Paedophilia and the Vatican
Mick Armstrong’s article on Catholic and other church child abuse (Red Flag #49) is a worthy addition to his contributions to working class history over many years. However, Armstrong’s article can be pressed further.
The precursor to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was a NSW special commission of inquiry into high-level police and Catholic Church collaboration to protect paedophile priests in the Hunter region of NSW.
Commissioner Margaret Cuneen found no evidence to support the claim, but tried to discredit detective chief inspector Peter Fox, whose earlier investigations had revealed decades of church torture of children. His seniors stopped the investigations prematurely. Cuneen parroted the police view that Fox had “lost his objectivity” by empathising with victims.
Under the guise of bourgeois legality, Cuneen also provided a podium for senior police to attack Fairfax journalist Joanne McCarthy, whose investigative reports drew heavily on Fox’s, blew the lid off the cover-up and, combined with popular protest, forced the state to appear to be addressing the issue.
But a key volume of the commission’s four-volume report related to potential criminal charges has been embargoed.
Backgrounded by the Cuneen commission, the ALP-initiated royal commission is run by former senior police, political liberals and corporate investors. It can make recommendations but has no power to prosecute, meaning that should it refer criminal allegations against any church employees to the court system, they will enjoy prolonged freedom while charges grind along for years and witnesses tire or disappear, if indeed charges are laid at all.
Given its ideological composition, moreover, the commission has been precast to avoid dangerous recommendations that might expose the integration of the church with the interests of capital.
The sexual abuse under examination is a central component of a systematic institutional regime which embraces the gamut of practices from psychological abuse to sexual brutality.
Celibacy, cited by church sympathisers to justify its serial paedophilia, is a fraudulent defence on two counts. First, it has never been a consistent doctrinal condition for the priesthood over the centuries. Second, its observance has been at best modest, as sex workers can testify.
But for the Catholic fifth of the world’s population, overwhelmingly working class and peasant and living in the Third World, this gamut of repressive practices is a highly effective form of discipline. When complemented by the Vatican’s anticommunist ideology, doctrine and practice, it forms a unity whose unstated purpose is at one with the purpose of capitalist schooling and the class interests it embodies: the reproduction of a compliant workforce subordinate to capital accumulation and ever conscious of the threat of violence.
Enrichment through the most brutal forms of violence that it has historically supported in Latin America – from the Spanish invasion and occupation of the continent to its endorsement of military dictatorships – is the Vatican’s guarantor par excellence of that fact.
Were the church obliged to register its riches in Australia, it would be the country’s fifth-largest corporation. On a global scale, it is a transnational corporation with a CEO, the pope, its own tax-exempt bank linked to mafia interests worldwide and now with George Pell as its treasurer.
As Marx remarked of the 19th century English church, the Vatican would “more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income”. Its appointment of a commission to investigate what it politely reduces to “sexual abuse” is a tactical move to head off a major erosion of its capital, in a global context in which even some insiders like sister Mary Kelly (author of Taught to Believe the Unbelievable) are demanding that it be subjected to company tax and corporate regulation.
It is copybook “gatopardismo” (like the leopard changing its spots): cede a part so as to preserve the whole.
