We Catholics Don’t Particularly Need a Church

by Mary W Maxwell

There is an eye-popping report about child abuse committed by the Christian Brothers in Australia from 1920s to 1960s. It is dated 2014, signed by Gail Furness, QC, and forms part of the Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse.

I will mention some of the bad stuff below, but the point of this article is to remind readers that all the investigating may have been misplaced. Sure, the Church hierarchy acted terribly in regard to children. Whenever a priest got caught pedophiling, he was assigned to a different parish where it was guaranteed he would sin again.

Was that reassignment done at the advice of lawyers and insurance companies trying to shield the Church from lawsuits?  Most people say Yes, but I say No. The Church hid the goings-on in the 1980s because it wanted to keep the abuse going. That’s my theory, anyway, and I will now argue the case.

Tu Es Sacerdos in Aeternum

When I was in high school in Boston, it was common for a graduating class to send at least 4 girls to the convent and 3 boys to the seminary. Sometimes you could guess who had a vocation, as it was called. Occasionally we were surprised.

Still it could never have crossed our minds that a boy had been recruited to join the priesthood for any reason but devotion to God.

One can join the military for non-patriotic reasons. In fact, the army recruitment ads of the last few decades do not even mention helping the nation – they appeal to such selfish desires as having a good career or traveling all over the place.

Future nuns and future priests don’t even get that much. They can look forward to having no money, no freedom, and no spouse or children. It must be that they love God.  During their ordination ceremony, priests are told Tu es sacerdos in aeternum – you are a priest forever.

How To Plant a Pedophile Priest

However, we do know of at least one proof that there could be some deceitful vocations.  It was shown in a 1950 investigation that some Communists were planted in seminaries in the US.  I’m not sure what the purpose was – perhaps to have the priest persuade parishioners that socialism was a good thing. But they were planted.

Maybe the young man who allowed himself to be planted was already devoted to the cause of Communism and thought the deception was fair play. I don’t know.  People committed to a cause will make sacrifices.

But in my theory of planting pedophiles, I would imagine that the poor guy did not really feel desire to be a priest, rather he was mind-controlled – on autopilot, so to speak. It is certain that, by 1940, Tavistock in England was “in business” to spread mind control where e’re it could. In the 1920s it had experimented with shell-shocked soldiers to see how the brain could be manipulated.

I take the recent collapse of the Catholic Church to have been part of what HG Wells called, in his 1928 book, “The Open Conspiracy.” I even take the Boston Globe’s award winning “breaking of the story” in 2002 to have been planned for the purpose of harming the Church in the eyes of the faithful.

My own sense of the Catholic faith, of which I am an adherent (more or less), is that we did indeed trust our clergy and “Rome” — but that all of that apparatus was never part of Jesus’s message. Today we need not bedevastated by its loss.

Bindoon in Western Australia

It appears that the Christian Brothers that Gail Furness studied for the Royal Commission had come out from Ireland, sort of as missionaries, to WA.  I must acknowledge that 1920 was before Tavistock made mind control a big business in Australia – that did not start till around 1944 when Dr Dax came to Melbourne.

The thing that drew my attention to this part of the RC files was that I saw a comment, under a Youtube video about Mike Willessee, claiming that Mike had been sent to Bindoon — by his father, who was Australia’s Foreign Minister — to be “toughened up.” Then I saw a video in which Mike said that this was true, but that his stay lasted only 2 weeks.

Bindoon was part of a migrant scheme from the UK and Malta! Children were sent to this institution with promise of an education. They were not orphans; I shall assume the parents sent them away for economic reasons. The school was boys only and the staff were men only, that is, the Christian Brothers.

Allow, for a moment, that I am correct in my idea that the Church has internally, DELIBERATELY brought about its own downfall. This can be believed if there have always been manipulators in the Vatican.  In recent times, various theorists have said that the popes themselves were the manipulators. If you know anything about the Medici popes of the 16^th century you will know that high politics and the Church went hand in hand. (High sex, too; one of the popes was the son of another pope. S’truth!)

In her recent book White Witch in Black Robe, Wendy Hoffman rather deftly implies that she was a participant in rituals both at the Vatican and Buckingham Palace. This makes sense to me. I think there is a special religion, Luciferianism, that gives an alternative morality to people in high places. Let’s them get away with murder – virtuously, so to speak. Sorry, I can’t prove it.

From The Guardian of April 2014

Here is some of the testimony given to the Royal Commission in 2014 in Perth:

In emotional testimony on Monday, John Hennessey told the commission the men who abused him during his time at St Joseph’s Farm and Trade School, Bindoon, felt safe in doing so.  “I was exploited and abused by criminals [who were] safe in the knowledge that the state government and church were my legal guardians, and would never bother to meet their responsibilities,” he said.

