Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
The Roman Catholic Church and Child Abuse
It has become clear
in the past few weeks that the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) is in a
severe crisis
Stories about priests abusing children
have been about for years (e.g. in Ireland,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/europe/21ireland.html?_r=1
), but seem to be turning into an ever-growing cascade where similar
cases pop up in countries all over the world.
Clearly, the individual priests are to be
held accountable for their deeds. But that is only step one and it
is the easiest one.
It turns out that their superiors - and
the RCC is a highly hierarchical institute - often knew of what
happened. And as such become accomplishes to these crimes by not
reporting them. Supposedly, this went all the way up to the office
of the current Pope Benedictus XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger. When
reporting these issues, it took years for the highest ranks of the
RCC to take action, if at all (http://documents.nytimes.com/reverend-lawrence-c-murphy-abuse-case#document
).
All these cases and the lack of follow-up
put the RCC in legal problems, if not a legal crisis. But this is
not even the worst crisis that they are in.
The responses of the highest ranks of the
Roman Catholic Church in the past few weeks have been weak,
admitting what had happened without taking any action to do
something about the situation (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/world/europe/31pope.html
), ridiculous, comparing criticism of the Church to anti-Semitism (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/world/europe/03church.html
) and desperate, trying to link paedophile tendencies of priests to
homosexuality (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/04/13/2010-04-13_cardinal_tarcisio_bertone_vaticans_no_2_man_in_charge_defends_celibacy_attacks_h.html
).
All these reactions simply point to the
real crisis that the RCC is in: a moral one.
The Roman Catholic Church is the supposed
leader of morality, preaching the gospel of how to be a good human
being and make the world a good place to live for all of mankind.
Not only does it turn out that many leading people of the RCC have
acted with total disregard of the moral rules they preach, but when
found out, their superiors merely try to cover it up and when
confronted with the fallout of their behaviour years later, the
leaders of the RCC do anything but behave in a morally justified
way.
The only moral way out for the Catholic
Church is to do the following right things:
- Admit to what happened, apologise
sincerely and state that everything that is needed to help the
victims will be done;
- Stop making nonsense statements trying
to defend the Church against the accusations as they undermine all
credibility the Church has left;
- Bring the perpetrators to worldly
justice and remove their responsibilities in the Church;
- Remove the people higher up in the
hierarchy that were responsible for covering up the events and
replace them with morally sounder people;
- Get into real contact with the victims
and see how they can best be compensated for what was done to them;
- Change the organisation of the RCC by
making it far more transparent to the outside world, so that events
like these cannot be covered up for so long anymore;
