I've been meaning to post since Vatican representatives were summoned to Geneva to be questioned. I did a google news search today using search terms 'Vatican' & 'UN', & this remains the main news item. Of course except for the Catholic Register, which headlines 'Vatican Observer Calls for Concrete Steps Towards Peace in Syria' - far be it from me to suggest that this is a psychological mechanism to go, Look! There's trouble elsewhere in the world!
The 'secular' media reports it differently:
'The Vatican faced blistering criticism from a United Nations committee Thursday over allegations it protected pedophile priests at the expense of victims in what constituted a worldwide sex abuse scandal. [...] The Vatican insists it is not responsible for the actions of priests, who it says are not its employees but citizens of their own countries.' (http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/16/22324032-un-slams-vatican-for-efforts-to-cover-up-pedophile-priests-in-sex-abuse-scandal)
Despite continuing protestations of having no responsibility for the behaviour of its clergy, the Vatican claims to 'get it'. The protestations clearly indicate they don't, since the basis on which they claim not to be responsible for their clergy is a legal loophole as the clergy are not paid a salary so are not technically employees. Obviously when the Vatican produced guidelines in the 1960s instructing bishops to prevent 'scandal' at all costs, they didn't have any responsibility. The following quote is about what the Vatican is doing to prevent further abuse (in the interests of balance I'll state now that this is actually from a news item criticising the UN for not handling its own sex scandals);
'In December 2013, after refusing a U.N. request for information on alleged sexual abuse cases involving the clergy, Pope Francis announced through Cardinal Sean O�Malley, the archbishop of Boston, the decision by the Vatican to set up a child sex-abuse committee involving a panel of experts charged with producing guidelines of conduct for Catholic clergy and church officials.' (http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/01/pot-kettle-black-u-n-grills-vatican-over-sex/)
How many decades too late? When I posted about the UN & the Vatican before I commented that any respectable religious organisation should be ashamed to think of itself being investigated by the UN, given the organisation's usual remit. Yet they've even signed up to UN conventions, despite not then following up their duties under these conventions.
Here's the real problem: the Catholic Church sees itself as a monarchy, one in which everything is geared towards the defence of the monarch, who can be interpreted as (visibly) the Pope, or (invisibly) Jesus. Where they get this from is taking on the pomp & ceremony of the Roman Empire, & hence the fuss in some quarters about the Pope's humble act.
This is also why the Catholic Church ignores appeals by reasonable people to act sensibly & protect children - these people & their reasonable requests don't matter in the monarchy & never will. The relatively few priests kicked out - some of them with a pension - for abuse are to try to keep the ravening wolf of the secular world from the door. Hence why they are so difficult to deal with - the best advocates for clergy abuse victims are former clergy, who will know how the system works. They church will also feel free to ignore the United Nations, since that is a mere intergovernmental organisation.
This clash is therefore as much of a culture clash as anything. You will have correctly divined that I like anything that will bring abusers & those who protect them down with a bang. The first step, as always in witchcraft, is to name to problem, to know that this is the problem, & to continue to hold on to that as the problem unless disinterested evidence to the contrary comes to light.
From a witch point of view, what interests me about the Catholic Church thing, is that since they clearly do not get it, they plainly will continue to do the same strategies of denial-cover-evasion & these are precisely the strategies that will continue to get them into trouble, which is why awareness of how these people work is so important. In the modern world, having abusing clergy would not get them into trouble if they immediately involved the police, but these people do not live in the modern world & think they can retreat into their monarchy.
And in case anyone feels shocked at my evident satisfaction at these people's continuing downfall, well, carry on, I think this is wonderful. I was talking to a friend who is a Benedictine monk recently, who expressed some pity for the 'hard time' that the Ealing Abbey community have had. Hard time? Hard time? No, don't seem to have heard about it. Looking fools for presiding over a hotbed of paedophilia, including having a former abbot on the run from the police, is not having a hard time. The fear & destruction caused by abuse is having a hard time, claiming not to know about things is denial. And thus the pattern repeats itself.
But here's what happens, & I'll use Ealing Abbey as a microcosm of the Catholic Church to describe it. There are two sorts of men who will now join a community in their position: the first, namely those will say to themselves 'it's sorted now, it's not like it was,' are already in the denial mentality & thus will perpetuate the pattern, *if* abuse continues in the future so it will just continue.
The other sort are the people the church should be really wary of. My opinion is that the relatively high scrutiny under which Catholic clergy are no doubt assessed these days will actually attract people with issues. Leaving aside the tendency to let the guard down after a time, & the tendency to take anyone if an institute is desperate enough, given both the cunning with which paedophiles can convince others everything's OK, & the hoops they leap to to persuade themselves they're OK, nothing would surprise me.
You will also note that the report of the Vatican visitation of Ealing Abbey has not been published, the nearest I can find is a letter on the Westminster diocese's website that doesn't say a great deal (http://rcdow.org.uk/news/apostolic-visitation-to-ealing-abbey/). The message is clearly that everything continues in the kingdom. This is how kingdoms work: everyone's happiness is dependent on the continuing existence of the king. This is exactly the same as what's happening in the rest of the Catholic church. Any person appointed a bishop now who is in the their right mind would go through the diocese's secret archive & review all their clergy's history.
I'll leave it to their imagination whether this is actually happening, I don't think these people are *very* likely to take hints from the world outside!
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