Catholic and Loving it!

This is apparently what a million pounds looks like in £5 notes...

[image source]

I only mention it, because if you happen to see any of those lying around you might want to send them to the Diocese of Middlesbrough who may be needing a few of them soon.

Catholic Church reluctant to accept its responsibility for Britain’s biggest child abuse case so far

The Middlesbrough Diocese of the Catholic Church was told by a High Court judge this week that it was responsible for a children’s home that was the centre of a large-scale abuse scandal. The diocese now faces a potential £8m compensation bill.

The abuse claims centred on the St William’s Community Home in Market Weighton, East Yorkshire. More than 140 former residents filed claims of physical and sexual abuse but it was unclear who was responsible for the home – whether it was the Middlesbrough diocese or the De La Salle Brothers, an order of lay teachers.

The case concerns alleged systematic abuse of children at the care home from 1960 until 1992 when it closed. St William’s took emotionally and behaviourally disturbed boys, aged 10 to 16, referred by councils largely from Yorkshire and the North East.

...

Judge Simon Hawkesworth QC ruled at the High Court in Leeds that the claims should be made against the diocese, and it opens the way for the biggest compensation pay outs from the Church that this country has ever seen. It is the culmination of a six year battle in which the diocese has tried every legal trick to delay the issue and try to evade responsibility. The Church still has the option of making a further appeal — claiming that De La Salle should be liable — which would delay matters for at least another year.

Solicitor for the claimants, David Greenwood, said: “It has been a long battle with the organisations responsible for the home. They have used every argument possible to resist the case and I am hopeful that the Middlesbrough Catholic diocese will consider settling the cases now."

[link]

Where is the Diocese of Middlesbrough going to find £8m? Church closures and sell offs is my guess. It's desperately frustrating for me as a lay Catholic to contemplate the fact that my Church might be sold off and all our efforts destroyed because of events somewhere else fourty years ago. It doesn't seem fair, but then, it doesn't seem fair that young boys were abused either so what right have we to complain? Life isn't fair.

What I can complain about is the present.

Why am I learning about this from the National Secular Society? If there were no such thing as the National Secular Society would I be learning about it at all? We hear all this stuff about lay involvement and "empowering" laypeople but it's smoke and mirrors. How many laypeople in our diocese know that they are liable for the biggest child abuse case in this country so far? Most of the laity I speak to are under the impression that these things happen somewhere else. America, Ireland, London... but not here.

It's hard to imagine an article about this in the Middlesbrough Catholic Voice. That magical fairy land where the sun always shines, why would the diocese publish information that makes it look bad?

Authenticity? Honesty? Openness?

Heh!

In keeping this sort of thing quiet, in burying the information away and doing their best to make sure the people in the pews don't know anything about it the Diocese are effectively maintaining the same strategy that got us in this mess: They are, in a sense, covering up child abuse. They are not hiding it from the police, they are hiding it from their own laypeople.

What worries me is that this is the cultural norm within the Church - to bury bad news and it's not healthy because it gives us a kind of moral leprosy, we hurt ourselves but we cannot feel the pain so we keep on doing it.

The phenomenon is occuring today in Catholic Education where bad news is continally buried by the likes of CES so that every time the government forces something which is contrary to Catholic teaching the CES bury it away and everybody thinks there is no crisis in Catholic schools, it's happening in Catholic Youth Work where everybody pretends that Reclaim the Future wasn't the product of the Youth Work community and that there is definitely nobody out there with funny ideas and it happens in liturgical matters where Bishops would rather pretend that Fr X never does anything wrong than announce publicly that Y shouldn't be happening.

Until we fix this fundamental cultural problem within the Church it is very difficult to trust anybody.

Until we have openness, it is difficult to see how our children can be safe. Perhaps they are not in danger of paedophiles anymore (child protection is now a top priority) but they are in grave danger of hearing dodgy teaching and witnessing dodgy liturgy and we all have to pretend that's not true.

People wonder how child abuse was able to happen within the Church for so long without anybody in authority doing anything about it. I don't wonder. They were just following standard procedure and perpetuating a culture which is favourable to abuse.

A culture which continues to exist today.