For many years the Irish establishment connived with the Catholic Church. Police and government officials helped them to conceal the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children and vulnerable adults. Complaints were ignored, trivialised or even perverted into accusations against the victims.
Despite recent expressions of regret and protestations of intentions to be open by the church and the Irish state there has been little reason for victims to believe that things had fundamentally changed. The recently published Cloyne report was damning in its assessment of the behaviour of the Catholic Church at every level in the Irish Republic. That was good, but it is just another report. There have been many of those which have not brought about proper recompense for victims or indication that there is genuine contrition by the Church.
Now Enda Kenny, the head of the Irish Government, has said in parliament hat the Cloyne Report into how allegations of sex abuse by priests in Cork had been covered up showed that change was urgently needed. Mr Kenny said the historic relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again. He said the report exposed the elitism, dysfunction, disconnection, and narcissism that dominated the Vatican.
“The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’,” the Taoiseach said. “The Vatican chose to focus on the interests of the church rather than the children abused by its clergy and shielded by its leaders.”
During the debate, the church was called upon to publish the audits currently being sent to every Catholic diocese in the country.
All of this is long, long overdue, but it must be welcomed that the leader of the Irish Government is now recognising the reality of the extent of the crime and cover up that has occurred. Mr Kenny must follow through to make sure that the church can never again hold such sway that it can obstruct justice and conceal crime.
First of all we need to be clear about what adultery is. You might think that is easy, but the commandments were written about three thousand years ago and things didn’t mean the same then.
People today tend define it as any act of sexual intercourse outside of marriage or, perhaps a bit more narrowly, any act of sexual intercourse between a married person and someone who is not their spouse.
The ancient Hebrews had a different understanding and limited it to just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who was married or betrothed. The marital status of the man was irrelevant. A married man was not guilty of “adultery” for having sex with an unmarried woman.
This is because at that time women were little more than property — a slightly higher status than slaves but not full citizens like men. Because women were like property, having sex with a married or betrothed woman was regarded as misuse of someone else’s property. A married man having sex with an unmarried woman was not guilty of such a crime and thus was not committing adultery. If she also wasn’t a virgin, then the man wasn’t guilty of any crime. A man could have sex with slaves any time he liked.
Because adultery was about married or betrothed women, gay sex didn’t count. It was against other laws of Moses, but not the commandments.
Christians now tend to define adultery much more broadly, and as a consequence almost all extramarital sex acts are treated as violations of the Seventh Commandment. Many claim that adultery should include lustful thoughts, lustful words, polygamy, etc. This is justified by the words of Jesus: “You have heard that it was said by them of old time, You shall not commit adultery: But I say to you, That whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.“ (Matthew 5:27-28). That makes life tough for a bloke and makes it fairly certain that nearly half the human race breaks the rules most days of their life.
Some Abrahamic religions still accept polygamy, so many Moslem men can have up to four wives. Much less need to commit adultery in that situation. Some parts of Shia Islam have the even more convenient concept of mutah or temporary marriage. The temporary marriage contract is as follows: The woman says: ” I marry myself to you for the specified dowry (mention the amount) and for the specified time period (mention the time period)”. Then the man says: “I accept”.” That’ll be fifty bucks for your half hour luv. OK thanks.
Teenage preganancies in the UK have risen for the first time in five years. Britain has the worst record in Europe although it is not as bad as the USA where Bush’s capitulation to the Christian lobby has placed emphasis on abstention from sex before marriage while removing support from anybody helping with contraception or abortion.
Here, the government is asking whether there needs to be an improvement in sex education in schools or classes for girls to show the burdens of motherhood.
I am not sure whether the idiots who suggest this stuff believe any of it or not, but either way it doesn’t matter. They are still going to throw away vast amounts of taxpayers money doing it and building their empires while the misery caused by immature, inadequates becoming parents will continue.
One thing that these children and their families do understand is the benefit and welfare system. Some of them have been living on it for generations and they share their experiences with all their mates. Kids who do not get on at school, have miserable experiences at home and do not see any prospect of doing well in the working world just don’t care about exams or putting effort into anything which is not pleasurable in their eyes.
When a young girl gets pregnant, the state rewards her with loads of attention, a support network, financial benefits and the prospect of a home for her and her baby. Even if she does not get pregnant deliberately to escape her own disfunctional parents or to create another living thing that loves her, she might be happy if it happens for completely rational economic reasons.
