Pope 'visibly upset' at horror uncovered by Ryan inquiry

By ED CARTY and JOHN COONEY, Tuesday June 09 2009. Irish Independent

POPE Benedict was "visibly upset" by horrific revelations of sexual, physical and emotional torture of children uncovered by the Ryan inquiry, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin revealed yesterday.

The Pontiff also told Ireland's two most senior Catholic clerics that the victims of abuse must get justice.

In a Vatican meeting with Cardinal Brady and Archbishop Martin last Friday, Pope Benedict reiterated his call for the Church hierarchy to make amends to the thousands of children who suffered at the hands of abusive priests, brothers and nuns.

"He (the Pope) was very visibly upset to hear of some of the things told in the Ryan report and how the children had suffered from the very opposite of the expression of a love of God," the Archbishop said.

Cardinal Brady and Archbishop Martin briefed the country's bishops in Maynooth on the 45-minute meeting with the Pontiff and on separate talks with seven cardinals in the Holy See last week.

Devastating

The two archbishops outlined to the Catholic leaders the devastating findings of the report along with the subsequent fallout and criticisms of 18 religious orders.

Cardinal Brady said: "He (the Pope) listened very attentively, very sympathetically to what we had to say and he said in reply that this was a time for deep examination of life here in Ireland and the Church."

The Cardinal, Primate of All-Ireland, said the Pope also discussed the steps needed to respond to the harrowing catalogue of abuse.

"Establish what is the truth of what happened -- and the Ryan report is an important part of that -- to ensure that justice is done for all; and put in place the measures that will prevent these events ever happening again with a view to healing -- healing the hurt suffered by survivors," the cardinal said yesterday. (No mention of the clerical institutionalism which desperately tried to save itself from this exposure?)

"He (Pope Benedict) listened very attentively to everything we had to say."

The Conference of Religious in Ireland was briefed on the Vatican meetings last night.
"The message again we bring back with us, we have to listen to the victims, we have to listen to the survivors. They are the ones who have gone through this," Archbishop Martin said.

"It is to listen and learn from what's in the report and do a little bit of deep soul searching of what way the Church will look in Ireland in the years to come."

The Archbishop also signalled talks with senior Vatican officials on the damning Ryan inquiry will continue.

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Listening is good, seeking justice is good, enacting child protection strategies is good, but if it's all designed to leave the real problem in place--an absolutist non transparent Church institution-- then it's all a good smoke screen.

Pope Benedict can not possibly feign ignorance of this situation. A number of the documents used in the Ryan report with regards to some of the congregations came directly from the Vatican. As Cardinal Ratzinger he was in charge of dealing with cases of religious sexual abuse in the two and a half decades he served in the CDF. A lot of this information had to cross his desk, and although he never said a word about the victims, the perpetrators continued in ministry, usually in other dioceses or even countries.

I can't help but wonder how much of his disgust is with himself, and the system he led, which allowed this to go on for so long. I hope he understands that calling for justice for victims and for a deep examination of the Irish Church and culture may lead to the necessity for change in how the Church does business. In may further lead to the admission that in this kind of institutional abuse, the mission of the Church itself has been consistently co opted by the society in which it operates and which it help formulate.

The further I delve into the Ryan report, the more I wonder if this isn't really about institutionalized class warfare just as the abuse in Native residential schools was institutionalized racial and cultural warfare.

The commitment statistics seem to indicate the real crime committed by the vast majority of these children was poverty. The crimes committed against them were all too often perpetrated by individuals from the same impoverished background who were given no formal education by the orders they joined to escape their own poverty.

"The section on Artane notes reasons for committal between 1940 and 1969: 1,374 children were committed for “improper guardianship”, 1,045 for bad school attendance, 720 for destitution, 227 for being homeless, 220 for larceny, 90 for other crimes."

Not a whole lot of violent crime in those statistics, but a whole lot of collusion by the courts and the child welfare system to get these kids off the streets and to pay the Church to do whatever it took to keep them off the streets. This does appear to be a case of Church and State aligning against the poorer classes. This was not about Christian love, it was about good old fashioned societal fear.

The US has done this very same thing, not only to our Native children, but also to our mentally ill and mentally retarded. Those massive institutions prior to the 1980's were warehouses staffed by questionably educated people who all too frequently took advantage of their 'patients'. I toured a number of them in the 70's and left them in tears, far beyond disgust.

Later when I worked with a number of smaller group homes I found that some of this population was completely misdiagnosed and were now institutionally retarded, almost incapable of living on their own. That's not surprising when you consider some of them had been living in underfunded institutional settings for thirty or forty years. Prisons, it seems, come in many shapes and sizes and for many kinds of 'unacceptable' people. They exist in all societies.

But here's the difference, the entire mental health system was revamped in order to clean up and find a more humane approach for the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled. It was a huge undertaking, took a lot of soul searching and a lot personal honesty. There was never a question that the system had to be changed and that meant from the courts right down to the qualifications of the lowliest employee. The system was forced into accountability by the people it was supposed to serve--families, patients, and other providers.

I don't see where Catholicism under it's present form of governance is willing to under go the same process. It's hard to imagine an unaccountable hierarchy forcing itself to be accountable unless the people it exists to serve, the laity and those clerical members of integrity, insist on real change. Until that happens, the privileged inmates will continue to run this particular asylum and the abuses will continue to occur.