Almost the Pope

With a bit of luck and the application of the law, cardinal Pell will be in a cell tonight. There might be a God after all! One wonders how this will be faced by this man who for years denied justice to those child victims subjected to terrible abuse. I never like the man. Each time he was on TV I could not help but feel he was a man devoid of feeling. The Pope has now been given a list of 6000 paedophile priests. Those priests are still alive. The Pope in his celestial wisdom announced they were ‘The Tools of Satan’.  Even now, he is not willing to face the terrible truth that each of those abusers should have been dealt with by the law. The Catholic church still prefers to hide the fact that for decades the only thing the church was interested in was to hide the truth of rampant paedophilia. The victims were secondary in this whole debacle.

Cardinal Pell was the third highest in the hierarchy of the catholic Church. Almost a Pope. The Catholic church now has a crisis on its hands. It can no longer persists in one of its strongest dogmas of its insistence on celibacy. People have sex. The denial of that is just plain stupid. Of course, abuse of children is not just concentrated by the catholic church. It happens everywhere but, the catholic church is the one religion which stands out above all the others in its treatment of the victims.  The hiding and moving paedophile priests to other parishes was a matter of routine. It seems unbelievable that that was the norm. Pell seemed to blame the victims of abuse. A callous man devoid of compassion and empathy.

It is now seen as an institution run by feeble old men run for feeble old men. You look at those images of all those old purple clad men huddling together eager to kiss the withered hand of a shaky mitered Pope in Rome. Where are the women in all this? There needs to be a revolution by the catholic church.

In any case, Pell will be locked up tonight. One can only wonder what he will be thinking. Is there going to be a moment, just a split second, whereby he will acknowledge within his frosty heart, the terrible deeds he now has been found guilty of?

Dropping a bombshell.

When Cardinal Pell declared some years ago, that the health hazards of homosexuality were worse than that of smoking, he sure showed his cards. The fact that as a priest his anti gay stance drove young aspiring men to suicide did not seem to trouble him the least.

Pell will get his trial and no matter the outcome, the catholic church is receiving a king-hit right now. It cannot risk losing support from their own staunchly conservative anti-gay, anti same sex marriage of ‘true’ believers, nor from those that were hoping that this new Pope would finally steer the church into a more progressive direction. It is a real dilemma and a nightmare. One can just imagine the battles being fought between the younger progressive cardinals and the concreted conservatives. I would not be surprised it coming to fisticuffs with mitres flying about, littering the Vatican’s corridors.

I reckon the Pope would have been tossing and turning last night. A restless sleep. He needs all the advice that his most trusted cardinals can muster. The whole Vatican must now be seething with anxiety, lawyers getting copies of briefs, ready for the Melbourne procedures. It is clear that Pell’s TV appearance last night was already pointing out at great lengths that ‘character assassination’ and ‘media gossip’ will be used as one of his best modes of defence. It might be argued that his trial cannot possibly be fair when so many allegations of sexual abuse have already been ‘relentlessly’ aired and tried by the media. Against that is the belief that ‘no-one’ is above the law, not even the Pope.

My own parents gave it all a miss many years ago. Mum reckoned she would have used the pill if available in earlier years. She was a great supporter of her own children later on choosing the number of children they wished to have. It begs the question, if the pill would have been available in my parents time, some of us might now not be here to tell the tale! The bombshell when I announced my plan to travel to Finland to get married was received with total mayhem and utter despair. “You used to be such a nice young man, Gerard,” was what my still fervently believing catholic inspired mum told me. Dad was more understanding or just less orthodox. Either way, the idea of marrying a girl they never met, was  much less of an issue than the fact she wasn’t ‘catholic.’ It was one of the most irritating questions we were asked by mother, when dating a girl; Is she Catholic?

I would like to think that my trip to Finland might well have been the catalyst in their slide-down into becoming ex-Catholics or non-believers. It was slow in coming but gathered speed as the years went by. It had a liberating effect on my parents. The final knock-out blow to their Catholicism was delivered years later, when they watched a TV segment whereby their former ‘nice-boy Gerard’ was interviewed about his recent vasectomy. There could not have been a more enthusiastic supporter for the cut to the vas deferens, than my mother.

The surgeon was Barbara Simcock. I read years later that she performed thousands of vasectomies.  What she doesn’t know about testicles is just not worth writing about. The seventies was just the beginning. Vasectomies become so popular the term vasectomania was used. It still is the preferred method for male contraception. Just type in ‘vasectomy’ and one gets the most mouth watering invitation from dozens of clinics offering a host of very tempting procedures. One even offers a three-day trip on a luxury liner.

 

The mind boggles.