To actually address the issue, the Pope would have to disband the Catholic Church as an irredeemably corrupt and untrustworthy organization, and pass the voluminous documentation of abuse and cover-up held in internal church records, to law enforcement. I think we can safely assume that this will never happen, and the Pope will be reluctant even to take the first steps in that direction.
Every organisation with a hierarchy – churches, governments, schools – has a problem with abuse of the vulnerable. The Catholic Church is not unique in this, or even particularly egregious.
“Worldwide, the number of priests in 1970 was 419,728.” In the last 50 years, between 1.5% and 5% were involved in sexual abuse cases. According to a Newsweek article, the number of abuse cases in the RCC is comparable to that in the general population.
I spent my childhood and early adulthood surrounded by priests and nuns. Never did I see any evidence of anything untoward.
While I wouldn’t defend the coverup of abuse in any institution, I certainly understand it. It’s natural to want to wash one’s family’s dirty linen in private.
@raymondm there is one thing unique about the Catholic Church when compared to schools, sports clubs, scout groups etc. Priests take a vow of chastity. They have no legitimate outlet for sexual activity with others. They are also “in role” 24×7. Unlike say a sports coach they are often granted access to peoples homes during times of need. Experience in Boston, Ireland etc shows that they took full advantage of this.
@raymondm: the point here is not so much about suggesting that the roman catholic church would be more egregious in numbers, but rather that, unlike “governements” and “schools” it lacked accountability and oversight, and that abuse and predation, including criminal behaviour, would go unpunished, unacknolowledged, and, crucially, remain hidden from the civil justice system. impunity is what drives the scandal, especially coming from an organisation whose sole purpose is ostensible moral authority.
as far as criminal behaviour goes, while it may be natural to try to cover it up (there is no indication that the church as an organisation ever had any intention to wash any kind of linen until scandal engulfed it), while it may be natural, it is also criminal and immoral.
Albert, “laic” is a layperson, a non-churchy person. An independent person not controlled or protected by the hierarchy. Someone who can report on the bad things church people do with the possible result of jailing the bad guys.
It’s a thing that can never happen. Not unless we first arrest the Pope and the first three layers of under-popes for conspiracy to rape. They have already admitted to these crimes, more than once, publicly so there is no doubt of their guilt.
Charging the boss and close under-bosses with anything other than conspiracy to rape, conspiracy to mass rape, conspiracy to serial rape, conspiracy to assault, conspiracy to sexual assault, conspiracy to contribute to the delinquency of minors and conspiracy to assorted other moperies, doperies and shenanigans on the spaceways may be difficult as the very statements that support conspiracy charges, their admissions to protecting their underlings, lackeys and minions from the scrutiny of the laity (sort of plural or mass noun of “laic”, Albert) are what also protect the boss and under-bosses from the consequences of anything they may have done.
We can get them for conspiracy to do rape stuff on minors. Possibly. Getting them for doing it is unlikely.
Had any government or statutory law enforcing body the courage to act, would that suffice?
Not that any ever will. After all, if we can go after Popes then no one would be safe.
oh, and saying the roman catholic church is just like any other organisation, and just as fallible, is saying something about its claim to uniqueness. see “unam sanctam”, for instance.
Raymondm, anyone who has ever been through The System as a vulnerable person, adult or child, knows that abuse of the vulnerable by those with even petty and limited power happens. Lots and everywhere.
Children in “care” are particularly juicy targets. Anyone who has been a child in The System quickly learns which adults to avoid being in a room alone with, which adults are safer [never, ever “safe”, there is no such thing as “safe”, that is a fact learned very early] and which ones might offer a small chance of protection against the predators [sometimes, in certin situations, temporarily and at best partially]. They learn, damned soon after induction into an institution of almost any sort, that reporting crimes and misdemeanours, assaults, abuse or even tortures is never going to better their situations and may well worsen it; almost always will worsen it.
They learn that trouble-makers, those who rock the boat those who make a nuisance of themselves and those who tell lies about upstanding pillars of the community and respected members of staff are systematically targeted for more abuse.
Later. Never obviously but quietly, slowly and sneakily in a fashion that never looks like a pattern of responding to the charges made. Predators are often too clever, too cunning, too expert at breaking the weak to do anything blatant.
Those who have been pummelled by The System soon learn to take it and to wait for that glorious day when they are booted out as being too damned old for fiddling with them to be enjoyable for the predators any longer. They learn that life can be a little easier if they just co-operate until then.
And they learn that every lock-up is the same. They all have the odd few predators, the friends of the predators, the otherwise relatively “good” people who quietly protect the predator out of fear or loyalty or simple tradition and the managers who protect their status in the community, prestige, power, privileges and possibly profits.
Those who have been vulnerable at the hands of entrenched power learn never to speak of it. To anyone, ever.
Being the target of a predator twice your size and ten times your mass may be a horrible thing but there is one thing the prey learns : it can always get worse.
What is astonishing to some of us is that a few of the abused find the tremendous courage needed to go public so things like the RCC and Rotherham are ever reported.
That is true bravery. That is heroism. That is the human spirit at its best. Few of us have that kind of strength.
Few enough of the Staff are willing to speak up, even fewer of the bosses and owners and oversight committees so it should not surprise us that the victimised are silent.
If the Staff were honest, if they were all willing to make a stand against the evil then it might be possible to cleanse the care homes of the predators. They aren’t, they never will be and it is an impossible dream.
The strong will always prey on the weak given any opportunity.
Two questions for the audience: knowing what happened, would it be a moral and righteous act to prevent the conception of young Adolf by getting Papa H. too pissed to perform thus possibly preventing the deaths of millions? (Assume one can travel back in Time to accomplish the task.)
Assuming Raymondm’s 1970’s enumeration of the priestly body to be accurate, question two is this: is is a moral and ethical act to eliminate the priestly caste to prevent the rape, molestation, torture and other abuses of hundreds of millions of vulnerable adults and children, even if “elimination” means “killing them all”? Remembering that a certain Mr. Saville was a near-priestly “pillar of the community” and respected member of the charitable and caring elite who preyed on hundreds, perhaps thousands of adults and children without the official protection of any church. Whether this makes the case for elimination of the priesthood more or less morally supported could also be discussed.
SmallVoice:
I’m in the middle of reading “The Darkening Age – The Christian Destruction of the Classical World”. If was a sniper with a time machine I would be more inclined to take out Constantine just after his 1st edict favouring Christianity over all the other religions. There might have been a civil war with massacres of Christians & destruction of all churches, but that would have been less bad than what actually happened.
@Steve “Priests take a vow of chastity.” Some do, not all. Most secular (diocesan) priests make a promise. Religious take vows. Priests who have converted – eg, Lutherans, CofE – who are married are given a dispensation. (I realise this is not the crux of your comment.)
Celibacy is not dogma, it’s discipline. It can be done away with at any time.
You will find that many abusers – trusted coaches, teachers, other leaders – are given the same access to families that priests are.
An aside: Not all “abuse victims” are children.
@ jean-françois “an organisation whose sole purpose is ostensible moral authority” That’s really not the sole purpose of the RCC.
“hidden from the civil justice system”
For most of history, the Church has not been subject to secular government. That’s a fairly recent development.
Whether the justice system really delivers justice is another point to ponder. I don’t think it does, but that’s my anarchic side talking.
The Church is all about redemption. The sinner confesses and makes an act of contrition, and God forgives. The “punishment” the Church inflicts is penance, and priests who have violated their promise (or abused someone) are transferred and obliged to undergo counselling. This is where they’ve failed, imo. They have a duty to protect, and too often they haven’t.
@ SmallVoice
You are talking about something far more vast than abuse in the Church. You are talking about the human-male propensity to impose one’s will.
I watched Dr Ford’s testimony and I KNOW she was telling the truth.
“killing them all”
Of course not.
I’ve long thought, though, that priests should be the head of the household. Not a mystical member of a caste, but… the head of the house.
SmallVoice: edit function: I recommend that you do all your editing in the comment box before submitting. The edit function which comes up after you have posted only lasts a few minutes and is a bit clumsy to use. So, proofread all of your comment as you go, while composing it. You may still miss typos like “is” for “it”, but your meaning will probably be quite clear (at leat verbally, maybe not philosophically!).
I hope I’m not telling a grandmother how to suck eggs!
