North America, Ireland, Northern Europe - Now Brazil

This from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Child sex scandals roiling the Roman Catholic church spread to Brazil on Tuesday after the Vatican said three priests were under investigation following allegations of child abuse.

The Vatican's acknowledgment takes controversies that have rocked the church in the United States and more recently in Europe to the country with the largest Catholic population in world. About 74 per cent of Brazil's 140 million people identify as Catholics.

SBT television last week aired video from a hidden camera showing father Marques Barbosa, 82, having sex with a 19-year-old boy in the northeastern state of Alagoas.

After the act, the priest's face is identified as he looks toward the camera and says "Who's there?" "Who is it?"

The report on the program Conexao Reporter also included charges by three former altar boys that they too had been sexually abused by local priests.

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Will Benedict Resign Over Abuse?

OK, I know just the question seems absurd, but somebody seems to think so, sufficiently strongly to be putting money on it - big money. The betting odds are tumbling, You can even get odds on the choice of papal successor!

Bookmaker slashes odds on Pope's resignation

LONDON (Reuters) - Irish bookmaker Paddy Power said Friday it had cut the odds on Pope Benedict XVI resigning after allegations of child abuse by priests in Germany gripped the Roman Catholic Church.

Vatican Paper Asks: "Where Were The Women"?

For many years, it seemed that the institutional Church was content to ignore the unfolding stories of widespread sexual abuse by priests, or at best to address only the specific problems of individual perpetrators and the pain of victims. Recently, as the scale of the problems expands (Switzerland is the latest country reported to be investigating complaints) numerous observers have remarked on how swiftly the tone has changed, with an increasing number of high ranking prelates starting to talk about the real issues contributing to the enabling environment. Just in the past few days, Cardinals from Austria (Schonborn) and Brazil (Hummes) have been calling into question the rigid rule on compulsory celibacy.

"Times have changed, and society too, and the Church will have to consider how this type of life can be maintained or what it has to change," Salzburg Archbishop Alois Kothgasser said on Austria's ORF television on Thursday evening.

In a diocesan newsletter, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna said the Church had to ask difficult questions about the abuse scandals. "That includes the issue of celibacy and the personal development" of priests, he wrote.

-Reuters

The Catholic Church is studying ways to loosen the centuries-old requirement that priests abstain from sex in an effort to rebuild its image in the wake of pedophile scandals, Rome-based la Repubblica reported today. Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, who once said “celibacy is not a dogma,” is in charge of the project as head the congregation of the clergy, according to the report.

Business Week

Outside the ranks of the powerful others have been calling for greater lay participation in the selection and oversight of their bishops.

Now, right at the heart of the Vatican, the newspaper L'Osservatore Romano is suggesting that it is time to revisit that other church bugbear - the place of women.

Vatican: A Ship Sinking Itself?

One of the funniest books I have ever read was "The Book of Heroic Failures", written by the founder of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. The background to this is that Stephen Pile was a fairly ordinary Englishman who believed that the world was becoming obsessed with "success" - bigger, better richer, brighter, faster, and all the rest - when most of us are pretty ordinary, like himself. So, reasonably enough, he formed a club for people who were NOT very good at anything, and especially for those who were very bad at something - who used to meet, and tell each other stories of spectacular failures. These were later collected and published under the title "The Book of Heroic Failures." I read this nearly thirty years ago, and still snort when I remember some of the anecdotes: of a hard of hearing military quartermaster who incorrectly heard a request for several hundred brass taps, and bought bra straps instead (for an all0male camp), or the nervous amateur actor who had a few drinks to calm his nerves before his first night as the Prince of Denmark, then a few more - then passed out just before the curtain. In the best theatrical tradition, the show duly went on - without Hamlet.

The book itself was a story of staggering failures:

Abuse as the "Defining Moment" of Benedict's Papacy

In an effective analysis at the Times, Richard Owen argues that the whole clerical abuse saga may well turn out to be Pope Benedict's defining moment. For far too long, the church authorities appeared to totally ignore the problem and brush it under the carpet. Even as recently as the visit of the Irish bishops, the impression created was that he was totally underestimating the problem.

"Papal Whitewash" ran one headline in the Irish press after Pope Benedict’s encounter with the Irish bishops. No bishops were sacked, no abuse victims were heard, and the Pope — who is to visit Britain in September — announced no plans to visit Ireland to apologise and to mend fences.

More recently, there has been some grudging recognition that more may need to be done, but this still does not go beyond absolute basics. Instead, they have gone on the defensive, trying to argue (against all the evidence) that the Vatican response has been "decisive" and that other institutions are equally guilty.

(Continue reading this post)

Abuse: Is it OK if everybody else is doing it?

An Irish prelate has lashed out at "the media" for making so much fuss about clerical abuse, when so much more abuse occurs elsewhere.

A senior bishop has attacked the media for singling out the Catholic Church for covering-up paedophile priests when 95pc of child abuse occurs in families and community life.

Christopher Jones, the Bishop of Elphin and head of the bishops' committee on the family, said in Maynooth last night that he strongly objected to the way the church was being isolated. "Of course we have made mistakes," Dr Jones added.

"But why this huge isolation of the church and this huge focus on cover-up in the church when it has been going on for centuries?

"It is only now for the first time ever that victims have been given their voice." Dr Jones said that it was known that "95pc of abuse out there is in families, communities and other institutions.

He is right, of course.  There is far more abuse outside the church than in it.  But that completely misses the point.  We do not point to "families" as at fault, because they do not represent a cohesive group, subject to the same  corporate rules and controls as the church.

But let's take Bishop Jones' figures at face value, and consider their implication.  If 95% of abuse takes place outside the chruch, then presumably 5 % is "within" . That implies that 5% of abusers are priests ( or other church staff).  Wikipedia gives the number of secular clergy in Ireland as about 3000, with a further 700 in religious orders.  Call it 4000 for round numbers, or even 5000 in case of undercount. The total population of the country is about five million: one person in a thousand is a priest.  So, 0.1% of the population are responsible for 5%  of the of the abuse.  That equates to a propensity to abuse which is 50 times greater than the general population (or 25 times more if we assume all abusers to be male). That is the point - not the total number of cases, but the incidence, especially in an institution that claims to be a moral guardian, guiding us in right living.

Abuse & Celibacy: Austrian Cardinal Opens the Can of Worms (UPDATED)

As the problems of sexual abuse within the Church continue to cascade across Europe, The Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna has called on the Church to investigate fully the causes of the problem, including the role of celibacy and methods of priestly training.  This is should be welcomed with enthusiasm:  observers and analysts outside the Church establishment have for years been producing convincing evidence that these are two of the crucial issues behind the creation of the enabling environment, evidence which most bishops have simply ignored.   In an odd sequel, though, Cardinal Schonborn later issued a "clarifying" statement that he was not calling into question the Vatican stance on compulsory celibacy.  In doing so, he brings into sharp focus the third of the factors widely believed to be behind that enabling environment:  excessive central control and abuse of power. For there is little point in "investigating" the causes if you rule out in advance certain conclusions that  might follow, or fail to act on the conclusions you might reach, but the Cardinal knows full well that an unfavourable conclusion on celibacy will be totally unacceptable to the Vatican - and so threatening to his own position.  It is not at all accidental that Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, through his extensive work with the Australian problems with abuse, reached the firm conclusion that celibacy was indeed central to the issue - but waited until his retirement before publishing those conclusions.

[caption id="attachment_5349" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Cardinal Shonborn - under his watchful eye."][/caption]

Still, every little step forward is welcome.  The institutional response is clearly "evolving", and will evolve a lot further before this is over.