Let me make this abundantly clear; I do not, in any way, condone the principle of silence that the Church (any church because they all do it, but the Catholics seem to be the most visible) has adopted, nor do I think that sexual abuse is anything other than deplorable.
I do not, however, believe that all the blame should fall on this priest just because he's the only one who is still alive. I think it's awful that that's the way the Church has dealt with things over the course of its history, but I don't think that any of us, living at that time, in that position, would have done anything other than what Sean Brady did. And for us to sit here 35 years later and say we wouldn't is incredibly self-righteous.
Do I think it was right? Of course not. Would I have done the same thing? Weighing the options, absolutely. If I'm a junior priest in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, you can bet your ass that I'm keeping my mouth shut and my head down.
So I have a really hard time with the way it's all being treated by the media, both here and over in the states. I think it's a very dangerous thing to pass judgment on history using modern mentalities. By doing that, we brush away the realities of the society in which the events took place and to some extent that makes it too easy to dismiss that society all together. Can we all agree that it was wrong? Certainly. But to condemn it with the self-righteousness of modernity and in the light of countless other exposed similar agreements and payouts is useless.
4 opinion(s):
The church has been a problem for a long time, but it has put itself above all else....oh the irony.
Addressing the symptom with 37 pieces of flair would be much better.
Jk.
Kinda.
I agree w/this, sort of. Looking at any situation in history through the lens of modern times absolutely may lead to false, or skewed, conclusions.
However, I tend to be of the mindset that all it takes for evil to prevail is the silence of good people (see: WWII, spcifically the Holocaust). Had Sean Brady - and countless others - done the right thing regardless of their personal careers, he could have helped solve the problem instead of turning a blind eye and, therefore, helping this problem still be an issue today.
Rachel, I don't disagree with you, but I don't agree with you either. One person by himself is worth nothing. Until the one person decides that he is willing to be a martyr in some way or another and joins other people who are willing to do the same, he is ineffective. Every resistance movement in the history of the world is a demonstration of that.
But the problem indoctrinated in the Church is that there aren't enough people standing up and saying "this policy is not okay; it puts us in a terrible light and more importantly than that, it ruins the lives of these children and their families and undermines the faith of our parishoners." The people who are doing that are outside the lines. Priests who have been defrocked for standing up or who have left of their own volition, the abused and their families,etc. This doesn't get fixed until Rome does something about it. And they have shown that they won't.
Then again, Pope Pius XII refused to offer more than advice to "bear the adversity" or any denunciation of the extermination campaign the Nazis were running until about 1944, so why should any of the policy change now? Denial has been working for so long.
The other thing is, let's say you're Sean Brady...you're living in a war zone in the early 70s and you feel you have been called by God to work for him. In the early 70s, you've got Protestants killing Catholics and Catholics killing Protestants every single day.
Whether or not you approve of his silence, I think you have to understand that if he says something, he's stripped of the one job he feels he was called to do and robbed of any ability to make a difference to the more pressing political turmoil. I mean, the country was quite literally falling apart at the time.
So if you're him and you're weighing your options, you come out with, "I can say something and help these five kids and be defrocked or I can say nothing and I can help a million and a half people in Northern Ireland." And while that's likely an oversimplification, I think that most of us in that position would have done the same. If I have to let you be killed to save the 1.5 million people, I will let you be killed. And whether you acknowledge it or not, you would let me die for the sake of 1.5 million others. And if you wouldn't, I think we have a problem.
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