@raymondm: i was discussing events that are in the news in the last decade. author is explicitly referring to “the child abuse scandal”. we’re not talking middle ages, here. i’m also not discussing issues outside the roman catholic church, being unfamiliar with the c. of e. and other catholic-like hierarchies.
the scandals in ireland, newfoundland, the u.s., and here in québec, those scandals are precisely about hiding the crimes of priests and nuns, about shuffling priests around parishes every few years and not reporting them to authorities, which, in all of those cases, would very much have had a civil system in place to prosecute them. (a claim that justice doesn’t work anyway is unverifiable and cannot be argued with, so i won’t bother.)
my point is that the relevant difference between the church and any other organisation, in that regard, is that the church claims moral authority while behaving immorally and, in those cases, criminally. it very much does claim moral authority, through petrine authority.
as for pennance and contrition and all, the rcc has provided no evidence that this happened in a general sense. understandably, even if such evidence exists, it is not in the rcc’s interest to make public documents that would… prove it behaved criminally in a strict sense. an act of contribtion would very much look like a confession because, well, that’s what it is. as a result, not reporting the acts confessed to in the act of contrition is a crime.
Raymond, I am 53. I went to a secondary modern school. Across the road two girls lived. They were Catholic. Both were abused by different priests! Another girl I dated also told me that a priest put his hand up her skirt and into her knickers when she was seven years old…I was also informed of nuns abuse in Catholic girl schools by work colleague’s. The entire Catholic setup reeks of hypocrisy and cover up after cover up. Stop being part of the problem by being in denial…
Author, once again you have created a memorable punch line and inspired an interesting thread. Bravo.
I agree that there are aspects of the Catholic church that make it unique among abusive institutions. Institutionalized confession is one example. People aren’t generally taught to confess their innermost thoughts and actions to their sports coach. As a method for giving priests control of information, and a heads up on vulnerability, the confessional is hard to beat.
As for the dangers and futility of protesting abuse: My sister threatened to tell on the family pedophile. He then accused her of doing something she hadn’t done, and had my father punish her, despite her protestations of innocence. It was his way of showing her that if she said anything, he would be believed and she wouldn’t.
Statistically any large group of people will have sexual predators. When most schools, hospitals, youth organizations, and the like discover a child rapist they inform the appropriate civil authorities. The Catholic Church made a point of not telling the police or governmental youth services, instead they moved Father Kiddydiddler from parish to parish, diocese to diocese and even country to country. Often the victims were given money in exchange for silence about their abuse.
The Catholic Church claims to be the supreme moral authority on Earth. They also acted in a blatantly immoral manner in regards to child rape. It’s my opinion that an organization can either be a moral authority or be immoral. It’s obvious which choice the Catholic hierarchy made.
Jim Baerg, topple Constantine after he supports the Christians? Why not before?
But is any interference with the past justifiable? See “The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass” by Frederik Pohl for a short story pointing out how dangerous fiddling could be. Whether it is ever possible is not always the point, the question may be who decides what better is? To a rabid modern neo-nazi extending the lifespan of a certain government may be a morally good choice.
SoG, thank you. I do try to read proofly but I have found out that doing so while watching “Elementary” is not conducive to perfection. I need a secretary. Or fewer distractions. Maybe both.
Michael, the RCC is not the only organisation to cover up abuses of power and to protect its people from The Law. The BBC did it, too and parliaments and children’s homes are renowned for it. As are families.
Many families (DH’s for one, apparently) have a weird Uncle Hugo who touches the children inappropriately even when parents and guardians are around. But don’t worry about Uncle Hugo, he’s harmless, it’s just how he expresses himself. He means well. He’s just a bit odd.
It’s not too large a leap from not reporting Uncle Hugo to not reporting that thuggish child rapist in a black dress who has such a good relationship with all the choir boys and girls. Or to staying silent when Judge Gerry has a lovely little girl in his getaway cottage for a weekend of adventures.
It is pandemic. It is universal. It is catholic. The strong will always prey on the weak and many will silently protect them.
DH, I wish I could travel back to your sister when she was younger to shield her, protect her, give her a gentle hug and perhaps set light to a gonad or two. As that isn’t possible, I’m sorry she was hurt.
The problem is that many, many children and adults are hurt, were hurt and will be hurt. There is no stopping it. Not completely, not while humans are human.
Yes, it is better for the weak now, in some places but the strong and evil are still among us. It is up to the rest of us to always report them no matter what effect that has on our careers or social standing. We should always call out the Savilles. No matter how “respected” they are.
Raymondm, I don’t know if Dr. Ford is a victim or a liar of truly magnificent consistency and talent, it is possible no one ever will know for sure but it is possibly not a good idea to give a man accused of multiple cases of abuse a position of power. Not before he is publicly completely exonerated and shown to be innocent.
Which he may well be.
Hiring a locum from some town in the boonies, preferably a totally ignorant peasant with absolutely no clue, no idea what he’s doing, no knowledge of the Law and no personal bias – because he’s too stupid to have one – while the current candidate is openly investigated for badness doesn’t seem like too onerous a measure. It would need to be someone who couldn’t spell “god” if given three tries and three of the letters but there seems to be a fair number of folk like this available.
The candidate for judgeship under discussion and suspected of naughtiness is going to have the job for life, delaying it a few weeks while the grindstone of Justice mills his life doesn’t seem like a great hardship for him and a locum would allow the Court to continue making mistakes.
Author, thank you for the link to “Scenes From A Multiverse”, it’s another very good read at mumble o’clock. I’ve now got ten years to catch up on. Hugs. Lots of hugs.
“In consecrating Vatican City State to St. Michael the Archangel, I ask him to defend us from the evil one and banish him.” – This from a supposedly monotheistic religion, there can be only one god (a superhuman being with power over nature)…..but it’s ok if you pray to all the minor deities and ask them to banish the bad one.
The problem of sexual abuse is universal. How well this abuse is covered up depends on the level of insularity of the surrounding community.
In that, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has a real problem. (You know, the freaks in the black coats and fur hats. Not regular garden variety secular Jews.) The ultra -Orthodox are completely self-contained, having few dealings with the non-Orthodox world. Therefore, excommunication and shunning are extremely effective tools to shut victims up.
Laripu, UOJ cultists find that shunning their fellow members is effective? My immediate thought is that this seems a little strange. All that would do is leave the once shut-in, insular and segregated former members with the entire world of possible friends to talk to.
Were I one of them, I’d have begged to be shunned. It would have been the best gift they could have given me.
But I’m looking at it from someone who left home and never looked back so perhaps my perspective is slightly skewed.
No. According to a walled-up cult my perspective is definitely skewed, drastically. This gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling of niceness. I feel for those trapped in such depressing prisons of convention and regulations but I’m exceedingly glad I am not one of them.
The Catholic church is egregious when it comes to child abuse but hardly unique. As seems always to be the case-sunlight is the best disinfectant.
What happens when priests are beyond reproach? You get reproach-worthy priests.
What happens when muslim men cannot be sanctioned for fear of racism? You get grooming gangs.
The case of Savile is particularly salutary when you consider that he must have been vetted by secret services to be allowed to hang out with royalty and do Xmas with Thatcher.
So–either the UKs vetting services are worse than those of the FBI (they might be) or they knew and didn’t care.
I’m not sure which prospect carries the most chance of further abuse, but neither prospect pleases.
It doesn’t matter how many potential friends there are to be had — being forced out of the only community you have ever known into an outside world where you don’t know anyone and don’t even speak the language well can be extremely frightening and painful. (I live in NYC, and the Haredim here grow up speaking Yiddish among themselves, and usually speak English with thick accents). Nevertheless a fair number of Orthodox Jews do end up defecting to the modern world.
However it may be that those who leave are those who are psychologically least suited to the Orthodox lifestyle, which would mean that those who remain are necessarily those who are more suited. Since all psychological traits are about 50 percent heritable, this could very well mean that the members of Orthodox communities are being genetically bred to be progressively more and more Orthodox!
This process, where the least suitable members of a community leave while those more suited remain, has been described as “boiling off.” Although the link talks about the Amish, Orthodox Jews would clearly be subject to the same dynamic. The final result would be that the most clannish of the Orthodox Jews would become more and more satisfied with their lifestyle, so fewer and fewer would leave. And since their birthrates are so much higher then those of their neighbors, eventually they would come to demographically dominate the cities and countries that host them. That is, if the Muslims don’t do it first.
