Catholic Hierarchy and Pedophilia – Part 2 of Gumshoe’s Royal Commission Series 

HQ of Holy Mother Church and of The Firm

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

The Royal Commission is looking into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. I showed in Part 1 that records kept by Jehovah’s Witnesses revealed that the church knew of 1,000 cases. They reported none to police. Mind boggling.

The Catholic story of pedophile priests became well publicized, especially in the US and Ireland. The Boston Globe broke the story in 2002, although abuse victims had been asking for a long time for public acknowledgement. Some perpetrators are now in prison. Millions of dollars in damages has been paid out.

The main focus of the present article is “Case Study 28,” which deals with the Catholic hierarchy. The Royal Commission has amassed what it calls “tender bundles.” These contain statements offered directly to the commission by victims or their families, school principals, and other witnesses.

There are also bundles of correspondence and records, such as minutes of meetings, some obtained coercively by the Royal Commission. Since 2013, there have been open hearings; the transcripts of these also get added to the paper file. By the way, another 1500 Aussies are in the queue to tell their abuse story to this commission.

Open Hearings

When I attended the first two days of Case Study 28 hearings in Melbourne, the thing that grabbed my attention was the way the priests in the witness box were not acting like the priests I have known all my life.

They evaded the questions to an embarrassing degree. Not the way a politician would do it, by beating around the bush. (I suppose we should be thankful for that.) Rather, each priest calmly said he could not remember. None of them blushed or stammered. Believe me it was disconcerting. They MUST have been lying. But why?

The counsel, Mr Angus Stewart, SC, put some sense into the proceedings by showing, on a screen, the various statements by that very person that are already in file, which undermine his claim of a blank memory.

But even this did not cause the priests to capitulate! They repeatedly said something like “I never knew Reverend Pedophile was getting up to anything, and we normals didn’t gossip about it among ourselves.” Un-be-something–leivable!

I’m grateful for the way the Royal Commission is conducting the work, so far, and I’m in awe that such a citizen-accessible event is taking place. It’s truly innovative and valuable.

Time will tell if it is a whitewash, as Royal Commissions tend to be. But even if the commissioners don’t put the material to good use, society can do so. Pass me the tender bundles please.

Out-moded Explanations for Church Silence

Let’s jettison three outmoded explanations that have often been given, as to why the Church may have swept the problem under the rug:

Explanation One: The Catholic Church kept its knowledge of pedophile priests secret so as not to shake people’s faith in their religion. Nah, that can’t be right. It’s only logical that the way to keep people’s faith intact would have been for the Church to defrock any priest caught molesting a child.

Explanation Two: The purpose of keeping information about bad priests suppressed for decades was to avoid the financial burden of paying compensation. Again, this does not make sense. If money were the goal, the pedophilia should have been stopped the minute the diocese became aware of it.

Explanation Three: The rules of Canon law were such that the policy to be followed was one of discouraging complaints. We saw this sort of thing in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ written policy “Pay Attention 1981.” Yes, there was a similar discouragement policy in the Catholic Church, but it could not have condoned sin. Roman Catholicism has a very consistent theology against sin. (Remember “Stop, or you’ll go blind”?)

So, then if the foregoing do not adequately account for what happened, what are the real explanations?  One possibility is that “pedophile rings” are running the show. Another possibility is that the Church has been infiltrated. Let us canvass these.

Pedophile Rings

It is well established, worldwide, that there are networks of men, powerful men, who buy and sell children, and who may kill them when they are finished with them.

In Belgium, the Dutroux case went on for years despite massive public protests. In Dunblane, Scotland, the involvement of police in the 1996 massacre of schoolchildren was leaked by Lord Burton — yet no prosecutions of the powerful have ever taken place.

A survivor from New South Wales, Fiona Barrett, has asked this Royal Commission to deal with the issue of pedophile rings. She demanded a private hearing and has given the Commission piles of information. If they don’t act on it, I will deduce that the ring-situation is significant.

