Why are we only focusing on money to pay for the crimes of the Catholic Church?
Like many people, I have been following the scoping report on sex abuse in Irish schools run by religious orders. I’ve spoken to a number of principals of schools where clerical sex abuse happened on the premises they now lead. I’ve asked them whether any parents or staff have mentioned it to them and the answer from all of them has been “no.”
I wonder how are people so numb to this. Perhaps because the crime is so unimaginably horrific, we find it hard to grasp the reality of it. The thought of it should disgust us. Some argue that it’s like gun crime in the US — when we first heard about school shootings, there was mass outcry on banning guns; these days, it’s almost a shrug of the shoulders. We have been hearing about the Catholic Church covering up sex abuse for a few decades now. Is it possible that could be the reason?
Another possible reason is because of who has committed the crime. For whatever reason, when the Catholic Church do something utterly vile, there seems to be a forgiveness of sorts. I’d like to think that if I covered up a terrible crime in an organisation I ran, I wouldn’t be allowed to continue running that organisation. And yet that is what is happening.
The very same people that keep covering up this stuff still make all the big decisions in schools. When most schools hire a teacher, the school must get the appointment passed by these same people that may have covered up child sex abuse.
I have been waiting for teacher representative bodies, namely the CPSMA, IPPN and INTO, to come out and tell school principals and teachers that they are there to support them if they’ve been affected by any feedback from parents, past-pupils, etc. regarding the scoping reports. The fact that they haven’t suggests to me that:
a) there has been no contact made by schools to representative bodies, thus no approaches
b) they don’t see the connection.
My guess is it’s both. I can’t understand the cognitive dissonance.
Instead, within a week I’ve seen a couple of posts from a principal representative group celebrating the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers; and I read an article about CBS Synge Street becoming a co-ed, Gaelcholaiste. There wasn’t a single mention of it remaining a Catholic school. There wasn’t even an acknowledgement of the scoping report where there have been dozens of allegations. I can only imagine how survivors feel to see a place they experienced the worst of humanity being spoken about in these terms.
I have read countless articles in the media and the word almost all of them have in common, with the notable exception of the wonderful Fintan O’Toole, has been “redress.” It seems that everyone is simply waiting for the monetary cost of how much compensation is going to be given to survivors of the most horrific crime one can commit — to sexually abuse a child. Who is going to pay the survivors? What will the cost to the State be? Will the Catholic Church contribute? These are the questions I have been reading through the last week and I am left wondering why nobody is asking a more obvious question.
How is the Catholic Church going to pay the price for continuing to cover up the crimes of its clergy in the schools they managed? And when I say “pay” I don’t mean in money. Given that it is clear that few lessons have been learned given the allegations in this report are as recent as 2013, it is clear to me that the Catholic Church cannot be trusted to provide a safe environment for children. It is beyond time that they exited the education space.
While I would rather they left education in a less shameful way, perhaps the price, both monetary or otherwise, should be the ownership of their assets. Currently, the State pays them billions of euro a year indirectly and directly. Every school build, every extension, every refurbishment, every utility bill, every single thing is paid for by the State using taxpayers’ money and gifted to the Vatican. In fact, over the last 5 months I have saved newspaper articles on over 50 schools — with billions spent on them. Not a single article mentioned that the entire project is gifted to the Catholic Church.
Let’s just take these 50 school buildings and see what would happen if the State did something very simple, which it could do tomorrow.
Step 1: The State no longer pays for capital projects.
That’s it.
An arrangement could be made that the State would use the money they currently gift to the church and move it into State ownership. In other words, over time the church would no longer own the buildings or land and they would fall into State ownership, and the money saved could be used to compensate victims.
Just taking the last 5 months, and only the articles I could find, that is already billions of euro.
To me, this is the fairest price to pay for their crimes. They should never, ever, be allowed to have any influence on or profit from children. They currently have an almost monopoly on both of these and it needs to be taken from them once and for all.
The only thing stopping it right now is the cognitive dissonance from the Irish public. If sexually abusing children and covering up these crimes isn’t enough to change that, I honestly don’t know what will.
