PAEDOPHILE PRIESTS - What the Royal Commission Won't Say

The sex-abuse Royal Commission is in the news again today. They’re chasing down Cardinal Pell’s hush money.

The money was difficult to claim, implied no admission of responsibility by the church, and was used by some victims to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol. It’s an important strand for the commission to follow.

But it’s not the most important.

You’re unlikely to learn the most important facet of church sex-abuse by following the Hearings. I’ve come to believe it’s related to the Catholic doctrine of original sin.

Paedophile priests were protected. Their superiors hushed up their crimes and moved them on to different communities. Was this done to shield the church from scandal? Yes. To preserve the reputations of cardinals, bishops and monsignors? Absolutely. To shift the problem on to some other bishop’s patch? Almost certainly.

But there’s something uglier lurking underneath. Something inseparable from the old-style Irish Catholicism that infected so much of this country.

It’s the idea that the child is somehow to blame.

The idea that the offender is a good man tempted. Remove him from the source of that temptation and all will be well – for everyone who counts, that is. It was the child’s fault.

For a victim, that stays with you. It colours your entire world view. It does more damage than the original assault.

You carry it into every relationship you will ever have. The certainty that you don’t deserve to be there. That you’re never going to be good enough. That you don’t deserve to be loved. That if only you can be better, then maybe you won’t be hurt again. That if you are hurt, then you’ve earned it.

Of course, you don’t understand all this as a child. That’s the beauty part – you get to think about it for decades.

It’s where the real damage is done.

It’s the ugly scar that grows over the wound.

And, while the Royal Commission carries on, it’s worth remembering.

AFFIDAVIT

I never in thirty years realised quite how angry I was. It usually moves in identifiable stages: a pulse in the calf, then the biceps and shoulder; next, if the stimulus continues, an all over tremor as adrenaline storms the body; in the red-line final stage evolution ceases to matter as the top lip twitches violently then peels back to show the canines.

            Saturday, watching the investigative news program unfold the stages didn’t occur. When the journalist stood in front of Parramatta courthouse unable to say the priest’s name I went straight to the lip twitch. Father (initial)...Father (initial)...Father (initial – see I can’t use it either). By the time they showed his blurry face walking the streets of Armidale I didn’t know whether to chew someone’s throat out or climb inside myself.

            And then it’s the text messages, my desperately catholic mother watching the same program: his name was (......) wasn’t it? And weren’t you lucky, trying to persuade herself against what’s been there to see for so long, seeing the stories of boys whose trajectories mirror my own: the bright kid who ceased to be interested in school; the inability to hold down a job; the succession of troubled, abused, abusive women. The heroin. There’s no denial like religious denial; unless it’s maternal denial.

            In the end you crawl inside yourself and hope you’ll eventually find something worth saving. I’ve managed to make and hold on to a handful of healthy friendships; people as or more screwed up than I am, but with a sense of perspective and the desire to be better. I’ve managed, as yet, not to destroy myself; I’ve ceased actively trying.

The rage that jumped up and smacked me Saturday at last has a shape, a face, a name. You get into the habit of burying things, and sometimes they go so deep you don’t recognise them when they re-emerge. I recognise this. I can now capture and hold on to it, examine it like a nineteenth century naturalist, describe and classify it, and hopefully skewer it to the page of a volume I can consign to my library of read books: unable to be discarded, but understood, and rendered useful.

The friends who’ve helped prepare me to do this know who they are, know I’d die for them, and don’t need to be named. Some of them are reading this now.

These are my last words on this.