However, judging from what I have seen so far at the hearings in Melbourne (which is far too little), it does not strike me that these priests’ behavior, as described, is the “ring” kind. Each of the errant curates attacked, say, his own altar boys. There was no exchange of victims between parishes, much less among states.  The perpetrator did not appear to be “supplying” kids to the powerful.

That said, an ex-police detective, Denis Ryan, age 83, gave testimony in Case Study 28. He was in a position to find out about the goings on in the Church and had a duty to report criminality. He did report it; he went to great lengths about this for years, but was rebuffed and threatened. I have ordered a copy of his new book, Unholy Trinity, and will postpone discussion of pedophile rings until it arrives.

What about Infiltration by the Intelligence Agencies?

Let me posit a theory and see if it answers the question: Why did the hierarchy turn a blind eye all those years?

I propose that the particular members of the hierarchy who stymied all efforts to sack the pedophile priests were not random members of the clergy. They are, perhaps all of them, working for one of the many covert agencies, such as the CIA, ASIO, Mossad, or MI6.

I speculate that not every priest gets his vocation from God. Some boys could be recruited in high school, and enter the seminary, to work for a well-concealed boss. Note: if the boy had been MK-Ultra’d in childhood, his ‘recruitment’ would have begun around kindergarten days.

This much can be said about infiltration: a basic assignment of intelligence agencies is to infiltrate all the professions and all civil-society associations. It’s unlikely that the Churches would have escaped this. So just go along with my gig here for a few minutes, even if it sounds fantastic.

Elsewhere I have theorized — at book length — that some group at the top — “World government”, “the cabal,” whatever– is keen on controlling the 7 billion of us.  Naturally, they feel a need to destroy any type of power we have. They want to destroy our health, our industries, our belief in God, and even our family life.

Such an idea is not original with me. Three references for the proposition that the top dogs have been destroying religion for a long time are:

HG Wells, “The Open Conspiracy” (1928); Rabbi Marvin Antelman “To Eliminate the Opiate” (2002); Lawrence Dunegan “The New Barbarism” (1988).  That last one is a report of a talk that was given by Richard Day, MD, back in 1969.

Dr Day stated that the churches would themselves participate in destroying the church. Whew! His talk contained many predictions about other things that subsequently came true – such as the deliberate lowering of the age of puberty! Therefore I think his words ought to be taken seriously.

In 1969, Dr Day said this:

“The old religions will have to go, especially Christianity. Once the Roman Church is brought down, the rest of Christianity will follow easily….  Some of you probably think the churches won’t stand for this [but] the Churches will help us.”

Not in the Pulpit You Don’t

As I said, I am staggered at the way the members of the hierarchy (e.g., a Vicar general and a bishop) as well as pastors do not give up on their stance, when interrogated by the Royal Commission.

They say they “don’t remember” events which must have been so salacious at the time that any person would clearly have stored it in their nog forevermore. Thus I ask, why are they lying? And why aren’t they men of character?

We Catholics always assumed that the guy in the pulpit who “moralizes” us every Sunday has a genuine sense of virtue. He just wouldn’t do this crazy cover-up!  If he recognizes that a priest is sexually abusing children, he would hardly rush to shield that man. It makes zero sense.

So we have to try another approach. My approach is to theorize that many members of the hierarchy are not, and never were, what we thought they were. They were outsiders, running the Church for some nefarious purpose. One purpose I floated above is to get in there and demolish people’s faith. Another reason could be just to keep people happy and occupied with godlike things.

Please see my reaction to the November 24 hearing, video’d by Dee McLachlan for Gumshoe News, and then watch for continuation of this series of articles.

— Mary W Maxwell is from Irish-Catholic Boston, now in Adelaide. Please see her Gumshoe articles on such forbidden topics as vaccination and Holocaust so-called denial. Her website is ProsecutionForTreason.com.