Keith Porteous Wood is Executive Director of the National Secular Society
I am pleased that commentators [see Shane in Jeff's post last week] have come forward to illustrate the somewhat counterproductive strategy of apologists for the Catholic Church’s non-actions in tackling child abuse. They make a bad situation a hundred times worse: shooting the messenger; attacking the attacker and playing victim are specialties of the Church. He has learned well from them. But it will not cut much ice; the time is long gone when the Church had so much moral authority those asked to jump asked, “how high?” The Pope discovered that yesterday when his supposed olive branch to the Irish people was rejected by the vast majority of commentators.
On Shane’s secrecy point, I suggest he (or anyone else) puts “secrecy vatican child abuse” into Google. It will provide hours of reading. The culture of secrecy is well covered in an article[1] entitled Arrogant, corrupt, secretive – the Catholic church failed to tackle evil from the Observer on 21 March 2010, which deserves to be read in its entirety. Another article in the same paper refers to the Pope’s/Cardinal Ratzinger’s notorious 2001 letter “instructing bishops to report all abuse cases to his office at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for confidential handling. Vatican officials have said the measure was designed to prevent cases being covered up at local level, but Irish bishops reportedly understood the letter to mean they should not report cases to the police.”
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