Dublin Archdiocese Report on Child Sexual Abuse

Serial-Paedophile-Enabling Archbishops: John Charles McQuaid 1940 - 1972, Dermot Ryan 1972 - 1984, Kevin McNamara, 1985 - 1987, Desmond Connell 1988 - 2004.
Murphy Commission:

* Dublin Archdiocese Report on Child Sexual Abuse: Part 1
* Dublin Archdiocese Report on Child Sexual Abuse: Part 2

"Officials of the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities have repeatedly claimed to have been, prior to the late 1990s, on a learning curve in relation to the matter. Having completed its investigation, the Commission does not accept the truth of such claims and assertions."

Church 'lied without lying'

One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows clerics mislead people without believing they are lying.

According to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits a church man knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying”.

It gives an example. “John calls to the parish priest to make a complaint about the behaviour of one of his curates. The parish priest sees him coming but does not want to see him because he considers John to be a troublemaker. He sends another of his curates to answer the door. John asks the curate if the parish priest is in. The curate replies that he is not.”

The commission added: “This is clearly untrue but in the Church’s view it is not a lie because, when the curate told John that the parish priest was not in, he mentally reserved the words '…to you’.”

I found it astounding that the commission even spent any time considering the mentality of the people who helped enable the continued activities of paedophile sexual abusers in the Irish Catholic Church.

If the commision had any integrity it would merely have called them out as liars, morally-bankrupt cowards and peadophile enablers each and every time they were caught doing it.

What this shows is that even in the midst of all these revelations of the absolute depravity and evidence of the role the Church Heirarchy in covering-up and facilitating the continuation of serial child sexual abuse, the Commission of Inquiry are STILL threading carefully so to avoid causing too much offence to the oh-so-delicate sensibilities of the Irish Catholic Church Heirarchy.

For example :

"The commission added: “This is clearly untrue but in the Church’s view it is not a lie because, when the curate told John that the parish priest was not in, he mentally reserved the words '…to you’.”

Serial Paedophile enabler and all-round sophist, Cardinal Desmond Connell: explained 'mental reservation' as method whereby clerics can 'lie without lying'

It is that exact same deference to those oh-so-delicate sensibilities of the Irish Catholic Church Heirarchy, which allowed them to continue to cover-up the activities of these child sexual abusing Clergy.

Attempts to explain the Churchs view go some way to inssulatig them from the consequences of their actions. The commisions job hould not be to provide mitigating evidence for the churchs deplorable actions (or lack of them). it is not a defence to say they had a rationale for what they did.

Attempts to explain the Irish Church's rationale seem to me to be an attempt to somehow insulate the Church from the true reality of what it did (or what it did NOT do, which it should have done.)

I'm sure every peadophile or sexual abuser everywhere has a rationale for what they did, but the Irish Church's actions (or lack of them) are even more egregious in these matters than would be those of an actual peadophile or sexual abuser, given their self-appointed role as moral arbiter/guardian for Irish society as a whole.


William Burroughs:
"If you're doing business with a religious son of bitch,
get it in writing."
(William ,of course, had his own dark history concerning sex with young men and boys. Since they were under-age, and some sort of pay-off was usually involved, one could hardly argue that it was consensual.)

This sort of sexual abuse, by those in positions of authority over young people, is far from being merely a problem of so-called The Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church. Evidence for this can be found when one considers that the exact same sort of abuse has occurred (is occuring) in similar British institutions. So here's nothing particularly 'Holy Roman Catholic' about this sort of thing, despite many people's attempts to claim that there is.

The last time I checked the British were not under the control of the so-called Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church.

When people are given absolute control over others and when there is no effective oversight concerned with the interest of those under control, abuses of power like this are inevitable.

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902)in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887

Proof of the truth of this can be found by examining the events which occurred during the Standford prison Experiment

Standford Prison Experiment @ Google Video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=677084988379129606#

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Those selected were chosen for their lack of psychological issues, crime history, and medical disabilities, in order to obtain a representative sample. Roles were assigned based on a coin toss.

They adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized (two of whom had to be removed from the experiment early). After being confronted by Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating,[2] and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become too grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days. . . . The Stanford experiment ended on August 20, 1971, only six days after it began instead of the fourteen it was supposed to have lasted. The experiment's result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.

In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attribution of behaviour rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behaviour, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.

One could also examine the conclusions of the Milgram Experiment

The Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[2]

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?"

Milgram's testing revealed that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.[3] Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Abu Ghraib - sexually abused Prisoners and various other forms of degredation

look at Abu Ghraib. the guards there were not particularly 'Holy Roman Catholic' either if I remember correctly