I was pointed to this piece by Scott Stephens “The Poverty of the new atheism”. I was going to reply to it, but looking through it, I can’t actually find an argument? It appears to just be a long series of unrelated quotes.
Again, this man is paid to be “Religion and Ethics Editor” for the ABC. I can’t help but feel we can do better.
[Again, trigger warning. This post discusses child abuse, and a disgusting piece of work that attempts to defend it and minimise the consequences.]
Some more fun stuff on the @abcreligion defense of the Vatican.
First a correction: The initial reports had it as an advisor to the Pope was arrested. In fact it was a priest under the advisor to the pope. I will go back and update the original piece.
Miranda Celeste took the report to pieces here. I hadn’t realised just how offensive the redefinition of pedophilia in the report was. But that’s OK, as our mate Scott said
“While this is neither here nor there, and has no bearing on the methodology or substance of the study itself, it is a technical point that has generated unwarranted consternation among many in the media.”
Had they stuck with the DSM IV definition of pedophilia (13 and under) the percentage would have jumped from 22% to 73%. Some “technical point”, hey Scott? As Miranda points out, they had absolutely no justification to do this. None. None at all.
Some other details from Miranda’s piece: The US Catholic Bishops got to decide if the report was to be published. They and allies contributed the vast amount of the funding. And of course, as you’d expect, the methodology of the report was more or less junk - self reported, ass covering junk. Miranda’s piece is worth reading in full. It shows just how worthless the report is. And he was bitching that the media didn’t pay enough attention to it.
Some other points I missed, or didn’t stress strongly enough, pointed out to me by Jason Langenauer.
The quote from Hillaire Belloc that Scott quoted starts with this:
“The popular Press as objects for admiration a bundle of things incongruous: a few of some moment, the great part trivial. ”
Apparently a decades long cover up of child abuse is “trivial”, according to the “Religion and Ethics Editor” of the ABC. Or is he reading something else into this?
Something I didn’t stress strongly enough in the first piece. If Scott is claiming that the 60s and 70s are to blame (also known as “the hippies made us touch kids” defense), that is, if the church, with it’s famous claims of papal infallibility, is so susceptible to the current trends, what the fuck use is it as a moral arbiter? Apparently they are fine with “standing athwart history, yelling stop” when it comes to contraception, gay rights, equality of the sexes, but apparently a bit of licentious behaviour from society and it’s off down to the playground with a bag of tempting lollies by the priests.
(Note that this is not at all to give any credence to the thesis pushed by Scott, or this report. It’s utter nonsense, and would be laughed out of court by a judge. “Society made me touch children”)
—
And Scott, tell me, where do you stand with the relationship of the Catholic Church to civil society? You appear to be a big believer in St Augustine’s beliefs that the church is above civil society. These beliefs, of course, date back over 1500 years. If a church discovers one of their priests is touching children, should they report said priest to the police? The real police, not the magic church police. Can you answer this? Yes or no? It’s a pretty simple question.
And finally, I have a question for Jonathan Green, editor of the Drum. Do only ABC employees get the right to publish such utter tripe on The Drum, with comments disabled? Do you actually plan on allowing anyone right of reply to Scott’s minimising of child rape by the catholic church? Or is the “Religion and Ethics Editor” of the ABC above and beyond the rest of us, just as Scott would have religious organisations be above and beyond the norms of civil society?
[trigger warning: This post discusses a post by a horrible piece of filth attempting to defend the catholic church’s history of coddling and protecting the rapists of children]
I don’t have high expectations of the ABC “The Drum” opinion site. I really don’t. But occasionally a piece comes along that it so vile, so hideous, that I can’t help but respond. I’d have left this as a series of comments, but as usual with the Drum when they post obviously evil and flawed pieces, comments don’t appear to be enabled. And well done to the ABC for giving both sides of the “child rape by priests is bad YES/NO” debate a hearing.
“Catholic sexual abuse study greeted with incurious contempt”
actually, after reading this, yes, I did have a feeling of contempt. But not towards the study, but towards the writer of this piece.
“By Scott Stephens”
sneak preview. The bit at the end tags Scott as “Scott Stephens is the Religion and Ethics Editor for the ABC.” As far as I can tell he is also tweeting as @abcreligion. He’s been aggressively defending the Catholic Church for the last week or so. Attempts to figure out if @abcreligion and @scottabc are the same person have been answered with silence. [update: subsequently, @abcreligion confirmed that Scott is in fact one of the tweeters of that account]
“I suppose I should no longer be surprised by the self-righteous cynicism and seemingly wilful ignorance of the media when it comes to reporting on Catholic affairs.”
I know hey. Spend a couple of decades covering up child rape, suddenly people think you’re the bad guys.
“But it was the way that the Australian press allowed the findings of a recent study into The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010 to sail past with little more than a perfunctory acknowledgement of its existence, much less a serious engagement with its substance and implications, that has left me bristling.”
