caught their breath and began to realize that here we had thrown at us out of the innocent blue a rainstorm of crimes - the active abuse itself, criminal assault, endangerment of children - worse - obstruction of justice by bishops dispensing hush money.

Many of us expected to hear and see in states which allow television of court hearings a whole raft of trials and sentencing because surely what was going on 30 and 20 and 10 years ago is going on now. But there haven't been, that I've seen, any more public trials. In Boston parades began of members of the cardinals congregation calling for his resignation. Protest placards pleaded or shouted "Jail Time for Priests". And then we came on the realization that the Catholic church is a law until itself, or rather is controlled by a body of law known as "canon law".

In the past quarter century or so the bishops have lived by bypassing our civil laws by simply not reporting these cases and mainly that is the way they've behaved because, on the subject of crime and punishment, the Catholic church has always given overriding concern to the doctrine of penitence and redemption. So that when the Pope finally spoke, at that cardinals assembly, he first helped the bishops - the field commanders of all the parishes - by in effect saying now they have a duty to report cases of paedophilia to the civil authorities. Until now all they had to go on was a clause in the code of canon law which since 1917 has been, you might say, the constitutional law of the church.

Clause 1395 says that "a priest who violates his vow of celibacy with a minor is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants". "Just penalties" were at the definition of the bishop and there has been, until now, no public demand from Catholic congregations for action to be taken in civil or criminal courts. But while we outsiders of whatever religion paid most attention to the Pope's first paragraph, Catholics were more likely to give equal weight to the second.

Here is the first: "People need to know that there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young. Such abuse is by every standard wrong and is rightly considered a crime by society. It is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God." Now the second and final sentence: "We cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God which reaches to the depths of a person 's soul and can work extraordinary change." Well one cardinal, at least, has believed steadily in the possibility of extraordinary change, even after 20 and more years of switching parishes for the Boston priest, whom another American cardinal in Rome called "a moral monster". In all this we've heard nothing, except from the Pope, of grief for the child victims. One Catholic journalist here has written: "The bishops' compassion for their colleagues is as florid as it is chilling."

This public absence of care and compassion for the former victims is the great divide between the elders of the church and the general public - between, if you like, the cocoon of canon law and the wide world of the law that binds the rest of us. And what has not been settled - and many Catholics believe will have to be settled - is the question of why bishops and cardinals should be exempt from the punishment that would face any non-Catholic citizen who enabled sex abusers - and raised close to a billion dollars in hush money out of the Sabbath dollar offerings of the faithful.