Content advisory. Some discussion of physical abuse ahead (I've stripped the descriptions of sexual abuse from the descriptions).
Some quotes from David Yallop's
The Power and the Glory:
The secret system that protects the clerical sex abuser was functioning effectively as far back at least as the early part of the seventeenth century when the founder of the Piarist Order, Father Joseph Calasanz, suppressed the sexual abuse of children by his priests from becoming public knowledge. One such paedophile, Father Stefano Cherubini, the member of a well-connected Vatican family, was so successful at covering up his crimes he even succeeded in becoming head of the Order. It took fifteen years of complaints against him and other senior members of the Order before action was taken by Pope Innocent X and the Order was temporarily closed down. As historian Karen Liebreich, in Fallen Order shows, the seventeenth-century secret system had a very modern ring, including ‘promotion for avoidance’ – elevate the abuser away from his victims.
Recently yet another secret Vatican document concerning the crime of solicitation has surfaced. The document, Instructions on the Manner of Proceeding in Cases of Solicitation, deals with the crime of a priest attempting to procure sexual favours from an individual whose confession he is hearing. It was published by the Prefect of the Holy Office, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, with the approval of the then Pope, John XXIII, in March 1962. The document has never been made available to the general public. The distribution list was confined to ‘Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops and Other Diocesan Ordinaries’. Among those receiving a copy would have been the newly promoted Bishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla.
It deals with the secret trial arrangements of any cleric charged with the offence. The document has recently been described by lawyers as ‘a blueprint for deception and concealment’ while apologists have argued that as the Sacrament of Penance is protected by a shroud of absolute secrecy, the procedures for dealing with this ‘ecclesiastical’ crime also invoke secrecy, putting the offender above the criminal law of the land. This was precisely the position that the Vatican has taken for many centuries on all acts of clerical paedophilia perpetrated in or out of the confessional box.
The 1962 Holy Office instructions for ‘addressing this unspeakable crime’ go to remarkable lengths to ensure total secrecy. The victim must lodge a complaint within ‘thirty days’ of the crime. Failure to do so will mean the victim’s automatic excommunication. As the victim was often a young child, that particular directive beggars belief. The alleged perpetrator was able to ‘be transferred to another assignment unless the Ordinary of the place has forbidden it’. Both the perpetrator and the victim are ordered to observe ‘perpetual silence’, under pain of excommunication. Again an element of the secret system has come into play. ‘The oath of keeping the secret must be given in these cases also by the accusers or those denouncing the priest and the witnesses.’ Chapter Five of the document, entitled ‘The Worst Crime’, states ‘by the name of the worst crime is understood at this point evidence of any obscene, external deed, gravely sinful act, perpetrated by a cleric or attempted with a person of his own sex or attempted by him with youths of either sex or with brute animals (bestiality)’.
In St Ninian’s the monks varied the regular beatings, rapes and the gamut of sexual abuses of the boys with their own version of torture and brutality. An electric generator was set up in the boot room where boys were forced to hold onto the bare wires leading from the machine and receive a series of electric shocks. The children were also subjected to whippings with a riding crop with the ends tied to cause greater pain.
Christopher Fearns, a social worker, recalled, ‘I was beaten with the riding crop two or three times a week for four years. They told us they’d whip the Devil out of us. I was battered so many times on my head and ears I cannot hear a thing on my left side, and I’ve undergone extensive surgery because of it.’
To date just three people have been brought to trial; all were found guilty. Among the ten charges that were proved against Brother Benedict were assault, forcing children to eat their own vomit and breaking a boy’s arm. The three men were given token sentences of two years’ imprisonment. Brother Benedict appealed and was granted bail. More than a year later his appeal has yet to be heard and he walks freely among his fellow citizens.
Jimmy Boyle, formerly the most feared man in Scotland, recalled his years in another De La Salle school, St John’s in Springboig: ‘Even today I can still hear the sounds of breaking bones as a monk deliberately smashed a child’s leg to smithereens. Or footsteps in the night that heralded yet another horrific rape of a terrified, crying child.’