Thanks for that, “SmallVoice”. Despite not being exactly youthful (numerically, at least), I’d never seen the word “laic” before… I’d assumed it was some technical acronym understood by those more versed in church matters than I am.
Helena, Saville was no threat to the Royals or the politicians he was vetted for access to. He wasn’t a loony Greenie or Commie or anti-Establishment Voice Of Conscience of any type. He supported the Great and the Good and benefited from the stability of the Aristocracy just as much as they did.
Yes, he had some interests that might have embarrassed his immediate bosses and sponsors, perhaps even the bosses of hospitals and care homes but even those were of absolutely no relevance to the Security Services. He could not have brought down governments or harmed the reputations of Princes had he been caught, jailed and publicly spat upon.
Saville may have been an evil nonce but he was a safe nonce, at least as far as the bosses are concerned.
The Security folks would probably never have even looked at his crimes. It was none of their business and had they known of them they would have been bound by law not to reveal them to anyone else, not even the regular cops. This is not frightening. What would have been frightening would have been the spooks finding a problem and spreading the bad news to the straight world. That would have been terrifying.
It is somewhat like using the Army to go after graffiti artists or burglars. Wrong tool for the job.
Albert, as anyone can see from this page and the previous couple, I’m a bit of a Writer. Words are my tool-kit. I love learning new ones. Had I not had an idea what the one under discussion meant, I would have wandered around my lovely dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopaedias until I did. It’s fun to me. So I thank you for the question. It gave me a chance to explore, to play, to learn and to confirm my suspicions.
It’s something J&M does every so often. “Hermeneuticon”, forsooth.
SmallVoice: “topple Constantine after he supports the Christians? Why not before?”
I think in pre-gunpower days, someone getting taken out by a sniper rifle would be taken as a thunderbolt from the gods punishing an evildoer. That would more thoroughly discredit the idea of supporting Christianity.
If I was to go for an earlier date to prevent the dark ages, I would try to figure out a way, in the Hadrian to Aurelius series of emperors, to formalize the custom of picking a successor who was unrelated to the current emperor. Thus preventing the Crisis of the Third Century, which was a series of civil wars over who would become emperor.
Jim, I wouldn’t take out anyone with a rifle, ever, I’m not that type of strong nor do I know where to get a rifle, I’m English, getting a time travel machine would be easier.
I wouldn’t kill Constantine. I’d implant a body-powered receiver into his ear and transmit voices, continuous loud tones and cRap music -except when he was being examined by a physician. That would make him look nuts and reduce his political effectiveness. Anything he did in Real History that I found objectionable would never be enacted.
But the Fred Pohl short story I mentioned above sounds a warning note. The ending is interesting as preventing the original prevention of the Dark Ages only delays the Malthusian Crunch, if that is the way we are going to go. It fixes the issue for the folks who needed that fix but not for our world full of descendants.
As the Great Pacific Garbage Patch shows, our kids need help from us.
Were I to have a time travelling device I doubt I would be tempted to interfere with the big stuff. I would more likely just get some engineers stoned on some very particular dates so I would be the only one ever to own such a thing.
Jb, boiling off, or the process of solidifying cultishness in inbred populations is not limited to cults, it happens with villages, too. Little bits of vestigial culture left over when groups are conquered and mostly absorbed tend to become more English than the English. More so if they have limited communications with the outer world as so many do.
It happens in the Amazon and in Papua and used to happen on other islands, too. Cultural insanity being inbred is one explanation for why the Easter Island folk mostly died off.
Cross-fertilisation between different groups is not only a genetically good idea, it is a damned good one for ideas, too. Insular fanatics who never listen tend to dies out, not swarm across the planet as all-conquering supermen.
It actually often works the other way around; a culture who conquers assimilates some of the thinking, language, foods, customs and booze of the conquered. As an example, see curry and chips. Assimilation and cultural imperialism improve everyone’s lot. Eventually. Sometimes.
Personally I believe that history is chaotic, and that even if you had a time machine there would be no way to change the past without scrambling it totally. Any significant alteration you made would affect who got born in the next generation, and that disturbance would ripple outward, until not a single person in the altered history would be the same as anyone in ours. No Luther, no Bach, no Marx, no Hitler, no Einstein. Instead you’d have entirely different historical figures who, while somewhat constrained by geography and economics, would nevertheless take history in wildly different paths from our own. I really don’t see any way around this.
Jb, if we ever find a time travelling machine should we experiment? If you are right, and it does feel like a sensible theory, then we could have loads of Butterfly Effect style fun.
On the subject of friends outside your village or cult, you are right, it is difficult to make new friends. If you are shy it can be painful to try. I was lucky when I moved to my new house, my neighbours are truly nice; not everyone is so fortunate.
Perhaps we should reach out more when new neighbours move in next door?
At non quantum physics Time travel back is impossible. Causality sees to that. Saville was not exposed whilst alive.. He knew too many high profile paedophiles and would have sung like a canary
Smallvoice, it is very hard for the ultra-Orthodox to leave that world. Often, they have no education except religious. As an example, you can read the story of Leah Vincent, who was abandoned on a NYC street as a teen for the “sin” of exchanging letters with a boy. Not even sex … not even kisses … not even holding hands … just letters. She’s lucky she survived and succeeded.
I feel lucky too. My parents were culturally Jews, holocaust survivors, but my father was an atheist and my mother was slightly traditional but not very observant. There were no serious religious demands made on me, except to learn what it was about, never to believe it. They wanted me to learn the Yiddish language. My father called all religion, in Yiddish, “bobbeh-meisehs”, literally grandmother-stories, but a better translation is fairy tales. (The language is similar to German, and knowing it helps me pun and joke with my German wife. 🙂 )
The ultra-Orthodox Jews, even when not sexually abused, are abused by the ignorance of their culture.
SOG. I remember my mother and father talking about saville who had asaulted two little girls they knew. I distinctly remember that they said it was common knowledge that Saville liked little girls…this was about 1975. The fact that it all came to light when he could no longer implicate the remaining perverts is a sign that arresting him when alive was not an option the authorities could risk…
Laripu, pray to whom? Michael is a little busy with the hundreds of thousands of priests and their boss. Perhaps you could try the beloved one, Lucifer? He seems nice and by all reports he is both incredibly powerful and well-liked by the ultimate boss. Praying to him might have the best chance of success.
Not that prayer has ever been laboratory tested to work well but that could be because those doing it were pleading to the wrong demi-gods. By all acounts, those aligned with our dear Lucifer are far more successful than those praying to the average saint, angel or djinn.
M27Holts, all organisations, groups and institutions have their evil bastards and a few who are too scared to report the crimes of them but it is surprising that you would think that law enforcers from many constabularies all over England over more than three decades would universally cover for a putrid nonce like Saville.
He might have been protected by the BBC, at least by his immediate line managers, and in omission by the charity organisers and care home and hospital managers who granted him access to the vulnerable – at least to a small degree – but it is not really credible that hundreds of cops from many forces colluded with the prat.
Saville wasn’t that likeable.
It would take a great deal of solid evidence to convince me that an all-powerful god who created the universe, including cancers, radioactivity, bosons and cats is worried about me seeing a girl naked or believing he exists. It would take a little more to convince me of Saville’s innocence.
I’m just glad I was never on the jury judging him. I’m not sure whether gratuitous and ignorant prejudice against the defendant is cause for dismissal but in my case it probably should be.
Saville may well have been a nice man but I detested what I saw of him.
If I, from a distance and knowing little real about him would be willing to think the worst of him and if he really was so evil as portrayed it is improbable that everyone close to him thought of him as being worth the risk to their reputations, jobs, lives, incomes and freedom. If people had known they would have reported him. It is most likely they did not.
A question, if I may, M27? Why did your parents not report the scunner? Fear of police inaction could not have been a reason in 1975. Saville was not so very important, then. True, two reports may have amounted to little but as we’ve recently seen witch-hunts are relatively easy to initiate and sustain.
That USA judge guy is a perfect example of such, whether he deserves it or not.
I was just reporting on a bit of anecdotal evidence that seemed to support the theory that Saville operated without fear of any real effort to expose him. The reasons for his seemingly unopposed ability to abuse are manifold. But I’m sure that he did know others of his ilk. Governmental abusers are as protected as Catholic priests. Or were in the seventies and eighties….
So, M27, it’s a “I dreamed of this disaster weeks before it happened …” type story? Ah, well, at this temporal distance I suppose anecdotal stories are all we could reasonably expect.
