1 comment below

1. Gordon Wilson
   January 5th, 2010 at 10:59 pm

   Dear Dr Lim,

   I was interested in this Vignette, because I think it raises several questions. In the first place, may I say that I am totally at one with you in unequivocally condemning these appalling crimes? To my mind there can be no greater betrayal not only of the priestly vocation in something so totally alien to the pastoral role, but also the message of Christ Himself in saying “suffer the little children to come to me”. Each guilty transgressor should be defrocked and made to bear the full weight of his national legal system. Having made that clear, I would like to address one point about comments on these crimes in general and one about the particular issue you raise of the BBC Panorama programme.

   My first point concerns the huge publicity the Catholic Church bears on the subject. Condemnation should be applied to the Church and its infrastructure whenever it fails in its handling, administrative and retributive measures, but there is a definite trend to have huge publicity on every Catholic case, which dwarfs any publicity that might go to the many other cases of abuse that occur in every country. Some would argue that because the Catholic Church sets such a high premium on moral standards it deserves more criticism when its adherents commit such an evil crime, and that is fair comment. However, the publicity goes way beyond this level to one of marked prejudice. For example, to give an American perspective, I quote from an article by Hilary Profita, dated 24 August in National Review Online, entitled ‘Has Media Ignored Sex Abuse in School? Why Haven’t Teachers Received Same Scrutiny As Catholic Priests?’ “Commentator Tom Hoopes wrote… during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government’s discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools.”

   In looking at the situation from the United Kingdom viewpoint, as a Catholic one is well aware of a latent general anti-Catholicism that exists in many sectors of British society, a legacy of attitudes endemic since the Reformation and the nineteenth century debate on Catholic Emancipation and this not surprisingly extends to this particular phenomenon. In addressing this aspect I would like to quote another neutral in the person of Anglican writer Philip Jenkins, who in his book The New Anti-Catholicism—the Last Acceptable Prejudice, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 133-57 supported many of these arguments stating that media coverage of the abuse story had become “….a gross efflorescence of anti-Catholic rhetoric.” He claims that the Catholic Church is being unfairly singled out by a secular media which he says fails to highlight similar sexual accusations in other religious groups, such as the Anglican Communion, various Protestant churches, and the Jewish and Islamic communities. He also claims that the Catholic Church may have a lower incidence of molesting priests than Churches that allow married clergy because statistically child molestation generally occurs within families but Catholic priests do not have families. He also claims that the term “paedophile priests” widely used in the media, implies a distinctly higher rate of child molesters within the Roman Catholic priesthood when in reality the incidence is lower than most other segments of society. Any incident is totally reprehensible, but I think it important to get the issue into perspective.

   A valid criticism is that in years past transgressing priests had, whenever possible, been sent where it was assessed that they could do no harm, whereas the response should have been far more draconian, but it is worth noting that such responses reflected the mores of the day. It was the widespread general custom to sweep under the carpet all scandals, political, financial, sexual and every other sort. Thus neither Lloyd George’s nor Kennedy’s sexual indiscretions ever found their way into the public domain, but now that could never happen. The Church, like other guilty bodies, could have been accused of holding on to this attitude long after its sell-by date, but that is no longer the case.

   As far as the second issue is concerned, the BBC Panorama programme was broadcast in 2006 and did not appear to make much of an impact. I, who always note comment on issues affecting Catholics in the public domain, was not aware of it. It seems that one of the few, if not only, paper to run an article on it was the Daily Mail, perhaps because it was considered by most informed commentators to be tendentious and obviously very subjective and was aired very late on a Sunday evening. It based its case on what it described as a secret document written in 1962 that sets out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse within the Catholic Church.

   Responding to the documentary, the Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, now Archbishop of Westminster, the primary Catholic see of England and Wales, but then also chairman of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (COPCA), said the BBC should be “ashamed of the standard of the journalism used to create this unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict XVI”. He said there were two strands to the documentary, one highlighting cases of child abuse by priests—a crime the Catholic Church dealt with seriously, carefully and with transparency—the other attacking the Vatican. He made a statement that was endorsed by the Bishops of England and Wales. “This aspect of the programme is false and entirely misleading. It is false because it misrepresents two Vatican documents and uses them quite misleadingly in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the Pope.” In fact it turns out that the ’second’ document cited by the BBC was not a second document at all, but merely a 2001 update of the original text. He also said: “Viewers will recognise only too well the sensational tactics and misleading editing of the programme, which uses old footage and undated interviews. They will know that aspects of the programme amount to a deeply prejudiced attack on a revered world religious leader.” He added, however, that the programme was a reminder of the need to work ceaselessly in the protection of children.

