Mar 07
3
Sins of the Fathers and other pedophiles
Just saw a W-Five report on a pedophile priest in Canada. Trying to find it online but no success. I have found this article instead, which is quite shocking if you were to click it and read it in its entirety. Gives some background on why pedophile priests may have historically been protected, their abuses kept hidden, their victims ignored, their transgressions minimized.
It’s funny how pedophiles do that, downplay what they did and its effects. Oh, it’s nothing, they say. You’re making too much of it. Just get over it. That’s what I used to hear too, not when I confronted family members who had abused me, because they’ve all since passed on, and I never did manage to confront them about it while they were alive.
When I bring it up with other people in my family now, it’s – But he was so nice to me. He always gave me money and gifts. I tell them he was so nice to me too, but I don’t tell them the word for it is grooming, and they should just be grateful that it didn’t go any furthur.
I never confronted the men who’d abused me, but I did confront someone in my family about what my best friend reported he’d done to her. Ah – it’s nothing, he said. She’s making it sound bigger than it actually was.
It’s a bit like someone kills your favourite pet, let’s say a puppy, cold-blooded, then tells you that it’s nothing. Your puppy would have died anyway You should just get over it. Don’t make it into such a big story. The policemen say, yes, he killed your puppy, but was there actually any blood. Did he use a gun or knife. If there wasn’t any blood, we don’t want to hear about it.
But the point is he took away the life of my puppy. Doesn’t that count for anything? Apparently not. So you go into derealization mode – for awhile. Or you get Kabbalah religious, not the true Kabbalah (a beautiful religion), but the new-age version, because the idea of parallel worlds starts to make sense, and you wonder if you just happened to wake up into some parallel darker version of the world you used to live in. A world where exploiting you sexually when you’re innocent, or killing your puppy without remorse or consequence, is ok.
A few people understand and care.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-82106617.html
Lay Catholics should demand more openness from the institutional Church. Dioceses should open their books to laymen as a matter of accountability and oversight. Doyle, who as counselor to many victims is privy to settlement details, says the people in the pews “would be absolutely shocked to discover how much of their money was being paid out on these settlements.”
Similarly, given how poorly the institutional Church has policed itself, there should be lay boards to review diocesan personnel files to make sure sex abusers aren’t being concealed. “I don’t want to hear about another new policy until someone says to me that someone other than the fox guarding the henhouse has examined the files,” says lawyer Steve Rubino, a leading victims’ attorney.
Restoring the Church’s credibility also depends on the bishops’ being less lawyerly and more Christian. Johnnie Cochrane didn’t come to save the world, Jesus Christ did. This means seeing those who have been raped or molested by priests as suffering souls in need of pastoral care, not moneygrubbing plaintiffs who deserve the brass-knuckles routine.
One parish priest says he will never forget the day he realized his former boss, an East Coast bishop (now retired), was a true man of God. “We had to meet with a family whose child had been abused by one of our priests. When we sat down face to face with them and the lawyers, we told them that the bishop had said his first priority was to do the right thing. We told them our investigation had found that the priest was guilty, but that he had never been in this kind of situation before. We had removed him from any further parish involvement. We told them that we didn’t believe we had been neglectful, but we wanted to help the family in any way we could, because we recognized lives had been damaged, and we were profoundly sorry. And that was the bishop’s position.
“I looked across the table, and the family was crying,” the priest recalled. “The father said, ‘Thank you. We never wanted to persecute anybody. That was all we wanted to hear.’”