The Catholic Church – A grotesque cult of abuse – VG

This is history. The record expresses the writer’s position. You can submit articles and posts to VG here.

Egon Holstad, Commentator in the VG newspaper in Tromsø

330,000 children were abused by 3,200 employees of the Catholic Church. More than 2,000 of them were priests.

The case reported in the media on Monday morning is beyond bizarre. Figures obtained by an independent commission from the 1950s to the present, and are therefore applicable only in France alone. Unfortunately, one must add, knowing that the Catholic Church is a global church with over 1.2 billion members.

Two-thirds of Europe’s population belongs to the Catholic Church. Even in Norway, where Catholicism is relatively weak compared to southern Europe, there are 100,000 registered Catholics, a double number if you count the working immigrants.

Therefore, the above numbers are only the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, it’s no longer shocking either. Abuses in the Catholic Church have long been suspicious of the religious community, and since the late 1990s police authorities, private investigators, and the media have exposed massive amounts of abuse against children, by those with influence in the Catholic Church. a church. Also in Norway. The dark numbers are all reason to believe they are enormous.

The danger with numbers as mentioned above, when it gets too big, is that it’s hard to absorb. But when in France alone there are 330,000 children (for a limited period of time) who have been sexually abused by persons in power in a particular denomination, only one country, it is worth thinking a bit about the extent. How many individuals, lives destroyed.

Pope Francis denounced all abuses in the Church, noting that they have a special responsibility to protect vulnerable children and adults. But we also won’t go back any further than his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who, as recently as 2012, sent an internal letter to the entire Church, threatening that arbitrary warnings to police authorities would excommunicate the Church. Such threats, especially from that edge, are relatively effective in those circles.

Thus, victim care is something entirely new out there in the yard, and it was only when the grave crime was discovered by outside forces, and so undeniably, it seems false and disgusting.

It should also be noted that the above commission was established by the Catholic Church in France itself, but this was the result of a series of allegations and revelations of grave abuses in the press. Now church representatives say they are “ashamed and disgusted” and are asking forgiveness from those affected.

Being ashamed and disgusted is all well and good, but it should really be missing, and not something you should ever feel praised for. Forgiveness is also something you have to earn. The Catholic Church here has a long way to go before they can expect to bring anything more than mere shame and disgust – for themselves. And the desire to clean this up, through both the judicial system and internal arrangements, and to compensate the victims, was entirely absent in the Church, until evidence—all over the world—compelled them to seize it.

The abuses are not a coincidence or something that happened without the responsible authorities in the church themselves knowing about them. They represented the same problem, either as aggressors themselves, or as officials who, over several generations, had deliberately helped hide and cover themselves, rather than help the victims.

The church was very reluctant to cooperate with the police authorities and instead wanted to “clean up internally”. One well-known step in this regard was the transfer of priests who knew internally that they abused children, who made only worse mistakes, as the same perpetrators were able to continue the crimes of abuse in new environments, until they were blessed by them. , So to speak.

This has also happened on a global basis. Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church has its own comprehensive Wikipedia page. And it was in 35 different languages ​​the last time I checked. Thus, we guarantee to speak for the millions of children who have been sexually abused around the world. To what extent this has happened in the past, is something one feels disgusted only by speculating about. The commission in France has relived 70 years in time. The Catholic Church has been a center of power for nearly 2,000 years.

What this “culture” means (in the absence of a much worse word, which was hardly in print), I personally think is less interesting, although it often needs to be researched. The requirements for celibacy are often mentioned. Same thing with no women in the corridors of power. In this context, however, it is completely irrelevant.

Adults who abuse physical, symbolic, and religious force to sexually abuse children know, of course, that what they are doing is both criminally and morally reprehensible. And in a crazy way, these gruesome finds are worse than the dark corners and cracks of the Internet doing the same thing.

When an all-encompassing sect and a world-wide superpower, which has had an iron grip on both political and economic power in countries around the world, in practice and with full intent, is a perverted free nation of abusers, the organization itself is something to be proud of.

A huge memorial next to St. Peter’s Basilica – symbolizing disgust, shame and remorse – would have been a fitting start. Huge financial compensation for victims and their relatives follow up in a timely manner. Second, the perpetrators who are still alive must be brought to justice and convicted.

There is a long way to go before the Catholic Church receives neither respect nor forgiveness.