Anti-Catholic feelings

[StrictlyKatty]

I'm pretty exhuasted right now with all the Anti-Catholic feeling on MN

A week never seems to go by without a thread about how Catholics should all feels ashamed about abuse (which we all do!) and how the Catholic Church should disband, that all Priests are kiddy fiddlers etc

Then, which really drives me mad, people with their threads about how to fake religion to get into Catholic school

There is now a thread about how frigging funny it is to see the Pope on a condom. I do wonder how funny people would find Mohammad on a sauasge... not very is my bet! Why can't respect for peoples religion be extended to Catholics?

I just wish people would understand that while noone feels that the RC church doesn't have a lot to apologise for it is not 100% rotten, the Pope isn't a Nazi and not every Priest signed up to spend time alone with little boys

DH thinks I should rise above it, but it hurts me! It has just made me cry seeing all the horrible things people have said about the church today.
Am I alone

1% is 1% too many. If it had been dealt with many years ago, when children tried to tell people - the police when children absconded, teachers who were told but did nothing because they were of course, good Catholics, social workers [children's officers] who just belted you one to shut you up as it would make more paperwork for them, etc. etc. - then it might have stopped it in its tracks.
Yes, individuals are to blame as no one made them to it. But it has been exacerbated by the agenda of the Catholic Church and the lengths it has gone to to hide it, accuse people of lying for monetary gain. And now we have half-hearted apologies to make it all better.
But as someone posted at me on the TES forum, we should have been grateful to have been given a roof over our heads when no-one else wanted us.

of course 1% is too much!

However Noddy is making out that it's practically a majority of Priests how have abused and it's why the majority sign up, so they can do it. That's just simply not true.

Well if it's a voice transcriber then I apologise. However Wannabe also uses a lot of the MN emoticons so would that be possible with a VT?

Yes I agree that there is a lot of anti-Catholic feeling on MN and in society in general.

I know lots of people thought that the Pope question in the leader's debate was a good one, but I rolled my eyes and thought here comes the anti catholic brigade. All the politicians answered the question well though, so credit to them. Maybe none of them wanted to loose the Catholic vote.

My Mum is Irish, and during the troubles she was often insulted by strangers once they heard her accent, so I have a great deal of sympathy for Riven and other Muslims.

someone posted. "I wonder why the crimes weren't reported for so long? Nothing at all to do with intimidation of course. "

I rmeember reading that victims who have been abused as dc very often do not feel able to mention it, never mind report it till they are well into their adult years - maybe late 30s, early 40s. Possibly this is a point where their own children have reached a certain age, I don't know. In which case it may be too late for a prosecution. Having read a few articles mentioning this point, I would like to see this changed in the law to make a prosecution possible at a much later stage.

I think anti-Catholicism was already fairly wide-spread in the UK before the current scandals reealed the true extent of abuse and cover- up . I think isolated cases were known of beforehand. There has always been an element of Catholicsm = worshipping idols and indeed even smacks of devil worship etc etc and Catholics are too thick to realise they can pray directly to God so think they need an intermediary and I don't know what all sorts of half-baked, half-informed attacks. To some degree or other, all religions are subject to that from outsiders.

I think if I had to look one victim of child sexual or other abuse in the eye - or the child's mother, I would be hard put to cope with that person's pain, hurt, etc. The main thing has to be total solidarity with the victims. I do feel sorry for those people who have given up a great deal to embark on the life of service and (I believe) utter loneliness whihc is priesthood or similar and have been in no way involved in this kind of horror scenario. I think these people are suffering a great deal too.

As a mother though, I see the hurt child first. I don't know the solution, I can live with the attacks and I don't know how anyone ccan really "fix" this kind of thing. Just can't understand how it ever got to the point that this kind of thing happened. Can't understand cruelty to children, sexual abuse of children at all.

'Catholics are too thick to realise they can pray directly to God so think they need an intermediary'

How can people say that?!

they do katty, I hear it all the time

but never mind, the point of the thread : is there too much anti-Catholic feeling - I don't know how excessive it may be atm because I have not really been following it. So little time atm to MN that I just belt out a quick post here and there and I'm off again IYSWIM

I've found when MN or anything else gets me down too much, I need to take a step back from it.

I don;t get upset when people are ignorant about the details of my faith and make silly comments based on that. I am much more upset by the fact that our church hierarchy covered up child abuse. And even if they were investigating it fully themselves (and I am mighty sceptical about their motives), the secrecy was unacceptable. These were crimes, and should have been investigated as such by the police. Where the church carried out their own investigations, is there any evidence that they handed the abusers over to the criminal justice system? Or did they just shift them on to another parish.

well what is being investigated would interest me.

I see the need (not an expert in any way) to find out how it came about in the first place. What structures/attitudes made it possible?

Another thing is dealing with reported abuse, making infomration known to the civil authorities for prosecution etc

There is a lot of talk about celibacy being the cause and I don't think I really buy into that. So many people are celibate (from necessity, from choice - partner is ill, dead or the sexual relationship has fizzled out but they are staying with their partner in a sexless marriage etc), yet these people don't start abusing children. So what led to it in the first place?

Then there is the attitude of the church hierarchy and the lower level parish employers towards dp who brought up charges. It has to be an acceptable thing to bring up these charges without being ostracized and there has to be a loving, caring, accepting attitude to the child that makes it possible for them to be honest about this after what they have endured. I have no experience of this personally but it must be incredibly hard if you are abused by someone who is in a position of particular trust (like a close relative or a church minister of some kind would be) to raise your voice and if this voice is then not believed.

