Video in Good Shepherd Chapel - Niamh Horan

[theskull1]

I'm not angry, I'm just telling it the way it is. Open your eyes and look how wonderful society is these days.
I've caught 12 year olds robbing a house, I see them drinking openly and engaging in adult behaviour outside junior discos. I've seen them assault adults on the streets. Teachers being assaulted in classrooms.

Is this a church problem or is it a problem with parents who aren't guiding their kids properly because they themselves have no moral compass.

Fox commander have you ever considered that the volume of media now is many many times greater than it was. Bad new stories are global. 30 years ago the media worked totally different. So how much of your belief is perception rather than reality.

And let's get rid of this notion that secularist don't really care about the society they live in. Many considered atheists seek to live purpose driven fulfilling lives.

[Lar Naparka]

LN
What part to you think the churches teachings/scripture had on this massive societal shift you talk about? Can the church take credit for any of it do you reckon?

I don't think everyone in the church is equally to blame but those who were aware of what was going on lacked influence and power.
I know the present archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, very well. IMO, he's a solid, honest individual and I couldn't imagine him trying too shield a child abuser. His predecessor, Desmond Connell refused to co-operate with the gardai when an investigation into child abuse in the diocese was launched. (As far as I can remember that was in the early noughties)
He maintained that Canon Law took precedence over civil law and refused to hand over relevant files. Then you had the extraordinary situation where the incoming bishop threatened to sue the outgoing one if he didn't comply with Garda requests.
In the end, Connell acquiesced with very much reluctance  and only because he knew it was only a matter of time until Diarmuid took over the diocese and would then have access to the documents in question.
Knowing Diarmuid, I'm certain he wasn't bluffing.
I mention al this because there were wide divergences of view amongst Church authorities and indeed priests and lay people.
BTW, very few if any seemed to be fully aware of the widespread abuse of children and women that was going on all around them.
If as girl was raped, often by a close relative or someone of influence in the locality, she was regarded as a "fallen woman" and either packed off to England or shoved into a Magdalene Home.
There were few like Diarmuid Martin back in the 50s and 60s and definitely sweet FA of them in times before that.
Sex was most definitely a taboo subject and even when a married woman had a baby she was regarded as being somehow "unclean" and had to undergo a cleansing ceremony before she could attend mass or take the sacraments again.
To try and answer you question, I'd say the Catholic Church back them lacked Christianity.
Have you heard of Jansenism?
The teachings of Jansen, a theologian from the 1600s, heavily influenced church thinking in Ireland to a larger degree than in any other European country.
The reason for this was that a large number of Irish students for the priesthood went to the seminary in Louvain where many of the staff held pro-Jansen beliefs. This was a Catholic version of Calvinism, pure and simple.
One had to come from a "posh" family to go to Louvain- Paddy Joe from over the mountain was lucky to get into All Hallows or Brendan's, Killarney.
The same PJ was likely to go no further up the promotion ladder than landing a curacy in some small parish or teaching ion some boarding school or other. If any of them became a PP in was in some isolated god-forsaken place that nobody else wanted.
Whereas the ones who were ordained in Louvain or Salamanca or the likes,  were the ones who went on to become canons and monsignors and the likes.
So you can see how the Jansenist priests carried a lot more clout than their numbers warranted.


The societal shift you speak of started in the mid to late 60s. The advent of TV was very much responsible for this.  If you are familiar with the works of Diarmuid Ferriter, the UCD historian who is pretty popular at the moment, you'll find that Church and State combined in an unholy alliance to keep power from the masses.
As a result, Ireland was a most conservative, introverted society from the time of the Famine or earlier for all I know.
I think the likes of Diarmuid Martin can take some credit for liberalising the church but then there were far more Connells than Martins back in the times we are referring to and it's been a long hard slog nce to get rid of them.
There are plenty of them still who yearn for the "good ol' days."