These kids are perfectly well aware of the facts of sex and no amount of education is going to make any difference. Still less will there be any point in telling them to save themselves for marriage.
It is really fairly simple. Stop rewarding children for producing more children. The welfare system needs to be dismantled, but a very good start would be to say that there will be no child benefit, no housing provision, in fact no benefits of any kind whatever for parents below the age of eighteen.
That will not stop under eighteens from having sex and it will certainly not stop all of them from becoming pregnant, but it will definitely make them much more interested in using contraception and for many girls, for whom motherhood would be a very bad thing, they will choose a termination rather than going on to face the full reality of what they have done.
I know this will be repugnant to many people. So be it. Let us discuss the issue and consider the consequences of our respective opinions.
The Christian Brothers are a teaching order of the Catholic church which has run schools and orphanages since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Many cases of sexual abuse of children in their care have been established against Christian Brothers in Britain, Ireland Canada and Australia. The requirement of celibacy and the repressive attitude to sex by the church will have undoubtedly contributed to the sexual misconduct by these priests.
What is less easy to explain and generally less well known is the extent of sadistic physical punishments of children in the care of these people. Before corporal punishment of children in schools became generally unacceptable, and illegal in many developed countries, the harshness of the Brothers was not the subject of too much focus and apologists for the order will say that they have to be judged by the norms of the times.
The truth is that the savagery of beatings by men of small children were sadism, sometimes with sexual content, and no amount of justification will alter that. There were also cases where children were taken from Britain to Australia to suffer at the hands of this order in their institutions. Some children alleged to be orphans did have parents and they were lied to about their parents. Apologies have been given for their failures by the Christian Brothers and the Australian Government. Little consolation for a ruined life.
What we should be asking is what is to stop members of this secretive organisation with such a horrific history from finding new ways to exploit and damage children out of sight of the scrutiny that we now hope to be in place?
There should be no place in education or child care for any organisation with such a background. Celibate priests and nuns still have the sexual drives that are generated by their hormones. If these drives do not come out in sexual abuse of children in their care, the frustrations caused by sexual repression may well manifest themselves in cruelty to those same children.
The church creates an unnatural environment in which misconduct is inevitable. It is the responsibility of society to ensure the educational and care establishments provide loving, supportive conditions in which children have the possibility of growing into balanced adults with an understanding of normal human relationships.
The stark truth is that those people who choose life in a celibate religious order are highly unlikely to be fit persons to have the care of children and allowing the Christian Brotherhood to run their own institutions is an invitation for abuse to continue.
David Koresh was originally Vernon Wayne Howell and like Wayne Bent (Michael Travesser) he led a Seventh Day Adventist breakaway sect. Like many others he claimed to be the last prophet of God.
Also like Travesser, and many other cult leaders, Koresh was a sexual predator and child sex abuser. Koresh claimed that he could have any of the females in his compound as his own and he also claimed to have been anointed by God. All of these things echo claims by Travesser. The behaviour of Travesser in ‘dissolving’ the marriages of his followers, not only gave him the self justification to have sex with his daughter-in-law (contrary to Mosaic law in Leviticus), but also, like Koresh, undermined the traditional parent-child relationship and replaced it with a dependence upon a central figure, himself.
Koresh, like Travesser, progressively revealed what he claimed to be God’s plan. In both cases the plan provides for women followers to become wives of the leader and for female children to be socialised to desire to be chosen as a bride of the leader.
Just like the residents of Travesser’s Strong City, children and adults in the Waco compound explained clearly and repeatedly why they chose to remain of their own free will in the sect. The psychological domination by these cult leaders is complete.
In the case of Koresh at Waco 76 people lost their lives in a final confrontation with the FBI. Whoever caused that final loss of life, the deaths and the sex abuse were all the result of the manipulation by David Koresh and the neediness of those who fell into his control.
David Berg called himself Moses and led the Christian cult called The Children of God. Berg was a sexual predator and paedophile who encouraged sex between adults and children in the group as well as himself having sex with children and many female cult members. His advocacy of ‘flirty fishing’ and ‘whores for Christ’ are now rejected by the organisation that continues to exist after his death under the name of The Family International. Like many other cult leaders Berg claimed to be a prophet, but, as always, they were false. His major prophecy was that there would be a doomsday event associated with the comet Kohoutek in 1973.
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