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	A Very Catholic Crisis: Perverts-in-cloak, Walking the Tight Rope of Enforced Clerical Celibacy By Hemantha Abeywardena Asian Tribune December 13, 2009 http://www.asiantribune.com/news/2009/12/13/very-catholic-crisis-perverts-cloak-walking-tight-rope-enforced-clerical-celibacy In the ideal world, it is normally a devout Catholic who kneels down before a priest while owning up to his or her misdemeanours in seeking the illusive spiritual commodity, forgiveness. This week, however, it was the Head of the mighty Catholic Church, the Pope Benedict XVI, who was compelled to make a part of the famously pious gesture, purely for being the Head of an institute that has been plagued with decades of child abuse on satanic scale in the Republic of Ireland, a heartland of Catholics. “I share the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by Irish people,” declared the Pontiff in condemning the cover-up of the scandal by the Irish Catholic church on a sombre note – a very harsh words in contrast to normally-measured papal language. The long-awaited Murphy report on child abuse committed by the Irish Catholic priests that was made public on Thursday did open a can of worms as widely expected. It was scathing in its attack at the way the enviably-hierarchical church handled the abuses reported to it during the period between 1975 and 2004: there are 300 victims and 46 culprits with pervasive streaks; 11 of them have pleaded guilty and some of whom are already in prison; the civil authorities did have the guts to call a spade a spade – and the priests, bishops and even archbishops were named and shamed as the architects of a self-deprecating project. According to the report, the priority of the Dublin archdiocese, where the abuse is said to have taken place during the troublesome period, was pretty simple: protecting the reputation of the church at any cost from a chain of scandals. So, they did the obvious – emulated to the letter the age-old tradition for being secretive. It has transpired during the investigation that the Church hierarchy knew what was going on behind the tall closed doors. So, they weighed their options: letting the cat out of the bag may have appeared more damaging than addressing the issue of welfare and psychological side of child victims. Born out of the nebulae of emotional scars, was an unholy cover-up – a very systemic one. Some of the complaints made by the parents have been ignored; some parents had been asked to report them to the police while knowing very well the latter wouldn’t dare poke its nose in the affairs of the church at that time – the institution still towers above everything else. Some serial offenders were transferred to other parishes as a shoal of red-herring – only to commit the same offences again in the new place. Most of the child victims who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of perverts-in-cloak had already been born into an unfortunate world of its own – products of unmarried mums, sufferers from alcoholic parents and mere orphans. So, they ended up in institutes which, at least in the eyes of the most devout, seemed to be an icon of kindness, compassion and love. Unfortunately, some of the very places – not all, of course - turned out to be manned by individuals with the mentality of the guards at Auschwitz rather than that of a religious order. It is the children who say that they have been abused at these institutes run by the Catholic priests, when they grew up. They often spit out emotional vomit to cleanse themselves of torturing dirt. Sometimes, their tales are quite harrowing; that’s why the Irish government was compelled to look into these allegations while knowing very well the image of the Church in the country would take a heavy battering by the revelations. And it did, of course. “I was abused by Catholic nuns as a child,” says my Irish friend, Mary, referring to her dark days with them. “It was not sexual, but physical,” she insisted referring to the beatings she got almost as a ritual. Even after becoming a mother-of-three, she still carries the indelible scars – and freely admits to it, regardless of what others may make of it. It is unfair to brand the Catholic Church as the only religious institute that is battling with its image in the presence of child abuse. It happens in other religious places too. If it went on for well over 30 years in a functioning western democracy, we can only speculate how bad the things are in the developing world where the towering men and women in immaculate cloaks are looked up to, almost as divine manipulation on earth. In that part of the world, folks who witness a boy being accompanied with undue fondness by a priest sense that the latter is not in the business of teaching the former how to count marbles – as part of the first lesson in arithmetic. However, they keep quiet because a priest is above both civil law and moral law – a faultless creation of the Almighty. The Catholic Church made a mistake on this occasion by their obsession with the image of the church, not the humanity. The high priests who handled the issue for a long period of time didn’t seem to have drawn inspiration from the divine realm, as the strategy of remaining secretive spectacularly backfired on them. Their conduct and the inevitable consequences reflect very badly on the majority of Catholic priests who are God-fearing gentle human beings. Since it is the only properly-functional religious institute for most of the Europeans – despite the obvious failings – a serious damage to its image will have far-reaching consequences, especially at a time both Capitalism and its sibling, the materialism, are on their knees at the economic front; when material bankruptcy hangs in the air, most Europeans can’t afford to let moral bankruptcy walk through the back door.
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