Appalling abuse by the Christian Brothers has been matched by cruelty from the Poor Sisters of Nazareth or the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul or the Sisters of Mercy. For more than 100 years there were Nazareth homes all over the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, the United States and Ireland.
From the mid-nineteenth century to recent times ‘Nazareth homes’ cared for the young and the old. The orphanages were run by nuns from the order of the Sisters of Mercy. Violent degradation and thrashings were a daily event. The children woke up to the screams of other children and to the familiar sound of the strap. In 1965 Helen Cusiter was eight years of age when her mother disappeared and she was taken, along with her five brothers, to the Nazareth House in Aberdeen. In 2004 at the age of forty-seven, after a chance meeting with one of her childhood tormentors, Helen became one of over five hundred former residents to bring an action against the Sisters.
Her recall of what she had endured was corroborated by other former inmates who had not met for a lifetime. It included a particular incident with Sister Alphonso who had come looking for her while Helen had been playing on the swings.
‘She took me off by the hair, twisted me round and threw me against the church wall. She broke all my front teeth, my face was a mashed mess, the other kids were all screaming.’ Helen Howie, one of those screaming children, remembers the blood pouring from Helen’s face: ‘Sister Alphonso didn’t use leather straps, she used her fists, she had such strength.’
When the dentist queried the extensive bruising on the eight year old’s face he was told, ‘She fell.’ Sister Aphonso was convicted on four charges of cruel and unnatural treatment. Because of her age she was merely admonished rather than imprisoned. There are all too many similar testimonies from hundreds of damaged people. Many sought not compensation but just the opportunity of being heard, of having the pain they still felt acknowledged. The Poor Sisters are no longer poor. They have approaching £200 million in their bank and have eventually dropped the ‘Poor’ from their title. There is now an international campaign to bring the Order to the bar of justice. It will be an uphill struggle with the insurance companies combining with a number of the bishops to ward off the attack.
In 1966 at the age of nine, Willie was the oldest of ten children, living in a caravan without sanitation or running water. It was his responsibility to help to feed the family. His father, a tinsmith confronting a shrinking market with the advent of long-life kitchen utensils, needed all the help he could get. Willie was caught stealing piglets and sentenced to six years in Letterfrack, an industrial school in the west of Ireland, described by survivors as ‘a hell on earth’. Inmates suffered physical, mental and sexual abuse. Willie was treated brutally. In 1970, by now thirteen, a few days before he was due home for a precious two-week holiday, Willie was continously beaten about the head. Survivors have recently testified that one of the Christian Brothers was continuously beating Willie’s head with a bunch of keys; others remember him using a pole. At home Willie complained of severe headaches, then he suffered a fit, went into a coma and died. Doctors at St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny said he had died of meningitis.
And some figures
It was subsequently revealed that in New Zealand in early 1991 six Roman Catholic dioceses had confirmed thirty-eight cases of sexual abuse by priests and brothers, within two years of a complaints procedure being set up: a great many more were in the pipeline including complaints of abuse that reached back fifty years to the 1940s. For most of that period the Catholic population of New Zealand was less than 500,000, with only around 500 priests: the confirmed cases indicated a historic average of some seven per cent of priests being sex abusers.
The Catholic psychotherapist Wunibald Müller, a man with decades of experience in the treatment of priests with psychological and psychiatric problems, has estimated that there is a minimum of two per cent of all priests in Germany with a predisposition to paedophilia, giving a national figure of between 250 and 300. Paedophiles are invariably serial offenders and therefore the number of children at very real risk in Germany today, even by the most conservative of estimates, is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. The actual figure is undoubtedly much higher. Müller’s estimate was based on the evidence that has been made available to him through clinical study of the general German population. But the extraordinary efficiency of the German application of the secret system has for decades dramatically suppressed the abnormal incidence of sexual abuse among the clerical population. Consequently Müller’s estimates are only around half of comparable estimates for other countries, notably the USA. His figure is disturbingly low.
