When I was younger I remember being told that faith can move mountains. Perhaps it can and has, but prayer cannot rid the priesthood or the world of paedophilia, not even slightly or remotely, and it is unwise, foolish and perhaps even dangerous for the Church to pretend it can, or implies to the world it has that power.
It does not. Let’s just look at some statistics. Ten thousand Americans claim to have been abused in this way by members of the clergy. Twenty-one priests were accused. Six of them died before any allegations were made against them. The number of priests who, it is alleged, abused children in the last 50 years in the US alone is 4392. And Cardinal Law, who was Bishop of Boston when the scandal broke and responded by simply moving paedophile priests around, is now a respected figure in Rome!
The Pope though, apparently believes differently. He has instructed Roman Catholics to pray to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. How on earth can that make any difference, praying I mean, regarding paedophiles? I suggest a different, very different approach. Like vetting the very few who go into the priesthood scrupulously and carefully before allowing them to become priests. Telling them very clearly that any allegations will be immediately passed to the police without letting those who are being accused know so they can be filmed and trapped and stopped for good. Letting current and potential priests and nuns know that the Church will not protect paedophiles, whatever their cloth or importance. Secretly filming them when they have contact with children at some stage of their training to detect any worrying signals.
Perhaps this shouldn’t only be done with priests but also with all those professionals who choose a career with children, because although they are in a minority among any profession including the priesthood, paedos do apparently, if they can, choose jobs where they can be near children, and we can’t do enough not to stop paedophilia (which we can’t do) but to expose it very quickly and deal with the perpetrators very harshly and very finally. Because paedos are, above all, cowards. They choose children because that is a form of power and control they don’t have or feel they have in their normal lives. And if enough of these cowards were frightened of what would happen to them, including public exposure, public ridicule and very harsh punishment, we would hopefully see a lessening of cases.
Talking about praying to curb paedophilia gives the false impression that God intervenes, or can intervene or will intervene to stop it. How can that be? Paedophilia is growing unbelievably fast, encouraged no doubt by the Internet, by a modern world that demands a huge amount of sexual and varied pleasure. No amount of prayer will stop it or slow it, and it is irresponsible to claim, or to give believers some form of hope that it can.
Two programmes on British satellite TV recently explored the explosion in paedophilia, because make no mistake it is growing. One character trapped by a TV team who posed as a 12-year-old girl found one priest chatting to her, sending her lurid pictures and the like. He was told to stop and promptly did it again. He admitted on camera that he would not stop, that these were his fantasies, that he knew it was wrong, that he had sort of left the priesthood anyway, but that he would go on, perhaps more carefully and covertly.
In America, one TV programme is publicly trapping people, paedophiles, on national television. Those trapped and exposed include doctors, magistrates, lawyers and it is in fact the middle classes who are coming off worse. Even more shocking many of them are respectable dads! They trap them by chatting to them online. Eventually an encounter is arranged and these nasty paedos, who look nothing like the paedos arrive to meet some 12-year-old girl, which is really a TV camera.
One nasty character had a huge tube of KY jelly bulging out of his too tight jeans, so it was pretty clear what was going on in his warped brain. And then of course the police pounce and give them some of the harshest sentences in the Western world for what is known as “grooming”, which is preparing, enticing, whatever, children for sex. In the UK and in Malta the punishments are derisory. Most get off as it’s a first crime or whatever, but the most chilling part of these programmes was how prolific these paedos are, how clever, how educated. You really would never know.
Within half an hour of posting her pic on line, one 12-year-old girl had already received three invitations from dirty old men to chat that obviously didn’t come out right away. Chillingly, many of them wanted to meet and told their victims they would play daddy and daughter! What kind of warped sexuality is that? The programme was all about protecting your kids. Allow them to chat only in the living room or in a public area, not in their bedrooms. Get familiar with the net and its workings. Talk to your children and monitor what they are doing. Twelve per cent of the children interviewed admitted meeting strangers they got to know on the web. Twenty-five chatted to total strangers on-line, and these are children whose average age was 11.
So while I am grateful to the current Pope, who used to accuse the media of exaggerating the issue of paedophile clergy, and has now taken a much more hard line approach against it: I do hope he, the whole Church and all our public institutions will pray less and take far more concerted action against this most heinous of crimes.
We need better legislation, more policing, more enforcement, more follow up and more resources to lessen the success of paedophiles not prayer. I pray that those who can make a difference will listen and stop shoving this issue under the carpet as a little aberration that can be prayed away.
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