An atrocious scandal at a Benedictine abbey

[fpb]

I am not well disposed about charges against the Catholic Church. But what has come out from the Benedictine abbey of Ealing, west London, and its school, is so atrocious that I am firmly convinced that the whole abbey ought to be investigated as a criminal association. It is not just impossible, it is inconceivable, that abuse could have gone on

Comments

[sabethea]

the long-heard lie that the whole Church is somehow responsible for these crimes

Oh gosh, this argument when used against any general body makes me FURIOUS. A small amount of animal rights protestors who kill/put at risk humans means that all AR people are nuts. A few people diagnosed with ME send threatening letters to doctors who say it's all in their minds, meaning that all people with ME are dangerous criminals who think the same way. A murderer is found with Black Sabbath CDs in his room, therefore Black Sabbath made hir commit the crime.

There have been millions of Catholic monks and priests and religious order folk. MILLIONS. And a tiny fraction of them have been - well, whatever word you choose to use: evil/mad/twisted/perverted/horrible/mentally ill. This says nothing about the church (any more, to be fair, than the equally comparatively small number of Incredibly and Amazingly Wonderful people who are Catholic means that the church is beyond reproach).

Any argument which is based on "there are five cases of this out of millions, therefore this proves it is commonplace" is ridiculous.

[fpb]

Thank you, but, while I agree, the point is somewhat different.

What the victims' disgusting lawyer imagines, and what she has got an ignorant judge to state, is that somewhere in the universe there is an entity called "the Catholic Church" which is the employer of these villains, which pays their wages, and which can therefore be held responsible for their crimes. NO SUCH ENTITY EXISTS. The entity which, in law, ought to be regarded as the employer of the monks - and of the teachers, if the school belonged to the abbey - is a specific "family" (there are fourteen, I believe) of the Benedictine Order. This is already quite a large target for any ambulance chaser; every Benedictine Family owns several abbeys and priories with large properties in land and the product of monastic labour (the Benedictine motto is "Work and Pray", and monks from this tradition are supposed to earn their living with their own hands). The relationship of the Patriarch of Rome with this body, as with many others, is one of jurisdiction, not of government and certainly not of possession or financial administration. The Papacy validates the Catholic identity of every body - Diocese, religious order or other institution - that is, as the expression says, "in communion" with it; it can, conversely, expel (excommunicate) members or institutions that refuse its teaching in word or deed, or order delinquent clergy to stop practicing their function as clergy (suspension a divinis, laicization), or use other appropriate disciplinary functions; and it can direct specific persons to work in specific areas (e.g. missionaries, but the Church can also commission a priest who is a scholar to produce a work of scholarship - for instance). In short, and to be clear, the Pope is not the ultimate shareholder, but the ultimate judge. Every diocese and every monastic order is in that sense an independent entity, subject to Church law, but that administers its own property, has its own income and expenditure, and pays its own clergy and its lay employees. The Vatican does have international financial structures including a bank (the IOR, Istituto per le Opere di Religione - Institute for Religious Works), but their relationship with dioceses and religious orders is that of two autonomous bodies. The IOR is NOT the owner of any parish, school, monastery or other religious body outside the actual territory of the Vatican.

Behind this false thinking there is, of course, the kind of prejudice you mention, but there is something more practical and immediate: the lust of Henry VIII, the observation that Catholic bodies own considerable amounts of assets and that those assets, or their value in cash, would look so much nicer in your own pocket, But in order to carry out this kind of raid it's not enough to prove that a crime has been committed within the Church (and in an organization that includes one-sixth of mankind, crimes are always there to be found by anyone who wants to find them), but to prove that the whole Church is - not responsible, because not even the worst ambulance chaser could actually prove that, but legally liable for it. And that is just plain wrong. It's bad law and false to facts.

In this case this leads to something even worse. The Lib Dem peer Lord Carlisle, the very strange choice for an investigator in this inquiry, has also failed to note the real point, which is that the abbey itself must be regarded as a criminal association, or at least as sheltering one, and has gone off into a disgusting little side issue of trying to break down the organizational dependency of faith schools in general with religious bodies in general. This is bullshit in this case - since some of the criminals were lay employees and not monks - and utterly undesirable in general. I have a life-sized picture of a Sikh gurdwar or a Muslim mosque accepting to follow Lord Carlisle's recommendation; they would tell the State to keep its fingers out of institutions they have set up, paid for, and staffed, and they would be right.