It would have been nice had someone who “knew” reported Saville way back when he was just starting but it would also have been lovely had people done the same for the Krays, Manson and millions of others.
Including the rare, exceptional case of politically protected ponces.
I suppose it’s just too much to expect from fallible, frightened people.
When I said anecdotal. The fact is I distinctly remember my mum and dad discussing about a friend’s daughters who reported indecency to their mum by Saville. This was 1975 at the height of his popularity and fame. She went to the police who basically told her that her daughter’s had fabricated the story. Standard practice in those times I would Imagine.
Smallvoice. You do the security services too much credit in implying that they give two shits about innocent lives being ruined.
They aren’t vetting to see if someone is a danger to the Royals–they only care if he is blackmailable. I slightly know the ex ambassador to Uzbekistan (we’ve had a couple of pints and gone on a march together–we aren’t close). However, he told me of his positive vetting experience.
A couple of serious secret service types turned up and had a list of his affairs (he claims no woman can resist a man in a kilt). He wondered if this meant the end of his career? Oh, no–came the reply, usually when we are asked to do this the worry is that it will be little boys.
Affairs don’t end careers any more (think Boris) but pedophilia might–because you are blackmailable. And if you are blackmailable then you are an asset to other people’s secret services, potentially (that’s the major fuss over Putin and Trump).
I genuinely dont know what to make of this in the Savile case. These folk are pretty good at this and it wasnt exacrtly a closely guarded secret was it? (There are dozens of Beeb in-jokes about it, such as this one by Mitchell and Webb, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBlUzPlnx6U
John Lydon was shut down for talking about it, Jerry Sadowitz was talking about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0) Etc etc.
I am reluctant to believe in conspiracies per se (people are too incompetent, every system leaks etc) But I do believe in inept cover-ups of the Emperors new clothes type (“I’ll say something the moment someone else does…the very moment…”)
But that doesnt quite cover the secret services. For what its worth my guess is that they were just told to soft peddle because if Savile was blackmailed then no-one would give a damn–he had access to the Royals etc but no actual secrets, and they didn’t really care about the little girls being abused any more than the ones in Rotherham did. But, I’m open to other readings
Helena, dear lady, I can assure you that most women can resist some men no matter how that man may be dressed or un. Personal experience, with “most” having a value exceedingly close to “all”. Your friend was optimistic at best.
Things like Rotherham, Saville and the others may be down to institutional reluctance to be bothered with trivia, institutionalised individual fear and laziness or something worse but I more tend to think of them as being the result of incompetence and inattention. Not that I think we’ll ever really know. There are just sufficient numbers of bad operators to ensure the worst secrets stay secreted.
It is made worse by those loud voices who are convinced no human has ever landed on the Moon [in spite of our having bases on a more distant world] or that 11/9 was an inside, false-flag job or that Mr Gates was merely a front for the filtering of Roswell/Area-51 derived alien technologies. No matter how open the bosses force the cops and spooks to become on any subject there are those who will noisily always believe the stories told to be lies. Who believe that no mater how bad the news the truth is hidden and much worse.
Tin-hattery is an evil influence that has crept into our very souls. All of us are tainted a little by it. We may laugh at the Moon-deniers, the Comet-heaven cultists and those who tell us Jack was smuggled into Albania where he lives today in luxury but we have that small cloud of dark suspicion somewhere in our beings.
No one trusts the cops, not fully, not all cops, not any more.
We are all trained by “Capricorn One”, “The Domino Theory”, the nightly News and “Person of Interest” to suspect so we do.
It doesn’t help that everyone lies to us. No all of the time but sufficiently often that we can’t trust them. Not totally.
Crying wolf syndrome works.
We are prepared to believe the worst in the Saville affair because we’ve seen Profumo and Watergate and all the others.
I do prefer to think well of most policemen, spies, politicians and even priests but that is only because I love humans. I admire humans. I think people are the greatest thing since dogs. Yet even I admit to not entirely trusting a small number of them.
Which I find very sad. One should always be able to trust those who govern. They should deserve our trust. It is sad that they sometimes seem not to.
It is sad that we hear The Good News from Jesus and Mo’ and all their friends and our first conclusion is that they are self-aggrandising confidence tricksters trying to avoid farming while getting chicks.
M27Holts, no offence was ever intended to your parents or your good self, I just wish more had been done long ago.
But you are correct in that the word of little girls was given scant credence for many generations when those words attacked the reputations of the powerful. That is a sadness.
Small Voice. I think a lot of us were taken by surprise when someone who peddles those sorts of conspiracy theories took over at the White House. A lot of it comes down to who you trust (which isnt the same as who you think is always right). I trust climate change scientists. That doesnt mean I think they are infallible–but I’m fairly sure that they arent ina conspiracy (because I know scientists and the only thing two of them can agree on is that a third doesnt deserve the grant she just got).
But I dont trust paid shills–the people whoa re paid to deny climate change are from the same playbook as those who denied the issues with asbestos, oil, tobacco etc. In many cases–its the same people.
So–how to judge these things? We’d love to have an infallible easy-to-follow metric but I dont know of one. And its doesnt just boil down to brains. Very smart people can believe very strange things. Just try loggin on to Soctt Adams’ web page to watch a man go steadily off the rails (holocaust denial, evolution denial, climate change denial, Trump worship) over the last few years
Oh–thanks for the “Nazis on Mars” links. Of course, the Jews want us to think that…
The psychological effects of conspiracy are in built into us by natural selection. The hominids that thought everything was out to get them survived….and led to the 21st Century Schizoid man…
Helena, do “the Jews” want us to think the Nazis have secret bases on Mars because this makes their enemy a great threat and mighty thereby making “the Jews”, themselves, look even better for having defeated them – sort of like making Thanos or Galactus a huge threat so the good guys look cool when they beat them?
Or do “the Jews” want us to see “the Nazis” and their friends and allies in “the New World Order” as a great threat so we’ll see “the Jews” as an underdog whom we need to support as they are the good guys and are so obviously outmatched and in need of aid and money, diplomatic support, free weapons systems, new laws and stuff?
Or is it all a Jewish-Zionist-Nazi-Illuminati-Hybrid plot to drive us nuts with dark mists of confusion so they can continue ruling all the worlds in peace?
Or do they just want to sell us more oranges?
Personally, I would like to blame the Lydians. Not for anything, I would just blame them because there aren’t any of them any more and shifting the blame to them is fairly harmless as a hobby.
Except … could the lovely, wise, wonderful, truthful mystical, intellectually powerful and twittish Mr. Trump be a remnant, relict Lydian?
(Hmmm … something odd here. My spell-checker allowed the hyphenated “JZN” but baulks when I add the Illuminati. It thinks “Illuminati” itself is correct when standing alone and unhyphenated, it just doesn’t want them aligned with the others. I find that terribly suspicious.)
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
July 17, 2024
To actually address the issue, the Pope would have to disband the Catholic Church as an irredeemably corrupt and untrustworthy organization, and pass the voluminous documentation of abuse and cover-up held in internal church records, to law enforcement. I think we can safely assume that this will never happen, and the Pope will be reluctant even to take the first steps in that direction.
well archangel Michael is as real as Satan [PBUH]. weird though, how its always Satan’s fault
I felt _so_ disappointed when I got to the last square. With the Pope, not the cartoon.
Is that pray for help in preventing kiddie fiddling, or help in preventing criticism of the church?
Every organisation with a hierarchy – churches, governments, schools – has a problem with abuse of the vulnerable. The Catholic Church is not unique in this, or even particularly egregious.
“Worldwide, the number of priests in 1970 was 419,728.” In the last 50 years, between 1.5% and 5% were involved in sexual abuse cases. According to a Newsweek article, the number of abuse cases in the RCC is comparable to that in the general population.
I spent my childhood and early adulthood surrounded by priests and nuns. Never did I see any evidence of anything untoward.
While I wouldn’t defend the coverup of abuse in any institution, I certainly understand it. It’s natural to want to wash one’s family’s dirty linen in private.
What’s a LAIC body?
@raymondm there is one thing unique about the Catholic Church when compared to schools, sports clubs, scout groups etc. Priests take a vow of chastity. They have no legitimate outlet for sexual activity with others. They are also “in role” 24×7. Unlike say a sports coach they are often granted access to peoples homes during times of need. Experience in Boston, Ireland etc shows that they took full advantage of this.
