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	Hell, Who's Joining Me? By Alan Howe Herald Sun November 8, 2010 The late Archbishop of Melbourne, Sir Frank Little, accused me of blasphemy once after I published an irreverent Mark Knight cartoon. I'd describe Mark's amusing effort to you, but I'm in enough trouble as it is. The archbishop was very angry and wrote a letter of complaint to my boss. A prayer group that formed to try to save my soul - perhaps they knew I was also a Catholic - apparently was advised that any such efforts would be pointless as my sin was unpardonable. So Hell it is. It will be interesting to see who I might meet there. But I am hoping they rope off the section holding the late Kevin O'Donnell and his mates. O'Donnell is perhaps not the worst of Australia's paedophile priests. But the attitude of the Catholic Church once it knew what O'Donnell did to children, and its treatment of Chrissie and Andrew Foster, the parents of two of O'Donnell's victims, make his case among our most infamous. Mrs Foster has courageously and damningly spelled out what happened to two of their daughters, and then what happened to them, in a book, Hell On The Way To Heaven. When I turned over the final page I decided never again to describe myself as Catholic. I was filled with a deep sense of shame and revulsion about the way in which what I once called "my" church has acted over so many years. While pursuing newspaper editors over cheeky cartoons the Catholic Church - and I'm not talking about it in America, or Ireland, or Germany, or the Netherlands, or Brazil, but right here in Victoria - could turn a blind eye as priests raped their way through generations of fearful schoolchildren, many of whose lives they destroyed. Then, knowing full well that all paedophiles are gloatingly recidivist, might move them on to other parishes. Green fields of free-range children. Even then, the Catholic Church - once better known for its work in education and hospitals - wasn't always finished with the victims or their families, and that's the dispiriting story charted in Mrs Foster's book. With arrogant indifference to the suffering of those it professed to protect, the church appears to have preferred to protect its assets and "reputation" rather than attend to the emotional holocaust its wayward priests unleashed. Instead, families, through no fault of their own - even though the church did sometimes seek to blame victims - unwittingly entered the orbit of the malevolent, and calculating, black-hearted, white-collared paedophiles. The Catholic Church ordained these criminals as priests, once a lofty position in Australian society, but whose authority and credibility is diminished. What's more, they were to be known as, and called, "father". I can just see O'Donnell and his ilk sniggering at the sneering perversity of their title, as they slipped the underwear from yet another innocent five-year-old whose life they had chosen to junk. It was the esteemed Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who while in Australia came up with his solution for these men. "Jesus says very clearly that whoever scandalises a little one, it would be better for him to have a millstone around his neck and be thrown into the sea," he said. What a shame he didn't become pope. O'Donnell has robbed the Fosters of almost everything, although they are just a few of the hundreds of victims whose lives he unravelled while criminally satisfying his uncontrollable lust for forced sex with minors. The Oakleigh parish priest first raped the Fosters' daughter, Emma. It led to an - albeit brief - lifetime of mental illness, self-harm, drug addiction and anorexia until she ended her agony, aged 26, in January 2008 with yet another overdose. O'Donnell then had contact with Emma's younger sister, Katherine, who developed an alcohol problem, considered suicide and was struck by a car, crippled and brain-damaged. She's 26 now and requires around-the-clock care. So how did the Catholic Church - Mrs Foster's church - handle these events? Tellingly, when the family invited O'Donnell's successor home to explain to him about Emma being raped, the priest appeared concerned, but on leaving said: "Don't tell anyone." Why not? There was a crime. There was a criminal. There was a victim. There had been a cover-up. Lives lay wasted. But no one was to know? The Fosters then sought to have O'Donnell defrocked by the church; sounds fair enough - he had been jailed after admitting raping defenceless children. They wanted to him stripped of the designation "father". They met the church's canon law expert. "His crimes against children make him unfit for the title," Mrs Foster told the scholarly priest. She remembers the man's smile broadening. He shrugged: "We can't do that." Why not? When Mrs Foster asked why the church's response to the tidal wave of cases of rape by priests had been so lame, the late Monsignor Gerald Cudmore, then Melbourne's Vicar General, responded: "We didn't know the effect it (sexual abuse) would have on children." What? The Catholic Church did not understand the damage that would be done to little children forced into grotesque acts of sexual violence by Catholic priests? I wonder how surprised the monsignor was to find that it had been against the law for many centuries. At the same time Cudmore told a Herald Sun reporter that he didn't "think we understood paedophilia, or the extent of the problem, in the spirit of the time". The spirit of what time? What century does the Catholic Church believe this to be? And few Australians have ever forgotten - or forgiven - Sydney bishop Anthony Fisher's vulgar dismissal of the Fosters and families like them seeking action on rapist priests as a few people "dwelling crankily ... on old wounds". His cruel insouciance should keep someone in the Catholic hierarchy awake at night. Mind you, his boss, Pope Benedict, declared in this year's Palm Sunday address: "From God comes the courage no to be intimidated by petty gossip." I want nothing to do with a church that considers sex attacks, and the sometimes criminal efforts to cover them up, as "petty gossip". If there is a God, I'd thank him for giving the Fosters the strength not to be intimidated by the Catholic Church.
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