Here we go.
“But instead, as if to add insult to injury, what coverage the study did receive - especially in Australia and the UK - was haughtily dismissive. It was brushed aside as somehow tainted, inherently flawed, or otherwise implicated in some malign Catholic apologetic. All this because the Causes and Context study was neither as salacious nor as simplistic as the media’s own favoured cadre of disaffected priests - each one a variation on the preposterous Hans Kung - and anti-Catholic jingoists.”
Apparently, pointing out that he who pays the piper calls the tune is being “haughtily dismissive”. Must be why all that tobacco funded research into lung cancer, that Exxon Mobil funded research into climate change and the like has held up so well.
“And so it appears that a meticulous, restrained and even-handed study”
We are, you will remember, talking about institutional protection, over the course of decades, of rapists of children.
” - which brings a much needed sophistication, even nuance,”
Yep. Nuance. That was what was missing. The whole “vulnerable children raped in Alaska by a known sexual predator” story just needs “nuance”. You scummy fuck.
“to the description and analysis of this whole sordid affair - is far less newsworthy than Kung’s familiar rants against the evils of celibacy, or Geoffrey Robertson QC’s delusional fantasy about Pope Benedict XVI at the helm of the Vatican’s “command and control centre” or as the head of a “global paedophile trafficking ring,” or Christopher Hitchens’s grubby slur about the Church’s “no child’s behind left” policy, or Richard Dawkins’s execrable, fact-defying description of the pope as a “leering old villain … whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”“
Ah, I see the first bit of quote mining going on. When in doubt, attack, attack, attack. It turns out some secular folk, when they are exposed to the sheer depravity and loathsomeness of the Catholic Church’s decades-long attempt to shelter and protect the abusers of children, use strong language. Shame on them.
And well done for the victimhood claiming. Robertson, Hitchens and Dawkins. What, no space for PZ Myers? He will be so disappointed. Those nasty new atheists, with their whole moral relativity stance on “raping children is a bad thing, always”.
“Does this not confirm Hilaire Belloc’s extraordinarily prescient description in 1929 of what he termed the “Modern Mind” - that cultural conceit that has been formed through the intermingling of arrogance, ignorance and sloth - and the “instrument” which feeds and deepens its malaise? “The popular Press,” writes Belloc, tends to present … snipped blah blah blah pseudo-intellectual wanking …”
Well done. You read books. Gosh. Wanker.
“It is precisely this form of sneering, stultifying pseudo-morality so often adopted by the modern media - whose self-promotion to the status of judge and arbiter of what warrants public attention, coupled with its fickle affections and compulsive dalliance with social media - that represents the realisation not just of Belloc’s predictions, but of Kafka’s nightmares.”
Remember, folks, we are talking about the rape of children. And an organisation who decided protecting their own status took precedence over, say, reporting the child predators to the police. And yet we who criticise are guilty of “pseudo-morality”.
“Now, it must be said that Pope Benedict XVI has consistently been more gracious toward the media on this matter than I have been. While he has expressed his frustration at those self-appointed authorities who speak from “the tribunal of the newspapers,” he says that “the media could not have reported in this way had there not been evil in the Church herself.”“
Oh really, Scott? You would be less gracious? Perhaps you could have arranged the catholic equivalent of a fatwa on those terribly naughty journalists who dared to point out that your wonderful, lovely, beneficent church has been shuffling kiddy fiddlers from place to place to cover up their misdeeds. And has been attacking the victims who dared to step forward. And trying whatever dodgy mechanics they can, such as declaring bankruptcy to attempt to get out of paying the victims what they deserve.
“In an effort to set the record straight, let me lay out some of the study’s more apposite findings (keeping in mind, of course, that these findings relate quite specifically to the Catholic Church in the United States - although similar patterns are emerging elsewhere).”
And here begin the quite, quite disgusting apologetics. Truly disgraceful.
“First, the study confirmed that the sexual abuse of children by priests is not an endemic or ongoing “crisis” within the Catholic Church. As was already clear from the 2004 Nature and Scope study, there was a sudden and disturbing increase in instances of sexual abuse from 1960, reaching its hellish pinnacle in 1975, followed by a “sharp and sustained decline” from 1985 to the present.”
It turns out that no coverup and buying off of victims last forever. And well done on the timing, when just this week we hear reports of one of Benedict’s own advisors buying off young boys with cocaine. I guess you could probably defend that as Benedict turning to a subject matter expert, hey? [update: initial reports I read were wrong - in fact it was “only” a priest who reported to the advisor]
“Second, the study demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2010 were male (81 per cent) and between the ages of eleven and fourteen (51 per cent). Meanwhile 27 per cent were aged fifteen to seventeen, 16 per cent were eight to ten, and only 6 percent were under the age of seven.”
