Saturday 20 March 2010

Mixed response to Pope apology

Hmmmm. Not surprising, really. What appears to be about to happen is that the clergy responsible for the abuse are going to be wheeled out to face their accusers, these many years later. If this is the plan, then the hypocrisy of the policy is there for all to see - the Church hierarchy have known what was going on, for a long time, and they appear to be behaving as though, provided they don't ever admit publicly that they knew, they can proceed as if they didn't (know).

Mixed response to Pope apology

And the letter is not for the abused; it is for those who have not been abused, or had loved ones abused and cannot perceive that they would have been subject to the same level of betrayal. In other words, the abused, who are angry and want reparation, are dispensable - it is not them to whom the Pope is speaking. The Pope is engaging a damage limitation exercize - desperately seeking to hold on to his waning control over his "flock" by assuring them that there will be some punishment meted out to the evildoers.

Were that he could apply his high-powered sense of "justice" to himself. But that's monkeys, for you... Something bad has happened, so somebody must be punished. Paedophiles are widely reviled, and there will be least objection to the punishment being done to them, when, as has been clearly stated by the abused in this tawdry tale, those who engaged in cover-up are equally culpable, if not moreso, because they were in a position to make things right, at the very outset.

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