Is there such a thing as “Catholophobia”? A casual reading of the liberal press might make you think so.
But first a bit of background.
Kincora Boys’ Home, like many institutions in Britain and Ireland of its sort, was a loveless place where the young inmates were routinely emotionally, physically and sexually abused. What made it rather different was that both the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and MI5 knew about the extent of it and the participants’ identities. It’s a murky area but it’s widely accepted in the north of Ireland that the state permitted the abuse to continue in order that it could blackmail those involved into providing intelligence about some of the loyalist gangster organisations. A similar concern for the welfare of abused children was displayed by both the RUC and the Republican Movement when Gerry Adams’ niece went to them with allegations of abuse against her father. The cops wanted her to provide information about family members.
On the radio earlier this week to plug his book Against All Odds was Paul Connolly. He is “a celebrity fitness trainer and creator of the hugely popular Boxerobics”. Connolly spent his childhood in St Leonard’s Children’s Home in East London and his description of systematic sexual abuse by staff and older children was horrifying. in his account some staff members worked in the home for other purpose than to have access to children whom they could abuse. Until the mid 1980s there seemed to be no effective safeguards to protect children from any form of abuse in either state or church run institutions in Britain or Ireland and for some state agencies this was a perfectly valid tool for them to use in their counter-insurgency strategy.
Coming right up to date Birmingham Social Services is currently short of 150 staff. Under these circumstances it’s not surprising that children for whom it is responsible are being murdered by their parents and with the cuts that the council is proposing it is not easy to see how child protection is going to be enhanced anytime soon. You could make a fairly persuasive case that both the local and the national state are complicit in this abuse.
Yet no other organisation is receiving anything like the hammering that the Catholic Church is taking for a series of crimes that happened, for the most part, more than twenty years ago. Much of this opprobrium is well deserved. Its longstanding toleration of abuse and callous attempts to cover it up earned it that. It was one organisation among many which was charged with looking after children and instead destroyed them.
In Pope Benedict’s letter to be read out tomorrow he says to Irish Catholics “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated. I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured." He probably means it but whether or not it does any good is moot. Sean Brady got a round of applause for his apology earlier in the week.
The one thing that is certain is that the liberal press is going to carry on presenting every Catholic parish as a hotbed of child rape, intimidation and emotional violence. Having decided that climate change isn’t so important after all news outlets like the Guardian and Channel 4 have decided that the Papists are the biggest threat to right thinking people. This is a theme that Splintered has explored as well. The trouble is that it has nothing in common with the experience of currently active Catholics. The organisation has spent fifteen years putting in place safeguards comparable to those in the state sector. Catholic churches tend to be places where people come together for a sense of community and things that the outside world does not offer them. One sure way to antagonise lots of working class people will be if some militant secularists decide to protest when Benedict visits Britain. No one is forced to be a Catholic and, if we take the evidence of birth rates, not too many people listen to what the priests tell them about family planning or pre-marital sex.
There are a couple of distinct strands to the attacks on the Catholic Church. The sickly creature that was Irish liberalism is having a field day biting chunks out a big beast to make up for the decades in which it was unwilling to confront it politically. Yet even still there are not too many voices in Ireland making the obvious demand to take the schools and hospitals out of Church control. Government ministers complain that they can’t afford to it and no one challenges the assertion.
Accompanying this is the bunch that wants to take a Dawkinsesque pop at any manifestation of religious belief. It’s not just that they don’t take the trouble to find out what actually happens in active Catholic communities in 2010 it’s the laziness and obvious partiality of a lot of the coverage that becomes irritating. Rather than devoting investigative resources into exploring how government spending decisions in Britain and Ireland are about to make the lives of many thousands of vulnerable children a great deal worse they take the much easier option of a bit of indignation about the Church’s crimes and cover ups.
That’s liberalism for you.
Liam redux 
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