For a long time now I have known what causes the imbalance of mind amongst clergy and mainly Catholic clergy at that, when they abuse young children, in the main young boys. My old friend, Tom Doyle, the Dominican priest who has been fighting clerical sexual abuse of children in America for the past 30 years and is renowned in the legal world as being the foremost expert on this subject all over the Christian realm, explained it to me some years ago.
When you take an 11 year old boy and lock him up in a junior seminary like St Bede’s in Manchester was in my time and give him little access to his family and the outside world and being surrounded by other boys of like persuasion and priests who more often than not were abused as children and learnt their grooming skills as boys themselves and at 18 send him to senior seminary with even less access to humanity and make him a priest at 24, that man is still emotionally an 11year old boy. He has not matured emotionally having had no proper contact with the outside world. Therefore as a mature man of 24 he considers himself on a par with 11 year old boys. It is therefore easy for him to consider abusing young boys who come into contact with him. His emotional development, that most of us take for granted, having gone through the long hard grind of puberty and youthfulness, does not take place. Most abusing priests do not think they do any harm, most of them in fact do not think they have committed a crime, they cannot comprehend the almost god-like idea a priest has in the minds of children until confronted in therapy.
Tom arrived at this idea after studying thousands of cases in America since the early 1980s, he even explained it to the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of America in the late 1980s but unfortunately he was preaching to the emotionally immature. Even now the conniving Archbishop Carlson of St Louis has stated recently in a clerical abuse case that when he was a young priest in the 1980s he was not sure that adults having sex with chilren was a crime. This was from an intelligent, well educated, man of God. He was not even sure when he was an Auxilliary Bishop of St Paul in Minneapolis in the late 1980s whether it was a crime for a priest to have sex with children. So even has you climb the ladder of success in the Church, this emotional immaturity does not improve. It is well worth watching the various film clips between Carlson and the advocate , Jeff Anderson, on Bishop Accountability website and those on Anderson Advocates website to show the absolute paucity of emotional maturity in these men.
So having understood the main and real causes that sets a man of God on the road to perfidiousness, I turned my attention to another branch of society who are up to their eyebrows in paedophilia. These men get sent to boarding schools at 11 years of age and then at 18 join strictly male dominated societies at good universities and on graduation do not always become employed in the outside world before entering the world of politics and then onto male dominated cabinet positions. Yes senior politicians of all parties are more often than not found at some stage to have dipped more than their feet into the murky depths of paedophilia and yes as well their emotional development has not matured. They will easily patronise women, easily tell lies to anybody who will listen, easily consider theirselves untouchable.
Yes, the politician and the clergyman are of one and the same ilk.
Yes Paul, the dysfuncionality of both politicians and Roman Catholic clergy are there for all to see, especially the clergy. If they don’t appear to think and act like us, it’s because they don’t.
Conditioning of this sort at an impressionable age, the absence of the opposite sex in the school, the religious doctrine of clergy being celibate, all point to an unbalanced upbringing.
I once went to a dance at Notre Dame in Cheetham Hill and there were all these strange persons there – they were girls. When I think back, it was only my visits to a local youth club and underage visits to the pub that kept me in touch with the opposite sex.
While in the 6th form at Bede’s, for a few weekends, several of us did some painting and decorating at was then called a home for unmarried mothers, run by the Catholic Church. I learned more about human nature and life from those girls – I don’t mean in a derogatory or sexual way whatever – than I ever learned in seven years at Bede’s.
Bede’s was then like a time-warp, stuck back in the 1930s, no-one should really be surprised at the goings-on there, but the ability to keep it all quiet is the real tragedy, only now, half a century and more later, the truth about what went on is being revealed. The sheer breathtaking arrogance of the Church and College in keeping these nefarious deeds quiet for so long is unforgivable.
They must, repeat must, be made to pay for all the misery and suffering they inflicted on what, in most cases, were innocent children. Those still alive should be put on trial and if convicted, face lengthy sentences. The institutions which allowed this to happen should be made to pay punitive damages and issue public apologies to all the victims.
Then, and only then, can we move on…
One question I forgot to ask, in all this:-
If Cyril Smith wasn’t a Catholic, what was his excuse for what he did at Knowl View and also a house of ill-repute in Streatham, South London?
Just a thought….
Perhaps causality can be traced even further to parents outsourcing the care of their children to third party agents. After all, the history of mankind is a history of parenting.
I hear people saying that sending their children to these unseemly institutions gives them opportunities in life but i have never seen any real evidence of this. The more educated a person, the less thoughtful that person becomes. The higher up the food chain you go, the less likely you are to question it.
@Taylor
This depraved child sacrificial devil worship has nothing to do with the gender segregation of pre-pubescant children. I have as much anxiety over leaving my son in the hands of a catholic priest as i do leaving my daughter in the hands of concupiscent teenage boys.
It is about protecting each other from the evils that exist around us…
@Taylor again
Catholicism is not an excuse for raping children. The article is about the institutions that nurture the mercy out of humans. Cyrill was a product of these institutions. Like a conscript is stripped down emotionally and rebuilt into an infantry soldier. These boys are emotionally stripped down and rebuilt into evil monsters.
Please try to keep your thoughts lucid
To Danny:
I’d think the last person who would wish to be accused of ever being a victim would be Cyril Smith.
I worked in Rochdale for five years, around the time the allegations were published in the local mag, Rochdale Alternative Press and also Private Eye. He threatened to sue but never did.
I haven’t a clue what faith Cyril Smith was, he was a big cheese in a small town, Lord Mayor, MP, director on the board of one or two businesses, not exactly a shrinking violet then.
On one thing we can agree. He was protected by the higher-ups, be it councillors, police, the juduciary and senior Government officials. Whether or not the truth will ever come out, I severely doubt.
i suppose the point i am trying to make here is that instead of blaming the institutions, we should look closer to home and realise that these institutions rely on us to feed them. The sooner we take back ownership of our churches, governments, businesses, the sooner we put these psychopaths back in their boxes. We are the architects to our own nightmare.