With all the palaver being spoken and written about regarding clerical abuse and I hear lots and lots of talk and read reams around the subject but nearly nothing about the lives of the poor victims or survivors as some like to refer to them and how they get through every 24 hours of their living.
We hear the apologists saying that the poor priests are not to blame. It is the dastardly Church and its stupid determination to ensure celibate lives. How unnatural this whole process is and how the poor priest is only going through this harrowing ordeal because he is looking for a loving relationship. What nonsense, these fellows would be abusing young children and still be considering themselves celibate. If its loving they want, nuns have been supplying this service for years and if not a nun, there are plenty of ladies round the parish who would willingly accept the priestly staff, no questions asked. They could have an harem of women in the presbytery but to a confirmed paedophile that would not matter a jot. These men are born with this predilection and are guided to this calling by their twisted minds. You would think that there must be a psychological test that seminarians could be put through to weed these men out of the process. There probably is but with the dearth of vocations these days, this hurdle is possibly not taken.
Then there those who deny that there is a problem and that these accusations of clerical abuse are just the product of an over enthusiastic warped mind. There are a lot of these people about, believe you me. Just like there are those who deny the holocaust there are those who deny this abuse. I have an in-box full of these e-mails from people whose minds must be as warped as the abusers themselves.
And there are the excusers who say these men are just the same percentage wise as the abusers in the whole male population and this might be so but their position is a lot more complicated than that. The lay person, unless he is a member of the family has to rely on subterfuge and strives to put himself into a position of trust, the cleric has trust thrust upon him. The lay person does not start brainwashing the child about sin before they act, the priest has the child bewitched by tenets of religion to the extent that the child cannot believe he is being used until too late.
Finally there are the abusers themselves who say to the child whilst the abuse is being perpetrated that God wants everybody who loves him to love each other and that this behaviour is not only tolerated but also has God’s blessing. The child is totally confused and is easy meat.
So we hear all these testimonies, denials and excuses but nobody ever really gets into the victims lives. Nobody ever talks about the torment that these people go through on a 24 hour, 365 day, 60-70 year existence. Some of the victims of course do not and prefer to end the excruciation prematurely.
However I have listened to these survivors and I have read what they have had to say albeit purely by accident. I have become witness to the most horrendous tales of misery and purely by fluke. I wrote a blog post about a friend of mine at St Bede’s College in Manchester, who had been abused by the Rector of the College, Monsignor Thomas Duggan. I never set out to make a campaign of this, I just wrote about what Michael had told me and what eventually and tragically happened to him. (anybody interested can read about it in my blog posting Decline and Fall written in January 2010.)
I was amazed at the deluge of e-mails and letters I received from all parts of the world with ex-pupils of the school all telling roughly the same story. It was as though Duggan’s behaviour had caused a diaspora, with pupils fleeing off to all corners of the globe to escape, hopefully, their daily problems.
As I said it was all roughly the same story, mostly written into me at the same time, there could not possibly have been collaboration and everthing at that time remained totally anonymous. I was the only one who knew the individuals, I was the only one who knew the sources of these testimonies.
Some of these fellows after 40 years of marriage had never been able to tell their wives of the abuse and the women, not understanding the problems behind the mood swings of their spouses, put up with it for the sake of their marriages. They must have been strong, strong individuals. Obviously some of these marriages failed because of this inability to comprehend but others miraculously survived and when the truth through this process came out it was like a veil had been lifted from their lives.
Some of these chaps were in such a depressed state after leaving school that medication was prescribed in their late teens and early 20s, which they have lived with for 40 years or more. Now their doctors reckon it is too dangerous to wean them off their prescriptive lives.
Most took to alcohol as a way of deadening the pain, a lot of boys committed suicide, far and away above the national average and although we cannot be certain the causes that led to their premature deaths, certainly we can trace some of their histories back to abuse at school. An Australian study has shown that there is a direct link between suicide and premature death and with sexual abuse.