@raymondm: the point here is not so much about suggesting that the roman catholic church would be more egregious in numbers, but rather that, unlike “governements” and “schools” it lacked accountability and oversight, and that abuse and predation, including criminal behaviour, would go unpunished, unacknolowledged, and, crucially, remain hidden from the civil justice system. impunity is what drives the scandal, especially coming from an organisation whose sole purpose is ostensible moral authority.
as far as criminal behaviour goes, while it may be natural to try to cover it up (there is no indication that the church as an organisation ever had any intention to wash any kind of linen until scandal engulfed it), while it may be natural, it is also criminal and immoral.
Meanwhile, the non-existent Archangel Michael hears all these prayers and responds, “The fuck do you want me to do about it?”
Then again, he’s probably busy with admiring the world’s largest objects and battling bulls.
Albert, “laic” is a layperson, a non-churchy person. An independent person not controlled or protected by the hierarchy. Someone who can report on the bad things church people do with the possible result of jailing the bad guys.
It’s a thing that can never happen. Not unless we first arrest the Pope and the first three layers of under-popes for conspiracy to rape. They have already admitted to these crimes, more than once, publicly so there is no doubt of their guilt.
Charging the boss and close under-bosses with anything other than conspiracy to rape, conspiracy to mass rape, conspiracy to serial rape, conspiracy to assault, conspiracy to sexual assault, conspiracy to contribute to the delinquency of minors and conspiracy to assorted other moperies, doperies and shenanigans on the spaceways may be difficult as the very statements that support conspiracy charges, their admissions to protecting their underlings, lackeys and minions from the scrutiny of the laity (sort of plural or mass noun of “laic”, Albert) are what also protect the boss and under-bosses from the consequences of anything they may have done.
We can get them for conspiracy to do rape stuff on minors. Possibly. Getting them for doing it is unlikely.
Had any government or statutory law enforcing body the courage to act, would that suffice?
Not that any ever will. After all, if we can go after Popes then no one would be safe.
oh, and saying the roman catholic church is just like any other organisation, and just as fallible, is saying something about its claim to uniqueness. see “unam sanctam”, for instance.
(infallibility of the pope leaves more wiggle room, however. search for “However, this does not mean that every time the pope speaks he is speaking infallibly” here: https://www.uscatholic.org/church/2011/05/there-list-infallible-teachings .)
Raymondm, anyone who has ever been through The System as a vulnerable person, adult or child, knows that abuse of the vulnerable by those with even petty and limited power happens. Lots and everywhere.
Children in “care” are particularly juicy targets. Anyone who has been a child in The System quickly learns which adults to avoid being in a room alone with, which adults are safer [never, ever “safe”, there is no such thing as “safe”, that is a fact learned very early] and which ones might offer a small chance of protection against the predators [sometimes, in certin situations, temporarily and at best partially]. They learn, damned soon after induction into an institution of almost any sort, that reporting crimes and misdemeanours, assaults, abuse or even tortures is never going to better their situations and may well worsen it; almost always will worsen it.
They learn that trouble-makers, those who rock the boat those who make a nuisance of themselves and those who tell lies about upstanding pillars of the community and respected members of staff are systematically targeted for more abuse.
Later. Never obviously but quietly, slowly and sneakily in a fashion that never looks like a pattern of responding to the charges made. Predators are often too clever, too cunning, too expert at breaking the weak to do anything blatant.
Those who have been pummelled by The System soon learn to take it and to wait for that glorious day when they are booted out as being too damned old for fiddling with them to be enjoyable for the predators any longer. They learn that life can be a little easier if they just co-operate until then.
And they learn that every lock-up is the same. They all have the odd few predators, the friends of the predators, the otherwise relatively “good” people who quietly protect the predator out of fear or loyalty or simple tradition and the managers who protect their status in the community, prestige, power, privileges and possibly profits.
Those who have been vulnerable at the hands of entrenched power learn never to speak of it. To anyone, ever.
Being the target of a predator twice your size and ten times your mass may be a horrible thing but there is one thing the prey learns : it can always get worse.
What is astonishing to some of us is that a few of the abused find the tremendous courage needed to go public so things like the RCC and Rotherham are ever reported.
That is true bravery. That is heroism. That is the human spirit at its best. Few of us have that kind of strength.
Few enough of the Staff are willing to speak up, even fewer of the bosses and owners and oversight committees so it should not surprise us that the victimised are silent.
If the Staff were honest, if they were all willing to make a stand against the evil then it might be possible to cleanse the care homes of the predators. They aren’t, they never will be and it is an impossible dream.
The strong will always prey on the weak given any opportunity.
Always.
All the weak can ever do is endure.
And hope that it stops.
Someday.
Two questions for the audience: knowing what happened, would it be a moral and righteous act to prevent the conception of young Adolf by getting Papa H. too pissed to perform thus possibly preventing the deaths of millions? (Assume one can travel back in Time to accomplish the task.)
Assuming Raymondm’s 1970’s enumeration of the priestly body to be accurate, question two is this: is is a moral and ethical act to eliminate the priestly caste to prevent the rape, molestation, torture and other abuses of hundreds of millions of vulnerable adults and children, even if “elimination” means “killing them all”? Remembering that a certain Mr. Saville was a near-priestly “pillar of the community” and respected member of the charitable and caring elite who preyed on hundreds, perhaps thousands of adults and children without the official protection of any church. Whether this makes the case for elimination of the priesthood more or less morally supported could also be discussed.
” is it a moral ” of course. My edit function seems to have gone. Could this be because I’m refusing cookies?
SmallVoice:
I’m in the middle of reading “The Darkening Age – The Christian Destruction of the Classical World”. If was a sniper with a time machine I would be more inclined to take out Constantine just after his 1st edict favouring Christianity over all the other religions. There might have been a civil war with massacres of Christians & destruction of all churches, but that would have been less bad than what actually happened.
I’ll try to cover as many points as I can here.
@Steve “Priests take a vow of chastity.” Some do, not all. Most secular (diocesan) priests make a promise. Religious take vows. Priests who have converted – eg, Lutherans, CofE – who are married are given a dispensation. (I realise this is not the crux of your comment.)
Celibacy is not dogma, it’s discipline. It can be done away with at any time.
You will find that many abusers – trusted coaches, teachers, other leaders – are given the same access to families that priests are.
An aside: Not all “abuse victims” are children.
@ jean-françois “an organisation whose sole purpose is ostensible moral authority” That’s really not the sole purpose of the RCC.
“hidden from the civil justice system”
For most of history, the Church has not been subject to secular government. That’s a fairly recent development.
Whether the justice system really delivers justice is another point to ponder. I don’t think it does, but that’s my anarchic side talking.
The Church is all about redemption. The sinner confesses and makes an act of contrition, and God forgives. The “punishment” the Church inflicts is penance, and priests who have violated their promise (or abused someone) are transferred and obliged to undergo counselling. This is where they’ve failed, imo. They have a duty to protect, and too often they haven’t.
@ SmallVoice
You are talking about something far more vast than abuse in the Church. You are talking about the human-male propensity to impose one’s will.
I watched Dr Ford’s testimony and I KNOW she was telling the truth.
“killing them all”
Of course not.
I’ve long thought, though, that priests should be the head of the household. Not a mystical member of a caste, but… the head of the house.
SmallVoice: edit function: I recommend that you do all your editing in the comment box before submitting. The edit function which comes up after you have posted only lasts a few minutes and is a bit clumsy to use. So, proofread all of your comment as you go, while composing it. You may still miss typos like “is” for “it”, but your meaning will probably be quite clear (at leat verbally, maybe not philosophically!).
I hope I’m not telling a grandmother how to suck eggs!
Just trying to be helpful!
@raymondm: i was discussing events that are in the news in the last decade. author is explicitly referring to “the child abuse scandal”. we’re not talking middle ages, here. i’m also not discussing issues outside the roman catholic church, being unfamiliar with the c. of e. and other catholic-like hierarchies.
the scandals in ireland, newfoundland, the u.s., and here in québec, those scandals are precisely about hiding the crimes of priests and nuns, about shuffling priests around parishes every few years and not reporting them to authorities, which, in all of those cases, would very much have had a civil system in place to prosecute them. (a claim that justice doesn’t work anyway is unverifiable and cannot be argued with, so i won’t bother.)
my point is that the relevant difference between the church and any other organisation, in that regard, is that the church claims moral authority while behaving immorally and, in those cases, criminally. it very much does claim moral authority, through petrine authority.
as for pennance and contrition and all, the rcc has provided no evidence that this happened in a general sense. understandably, even if such evidence exists, it is not in the rcc’s interest to make public documents that would… prove it behaved criminally in a strict sense. an act of contribtion would very much look like a confession because, well, that’s what it is. as a result, not reporting the acts confessed to in the act of contrition is a crime.
