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	Irish Catholic Child Abuse: Was English Rule Ultimately to Blame? By Ruth Gledhill The Times May 30, 2009 http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/05/child-abuse-have-faith-that-gods-judgement-will-not-fail.html A senior Spanish government minister has criticised the Spanish cardinal Antonio Canizares who said 'What happened at some schools cannot be compared with the millions of lives that have been destroyed by abortion.' Canizares is Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. A full translation of his original remarks is provided by Chris Gillibrand of Cathcon has today written a guest essay for this blog, below, in response to the terrible events in Ireland. He makes clear how truly complex the roots are of institionalised child abuse and offers reassurance that even for the dead abusers, there is judgement at the hands of God. Chris Gillibrand writes: The universal law of the Church is the salvation of souls and Jesus makes entirely clear in the Gospel of Matthew how certain the punishment is for those who abuse children, even given the fatalism of Verse 7. Matthew 18 At that hour the disciples came to Jesus, saying: 'Who thinkest thou is the greater in the kingdom of heaven? 2 And Jesus calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of them, 3 And said: Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me. 6 But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea. 7 Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.' Given the enormity of the crime detailed in the report of the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, it could be said that it is irrelevant to point to all the magnificent work which the Church does throughout the world. A child abuser could not mitigate his crime by pleading in court that otherwise he or she had an excellent charecter. Some years ago, I visited Romania to help in a feasibility study for developments at an orphanage. While much work in Romania was being done at the time in good faith, the really effective work was being done by four nuns and a solitary Jesuit who lived the situation day by day. But if the Church herself is found guilty, can any amount of good works make reparation, especially in a society for whom reparation is an alien concept? Cardinal Pell, as ever, hit the right tone in response to the Commission's report,. However, one has to be careful as to who the guilty party or parties really are in this case. Many of the abusers and quite a number of the abused are now long dead. The former have gone to meet the sure judgement of God. Society has problems coming to terms with these cases, not least because we are more convinced of God's love for us all than for his judgement on each of us. One could be tempted to say that there are two churches under condemnation here, pre- and post-Vatican II. The post-Vatican II Church talks much about bringing justice and peace to the world, even to the extent of abstracting both from either the Gospel, tradition or the magisterium of the Church. The rhetoric becomes even more hollow as the victims of the scandals in Ireland have received little or no justice from the Church. Two nuns negotiated a cosy deal with the outgoing Irish education minister in 2004, a minimal financial contribution to damages and legal immunity for the perpetrators. The deal is so outrageous that more robust people than myself have speculated whether the negotiators were in some sense holding politicians to ransom. How can victims then find peace?The two nuns are avery modern type of nun, more wordly wise than pious, in full flight from the glorious past of the Church as for their religious orders, a past that was not glorious but full of shame. Just to emphasise the psychology, the Presentation Sisters (which one of the nuns heads) hasset up a Centre for Policy and Systemic Change. One also has to say that this is a very Irish problem. The Christian Brothers (not to be confused with the altogether more admirable De La Salle Christian Brothers, also a teaching order) is a uniquely Irish institution, an unusual position for such a large order to be in within the Catholic Church. The international governance of most orders places checks and balances on national idiosyncrasies (better to say in thiscase, obsessions and peculiarities.) The female orders are of their nature less internationalised but in Ireland, rather than living by the rule of charity,they became a law unto themselves. No wonder the head of the Irish Church finds the deal over tea and biscuits unacceptable. What makes thisreport so important is that it emphasises the centrality of the Irish educational system in the abuse scandal that has enveloped the churchworldwide. In the book "Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church" writtenby the investigative staff of the Boston Globe describing the childabusescandal in Boston, one Irish name after another roles off the pages. As abused turns into abuser, the roots of the abuse can be found in the barbarities of the Irish educational system right back in the nineteenth century. From the emigration, the malign influence of abuse spread to the US and Australia. The borderlines that divide disciplinary from sexual abuse are the darkest of all possible gray areas, even the perpetrators themselves not knowing at what stage they went from one evil to another. Returning to these roots is the key to addressing the guilt of the pre-conciliar church. There is the Hollywood stereotype of the authoritarian, even quasi-Nazi church waiting in travail to be liberated by Vatican II, Mrs Blair and her kind of Catholic. It is not dissimilartothe parody of the Catholic Church presented by the newspapers of England in the 19th century of beatings, imprisonment and even torture in the cellars of nunneries. The Times of the day compared to other newspapers was indeed rather restrained in its treatment of Catholicism. John Henry, later Cardinal Newman mocks these slanders and libels in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. In both cases, false memories abound, the greatest scourges of justice and truth. In the final analysis, the Irish tragedy is nothing to do with the abuse of power by hierarchy in the pre-conciliar church. Rather the Irish educational system was the exception that proved the rule that for the most part a Catholic education has always been second to none, even now with self-expression being put at a premium. Absolute self-expression is at the opposite extreme to the Irish system which by beating out individuality and personality, dehumanised. One ends with children who grow up knowing no boundaries in both cases. There is amedieval distinction between cause and occasion for an act, the forgetfulness of which causes much confusion to modern understanding of the moral acts in particular and the world in general. So when did it all start? In the country hedges of Ireland where Catholic schoolchildren had to be educated and disciplined as a result of the barbarities of English rule, which was itself an abuse of the whole Irish nation. Anger, passed on from one generation to another, can express itself in so many different ways but the abuse of children remains a sin crying to heaven for judgement. One could say that the once most Catholic of all nations has brought shame on the Catholic Church but the past reveals something altogether more complicated."
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