Why Humanists shouldn't join the Catholic bashing, and other perspective on the Catholic child abuse scandal

Mouse has not yet commented on the child abuse scandal that is rocking the Catholic Church round the world, and is even dragging the Pope into the sights of leader writers worldwide.

So much has been written already that Mouse feels he has little to add.  However, recently the language being used in the debates has become so far detatched from reality that Mouse feels compelled to bring his perspective.

The first piece which every critic of the Catholic Church should read is the piece by Brendan O'Neill in Spiked, 'Why Humanists shouldn't join the Catholic bashing'.

Mouse does not agree with everything that O'Neill says, but it is a good piece from a humanist arguing that there has been a trend amongst new atheists to use the scandal to demonise the Catholic Church is not based on a reasoned analysis of the facts.  There are a number of interesting lines of argument in the article, but perhaps more importantly there are some facts.  These have been lacking in many of the commentaries.  For example, it is the first time Mouse has seen that over a third of the allegations made in Ireland do not actually relate to priests, but to lay staff, care workers and fellow pupils.  Surely this is significant to those commentaries which lay the blame for abuse of celibacy rules, although it obviously does not diminish the impact of these cases for those involved.  Or take for example the fact that only 46 of the 381 claims of abuse came after 1970.  Again, surely relevant in understanding the nature of the scandal.  We must try to understand why there was such a peak of abuse in the 1960s, with half of all claims of abuse over the 85 year period coming from that decade.

This article can be contrasted with Richard Dawkins intervention.  He called the Pope a 'leering old villain in a frock' and the Catholic Church a 'profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution'.  No point wasting time with reasoned argument, just go straight for the insult bag and pull out as much as you can.

The second piece is an old article from Bartholomew's Notes, which he has recently re-posted.  Much has been made of the edicts issued from the Vatican to Bishops worldwide on how to deal with cases of alleged abuse.  Critics argue that they were an order to deal with allegations internally and swear the victims to secrecy.  The Vatican argues that it was no such thing, and merely an instruction to deal with cases by the book, including the need to keep confidentiality while cases were unproven allegations, and did not include instructions to conceal cases from civil authorities.

Bartholomew points out that the letter is very difficult to read if you are not well versed in 'canon legalise', which probably means that much of the comment on it is not based on a thorough reading of the letter, but on popularised media reports of it.  His conclusion seems to be that there is nothing in the letter which instructs Bishops to hide cases from civil authorities, but there is equally not a clear instruction to make them known to civil authorities.

From all of this, Mouse is left wondering what to do.  The first thing, of course, is to pray for the victims of abuse and seek to support them in any way we can.  As for the Church, there must be a process of seeking justice, which means bringing the truth into the open.  Cardinals who have failed to take the church down that road must now resign.