I don't understand for instance if someone becomes an abuser or children after entering the priesthood after a certain period of time/having made particular experiences or do they have this tendancy/inclination anyway. Do people who punished children in orphanages in horrible ways have something fundamentally wrong with them before doing that job or does the position of authority v.a.v. the children encourage that behaviour? I am rambling a bit. I think all this needs thorough research by independent psychiatrists,researchers if there is going to be a real end to it.

The church needs to do what it should always have done - put a lot of work into helping those who were harmed.

live and let live, I'm catholic and my dh isn't but our dc are. As long as people are good , kind and honest that's all that matters. I do get a bit cross with "all catholic priests are peados" stuff that is always in the paper, of course it's awful, but how many peados are out there who aren't priests, we have a lovely priest and my dd alter serves, but I take sensible precautions as I would with any one else who has contact with my child, it's a very sad world where everyone is assumed guilty just because others have done wrong.

can't get away from the feeling that fundamentally those children just were not considered of much account and I can't understand it, like perhaps further back in the past the poor were considered to be of not much account

Probably this is not the case but it is the impression that I get when I read about these cases and the way they were handled

ZZZenAgain, from my own experience, young nuns would finish their novitiate and be allocated to a specific home. They would arrive and after a few months the culture of abuse already prevalent in the homes would be adopted by them too. It then became the norm, the systematic physical abuse - not normal chastisement, but cruel, unreasonable punishment. Kicking, punching, pinching, hitting a child with wooden coathangers, wood-backed hairbrushes, belts, or being battered to within an inch of your life for just looking at one of the nuns or priests, is not reasonable chastisement. It is cruel and abject cruelty meted out to children who had no one to speak up for them.
For example, Bishop Mario Conti, Bishop of Aberdeen, but a young curate when I was a child in the home where he worked in the parish tried, in the defence of a nun who was being tried for cruelty, to say that hitting children was the culture in those days.
And, of course, we weren't of much account. The authorities placed us with the RC church because they, along with Barnardos were the main care givers in that era.
It was the cheap option.

that's horrific. How could they do that? I'm so sorry you went through that.

I just can't put myself in the place of one of the perpetrators of that kind of cruelty and understand how they ticked. On the one hand they have joined an order to serve Christ and mankind with all of Christ's teaching being brought up in front of them on a daily basis and they could hear all that and yet blank out how they themselves were treating you children. I don't see how they reconciled that behaviour at all with the life they were supposed to be leading. I would really like to think that had I entered into that orphanage, I would not ever have fallen in with the mishandling of children but now I am starting to wonder if the structures were fundamentally so evil in the first place.

How long were you there?

From birth to 15 which was the school leaving age at that time in 1963.
The reasons give in social work records were 'Abandonment.'

As an aside here, some children, but rarely, were sent to the homes on a 'short stay, arrangement if the mother or father was ill and extended family couldn't look after them.
They would get regular visits from family, The family would obviously be expected to pay for the privilege and, strangely enough,little or no abuse was directed at these children. The nuns and priest were always careful in that respect.

StrictlyKatty, you agree then that the Pope HAS kept it quiet so we don't have to argue that point any more?.

I can hardly believe we are all trying to explain this to you. Someone already gave a similar example, but if a headteacher found out some teachers were abusing the kids what right would he have to keep it from the police to investigate it himself? To tell the other teachers they would be sacked if they went to the police? To refuse to supply what evidence/records he had when the police did become involved?

I thought last night we might be being a bit hard on you, but now you are saying that keeping child abuse from being reported from the police is a good idea I have no sympathy at all.

"Heathen Do you actually understand how the law works?"

Umm, let me think, SK...

Does it start by reporting a crime to the police, and letting them assess the evidence?

Majoriew, that they would distinguish so clearly between the treatment of children there for a shorter time (whose parents were paying) and the other children shows very clearly to me that they were well aware that what they were doing went beyond "the culture of the time".

"I'm sure noone wants
to see innocent people vilified that is why the Church looks for actually evidence you know that thing they use in law to actually make it fair" And do tell, how did it come about that it became the church's job to look for evidence in these cases when generally when a crime is committed the evidence gathering is down to the police? At what point did someone make the catholic church above the law?

"Heathen Do you actually understand how the law works?"

Let me explain it, since you don't seem to know yourself. You see what happens is when someone goes to a senior authority and says "I have been sexually abused by father pervert" the senior authority should say "I am so dreadfully sorry my child. I will ring the police immediately." And then the police would be called and they would interview the child and the priest and then they would gather more evidence and then charges would be brought. Yes that's the police not the church.

Wannabe do you find it so outsides the realm of possiblity that someone could actually disagree with you?

Also you should thank Riven, for a minute I really did think a grown women couldn't spell decade.

Does anyone actually BELIEVE it???????????? that's what gets me..

I mean, really,... truly... believe that god made the world in 7 days and NOT that evolution occured over a million plus years.

Please... someone explain how you can NOT believe Darwin...

Well I know a lot of Protestants who believe in creation in a much much more literal way than I do... so I don't see why that is a point for this thread really.

The Catholic Church has accepted evolution, but states that it was God's will. That is what I believe, my Protestants friends believe there was an Adam and an Eve...