gerardcharleswilson

It is no longer possible to keep up with the number of commentaries and reports about the Pope, the Catholic Church and clerical sexual abuse, churned out indefatigably 24/7 by media instruments around the world. But it is not necessary to read everything. Indeed, a well chosen selection is all you need to get the picture. The overwhelming majority say roughly the same thing: the Church is evil, especially the Pope. There has never been such a massive reporting of the media on itself. The regurgitation of news would not match the intestinal movements of a thousand Savannah herds. If there is little difference in the unrelenting repetition, there certainly is in the mood and colour of the pieces.

They flow from a pseudo-scientific earnestness to the raving hysterical, some to the fiery red of ranting insanity. Richard Dawkins, high priest purveyor of atheistic dogma, has shown what turgid writing is all about in the stitching together of series of spluttering adjectives that become lost in incoherence. But we get the message: he hates the Church and its teaching, and especially he hates Pope Benedict.

I am building up a selection of commentaries that defend the Pope and the Church by stating the case as it actually is, and not as misrepresented, distorted and straight-out lied about. These are miniscule in number compared to those attacking the Pope. But there are not just the falsehoods and abuse in the campaign to get rid of Benedict. The other side of the picture is the transcendent hypocrisy of those attacking the Pope. The backdrop of their frenzy is a level of physical and sexual violence in society that for centuries has not been known outside the circumstances of war or of the total breakdown of civil society. In fact, civility is a barely known quality in today's world.

Sexual and physical violence is rampant in schools - teachers against students, students against teachers, student against student. The sexual abuse of children in families has reached unknown levels, the cases now clogging the courts. There is sexual abuse across all institutions, even in old age homes. The violence in the cities and suburbs is unrelenting, often resulting in the death of innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Clerical sexual abuse which is often no more than fondling pales in comparison to the violence outside Church institutions. This is not to excuse it at all, but to bring things into their right perspective. It is not that the people attacking Pope Benedict are unaware of these shocking circumstances. The reports, often from government sources, are there for even the lazy reporter to access. No, the ideological task of attacking the Pope and the Catholic Church is prior to any other activity. So the reports hardly get a mention, and if they are mentioned it is often merely to relay the information. The resulting hypocrisy is of no account. I have set up another page listing reports on the physical and sexual abuse across society.

Finally let me once again quote George Weigel in Scoundrel Time(s) who puts the hypocrisy well and truly into perspective:

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

13 April 2010

Hypocrisy and anti-Catholic bigotry reach transcendent proportions in the West's media

That, of course, is the object of the recent media campaign against the Pope, one that has seen everyone with an axe to grind against the Catholic Church clamber on board.