Catholic Child Abuse Scandal Reaches the Vatican
Forty Years and Twenty-Three Countries Later
By Ryan Stone
It’s always been fine for a member of the Catholic clergy to have sex with children on the side (as long as no one finds out). It’s a perk that the world doesn’t understand. Most nations have laws concerning pedophilia, pederasts, and child pornography. Historically, the Catholic church is more forgiving and has tried its best to look the other way when its children are abused.
Well-meaning men like Ireland’s Cardinal Sean Brady understand that problems can arise when people find out about the church’s serial offenders. So, he does what any devotee of the Christian god would do when entrusted with the spiritual purity and welfare of thousands: he has the victims take a vow of silence.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” has new meaning when it condemns thousands of children to be molested by what are supposed to be the purest men in their community. Recently, though, parishes and dioceses across the globe are now asking, telling, and sharing information about criminal sexual activity within the church that, up to this point, has been largely allowed.
Judging by reports from Argentina, Austria, Australia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Chile, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and thirteen other nations, it appears less like the church is putting forth all its effort to fight child abuse and more like it’s been using all of its collective might to cover up this decades-old problem.
Still, it’s hard to condemn the church based solely on four decades of continuous cover-ups, spanning twenty-three countries. But it gets a little easier when faced with people like Cardinal Brady, a man that explains past abuse like this: “There was a culture of silence about this, a culture of secrecy, that’s how society dealt with it.”
To paraphrase: everyone was doing it. And because of that, Brady isn’t stepping down. Even though he admittedly worked in the past to protect people like Father Brendan Smyth, a clergyman that sexually assaulted 40 children over the course of 20 years, Brady refuses to heed the words of anyone but the Pope himself when it comes to his resignation.
“I will only resign if asked by the Holy Father,” he says.
The Pope has made it his stance to be hard on child molesters like Smyth, but apparently that doesn’t transfer over to those that help cover up said crimes. To make someone resign their Cardinal position when they’re implicated in criminal obstructions concerning the continuous abuse of several dozen children…well, that’s a step the Pope doesn’t want to take just yet.
Maybe he wants to make doubly sure that the world won’t allow church pedophilia before he reverses the time-tested tradition of covering up child molestation. To be fair, Benedict did recently release a letter of apology to the victims. Unfortunately, for the church, the letter was received by those same victims as empty words coming from a corrupt organization.
From Brady’s statement to Benedict’s apology, one senses a black, sludgy undercurrent that no ranking church officials want to deal with. The governing dynamics of their institution has led to the most horrific mass sex scandal the modern world has ever seen, and the church’s response just seems to be a mix between “Everyone was ok with it before” and “I’m sorry, but what are we supposed to do about it?”