What a great post. It is weird thinking that I lived through some of that. Your post put some explanation to the context in which I was reared. Thank you

Well, thank you also.
It's comforting to know  that someone else knows what I'm talking about. (Sometimes I'm not sure I do myself.)
It was the late 70s before I even heard of a Magdalene Laundry and even then I just couldn't comprehend the reality of what went on in those institutions. I worked and fraternised with priests and other religious who were later faced charges of sexual abuse. Neither I nor any colleague suspected anything at the time.
But it would be wide of the mark to think that all, or even the majority, of sexual offences were committed by nuns, priests and brothers. They are easily identified because they belong to clearly  defined groups but I believe there were even more incidences of domestic rape , incest in other words.
My father-in-law told me that domestic sexual abuse was widespread, endemic in fact, in his younger days and in times before then as well.
To begin with, many people had large families and lived in small houses and so in many cases boys and girls had to share a bedroom with only a blanket or a curtain to segregate them.
Add in the fact that sex was definitely subject so the vast majority of teenagers knew nothing about the facts of life and it's easy to see that cases of incest were plentiful.
Sure there were laws about incest and rape and the likes on the ststute books and that's where they remained.
In my reply to skull I mentioned that the advent of TV in the late 60s was a major catalyst for change but I forgot to mention that the introduction of free second level education (in the south anyway) was an equally important one. This was introduced in 1966 and in time led to a better educated people who began to assert their independence and no longer let others do their thinking for them.
I know it's hard for many who are younger than the pair of us to comprehend that the majority of the common people  could live in such a state of wilful delusion but one need not go back to the 50s/60s to find cases of this.
How many here can recall what happened in Ballinspittle in 1985.
For those who can't, a group of young schoolgirls claimed to have seen a roadside statue of the BV moving spontaneously.
So the kids ran home and told their mammies. Mammies raced to the scene and "saw" the statue move as well. Mammies told neighbours and neighbours spread the news of this miraculous apparition far and wide.
Soon busloads of credulous people began to descend on the little village and just about everyone swore they saw the statue move.
A few local farmers made a killing by renting out fields for car parking and cafés and b&Bs in the general locality were soon raking it in.
Soon claims of moving statues and apparitions of other divine entities like saints and lambs and all that sort of stuff were coming in from all over the place. It's said that over 100,000 pilgrims visited Ballinspittle alone.
In all, there was soon over 30 places around the country were claims of statues moving and/ or images appearing on church walls or even on gates in fields and telegraph poles etc.
The Church refused to confirm or deny the credibility of those claims. A few bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities told the general public to cop on and to stop making eejits of themselves but there was no official repudiation of those phenomena.
Then the mass hysteria began to cool down and people who had been believers in those "miracles" felt reticent about even talking about them.
Remember we are talking about an incidence of mass hysteria that swept the county, north and south, within the last 30 years!
That's by no means ancient history.
People en masse can and often will suspend belief when the reality is too traumatic to accept.
The mid-80s was a time of deep depression, economic mental, and  throughout the land.
Who knows when large sections of the populace will once again be spooked by something or other?

[foxcommander]

You are saying the mindset was different, I am saying people know when something is wrong and that was the same in the 50s and 60s so don't try to patronise me or justify any of these crimes by saying it was a different time and place.

Build a time machine and go fix it then.

An equally stupid post!

Consider yourself patronized then....

[muppet]

There are quite a few straw men on this thread, and others, that need to be tackled.

Firstly, I think every poster acknowledges the great work done at all levels by the vast majority of members of the rank & file clergy. Most of us will know some of these men and women personally and will have had their lives enhanced in some way by them.

Highlighting the Church hiararchy's poor handling of the crisis is not an attack on Catholic ideology or teachings. God and the various parts of His Church are not all the same thing. Confusing this was Brendan's Smyth's modus operandi.