[fpb]

Whooops. The "something even worse" I mentioned went actually unsaid above. It is this: that in all this idiotic kerfuffle of bad law and power-lust, the one thing that has not been sufficiently investigated is the mechanics of the actual crimes and the extent to which collusion existed in the actual abbey. Nobody, that is, seems to have wanted to ask whether the abbey was, as seems obvious to me, a criminal association, how far back that association went, and who was involved in its common criminal purpose. To the contrary, Lord Carlisle seems to have started from an assumption that the abbey as such was innocent. Luckily the Pope has ordered his own inquiry into the facts, and while this Pope is no rabid disciplinarian, he has been know to shut down corrupt priories and discipline disorderly orders such as the Legion of Christ. Perhaps church investigators will show more sense than British lawyers.

[sabethea]

I apologise for taking the tone of this down from world religion, but to put it in simpler terms - basically, it's like suing a millionaire Minister for Education because one teacher (or even one school) committed a crime. Because the Minister in question (hypothetically) happens to be astoundingly rich, and they can request he pays from his own pocket.

On the other hand - and again, I'm probably showing my ignorance - shouldn't one start from the idea of 'innocent until proven guilty', whether it be the Catholic Church, a single person, or an Abbey? So I'm not sure that Lord Carlisle's premise that the abbey itself was innocent until proven otherwise was necessarily wrong (if he was cheerfully ignoring evidence - quite possible - which proved this wasn't true, that's another matter). Again, I will lower the tone and talk about football: the controversial inclusion of John Terry in England's squad is because he has been accused (but it has not been proven) of racism. From what I've heard of the evidence, it seems hugely likely he's guilty - but my opinion is that he should be given the legal backing that the UK allegedly works by, which is innocent until PROVEN guilty.

I'm asking for information more than anything else, because I'm only going on what I've understood from what you've said (which again, may not bear any resemblance to what you've ACTUALLY said!).

[fpb]

Point one: yes, to a degree. The parallel with the Minister is good because the Minister can be assumed to be rule-setter and overseer for schools, but every school or administration - I suppose - would have its own budget and its own administration, correct?

About "innocent until proven guilty", you have to remember that the defining characteristic of a monastery is the common life. Most monks sleep in dormitories, and spend much of the day in each other's company. And as monks aren't stupid, and there are centuries of experience behind their rules of life, they are supposed to correct each other and, if there are problems, report any sign of incorrect attachments or pursuits. (You don't snitch first, but if you see that a problem carries on it is your duty to go to your superior.) Now, like GK Chesterton (another Catholic), "I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable." Tell me that the Devil manifested himself in the monastery, and I shall be agnostic. But tell me that a consistent pattern of criminal attachments and sex can have been carried on, over a matter of forty years, by at least eight different members of staff, monks and lay, in the cheek-by-jowl conditions of a monastery, WITHOUT ANY SUPERIOR NOTICING, LET ALONE INVESTIGATING, and I shall not be agnostic at all. It would take a much greater and more horrible miracle of evil than a physical manifestation of Satan to make such a thing happen unnoticed. And the fact that, in these circumstances, Lord Carlisle busied himself not in investigating criminal connections and covers, but in making recommendations to take the school away from the abbey, suggests to me that he had his agenda already written.

[sabethea]

Yes to point one.

And oh, I love your simile in point 2 and can understand it (Oh, Father Brown!). But would potentially suggest ignorance from Lord C. Which, to be honest, in certain circumstances can be as bad/worse as starting with an agenda (because for goodness sake, can't one RESEARCH the area one is looking in to?) because I might have started by thinking "innocent until proven guilty", but I would like to think that I'd have enough knowledge to KNOW I didn't know anything about the situation as a whole and then to try and GAIN that knowledge before moving further through things. So yes - I can argue that Lord C might just be ignorant, but that to stay ignorant in the circumstances (as far as you tell them to me, and I am trusting you because I am *not* in a position where I am required to look into the entire case as a whole: I fear I would take NO one person's explanation as 'true' if it were otherwise, which I'm sure you appreciate) is actually really no better than starting with an agenda.

[fpb]

Coming across this after a month, I find that I want to say a couple of things. First, that I entirely appreciate your position ("I trust your view, but I don't know enough to underwrite it other than in trust") and ask for nothing more. In fact, it would bother me to be quoted as Absolute Authority on this or most other matters, the exception being things that actually happened to me. The second is that, forcefully though I expressed my view that this Abbey had degenerated into a criminal association within the meaning of the term, it was still only my view, and if a properly conducted investigation and/or trial proves that it was otherwise, I would not reject its findings.