Hennessey was forcibly separated from his mother in Bristol, England, and sent to WA. He did not see her for another 57 years.  While at Bindoon Hennessey was targeted by Brother Paul Keaney, other Christian Brothers and older children at the school.  On one occasion, Brother Keaney publicly stripped and savagely beat him.

Boys who reported sexual and physical abuse were often abused by the brother to whom they complained, the royal commission was told. “For some boys, the knowledge of the abuse was well enough understood between the boys, if not necessarily openly discussed,” counsel assisting the royal commission, Gail Furness, said in her opening statement.

“However, common to all of those men who will give evidence is the shame, guilt and fear that they experienced as a result of the abuse.”

At St Vincent’s Orphanage in Clontarf, boys would be selected almost nightly by brothers for abuse, said a survivor, John Wells. A brother would tickle the foot of a sleeping boy as a signal to go to his room. “The boy would often be crying because he knew what was coming and he knew he was going to be in pain,” Wells said.

He and his twin brother Arthur were so traumatised they did not physically touch for 70 years, until John Wells held Arthur’s hand when he was on his deathbed.

Another survivor of Bindoon, Edward Delaney, had the fingers of both hands broken and was left with a permanent disfigurement when a brother – named as Brother Doyle in the commission – hit him repeatedly with a leather strap with a hacksaw blade stitched into it.

Comparing Marci Hamilton’s Findings with Gail Furness’ Findings

In an article from Jusia/Verdict that was reprinted at Gumshoe on January 6, 2019, Pennsylvania law professor Marci Hamilton described her 15-year effort to get Statute of Limitations modified for cases of historic sexual abuse. She reports that the legislators were pressured by the Church not to cooperate.

Gail Furness also ran into a brick wall.  The Church in Western Australia sought to avoid blame and avoid payment. All Catholics should be intrigued to hear the reason why the Court could not hold the archbishop liable for his underlings. Namely, that he was “corporation sole” for the Church and the only legal role he played was for ownership of land.

I had read the same thing about the Chicago archbishop in Sherman Skolnick’s book Ahead of the Parade. Skolnick said Catholics should wake up to the fact that their parish does not own the real estate of church, school, convent, etc.  It is owned by one man, a corporation sole.

A Class Action Suit Filed by Slater and Gordon

Eventually some of the survivors of Bindoon arranged a class action with the law firm Slater and Gordon.

The following is from News.com.au dated May 1, 2014:

On Thursday, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual abuse heard from two lawyers who sat on opposite sides of litigation brought in the mid-1990s by abuse survivors from four Christian Brothers institutions in WA.

Under questioning from commission chairman Peter McClellan, Carroll & O’Dea partner Howard Harrison, who was a lawyer for the Christian Brothers in the 1990s, acknowledged the leaders of the order must have known about the violence at its institutions.

 “It is inconceivable they didn’t know that the violence went beyond punishment, was gratuitous in many cases. It is inconceivable they didn’t know that, isn’t it?” Justice McClellan asked.

“Well, yes, your honour,” Mr Harrison replied.

Justice McClellan also asked if it was inconceivable the order’s leaders did not know sexual abuse was occurring.

“Correct,” Mr Harrison said.

Mr Harrison also conceded he may have been instructed not to co-operate with requests to identify the order’s organisational structure. He said his preference would have been to steer the complainants to the correct defendants, but conceded it was “certainly possible that we could have taken a non-co-operative ‘you work it out yourself’ posture.”

…. Eventually, $3.5 million was put in to a trust for survivors of abuse following a three-year battle.

In all, 124 men were compensated.

“To be blunt, the trustees of the Christian Brothers had their knee on our clients’ throat and there was little opportunity for our clients to flex their negotiation muscle, or us on their behalf, faced with the judicial decisions that had proceeded this negotiation,” Mr Stephens said.

Through their lawyers they were able to successfully have two separate applications regarding compensation claims by former residents of Bindoon, Castledare, Clontarf and Tardun boys homes moved to WA where they were thrown out because of statute of limitation laws.

When asked by commissioner Justice Peter McClellan why this approach was taken, Mr Harrison said they wanted to manage the process and denied their strategy was to win.

But Justice McClellan disputed his denial saying that his earlier evidence was that “any technical point of defence should be taken”.

Summary

The scandal of the pedophile priests has brought down the Catholic Church. I personally don’t see this as a bad thing, as I now think we had been fooled all along as to what the “Church” consists of. It consists – at least to some extent – of a hidden group of men that subscribe to another religion such as that of the Church’s supposed enemy, Lucifer.

The sad goings on in Bindoon are nevertheless a mystery to me. The nuns and priests of my youth were kind, selfless individuals, clearly interested in the Gospel. Betcha anything they did not know that their archbishop was but a “corporation sole” for the purpose of holding land!

Muchos gracias to the survivors of Bindoon and elsewhere for persisting in their quest for the truth.  A very Catholic thing to do.