Raymond, I am 53. I went to a secondary modern school. Across the road two girls lived. They were Catholic. Both were abused by different priests! Another girl I dated also told me that a priest put his hand up her skirt and into her knickers when she was seven years old…I was also informed of nuns abuse in Catholic girl schools by work colleague’s. The entire Catholic setup reeks of hypocrisy and cover up after cover up. Stop being part of the problem by being in denial…
Author, once again you have created a memorable punch line and inspired an interesting thread. Bravo.
I agree that there are aspects of the Catholic church that make it unique among abusive institutions. Institutionalized confession is one example. People aren’t generally taught to confess their innermost thoughts and actions to their sports coach. As a method for giving priests control of information, and a heads up on vulnerability, the confessional is hard to beat.
As for the dangers and futility of protesting abuse: My sister threatened to tell on the family pedophile. He then accused her of doing something she hadn’t done, and had my father punish her, despite her protestations of innocence. It was his way of showing her that if she said anything, he would be believed and she wouldn’t.
Statistically any large group of people will have sexual predators. When most schools, hospitals, youth organizations, and the like discover a child rapist they inform the appropriate civil authorities. The Catholic Church made a point of not telling the police or governmental youth services, instead they moved Father Kiddydiddler from parish to parish, diocese to diocese and even country to country. Often the victims were given money in exchange for silence about their abuse.
The Catholic Church claims to be the supreme moral authority on Earth. They also acted in a blatantly immoral manner in regards to child rape. It’s my opinion that an organization can either be a moral authority or be immoral. It’s obvious which choice the Catholic hierarchy made.
BRAVO!!!
Author, you are THE best ever.
Jim Baerg, topple Constantine after he supports the Christians? Why not before?
But is any interference with the past justifiable? See “The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass” by Frederik Pohl for a short story pointing out how dangerous fiddling could be. Whether it is ever possible is not always the point, the question may be who decides what better is? To a rabid modern neo-nazi extending the lifespan of a certain government may be a morally good choice.
SoG, thank you. I do try to read proofly but I have found out that doing so while watching “Elementary” is not conducive to perfection. I need a secretary. Or fewer distractions. Maybe both.
Michael, the RCC is not the only organisation to cover up abuses of power and to protect its people from The Law. The BBC did it, too and parliaments and children’s homes are renowned for it. As are families.
Many families (DH’s for one, apparently) have a weird Uncle Hugo who touches the children inappropriately even when parents and guardians are around. But don’t worry about Uncle Hugo, he’s harmless, it’s just how he expresses himself. He means well. He’s just a bit odd.
It’s not too large a leap from not reporting Uncle Hugo to not reporting that thuggish child rapist in a black dress who has such a good relationship with all the choir boys and girls. Or to staying silent when Judge Gerry has a lovely little girl in his getaway cottage for a weekend of adventures.
It is pandemic. It is universal. It is catholic. The strong will always prey on the weak and many will silently protect them.
DH, I wish I could travel back to your sister when she was younger to shield her, protect her, give her a gentle hug and perhaps set light to a gonad or two. As that isn’t possible, I’m sorry she was hurt.
The problem is that many, many children and adults are hurt, were hurt and will be hurt. There is no stopping it. Not completely, not while humans are human.
Yes, it is better for the weak now, in some places but the strong and evil are still among us. It is up to the rest of us to always report them no matter what effect that has on our careers or social standing. We should always call out the Savilles. No matter how “respected” they are.
Raymondm, I don’t know if Dr. Ford is a victim or a liar of truly magnificent consistency and talent, it is possible no one ever will know for sure but it is possibly not a good idea to give a man accused of multiple cases of abuse a position of power. Not before he is publicly completely exonerated and shown to be innocent.
Which he may well be.
Hiring a locum from some town in the boonies, preferably a totally ignorant peasant with absolutely no clue, no idea what he’s doing, no knowledge of the Law and no personal bias – because he’s too stupid to have one – while the current candidate is openly investigated for badness doesn’t seem like too onerous a measure. It would need to be someone who couldn’t spell “god” if given three tries and three of the letters but there seems to be a fair number of folk like this available.
The candidate for judgeship under discussion and suspected of naughtiness is going to have the job for life, delaying it a few weeks while the grindstone of Justice mills his life doesn’t seem like a great hardship for him and a locum would allow the Court to continue making mistakes.
A good idea? No?
Sorry for verbosing. I’ll try not to do it too often. Hugs, Happy Mawlid (21/11/18) and Merry Christmas to all.
If we’re going to have a party for one of the boys, why not one each?
(Of course, Malid is also 26/11/18 so we get three for two.)
And Edit is back. It is a cookie thing.
Just a quickie, today’s UK “newspaper” front pages” one of which links to this little gem of an idea. The Times (the London one, not one of those foreign mimicries) has a FAQ on the subject.
Sorry, have a nice sky picture to look at instead. I would link to kittens but I’m far too tired to search for them.
Author, thank you for the link to “Scenes From A Multiverse”, it’s another very good read at mumble o’clock. I’ve now got ten years to catch up on. Hugs. Lots of hugs.
The problem with priestly celibacy is:
It’s unnatural, unnecessary, unbiblical and unsustainable
“In consecrating Vatican City State to St. Michael the Archangel, I ask him to defend us from the evil one and banish him.” – This from a supposedly monotheistic religion, there can be only one god (a superhuman being with power over nature)…..but it’s ok if you pray to all the minor deities and ask them to banish the bad one.
Anonymous, it begs the question, what about those outside of Vatican City?
“It’s in God’s hands.”
The same hands which I imagine are formed into a pair of middle fingers while God sticks his tongue out.
The problem of sexual abuse is universal. How well this abuse is covered up depends on the level of insularity of the surrounding community.
In that, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has a real problem. (You know, the freaks in the black coats and fur hats. Not regular garden variety secular Jews.) The ultra -Orthodox are completely self-contained, having few dealings with the non-Orthodox world. Therefore, excommunication and shunning are extremely effective tools to shut victims up.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_cases_in_Brooklyn%27s_Haredi_community
Note that these guys have no vow of chastity and are always married.
Laripu, UOJ cultists find that shunning their fellow members is effective? My immediate thought is that this seems a little strange. All that would do is leave the once shut-in, insular and segregated former members with the entire world of possible friends to talk to.
Were I one of them, I’d have begged to be shunned. It would have been the best gift they could have given me.
But I’m looking at it from someone who left home and never looked back so perhaps my perspective is slightly skewed.
No. According to a walled-up cult my perspective is definitely skewed, drastically. This gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling of niceness. I feel for those trapped in such depressing prisons of convention and regulations but I’m exceedingly glad I am not one of them.
Though I suppose they could be less lonely.
The Catholic church is egregious when it comes to child abuse but hardly unique. As seems always to be the case-sunlight is the best disinfectant.
What happens when priests are beyond reproach? You get reproach-worthy priests.
What happens when muslim men cannot be sanctioned for fear of racism? You get grooming gangs.
The case of Savile is particularly salutary when you consider that he must have been vetted by secret services to be allowed to hang out with royalty and do Xmas with Thatcher.
So–either the UKs vetting services are worse than those of the FBI (they might be) or they knew and didn’t care.
I’m not sure which prospect carries the most chance of further abuse, but neither prospect pleases.
I understand that the Jehovah’s Witnesses also practise shunning of awkward members. I don’t know what they’re like re sexual abuse.
It doesn’t matter how many potential friends there are to be had — being forced out of the only community you have ever known into an outside world where you don’t know anyone and don’t even speak the language well can be extremely frightening and painful. (I live in NYC, and the Haredim here grow up speaking Yiddish among themselves, and usually speak English with thick accents). Nevertheless a fair number of Orthodox Jews do end up defecting to the modern world.
However it may be that those who leave are those who are psychologically least suited to the Orthodox lifestyle, which would mean that those who remain are necessarily those who are more suited. Since all psychological traits are about 50 percent heritable, this could very well mean that the members of Orthodox communities are being genetically bred to be progressively more and more Orthodox!
