Ian Paisley an inspiration in Irish Catholic Church sex scandals

The most compassionate words I have heard in Ireland on the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandal came from the Rev. Ian Paisley.

That may sound utterly absurd, given Paisley's history of anti-Catholic fulminating, but while in Ireland I listened to an interview he gave on Newstalk radio last night, and it left me with an entirely new opinion of the man.

In Ireland, the Church abuse scandal has been reduced to legalistic maneuvers and predictable moral outrage comments. The children who were most affected seem strangely absent from the debate.

It is as if the argument has moved beyond the debate about the thousands of individual destroyed lives and identities shattered by the pedophiles who preyed on them.

All the speculation is about whether one bishop or another will resign, what legal maneuvering going on, were the bishops treated properly.

With all due respect to the bishops, they are not the issue here at all. The best that can be said about the whole bunch of them, with a few honorable exceptions, is that they overlooked evil when it was very evident in their ranks.

They can dance on as many pinheads as they want, but it will not excuse that fact.

Paisley instead went to the heart of the matter.

When he was asked about the Irish incidents he did not embark on a rant about the Catholic Church, which I had fully expected.

Rather, he said, and I paraphrase, that he put aside a quiet moment to pray for all those children whose lives were destroyed, who were unable to understand what had happened to them and to pray for their eventual recovery from their horrific mistreatment.

It was in no way an anti-Catholic statement, or a rant from a man once considered the greatest demagogue in Northern Irish history.

Instead, they were words of sheer wisdom from a man who went straight to the heart of the issue, the young children who faced years of official silence about the abuse that will have ruined many of their lives.

Later on in the same interview, when asked about the importance of the border in Irish life, Paisley was very frank, admitting his stance had changed on the Irish Republic but equally, the Irish Republic stance on Northern Ireland had also changed.

It was the kind of simple but direct analysis that has endeared me to the man.

At the last stage of his life, Ian Paisley saw the light and worked to bring peace to his troubled land.

The fact that he broke with the past and the old hatreds is a measure of the man.

He is an example to all in the Catholic Church who would prefer to sweep the current scandals under the carpet and pretend they never happened.

Ian Paisley spoke up and spoke truth to power when it came to Northern Ireland.

The Catholic Church needs to do likewise.

He should be an inspiration to them, strange and all as that might seem.

In Defense of Celibacy

Posted by Niall O'Dowd at 6/7/2009 8:47 PM EDT

I met a remarkable priest this weekend. The topic turned quickly to the horrific events in Ireland in the recent past, and my clear belief that if priests could marry then there would be far less room for pedophiles and abnormal deviants.

He disagreed politely with me. He let me know that while he debated celibacy often in his mind, especially the loneliness it brings him, he, on balance, still favored it.

Then he told me about his day and I understood where he was coming from.

It had begun with a funeral mass for a dead newborn. I can only imagine where anyone finds the strength to help bereaved parents cope with such a horrific loss.

It was followed by a funeral for a much-beloved parishioner, Irish-born as it happened, who had passed away. He had to comfort yet another grieving family.

Following that was a wedding and the kind of gear shift that must have left his head spinning as he moved from darkness to light, from death to celebration, from family tears to cheers.

He looked at me after he had recounted this and said 'I poured all my emotion, my empathy, my love into those three events -- how could I have anything left for a wife and children?

He told me about a horrific event at the beginning of his career when a young child was savaged to death by a dog. He was the first person called to the scene. The boy died. He was not from a Catholic family, but the Lutheran pastor never came to visit the family that awful day. The priest found out later it was because the man's wife had just given birth to twins.

His point was that to dispense his duties and to give everything in the name of his church, he was better off not married with no responsibilities at home. That way, he could focus on the parishioners in trouble, the tragic death or the uplifting wedding, and perform the pastoral duty he was very clearly well-suited to do.

He is a good man and a good priest, and he spoke a lot of sense in his defense of celibacy. I still disagree with him, but he did show another side to this debate, for which I am grateful.

What do you think?

Ultra Catholic Bill Donohoe Should Wise Up

Posted by Niall O'Dowd at 5/22/2009 4:32 PM EDT

William Donohoe has finally lost it. The great defender of every imaginable slur against Catholics has performed a useful role in pointing out the coverage of Catholicsm is often very biased. However, his latest effort, carried in a letter to the New York Times, attempting to justify some of the horrific abuse in the church in ireland is beyond the pale.

Donohoe, head of the Catholic League, tries to separate certain of the perverted activities of the clergy who abused from each other. Kissing and fondling for instance of young kids was not rape he said.Perhaps not, but it was still an incredibly cruel and inhuman thing to do to a young child against their will.

Donohoe even manages to divide up the activities into different grades of degradation. He writes;
"More important, the report labels four types of abuse: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. This includes things like “kissing,” “inappropriate sexual talk,” “being kicked,” “inadequate heating,” “lack of attachment and affection” and so on; regarding sexual abuse, the most common form was fondling, not rape.

"To conflate serious abuse with punitive measures that were not uncommon at the time (82 percent of the incidents took place before 1970) is manifestly unfair."

Excuse me Bill, any kind of sexual contact with a chiid constitutes sexual abuse and to pretend otherwise is to whistle past the graveyard of your religion if this blindness persists.

There can be no dimunition of the gross acts carried out against generations of Irish children.Wise up Bill, get off your bended knee for a moment and look at the reality of it.

If it were a class of people such as firemen, rabbis or teachers or doctors who did this to kids for generations they would all be in jail - and you'd be crying out the loudest to jail them. Just because they wore a collar didn't give them the god given right to abuse little kids.Capece?