I know a few Old Boys who have attempted suicide and been rescued by third parties in the nick of time and the psychiatrists who examined them afterwards in hospital certainly put their actions down to their abuse at school. Alcohol seems to be the daily harbour for most who have a reasonable control on their lives, but you can see the torment in these people’s faces as you sit and have a social pint together. You can see their agonies on an hourly, daily, weekly, yearly basis and when you think of the lads at Bede’s, the oldest chap I know was first abused in 1951. He has had 61 years of this torture and take it from me it is real, live, determined and eternal.
Last night I watched an Australian television programme on the computer called 4Corners that has just investigated the situation in New South Wales and the behaviour of that arch sexual abuser, Father F. The link to this programme is www. abc.net. au/4corners/stories/2012/06/28/3535079.htm. The Austalian boys, some of whom have committed suicide, speak exactly the same language as the St Bede’s old boys. It is quite incredible, the similarities and it is important to realise is that these kids received hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation, yet still committed suicide. Money does not protect people from the damage caused. The programme is 45 minutes long, spare the time and watch it, while Australian emotion on this subject pours out.
If you are able to spare yourself 45 minutes, try at some stage to spare more time thinking of ways of helping these poor chaps. Look around you and see if you can spot a normally decent person acting abnormally, try and help them, It might have been abuse that caused this derailment.
Paul
Thank you for another timely reminder of the ongoing horrors for the many now old men that had the misfortune to cross the path of the paedophile Monsignor Thomas Duggan. How the Pope ever gave him the promotion to Monsignor will probably never be answered. It bears reminding folk that only a Pope can create a Monsignor.
Regards the 4 Corners programme and the Father F. It was followed up by a couple of short segments on a current affair type TV show the following week. Father F’s real name and address was mentioned on a radio programme, but he is still protected and all sites with the real name were promptly squashed by legal threat from the Catholic Church of Australia. Finally this past week a QC Anthony Whitlam has been appointed to look closely at Father F and another priest and all the accusations. I personally don’t hold out much hope that anything will be resolved quickly. It will be dragged out as long as possible and slowly fizzle out of the public’s memory. It has happened before so many times.
At least the families with children that live in the same street as Father F have finally been told by the New South Wales Armidale Police who and what he is. So perhaps a few children have been saved from a fate worse than death.
An long investigation into sexual child abuse in the state of Victoria lost count of the number of cases of suicide that could be directed at the door of the RC church. Not less then 40 and perhaps as high as 100, spread over many years. Very few priests have ever be brought to book over the continuing abuse of children.
If one reads books on the subject, the same basic and tragic tale comes out all over the world. The systematic abuse of children has a pattern that is a world problem for the RC church.
I hope all your writing of the infamous Thomas Duggan was not lost when your blog went down. The Monsignor Thomas Duggan story needs telling to a far wider audience than at the moment.
Thank you Mr Australian for giving us your antipodean insight into that terrible case of “Fr F”. When will the Church realise that it has fallen flat on its face far too often and when will the authorities not flinch from doing their duty with these evil men.
You seem to be missing the big picture folks.
The whole purpose of the church is to destroy mankind. It is polytheism disguised as monotheism and this is the biggest sin committed today, a lack of gratitude. 3 in 1, asking for the intercession of Mary mother of Jesus, assigning divinity to Jesus. This is the blind leading the blind. I suggest we stop acting surprised when criminals break the law and lock the fekkers up..
If you cannot voluntarily renounce christianity, then know that everyone else associates christianity with child rape and you will be tarred with the same brush as your cherished church.
My advice would be to apply intellectual rigour to the study of your religion instead of that destructive concept of blind faith.
Time is running out…
Up until recently, my position on the holocaust has been to neither deny nor concur with the official statement. I have since conducted my own research and i now conclude that the holocaust was in fact made up by the powers that be. I am not a revisionist, i am a denier due to the fact that there has never been a recorded case of an Israeli ever uttering a truthful statement. This conclusion is based on claims provided by the people who use the holocaust as historical fact. Their evidence and claims are ridiculous and not even circumstantial. It is completely made up. Perhaps to cover up the real crimes of genocide against the German POWs after the war, however, that is merely conjecture. It seems to me that if you wish to claim that the holocaust did happen, the burden of proof belongs to you. (Burden being the operative word.) I challenge anyone to exhibit any proof.