This process, where the least suitable members of a community leave while those more suited remain, has been described as “boiling off.” Although the link talks about the Amish, Orthodox Jews would clearly be subject to the same dynamic. The final result would be that the most clannish of the Orthodox Jews would become more and more satisfied with their lifestyle, so fewer and fewer would leave. And since their birthrates are so much higher then those of their neighbors, eventually they would come to demographically dominate the cities and countries that host them. That is, if the Muslims don’t do it first.
Thanks for that, “SmallVoice”. Despite not being exactly youthful (numerically, at least), I’d never seen the word “laic” before… I’d assumed it was some technical acronym understood by those more versed in church matters than I am.
Helena, Saville was no threat to the Royals or the politicians he was vetted for access to. He wasn’t a loony Greenie or Commie or anti-Establishment Voice Of Conscience of any type. He supported the Great and the Good and benefited from the stability of the Aristocracy just as much as they did.
Yes, he had some interests that might have embarrassed his immediate bosses and sponsors, perhaps even the bosses of hospitals and care homes but even those were of absolutely no relevance to the Security Services. He could not have brought down governments or harmed the reputations of Princes had he been caught, jailed and publicly spat upon.
Saville may have been an evil nonce but he was a safe nonce, at least as far as the bosses are concerned.
The Security folks would probably never have even looked at his crimes. It was none of their business and had they known of them they would have been bound by law not to reveal them to anyone else, not even the regular cops. This is not frightening. What would have been frightening would have been the spooks finding a problem and spreading the bad news to the straight world. That would have been terrifying.
It is somewhat like using the Army to go after graffiti artists or burglars. Wrong tool for the job.
Albert, as anyone can see from this page and the previous couple, I’m a bit of a Writer. Words are my tool-kit. I love learning new ones. Had I not had an idea what the one under discussion meant, I would have wandered around my lovely dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopaedias until I did. It’s fun to me. So I thank you for the question. It gave me a chance to explore, to play, to learn and to confirm my suspicions.
It’s something J&M does every so often. “Hermeneuticon”, forsooth.
SmallVoice: “topple Constantine after he supports the Christians? Why not before?”
I think in pre-gunpower days, someone getting taken out by a sniper rifle would be taken as a thunderbolt from the gods punishing an evildoer. That would more thoroughly discredit the idea of supporting Christianity.
If I was to go for an earlier date to prevent the dark ages, I would try to figure out a way, in the Hadrian to Aurelius series of emperors, to formalize the custom of picking a successor who was unrelated to the current emperor. Thus preventing the Crisis of the Third Century, which was a series of civil wars over who would become emperor.
Jim, I wouldn’t take out anyone with a rifle, ever, I’m not that type of strong nor do I know where to get a rifle, I’m English, getting a time travel machine would be easier.
I wouldn’t kill Constantine. I’d implant a body-powered receiver into his ear and transmit voices, continuous loud tones and cRap music -except when he was being examined by a physician. That would make him look nuts and reduce his political effectiveness. Anything he did in Real History that I found objectionable would never be enacted.
But the Fred Pohl short story I mentioned above sounds a warning note. The ending is interesting as preventing the original prevention of the Dark Ages only delays the Malthusian Crunch, if that is the way we are going to go. It fixes the issue for the folks who needed that fix but not for our world full of descendants.
As the Great Pacific Garbage Patch shows, our kids need help from us.
Were I to have a time travelling device I doubt I would be tempted to interfere with the big stuff. I would more likely just get some engineers stoned on some very particular dates so I would be the only one ever to own such a thing.
Me, I’d trust with it. Few others.
Jb, boiling off, or the process of solidifying cultishness in inbred populations is not limited to cults, it happens with villages, too. Little bits of vestigial culture left over when groups are conquered and mostly absorbed tend to become more English than the English. More so if they have limited communications with the outer world as so many do.
It happens in the Amazon and in Papua and used to happen on other islands, too. Cultural insanity being inbred is one explanation for why the Easter Island folk mostly died off.
Cross-fertilisation between different groups is not only a genetically good idea, it is a damned good one for ideas, too. Insular fanatics who never listen tend to dies out, not swarm across the planet as all-conquering supermen.
It actually often works the other way around; a culture who conquers assimilates some of the thinking, language, foods, customs and booze of the conquered. As an example, see curry and chips. Assimilation and cultural imperialism improve everyone’s lot. Eventually. Sometimes.
Pizza.
And German beer.
Personally I believe that history is chaotic, and that even if you had a time machine there would be no way to change the past without scrambling it totally. Any significant alteration you made would affect who got born in the next generation, and that disturbance would ripple outward, until not a single person in the altered history would be the same as anyone in ours. No Luther, no Bach, no Marx, no Hitler, no Einstein. Instead you’d have entirely different historical figures who, while somewhat constrained by geography and economics, would nevertheless take history in wildly different paths from our own. I really don’t see any way around this.
Jb, if we ever find a time travelling machine should we experiment? If you are right, and it does feel like a sensible theory, then we could have loads of Butterfly Effect style fun.
On the subject of friends outside your village or cult, you are right, it is difficult to make new friends. If you are shy it can be painful to try. I was lucky when I moved to my new house, my neighbours are truly nice; not everyone is so fortunate.
Perhaps we should reach out more when new neighbours move in next door?
At non quantum physics Time travel back is impossible. Causality sees to that. Saville was not exposed whilst alive.. He knew too many high profile paedophiles and would have sung like a canary
M27Holts: “(Saville) knew too many high profile paedophiles and would have sung like a canary”
Fact or supposition?
Smallvoice, it is very hard for the ultra-Orthodox to leave that world. Often, they have no education except religious. As an example, you can read the story of Leah Vincent, who was abandoned on a NYC street as a teen for the “sin” of exchanging letters with a boy. Not even sex … not even kisses … not even holding hands … just letters. She’s lucky she survived and succeeded.
I feel lucky too. My parents were culturally Jews, holocaust survivors, but my father was an atheist and my mother was slightly traditional but not very observant. There were no serious religious demands made on me, except to learn what it was about, never to believe it. They wanted me to learn the Yiddish language. My father called all religion, in Yiddish, “bobbeh-meisehs”, literally grandmother-stories, but a better translation is fairy tales. (The language is similar to German, and knowing it helps me pun and joke with my German wife. 🙂 )
The ultra-Orthodox Jews, even when not sexually abused, are abused by the ignorance of their culture.
Pray for them.
Ok, that last line was a joke. 😀
SOG. I remember my mother and father talking about saville who had asaulted two little girls they knew. I distinctly remember that they said it was common knowledge that Saville liked little girls…this was about 1975. The fact that it all came to light when he could no longer implicate the remaining perverts is a sign that arresting him when alive was not an option the authorities could risk…
Laripu, pray to whom? Michael is a little busy with the hundreds of thousands of priests and their boss. Perhaps you could try the beloved one, Lucifer? He seems nice and by all reports he is both incredibly powerful and well-liked by the ultimate boss. Praying to him might have the best chance of success.
Not that prayer has ever been laboratory tested to work well but that could be because those doing it were pleading to the wrong demi-gods. By all acounts, those aligned with our dear Lucifer are far more successful than those praying to the average saint, angel or djinn.
M27Holts, all organisations, groups and institutions have their evil bastards and a few who are too scared to report the crimes of them but it is surprising that you would think that law enforcers from many constabularies all over England over more than three decades would universally cover for a putrid nonce like Saville.
He might have been protected by the BBC, at least by his immediate line managers, and in omission by the charity organisers and care home and hospital managers who granted him access to the vulnerable – at least to a small degree – but it is not really credible that hundreds of cops from many forces colluded with the prat.
Saville wasn’t that likeable.
It would take a great deal of solid evidence to convince me that an all-powerful god who created the universe, including cancers, radioactivity, bosons and cats is worried about me seeing a girl naked or believing he exists. It would take a little more to convince me of Saville’s innocence.
I’m just glad I was never on the jury judging him. I’m not sure whether gratuitous and ignorant prejudice against the defendant is cause for dismissal but in my case it probably should be.
Saville may well have been a nice man but I detested what I saw of him.
If I, from a distance and knowing little real about him would be willing to think the worst of him and if he really was so evil as portrayed it is improbable that everyone close to him thought of him as being worth the risk to their reputations, jobs, lives, incomes and freedom. If people had known they would have reported him. It is most likely they did not.
