Lollards’ Prison with wall shackles in Lambeth Palace Mayday Notes The Taoiseach Speaks up for the Abused Children of Ireland Most English newspapers have only quoted fairly briefly from Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny’s speech in the Dáil on the Cloyne Report into clerical abuse of children in Ireland and the Catholic Church’s cover-up of it. However, this tremendous historic speech, delivered on July 20th 2011, is widely available online – both audio and text – e.g. www.rte.ie/news/2011/0720/cloyne1.html and all who can should read or listen to it in full. It is an epic confrontation between Church and State with echoes resonating over more than a millennium. And unlike in the confrontation between King Henry II and Thomas Beckett, there can be no doubt who stands on the moral high ground. Here are few extracts:
The rape and torture of children were downplayed or managed to uphold the primacy of the institution [the Church], its power, standing and reputation. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St. Benedict’s ‘ear of the heart’, the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a Canon lawyer...
The Cloyne Report describes how many victims continued to live in the small towns and parishes in which they were reared and abused.
Their abuser was often still in the area and still held in high regard by their families and community...
This is the Republic of Ireland in 2011. It is a republic of laws, rights and responsibilities and proper civic order where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version of a particular kind of morality will no longer be tolerated or ignored...
As a practising Catholic, I do not say any of this easily... Today, that Church needs to be a penitent church, a Church truly and deeply penitent for the horrors it perpetrated, hid and denied – in the name of God, but for the good of the institution...
Through our legislation, through our Government’s action to put children first, those who have been abused can take some small comfort in knowing that they belong to a nation – to a democracy – ...where the law – their law, as citizens of this country – will always supersede canon law that has neither legitimacy nor place in the affairs of this country...
The then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said: ‘Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church’. As the Holy See prepares its considered response to the Cloyne Report, I want to make it clear, as Taoiseach, that when it comes to the protection of the children of this State, the standards of conduct which the Church deems appropriate to itself cannot and will not be applied to the workings of democracy and civil society in this republic – not purely or simply or otherwise, because children have to be and will be put first.
Rome’s reaction to the speech was to recall the Papal Nuncio.
Religion as a Human Creation SOF’s brief is to explore religion as a human creation.
The fact that religion is a human creation means that it has no supernatural authority and, like other human creations, is a mixture of good and bad. It is no part of SOF’s brief to defend the indefensible: neither cruel, inhuman doctrines or laws, nor acts of cruelty, arrogant pride, deceit or anything of that ilk committed by religious people, particularly religious authorities of any kind. This applies to the Christian religion, the Jewish and Muslim religions and any other. On the one hand, we must treat each other with respect as fellow citizens, listen and try to understand one another so that we can live peacefully together in a kind society.
On the other, when we see abuses perpetrated, advocated or condoned by religious authorities – priests in black gowns – we should not be afraid to speak up. These are two complementary, rather than opposing, tasks in exploring religion as a human creation, and we should not confuse them out of a fuzzy attempt at ‘niceness’.
London Taxi drivers’ brains grow bigger when they get The Knowledge.
This cabbie had to deliver a baby in his taxi on 2nd September 2010.