By Peter Mcc
The Catholic Church finds itself in a bit of a bind these days. They love having their exclusive gentlemen’s club, with all the trappings and showmanship, fancy dresses, fine wines, and immunity from the Law, but suddenly folk have had enough of their treatment of children and society wants, demands actually, that they start behaving morally.
Sounds more than fair to me, but this includes changes to their sacred sacrament of Confession, and this little escape hatch will not be surrendered easily.
For those unaware of this neat little marketing tool, Confession allows you to tell the Priest your sins, and for the more than generous price of a handful of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, you get to purge your record and it’s back onto Santa’s Xmas list. Or entry to Heaven, whichever comes first.
Sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it? But here is the sting in the tail. God doesn’t want the Priest to tell anyone what has been confessed. It’s a secret between the Sinner, God and the Priest. That means if a Priest takes Confession from a fellow Priest, and the Sin is sexual abuse of a child, the chap hearing the Confession cannot dob the offender in. Not even to his Bishop.
The Priest then has the added pressure in his job of watching repeat offenders going on to rack up more sins against kids, then rinse and repeat.
What does each party stand to gain by this behaviour?
- The Priest taking the Confession? A ton of workplace stress unless they are also an Abuser. (And most aren’t)
- The Sinner? Further adventures with children and literally a “Get out of Jail Free” card.
- God? Initially no bad Press, but eventually a shit ton more and a king-sized credibility problem. Also, fewer recruits for the ground crew, unless they are a paedophile, which makes the whole approach a self-sustaining disaster.
- The kids? They become the biggest losers. Sustained abuse, and if they are very unlucky, multiple Abusers in a party environment.
Recently Archbishop Hart expressed his preference for going to jail rather than breaking the sanctity of the Confessional so we know where his concerns lie, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over him doing time and possibly copping the same treatment from ex-victims currently in prison, but there is another option.
A survivor of Abuse at the hands of the Church, suggested, it’s dangerous to allow the Catholic Church access to kids, so he offers the following.
Simply remove the Catholic Church from the education system.
I say simply, but it would take years to achieve, but a heck of a lot easier to manage than trying to micromanage chaps who get into their secret enclaves and take a long time to root out.
There are a stack of advantages though. Hart can keep pretending he has a special relationship with God and the Sinner, the kids catch a break, the Catholic Church gets a lot less bad Press, society has less traumatised people floating around, the Church saves billions in compensation. Priests taking Confession have a heck of a lot less stress by not being an Enabler, quality recruitment should jump as their reputation improves, the current Pope can keep his head buried in the sand, but it won’t look quite so bad, and the Catholic Church will not have to suffer horrific testimony such as that given by Cardinal Pell.
Of course, the trick is how we can bring about this change. Parliament is riddled with mates of the Catholic Church. Some have even done part of the training. They are not interested in losing access to developing minds and the earlier the better. They really need to cram in their dogma before critical thinking skills click in. Ideally, they would not have access to Primary schools, and if we really want to play it safe, Secondary schools should not be under their control. That still leaves them with Catholic Universities which can be quite profitable.
This is nowhere near dealing with the entire problem, such as in other religious schools, or government institutions, but at least it tackles one of the worse groups for taking the problem seriously. When our current (popular) Catholic Pope thinks it’s enough for Priests to “look into their soul and resign” if they have sinned, then we know it’s not being taken seriously. Imagine if the police rolled up to a State school investigating a complaint of sexual abuse, and the Principal said: “I’ll make an announcement that anyone who has been naughty should hand me their resignation.” Imagine the outcry, especially from those apologists who defend the Church these days.
I’m guessing the Royal Commission will have a few recommendations aimed at prevention, and it’s highly unlikely something so drastic will get a mention. But rest assured, this sort of approach would certainly get the Catholic Church’s attention.
References
Bishop Hart statement: https://goo.gl/kvCgtn
UN tells Vatican to act: https://goo.gl/Nn2TBm
Confessional definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessional
Survivors suggestion: https://goo.gl/zds7yH
Catholic abuse costs $4B in US alone: https://goo.gl/H4SLFi
The movie Spotlight: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/
Enabler definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enabler
This article was originally published on 1Petermcc’s Blog.
