Certified Hypocrite Award: Bill Donohue and Cardinal Antonio Canizares.
Yes, this time it’s a tie for the Certified Hypocrite Award. Why? Because there are two individuals with the audacity to downplay the recently exposed abuse in Catholic-run Irish schools. First up, Bill Donohue, notorious anti-gay bigot of The Catholic League.
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Reuters is reporting that “Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children,” yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. Four types of abuse are noted: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. Physical abuse includes “being kicked”; neglect includes “inadequate heating”; and emotional abuse includes “lack of attachment and affection.” Not nice, to be sure, but hardly draconian, especially given the time line: fully 82 percent of the incidents took place before 1970. As the New York Times noted, “many of them [are] now more than 70 years old.” And quite frankly, corporal punishment was not exactly unknown in many homes during these times, and this is doubly true when dealing with miscreants.
Sorry, but even when corporal punishment was considered appropriate discipline for children kicking could never, by any stretch of the imagination, be deemed anything but abusive. Furthermore since when does the fact that they were “miscreants” mean that abuse should be expected, even condoned?
The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower. They think about rape.
I worked 20 years in Human Services so I know very well what does and does not constitute abuse. Abuse encompasses a wide range of behaviors including verbal, physical, sexual and psychological. Neglect, which includes things like inadequate heating, insufficient food and the like, is also a form of abuse. (Of course specific definitions and regulations vary from state to state in the US and no doubt from nation to nation.) To claim that unless a person is raped they haven’t been abused is to demean victims everywhere. This is particularly obscene coming from the likes of Bill Donohue, who once stated “The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done.”
Next up is Cardinal Antonio Canizares of the Vatican.
CHURCH RESPONSE: A SENIOR Vatican figure, Spanish Cardinal Antonio Canizares, prefect for the Congregation of the Divine Worship, this week appeared to downplay the findings of the Ryan report when suggesting that the millions of lives lost through abortion represent a much more serious crime against humanity than clerical sex abuse.Speaking on Catalan channel, TV 3, Cardinal Canizares, said the behaviour of some Catholic priests and nuns in Ireland was to be totally condemned and that they had committed crimes “for which we have to ask forgiveness”.
Speaking in the context of an abortion debate prompted by a Spanish government proposal, the cardinal said: “What happened in some schools cannot be compared with the millions of lives that have been destroyed by abortion.It (abortion) has legally destroyed 40 million human lives.”
Cardinal Canizares is hoping he can divert attention away from the umpteenth Catholic child abuse scandal by getting people into an argument about abortion. He’s also like a deficient employee who, when called in by the boss, whines petulantly “But Johnson steals office supplies! Why aren’t you doing something about hiiiiimmmm?”
The Catholic Church needs to simply accept responsibility for what’s been done and face the repercussions. These attempts to downplay the seriousness of the abuses and deflect attention to shiny objects are pathetic and do a great disservice to the victims.