There is no comparison with bankers and politicians for any number of reasons. We don't have the same level of expectation of bankers and politicians. They are expected to be doing the respective jobs, to some degree, for personal reasons. We are not supposed to see priests in that way, and few did until the scandals began. We don't entrust our children into the personal care of bankers and politicians and they don't demand that we trust them by, for example, having them in our houses or confessing everything to them. The Catholic Church, as is the same in most churches, demands that we put a very high level of trust and faith in the clergy. The corollary of this is that we must expect a much higher level of behaviour from them. These scandals have shattered that expectation for a lot of people and this is really compounded by decades of the Vatican behaving just like greedy bankers and cute-hoor politicians, by hiding behind technical legal arguments and washing their hands of everything.

The 'different times' argument has validity, but only in that it is hard to judge people on what they did on the 70s & 80s by today's context. People were more respectful of the Church but also more afraid of it's clergy. These are two sides of the same coin and depend on which case you are trying to argue. There is little doubt though that those that suffered were the vulnerable, children in homes etc, and children of extremely devout families. The latter is a theme in, for example, Brendan's Smyth grooming of victims. Befriend the devout adults, who invariably are not the type to question a priest and when in situ, manipulate the children.

Thus the argument blaming the parents has a certain horrible irony. It is surely only made by someone who would never question the Church, thus exhibiting more than a passing resemblance to the unfortunate adults in the abused families.

The argument that the most rigorous protection procedures are now in place is the ultimate straw man. We rightly wouldn't have accepted Fianna Fáil saying in 2011 that the Regulator is now up to speed. Even the politicians have had pretend investigations and reports in the financial crisis, with another on the way, and as I pointed out we should have higher expectations of God's representatives on earth. We still haven't had a 32 county, or even 26 county, investigation into the Church abuse scandals. But to date only Cloyne, Ferns & Dublin have been properly investigated.

The North/South divide is an interesting twist in the argument but notably it is only used in the exception as most posters from both sides of the border seems to see things much the same way. In saying that, there is obviously a difference between what happened in the 6 counties and the in the 26. The distraught Dad in the docudrama 'Betrayal of trust' sticks in my mind when he is arguing with his wife. She suggests going to the police in the 70s after finding out Smyth raped their young daughter, in their house, and he says something like, 'you want us to report a Catholic priest to the RUC, in West Belfast!' But then I am not sure that the Gárdaí would have been a whole lot better at the time, such was the power of the Church at the time in the South. And we know telling the Church was a waste of time, ably demonstrated by Sean Brady, no matter which side of the border you were on.

Finally, and there is only one person doing this, but to call people who point out the above 'anti-Catholic bigots' is absurd and completely ridiculous. This viewpoint sees little everything as an attack and if the hierarchy of the Church thinks the same way, then I would argue that it is completely doomed. That surely would be the ultimate anti-Catholic strategy.

However, thankfully the new man in The Vatican seems to be cut from a different cloth. Originally the Vatican had shut up shop and protected this man, saying he was a Vatican citizen and that they had no extradition agreement with anyone (thus opening themselves  to accusations of hiding a suspected pedophile behind legal arguments as I mentioned above). But now, albeit after pressure from the UN, they seem to be doing the right thing. (http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=21841)

[T Fearon]

I assume the second last paragraph is a reference to me.Well it is not ridiculous to state that there are a number of anti Catholics on this board and involved in this thread who attack the catholic church at every opportunity and blame it for every Ill under the sun.The child abuse scandal is like manna from heaven (pardon the pun) for these people.Just check the absolute hatred in some of the posts.

The attitude of these people is every bit as bad as that of those who blindly follow the church regardless.

I am glad whoever that you acknowledge that the church badly mishandled child abuse.It took a while but at long last you've come round to my way of thinking

[ONeill]

Thank fcuk you lads don't believe in Santa Claus too. That's all we'd need.

[Orior]

Thank fcuk you lads don't believe in Santa Claus too. That's all we'd need.

Stop that.

[Pangurban]

Excellent post Muppet, hits a lot of Nails

[T Fearon]

Like most of Muppet's posts it also leaves a lot if sore thumbs from misplaced hammer blows

[theskull1]

Whats is there to hate about debate I wonder?