Church of the poisoned minds

I turn my head away for a couple of weeks and what happens? The Theresemobile, that’s what. And the weirdest of people – that’s to say, people who usually aren’t as weird as all that – are cooing on the sidelines that, sure, there’s no harm in it.

Bishop Brendan Comiskey, who, it will be remembered, was distracted by misfortunate personal circumstances a few years ago and never managed to focus on a predatory priest savaging the bodies and souls of vulnerable members of his flock, is suddenly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed again and preaching that the point of the Theresemobile is to proclaim the Church’s “vision” of the “ideal woman” in society.

This reminds me of Liam Lawlor. When Lawlor refused to come clean to a judicial inquiry about the mysterious millions percolating through his myriad bank accounts, such a tut-tut was raised that the Fianna Fail miscreant was hauled off to Mountjoy. And quite right, too, although Mountjoy didn’t hold onto him long enough.

Understandable that, on account of how he lowered the whole tone of the place while he was there.

But what sort of low-life is the pope?

On April 5th last, the Vatican was asked by European parliamentarians whether it would cooperate with a

judicial inquiry into reports of sexual abuse of nuns by priests. Allegations that this had happened were prominently reported and debated at the time, and were discussed in formal

session of the European Parliament. And then…

And then nothing. The story has died a death, an outcome which can sometimes be contrived by the target of allegations adopting the tactic of sitting tight and decisively saying nothing. It takes a rare degree of obduracy to carry this particular manoeuvre through. But then, the Vatican enjoys the advantage of experience, having obdurated on such matters for aeons.

A recap. The pertinent resolution was moved in the European Parliament following reports of abuse of nuns by priests in 23 countries. Headed “Responsibility of the Vatican in Regard to the Violation of Human Rights by Catholic Priests,” a resolution was passed by 65 votes to 49 with six abstentions.

The text “strongly condemned all violations of women’s rights and acts of sexual violence” and urged the Church leadership to “seriously examine every indication of sexual abuse committed in the heart of its organisations... (and to) re-establish women in their posts in the religious hierarchy who were removed from their responsibilities because they called the attention of their superiors to these abuses.”

The resolution called for the abusers to be removed from office and brought to justice. Speakers at the debate suggested, unremarkabley, that a formal inquiry would be appropriate to establish the extent of the facts and trace the chain of responsibility.

Some reports of the debate concentrated almost entirely on alleged incidents in Africa, highlighting suggestion that priests there had turned to nuns for gratification out of fear that sex with any other women would put them at risk of AIDS. The sub-text, to do with the uninhibited sub-civilised sexuality of black African men, was so evident it might have been written into the text proper. The pattern of reporting was validated by an intervention from official Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls to the effect that the problem was “known and restricted to a limited geographical area.”

Africa did figure prominently in the reports. But far from the phenomenon being confined to this “limited geographical area”, the 23 countries where the abuse had been reported included the US, Italy, Ireland, Brazil and India.

The reports weren’t flimsy or fanciful, and didn’t emanate from obviously anti-Church elements. They were originally given currency in the authoritative US journal The National Catholic Reporter and were drawn almost exclusively from information provided directly by members of Catholic religious orders.

Independently of the The National Catholic Reporter, the UK-based aid agency, the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CaFOD) confirmed that in 1995 it had given the Vatican a detailed report on the problem.

The details supplied by CaFOD are not for the squeamish. There’s no need to retell them here. They include violent rape and forced abortion.

CaFOD told the Vatican of one case in which a mother superior repeatedly, and increasingly desperately, told the local bishop that priests of his diocese were routinely sexually abusing nuns of her order. In the end, 29 of her nuns had become pregnant by priests. Disciplinary action was belatedly taken – against the mother superior.

Responding to the Vatican’s inertia in face of these reports, Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, points out that there is nothing new in any of it. She lists recent precedents. They tell us something of the Church’s real view of the “ideal woman”.

• In 1993, the pope called on women who had been raped during the Bosnian war to “accept the enemy” into them, and to “make him the flesh of their own flesh.” He urged violated women “to transform an act of violence into an act of love and welcome.”

• In 1998, during debate over setting up an International Criminal Court, the Vatican tried to ensure the exclusion of “forced pregnancy” from a list of proposed war crimes. A spokesman for the pope explained that defining “forced pregnancy” as a crime might undermine laws prohibiting abortion.

• In 1999, the Vatican used its anomalous and wholly unjustifiable position at the UN vigorously to oppose the provision of the morning-after pill to rape victims in Kosovo. A high Vatican official (inaccurately) declared every use of the pill an “abortion.”

• In 1996, the Vatican withdrew its annual contribution to the UN children’s fund UNICEF because the fund had endorsed a health manual for refugees which mentioned the morning-after pill as appropriate for rape victims. At the same time, Vatican officials at the UN implicitly threated to tell Catholic groups throughout the world to end any involvement in UNICEF fundraising.

Most tellingly of all in relation to ideal womanhood in the modern world: In 1994, the pope beatified a woman on the exlicit ground that she had stayed in a marriage despite being subjected to repeated violent abuse by her husband. Kissling continues: “The Vatican doesn’t get it. Women are tired of ‘nuance’ in the face of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. No more ‘shooting the messenger’ by claiming that talking about such abuse runs the risk of provoking racism and scapegoating Africa and Africans. No more blaming the victims by claiming that the problem is the low level of education of African religious. What women deserve from the Vatican is a clear and unambiguous condemnation of both the personal and systemic failures that contributed to such outrageous violations of human dignity...

“The world community, including leaders in government and in non-governmental agencies, must not be silenced from condemning such atrocities by the inevitable charge that criticizing the church, highlighting its shortcomings and demanding accountability, is ‘Catholic bashing’. The only bashing being done in this instance is that done to nuns and other women by church leaders.”

At a time when aforementioned reformed radicals are reflecting their rotund middle-age and contented position in society by babbling that Catholicism is “the new rock and roll” (in fact, the new rock and roll is going on strike) and beaming benignly on the progress across the country of a gilded box of old bones, it’s well to be reminded what a thoroughly nasty institution the Catholic Church is.

Anybody out there toying with the notion of making peace with the Church of their innocent childhood should bear in mind that there can be no innocence or peace for millions of women while the church exerts this influence in the material world.