“Because the majority of the victims were pubescent or post-pubescent, the Causes and Context study rather controversially claims that it is not therefore strictly correct to refer to “paedophile priests” (paedophilia being defined as “the sexual attraction to prepubescent children”). While this is neither here nor there, and has no bearing on the methodology or substance of the study itself, it is a technical point that has generated unwarranted consternation among many in the media.”
OK. Seriously. You are quoting a report that is attempting to minimise this on the basis of “well, technically they almost had a pubic hair, so it’s not paedophilia”. How the fuck do you sleep at night? And hand waving this off as “neither here nor there”. Perhaps it’s just me, but were I reading such a report, I might realise I was in the presence of really, truly quite pathetic levels of sophistry, and perhaps have used that insight to take another look at the entire report with a more critical eye. And “unwarranted consternation”? What the hell? I would say that this section alone is enough to cast the entire report into a bad light.
“Third, perhaps the most significant findings of the study relate to the profile of the priest-abusers themselves. According to the data collected in the 2004 Nature and Scope study, over 43 per cent of those priests that would subsequently commit abuse were ordained before 1960. This coincides with a 53 per cent increase in the number of seminaries between 1945 and 1959, and corresponding growth in seminarians training for the priesthood.”
And this has what to do with anything? This stuff is still going on. Your dear newly beatified Pope John Paul II fiercely defended the serial rapist Marcial Maciel until his death. He was raping children well before the 60s. But hey, he brought in the dollars, can’t complain too hard, right?
Bad people do bad things. And worse people protect those bad people, and enable them to continue doing bad things. It’s not very hard to figure out.
“Among this cohort of pre-1960 priests, they had on average 12 years in ministry prior to committing an act of abuse. But among those priests who were ordained in the 1960s, the number of years in ministry before committing abuse dropped to 7, while for those ordained in the 1970s it is just 4 years. These figures correspond to a quadrupling of the number of resignations from the priesthood between 1966 and 1969, before levelling out again in the late-1970s.”
“In other words, those ordained before 1960 tended not to commit abuse until the 1960s and 70s, while those ordained in the 1960s and 70s tended to commit abuse very shortly thereafter. This would suggest that the fetid cultural soil of the 1960s and 70s proved uncommonly conducive to the commission of sexual abuse.”
Ooooo. You wouldn’t be trying to pull the “blame the hippies” or “society is to blame”, surely. No-one, no matter how pathetic, would try that on, surely?
“It would also suggest that the dramatic influx of seminarians at Catholic institutions in the 1950s and 60s bore along with it a vile cabal of paedophiles, pederasts, ill-disciplined pissants and even outright predators who precipitated the true sexual abuse “crisis” of the 1960s and 70s.”
And apparently, a bunch of more senior priests who were prepared to cover up for, and minimise the crimes of, these same priests. Note that the infamous Father Maciel was first ordained in 1944.
“According to the study, far more significant for explaining the magnitude and concentration of the sexual abuse crisis are those discernable cultural patterns which indicate the deepening of a certain social anomie during the same period. Let me quote from the study at some length:”
Holy fuck. He’s actually going for “society is to blame”
“That being said, only someone who is wilfully naive or intractably bigoted would refuse to acknowledge that the social antinomianism and fetishisation of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 70s, along with the valorisation of the pursuit of individual pleasure and free experimentation with transgressive sexual practices, created the conditions for a dramatic escalation in deviant behaviour - including paedophilia - both within and without the Church.”
Mmm. Yes, I remember how the cry at Woodstock was “why can’t we rape children”. Oh wait, it wasn’t. It turns out Scott, that in fact the 1960s and 1970s weren’t all about raping children, at least amongst the rest of society. You know, the ones who weren’t priests. Or do you have research pointing to a sudden outbreak of child-raping amongst society as a whole during that time? You don’t, because it doesn’t exist.
“One could point to Canadian-feminist Shulamith Firestone, who wrote that once the incest taboo was overturned, “relations with children would include as much genital sex as they were capable of - probably considerably more than we now believe.” Or to that iconic soixante-huitard Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who wrote thus about his experience as a kindergarten teacher:”
Ah, right. Perhaps you can show when these two became part of the catholic seminary’s teachings? Oh wait, you can’t? You’re just grabbing a couple of random quotes out of thin air to justify your church’s coddling of child rapists? OK then. And really? In the 1970s the incest taboo was overturned? That’s funny. I must have missed that.
“I must emphasise once more that such cultural patterns are not a complete explanation of the occurrence of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, and the Causes and Context study never claims they are. But to discount what I have called “the foetid cultural soil of the 60s and 70s” as a factor out of hand, quite frankly, suggests an almost delusional belief in the health and progress of Western culture.”