I strongly recommend that people take some time to review the claims made by the enemies of man and compare them with the physical evidence that we have. Incredibly such an undertaking is illegal in most of Europe, therefore those of us who live in countries where freedom of speech has not yet been cruelly ripped from us must take the lead and rescue our European cousins from the tyrannical zionists.
What we find is that yet again we are asked to be believe that all laws of physics have to be ignored for us to swallow this specious bile. This is what the yankydoodles insist we do with the events of September 11th. There is not a single part of those events that stand up to any scientific consideration, which is strange considering the faith we put in the concept of scientific research.
What is remarkable about these events is that 99.9999% of the world are happy to suspend reality and blindly believe what newspapers tell them even though they have done nothing but print lies for centuries. Yet, these 99 percenters are the ones who suffer from the lies.
I write this in the hope that you will perhaps look into this and educate your readers.
The future of our species relies on it.
A small after thought…
Did you know that the Nuremburg trials were a complete sham with tonnes of false evidence being submitted and the witness testimonies and confessions obtained by torture?
Could it be that the official account of the the two world wars are in fact a monstrous lie and that the allied forces were the true aggressors?
How deep does this rabbit hole go?
Daniel,
I used to work with someone whose (Jewish) mother survived Auschwitz. She was the only member of her family who did. Please don’t talk nonsense, especially on a subject like this.
Paul,
Well, I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with Linda ever again. My late father went over in the second wave after D Day (around 7/8 June 1944) and did the trip all the way into Germany till the war ended. By the time war finished, he was relatively old for an infantry soldier (nearly 33), finishing as a sergeant – he reckoned it was because most of the people of his age in the unit had been killed, so he got his promotion by default – knowing my father, I would doubt that was the case. He was a better man than that.
He very rarely talked about the war (he lost so many of his friends during it), but he once mentioned some of his regiment were called in to ‘clear up’ one of the ‘imaginary’ death camps, he said he was glad that was one duty he was able to avoid.
The one thing a number of the soldiers involved in this unpleasant duty mentioned, at least to my father was this:-
The Germans had overloaded the crematoria with bodies just as the camp was overrun by the Allies, the stench was overpowering in the neighbourhood. But still the indoctrinated civil population were in denial as to what was happening – Goebbels the ace propagandist had carefully done his homework. They would not believe that mass murder was being committed in these camps.
I cannot believe that any fair-minded person can deny the Holocaust occurred. More so than TD at St Bede’s, the evidence is there. The Nazis, in their methodical way, even kept detailed records, fortunately all of which were not destroyed. Let’s not feel remotely sorry for the failure of the Third Reich and its abhorrent leaders.
No doubt someone with family who were victims or who had relatives serving in the forces who liberated the camps can put your son straight.
What do you believe? Poland invaded Germany in September 1939 and started World War II? Now I’m being ridiculous.
Linda…
I would never talk nonsense on a matter as grave as this. Our future depends on it. Everything i have said is backed by hard evidence. Your work colleagues mother survived Aushwit and got a sweet little pay out. No one else got reparations. Why not?
Although it is nice to see comments coming in and I try to let common and non sense have their run. I am afraid that the comments on this posting are getting away from what it was all about, ie. The serious harm that is done to victims of clerical child abuse.
All further mention of holocaust or not will be severely edited on this and other postings. There is a time and place for all weird thoughts but they ain’t here.
Thank you
Paul
Once and for all, will you please remove all comments made by this raving, deluded idiot, Daniel Malpas? He does your blogs great harm and casts considerable doubt on your integrity.
Sorry Rick the offending paragraphs have been deleted but I do think that you should give some time to an open forum. The reasons I have deleted them is not for their crassness but because they are straying from the point of the posting.
Paul