In the United States during the fifteen years after the Gauthe case of 1985/86, over 1,200 paedophile priests were exposed. In view of the fact that there have continued to be weekly if not daily exposures, new civil claims and continuous fresh allegations, the actual total continues to move in the United States inexorably towards 3,000 paedophiles or five per cent of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Even those estimates may prove to be far too low when more exhaustive research has been completed. If the evidence from the Indiana diocese of Lafayette was to be replicated across the United States, all of the previous estimates would have to be rewritten. In a diocese of just seventy-five active priests, by early 1997 it had been established that at least sixteen per cent were guilty of a wide range of sexual abuses.
From 1978 until April 2002 the Pope had deliberately and studiously avoided any public references to the global epidemic of sexual abuse by his priests and members of Catholic orders, apart from a few oblique comments. He had talked in March 2002 of ‘a dark shadow of suspicion’ that had been cast over priests ‘by some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination’ and have succumbed to the ‘most grievous forms of the mystery of evil at work in the world’. He could not quite bring himself to utter the word paedophilia.
Note all figures are from 2005 or so, when the book was published.
I admire the current Pope for his stand against paedophilia in the Church and against the corruption of Vatican politics by money laundering and "masonic lodges"*, but he has to be careful as hell. The "secret system" endures, especially in southern Europe. He can't trust people inside the Vatican to help him. And he's treading ground that at least one previous Pope has gone down...that Pope, you may recall, did not last very long in his position. 30 days, to be exact.
*Which may all be interconnected. While somewhat hard to credit, to put it mildly, a former Catholic priest by the name of Malachi Martin has some interesting things to say on this topic:
While the Catholic Church has been officially silent on the matter of Malachi Martin, his books have been popular among a certain segment of the Catholic population, who believe that there is an evil, Satanic element within the Vatican that has hijacked the Church for its own purposes. Martin was writing about this years before revelations exploded about the Vatican banking scandals, the Masonic P-2 society infiltration of the Vatican as high as cardinal level, and the alleged murder of Pope John Paul I after only thirty days as Pontiff. Thus, it is entirely possible that there are at least two factions within the Church, and that one faction supported Martin’s researches and that another firmly opposed them. Martin also alleged that there existed within the Church something he called the “Superforce,” which was the name he gave to the cabal of evildoers within the Vatican that perpetrated not only political and financial crimes, but which was also involved in pedophilia and other sexual scandals, some under the guise of a satanic cult of sex abusers. Recent revelations concerning the widespread cover up of pedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse within the Church—a cover up that begins at the highest levels of the Vatican bureaucracy—seem to support Martin’s contentions, particularly as, in some cases, this abuse was connected with vaguely ritualistic settings and ceremonies.
Martin isn't a complete crank, it should be noted. As Yallop notes, when detailing the lie of how Pope John Paul II took credit for redefining the Vatican's relationship with Jews:
Claims have also been made that he was the leading author of the final declaration. In just fifteen lengthy sentences, Nostra Aetate was a groundbreaking document launching a movement to reverse 2,000 years of hatred, oppression, vilification and annihilation of Jews by Catholics in the name of God. But it owes nothing to Karol Wojtyla for its existence. Just as the stories of Wojtyla’s wartime dramatic interventions to save Jewish lives are fantasies piled on myths so the claims that have been made on behalf of Wojtyla regarding his input and influence on the creation of this historic declaration are without foundation.
The credit for this historic document should be given in particular to two men, the Jesuit Cardinal Bea and Father Malachi Martin who had doctorates in Semitic languages, archaeology and Oriental history and was destined to become a highly controversial author. Working closely with Cardinal Bea, Martin drafted the document, which exonerated the Jews from culpability in the execution of Jesus Christ. Father Martin received overwhelming if not unanimous approval from the Vatican Council and many accolades from around the world.
So there may well be something in his allegations.
