UNITED KINGDOM
The Telegraph
The manner in which Cardinal O’Brien has been deposed is more despicable than anything he’s alleged to have done
By Brendan O’Neill
Last updated: February 27th, 2013
What did Cardinal Keith O’Brien do that was so bad? He is alleged to have made inappropriate advances to young men when he was a teacher of priests in the 1980s. But is not a crime to make sexual advances to men over the age of 18. It is not child abuse (despite the best efforts of the press to lump O’Brien together with paedophile priests). Nor is what he is alleged to have done perverted in any way. It can at best be described as stupid – and if everyone in Britain who has ever done something stupid was thrown out of their jobs, the nation would grind to a halt.
Ah, but O’Brien’s alleged behaviour makes him a hypocrite, say his exposers in the liberal press as they desperately scrabble about for a PC justification for why they are depicting adult gay interaction as something sinister and sordid. Perhaps it does make him a hypocrite, given his current stance on homosexuality. But perhaps not. We know nothing of Cardinal O’Brien’s inner spiritual life. For all we know he may have spent the past 30-plus years repenting for that “inappropriate” behaviour in the Eighties, before deciding that, on balance, he thinks that homosexuality is wrong and wicked. People change. People regret. Would we say St Paul was a hypocrite for criticising those who attacked Christians even though he spent his early life doing the same thing?
Now, what do we know about the allegations against O’Brien? We know they are being made by anonymous individuals, which makes it impossible for O’Brien to defend himself. In normal justice scenarios, it is paramount that the accused knows whom he is being accused by so that he can prepare his defence. We know the allegations are unsubstantiated, and will remain so for as long as the accusers are anonymous. They therefore linger in that limbo between rumour and truth. We know the allegations were leaked by someone – perhaps one of the accusers or perhaps someone in the upper echelons of the church – to the press, which immediately politicised them, allowing them to be used for the ideological end of getting one over on the Catholic hierarchy.
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