Here we have it. “Society is to blame”. “foetid cultural soil”. Scott, you actually, physically sicken me. I have spent my life around people who are sexually liberated. Gay, bi, straight, poly. And you know what, not one of them thinks RAPING A FUCKING CHILD IS OK. What the hell is wrong with you? What on earth makes you think “cultural patterns” are an excuse for child rape? What the hell sort of people do you hang out with? I am pretty confident that pretty much every one of the people I know would, if confronted with knowledge of child rape, report it to the police. As a crime. Not a special magic crime that only a more senior priest can work on, but an actual crime. With people in uniforms, arrests, court cases and the like.
“On this very point, it should also be remembered that, in the 1960s and especially in the wake of Vatican II, the “punitive approach” prescribed by Canon Law for incidence of clerical sexual deviance (Canon 2359 of the 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici) was widely criticised as being mediaeval, unenlightened and altogether ignorant of the restorative possibilities of psychotherapy.”
Yes. Again, that Woodstock cry of “don’t persecute the rapists of children”. Oh wait, again, that didn’t happen. And all those people calling for child rapists to not be reported to police? Aside from the near mythical NAMBLA, I don’t recall reading anything about that.
“While it would be wrong to minimise the role played by sheer indolence, inattention and arse-covering expedience on the part of many bishops over the past six decades in allowing sexual abuse within the Catholic Church to reach its hellish proportions, there was at the same time a manifest tendency among bishops to pander to the spirit of the age by adopting the more “pastoral” therapeutic approach of restoring abusive priests through treatment, counselling and relocation.”
Again, sickening. “The spirit of the age” never, ever extended to “hey, Father Frank is raping kids, we better move him to a more remote parish where he can rape kids with less oversight”. I am guessing that if you were to ask 5 random hippies in 1970, all 5 of them would say “dude. what? that’s fucked up”.
“It is therefore extremely significant that the reinstatement of the so-called “punitive approach” to sexual deviance in Canon Law (Canon 1395 of the 1983 Codex Iuris Canonici), along with John Paul II’s radical reform of seminary life and the spiritual formation of priests - which culminated with his magisterial 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis - precipitated what the Causes and Context report calls the “sharp and sustained decline” in incidence of sexual abuse in the Church.”
Ah, good old PJ2. Note that after 1992, he still allowed Marcial Maciel to accompany him to Mexico. Despite the well-established stories of Maciel’s depravity and filth by that time.
“While the reform of a priesthood that had become increasingly dissolute was one of John Paul II’s most enduring legacies, it has fallen to Joseph Ratzinger to carry out reform among the bishops. This commenced in earnest with the 2001 papal directive Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, requiring all cases of sexual abuse to be reported to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (of which Ratzinger was the Cardinal Prefect), and has continued without abatement into Benedict’s pontificate.”
Note that this didn’t include, as any normal human being would assume, REPORTING THESE CASES TO THE POLICE. No no, the holy mother church must protect their own. After all, they’d done such a sterling job of it for the last half century. Here’s another hint, Scott. When you rape a child, you don’t get to eat a few magic biscuits, say a few prayers, and then get a do-over. Instead, you get reported to the police, you get charged, and if you are guilty, you do fucking hard time in a prison. Yes, even if you are a priest.
“Benedict XVI’s determination to purge the Church of what he has repeatedly called the “filth” of abuse and concealment, his pastoral care of so many of the victims of abuse, and his insistence on the Church’s “deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice,” distinguishes this pope not merely as the person who has done more than any other to eradicate sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.”
Forgive me if thinking that a man who was PJ2’s right hand man and head of the Inquisition since 1981 might not in fact be the best man to enforce these rules. See for instance, this Irish Report (note: not for the weak of heart - the filth and depravity in it would turn any reader into a raving atheist). This shit has been going on for decades. It’s only the dedicated efforts of some terribly abused people and their heroic lawyers that have forced the catholic church to own up to their own complicity in this. And even so, they are constantly attempting to minimise it, diminish the hurt and suffering, and attempt to weasel their way out of paying for the consequences of their institutional actions. Just like you’re attempting to minimise it in this piece by attacking the media, and blaming society.
“He is also the man who can best bring this desperately evil chapter in the Church’s existence to a close.”
Good luck with that. I also recommend singing “lalalalalalalala” very loudly and hoping it all goes away.
I think we have our own local equivalent of Bill Donohue. The depressing thing is that your and my tax dollars pay his salary. And the ABC chooses to publish his filth.
And again, Scott, well timed. It’s all in the past, indeed. Nothing like that is still going on. You disgusting human being.
I should note that part of my disgust is I actually bothered to read up on the report that Scott is talking about. And now I need to bleach my brain to remove the evil.
As a reward for getting through this rant, here, have a link to Colbert on the report.
Feel free to leave comments below. Unlike the ABC Drum website, I am not too scared to solicit feedback. Or else tweet me on @anthonybaxter
