Priests - "70%" fuck kids

Have noted with passing interest about new allegations and facts that have been slowly surfacing in Australia over the last few months. Some of it's been extraordinary coming out of Victoria but there's just been this thing with me that I'm not surprised and so I won't think differently about it. Cripes it couldn't be any worse than the horrifying shit that was revealed going on in the US a while back; that there was a lot of them dying of AIDS as many of them were fucking each other (not that there's anything wrong with that other than the complete hypocrisy of it) and it seems Catholics can't use condoms even when it's man to man sex. The worst thing I read about it was a Priest in Florida who fucked around with kids, being HIV+. That one really shocked me.

Think it's been building up now for a while, with ever more increasingly horrifying happenings being given the light of day. Back in April, this came out from Victoria:

CONFIDENTIAL police reports have detailed the suicides of at least 40 people sexually abused by Catholic clergy in Victoria, and have urged a new inquiry into these and many other deaths suspected to be linked to abuse in the church.

In a damning assessment of the church’s handling of abuse issues, the reports say it appears the church has known about a shockingly high rate of suicides and premature deaths but has "chosen to remain silent."

Written by Detective Sergeant Kevin Carson, the reports state that while conducting lengthy inquiries into paedophile clergy, investigators have discovered "an inordinate number of suicides which appear to be a consequence of sexual offending.

"The number of people contacting this office to report members of their family, people they know, people they went to school with, who have taken their lives is constant. It would appear that an investigation would uncover many more deaths as a consequence of clergy sexual abuse," one of the reports states. Read more

I remember reading that and thinking how fucked up that was.That was in another state though as bad as it was, and I did sort of wonder why nothing had come to light in NSW? 

Well, months later there's been slowly more and more stuff coming out in NSW too. Although the abuse didn't surprise me as it's been so well known and documented in other parts of the world, and increasingly so. What I have been surprised about here is the shear number of cases, and the shear number of Priests involved. If there was a paedophile ring of these proportions in the secular community there'd have been huge busts by the federal police with raids across a number of properties. We'd have seen them on the telly carting PC's away out of residences to look at the hard drives (makes me wonder what's on the PC's of a lot of these priests BTW). But no, this is the Catholic church, it's all hushed up and hidden from the cops.

So today I read this, which is probably about the second time this year that I've been very surprised. Just when you thought you had seen everything from that fucked up church, we now have this, a psychologist Michelle Mulvihill is blowing the whistle:

Up to 200 victims have sought compensation from the St John of God order after alleging they had been abused in special schools and homes run by the brothers in NSW, Victoria and New Zealand.

Last week a Melbourne inquiry into child abuse heard allegations that Brothers had drugged and pack-raped boys at their operations in Victoria.

Claims were also made that two boys had allegedly been beaten so badly they were thought to have died but their deaths had not been reported to authorities.

And Fairfax Media has obtained documents revealing that in the 1960s and 1970s dozens of boys were brutally assaulted at Kendall Grange, the order's school for mentally and physically impaired boys at Morisset on the NSW central coast.

Dr Mulvihill, who is based in Sydney, worked with the order for nine years from 1998, sitting in on meetings involving negotiators from the order and 150 victims in NSW, Victoria and New Zealand.

But she says she quit the job in 2007, fearing that suspected paedophile Brothers still wielded too much power in the order and were interfering with victims' compensation and treatment.

On Sunday she described the order as hosting Brothers who were responsible for "the worst examples of child abuse I have ever heard of" and said of the 40 to 50 Brothers who had been in the order around the time she was involved, about 75 per cent had been the subject of allegations.

"There was a small gene pool as to who you could talk to [about the abuse],'' she said.

She also alleged the church and now Cardinal Pell had been well aware of the extraordinary numbers of victims as the order's head, Provincial Peter Burke, had borrowed millions of dollars from the church to pay victims in a deal overseen by Cardinal Pell. Read more

Cardinal Pell is the head hancho of the Catholic church in Australia. There's now a growing demand for a full national royal commission into sexual abuse within church institutions across Australia. Which of course I support. Dunno if it'll happen, pollies are dragging their feet as bloody usual. We'll see. But this shit goes right to the top of the church here.

What I find the most particularly galling however, is how over such a long time the Catholic church has demonised gays and continually crapped on about how it's wrong. 

Indeed, the Church has vigorously opposed almost every initiative that would recognize the civil rights of glbtq people, including the repeal of sodomy laws, and has declared that discrimination against glbtq people is sometimes justified. 

In a directive to American Bishops in 1992, entitled "Some Considerations Concerning the Catholic Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons," the Vatican specifically condemned anti-discrimination laws, and in effect blamed violence against homosexuals on the political activism of the glbtq rights movement. It declared that when "civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase." 

................................ 

In a document written in specific reaction to the growing impetus for legal recognition of civil unions, registered partnerships, and same-sex marriage, and approved by Pope John Paul II on March 28, 2003, and released publicly on July 31, 2003, the Congregation not only condemned with unusual vituperation same-sex marriage (declaring, for example, that homosexual unions are "evil" and that allowing homosexual couples to adopt children would amount to violence against children), but also announced that "When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed . . . in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral." more

"Gravely immoral". Like they're some kind of moral crusader for good, and that we should follow what they say because they know. And yet they've spend many years fucking kids and covering it up. I dunno how they could think they have any moral authority left about anything. Fucks sake, these assholes are the people telling gays they can't get married!
 
To the Catholic church: what I do with my body amongst adults is my own bloody business. You have no right to moralise to me about anything. I don't fuck kids. You do.