   The Panorama series, while generally good, is not always totally disinterested and has sometimes been criticised in the past for making speculative and subjective programmes without any supporting documentation to support their ‘facts’, such as is required, as you will know well, for any paper or article submitted with academic rigour. The fact that this issue has never risen to prominence in the public domain, even given the anti-Catholic attitudes previously mentioned, reflects the lack of credibility given to this programme and its claims. I suggest it is always wise to regard any documentary programme with a degree of reserve. The majority of those produced by the main British radio and television services are extraordinarily good and serve a necessary purpose, but if they have a message to send or wish to project a pre-conceived theory they can be very subjective in the way the “evidence” is put across and can leave out vital balancing facts. I have had personal experience of this in being a participant in the role of an expert analyst for a programme about a Cold War incident in Arctic Waters. I was asked as an independent academic to give my testimony about general Soviet theory and practices in a particular military dimension as part of the background to the incident, about which subject I was only told shortly before my contribution. I told the producers and directors that I had been very personally involved in the actual incident under investigation and was therefore very surprised, and somewhat disappointed that they then did not ask me to make a contribution based on my knowledge and experience, as I knew I had a great deal to contribute to the subject. Later, when watching the programme being transmitted live, at one stage a retired very senior Soviet military officer gave an assessment of the action taken by the British which bore no resemblance the true facts on which we, a group of four, had taken our decision. I realised then that no-one had approached me because any contribution would have blown apart the evidence of this Soviet officer and destroyed the whole conspiracy theory postulated by the programme. Many years later the discovery of the lost vessel on the seabed totally destroyed the conspiracy theory and vindicated my reaction. The programme was for the Independent TV authority, but of the same status as the Panorama documentaries. I’ve tried to compress this example as much as possible without going into too much detail, but I think it important to point out that sometimes documentaries are not all they claim to be. Although they may be beautifully produced and very persuasive, it perhaps behoves the viewer, not to be a cynic, but to preserve a touch of scepticism and not swallow the message hook, line and sinker.

   One final general point about Pope Benedict XVI, who was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, until his election as Pope in April, 2005, is that in the post he was unflatteringly described as the “Pope’s Rottweiler”. Thus, people who believe such cavalierly bestowed descriptions feared that this would reflect his approach to his role as pope. Far from being a fierce aggressive dog, his attitude has been that of an ameliorator and a builder of bridges. Not only is this seen most recently in his sending a high level member of the Vatican to check on the health and condition of the young woman who pushed him and an accompanying cardinal, whose leg she broke, to the ground on Christmas Day, but significantly in his approach to the Jewish and Islamic faiths. Where he could be criticised is in the selection of his closest advisors and many of the recent faux pas committed by the Vatican can be laid at the door of these aides, who are perhaps too few and not sufficiently sophisticated, for a role that should demand great political awareness. Thus we saw him in his role as an ameliorator in his decision to extend a hand of rapprochement to the followers of the late rebel Archbishop Lefebvre, who had objected to the terms of the Second Vatican Council and retained the Tridentine Mass, establishing a colony of supporters in rural France, putting himself in schism from the church by anointing “bishops” to carry on his work. The Pope’s sole aim was to bring the group back into the body of the church. One of these unworthy so-called bishops was an insignificant Englishman, Richard Williamson, who on deeper investigation proved to be a Holocaust Denier. Immediately the Pope was accused of supporting people with such views, drawing attention to his well documented and admitted, due to his youth and lack of knowledge, membership of Hitler Youth as collateral. Actually the Pope had no idea about Williamson and the Vatican declared that “in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, (he) will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted.” This revealed how quickly the world leaps to unreasonable criticism and the lack of thorough staff work which should have been undertaken by a proper and effective Vatican diplomatic service to protect the Pontiff from such wayward criticism.

   I hope my comments are of some help to you and your readers and please excuse me for going on at such length when the principle behind your vignettes is surely brevity. However, on the information you had you were quite right to bring up the subject and raise very valid concerns on such a significant issue, but that does demand that it be addressed very seriously in response. I might add that the new dimension you have brought to your website in branching out to produce these very varied and wide ranging thoughts is very entertaining.

   Yours very sincerely,
   Gordon Wilson