A question, if I may, M27? Why did your parents not report the scunner? Fear of police inaction could not have been a reason in 1975. Saville was not so very important, then. True, two reports may have amounted to little but as we’ve recently seen witch-hunts are relatively easy to initiate and sustain.
That USA judge guy is a perfect example of such, whether he deserves it or not.
Smallvoice? Whatever happened to short? Weren’t you going to try short? You just can’t help wittering on, can you?
Is there a lare, penate or patron saint of brevity?
I was just reporting on a bit of anecdotal evidence that seemed to support the theory that Saville operated without fear of any real effort to expose him. The reasons for his seemingly unopposed ability to abuse are manifold. But I’m sure that he did know others of his ilk. Governmental abusers are as protected as Catholic priests. Or were in the seventies and eighties….
So, M27, it’s a “I dreamed of this disaster weeks before it happened …” type story? Ah, well, at this temporal distance I suppose anecdotal stories are all we could reasonably expect.
It would have been nice had someone who “knew” reported Saville way back when he was just starting but it would also have been lovely had people done the same for the Krays, Manson and millions of others.
Including the rare, exceptional case of politically protected ponces.
I suppose it’s just too much to expect from fallible, frightened people.
SmallVoice: Re brevity: Don’t beat yourself up. I’m sure there are plenty who will be only too happy to do it for you.
Son of G re: 10/21: hear, hear…
SoG, promises, promises. No one comes around to beat me up any longer. Not since those … wait, what is the Statute of Limitations on these things?
Oldbabe, was that a sort of hinty type of offer? Or am I just being overly optimistic?
Hey! Brief. Cool!
Briefer!
🙂
When I said anecdotal. The fact is I distinctly remember my mum and dad discussing about a friend’s daughters who reported indecency to their mum by Saville. This was 1975 at the height of his popularity and fame. She went to the police who basically told her that her daughter’s had fabricated the story. Standard practice in those times I would Imagine.
Smallvoice. You do the security services too much credit in implying that they give two shits about innocent lives being ruined.
They aren’t vetting to see if someone is a danger to the Royals–they only care if he is blackmailable. I slightly know the ex ambassador to Uzbekistan (we’ve had a couple of pints and gone on a march together–we aren’t close). However, he told me of his positive vetting experience.
A couple of serious secret service types turned up and had a list of his affairs (he claims no woman can resist a man in a kilt). He wondered if this meant the end of his career? Oh, no–came the reply, usually when we are asked to do this the worry is that it will be little boys.
Affairs don’t end careers any more (think Boris) but pedophilia might–because you are blackmailable. And if you are blackmailable then you are an asset to other people’s secret services, potentially (that’s the major fuss over Putin and Trump).
I genuinely dont know what to make of this in the Savile case. These folk are pretty good at this and it wasnt exacrtly a closely guarded secret was it? (There are dozens of Beeb in-jokes about it, such as this one by Mitchell and Webb, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBlUzPlnx6U
John Lydon was shut down for talking about it, Jerry Sadowitz was talking about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0) Etc etc.
I am reluctant to believe in conspiracies per se (people are too incompetent, every system leaks etc) But I do believe in inept cover-ups of the Emperors new clothes type (“I’ll say something the moment someone else does…the very moment…”)
But that doesnt quite cover the secret services. For what its worth my guess is that they were just told to soft peddle because if Savile was blackmailed then no-one would give a damn–he had access to the Royals etc but no actual secrets, and they didn’t really care about the little girls being abused any more than the ones in Rotherham did. But, I’m open to other readings
No woman can resist a man in a kilt? Probably not if his cock is visible below the hem….
Helena, dear lady, I can assure you that most women can resist some men no matter how that man may be dressed or un. Personal experience, with “most” having a value exceedingly close to “all”. Your friend was optimistic at best.
Things like Rotherham, Saville and the others may be down to institutional reluctance to be bothered with trivia, institutionalised individual fear and laziness or something worse but I more tend to think of them as being the result of incompetence and inattention. Not that I think we’ll ever really know. There are just sufficient numbers of bad operators to ensure the worst secrets stay secreted.
It is made worse by those loud voices who are convinced no human has ever landed on the Moon [in spite of our having bases on a more distant world] or that 11/9 was an inside, false-flag job or that Mr Gates was merely a front for the filtering of Roswell/Area-51 derived alien technologies. No matter how open the bosses force the cops and spooks to become on any subject there are those who will noisily always believe the stories told to be lies. Who believe that no mater how bad the news the truth is hidden and much worse.
Tin-hattery is an evil influence that has crept into our very souls. All of us are tainted a little by it. We may laugh at the Moon-deniers, the Comet-heaven cultists and those who tell us Jack was smuggled into Albania where he lives today in luxury but we have that small cloud of dark suspicion somewhere in our beings.
No one trusts the cops, not fully, not all cops, not any more.
We are all trained by “Capricorn One”, “The Domino Theory”, the nightly News and “Person of Interest” to suspect so we do.
It doesn’t help that everyone lies to us. No all of the time but sufficiently often that we can’t trust them. Not totally.
Crying wolf syndrome works.
We are prepared to believe the worst in the Saville affair because we’ve seen Profumo and Watergate and all the others.
I do prefer to think well of most policemen, spies, politicians and even priests but that is only because I love humans. I admire humans. I think people are the greatest thing since dogs. Yet even I admit to not entirely trusting a small number of them.
Which I find very sad. One should always be able to trust those who govern. They should deserve our trust. It is sad that they sometimes seem not to.
It is sad that we hear The Good News from Jesus and Mo’ and all their friends and our first conclusion is that they are self-aggrandising confidence tricksters trying to avoid farming while getting chicks.
We really should be able to trust them.
M27Holts, no offence was ever intended to your parents or your good self, I just wish more had been done long ago.
But you are correct in that the word of little girls was given scant credence for many generations when those words attacked the reputations of the powerful. That is a sadness.
Small Voice. I think a lot of us were taken by surprise when someone who peddles those sorts of conspiracy theories took over at the White House. A lot of it comes down to who you trust (which isnt the same as who you think is always right). I trust climate change scientists. That doesnt mean I think they are infallible–but I’m fairly sure that they arent ina conspiracy (because I know scientists and the only thing two of them can agree on is that a third doesnt deserve the grant she just got).
But I dont trust paid shills–the people whoa re paid to deny climate change are from the same playbook as those who denied the issues with asbestos, oil, tobacco etc. In many cases–its the same people.
So–how to judge these things? We’d love to have an infallible easy-to-follow metric but I dont know of one. And its doesnt just boil down to brains. Very smart people can believe very strange things. Just try loggin on to Soctt Adams’ web page to watch a man go steadily off the rails (holocaust denial, evolution denial, climate change denial, Trump worship) over the last few years
Oh–thanks for the “Nazis on Mars” links. Of course, the Jews want us to think that…
The psychological effects of conspiracy are in built into us by natural selection. The hominids that thought everything was out to get them survived….and led to the 21st Century Schizoid man…
Helena, do “the Jews” want us to think the Nazis have secret bases on Mars because this makes their enemy a great threat and mighty thereby making “the Jews”, themselves, look even better for having defeated them – sort of like making Thanos or Galactus a huge threat so the good guys look cool when they beat them?
Or do “the Jews” want us to see “the Nazis” and their friends and allies in “the New World Order” as a great threat so we’ll see “the Jews” as an underdog whom we need to support as they are the good guys and are so obviously outmatched and in need of aid and money, diplomatic support, free weapons systems, new laws and stuff?
Or is it all a Jewish-Zionist-Nazi-Illuminati-Hybrid plot to drive us nuts with dark mists of confusion so they can continue ruling all the worlds in peace?
Or do they just want to sell us more oranges?
Personally, I would like to blame the Lydians. Not for anything, I would just blame them because there aren’t any of them any more and shifting the blame to them is fairly harmless as a hobby.
Except … could the lovely, wise, wonderful, truthful mystical, intellectually powerful and twittish Mr. Trump be a remnant, relict Lydian?
(Hmmm … something odd here. My spell-checker allowed the hyphenated “JZN” but baulks when I add the Illuminati. It thinks “Illuminati” itself is correct when standing alone and unhyphenated, it just doesn’t want them aligned with the others. I find that terribly suspicious.)