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There is much to interest a scholar of children in genocide in the international Catholic child abuse scandals, in which the corporate culture seems to have conformed to principles of human nature more often seen in the performance of genocide. As with genocide, the Catholic child abuse institution is one in which a class of people is objectified, vilified, starved, forced to work, tortured and raped. Like genocide, the universe of child abuse by Catholic priests and nuns is supranational, not culture-specific, and has its own criminal culture, one whose assumptions and processes are startlingly like those observed in the study of genocide.
First, is the paralysis of bystanders, of civil and church authorities to whom -- in the example of the Wisconsin deaf boys who complained to social workers, town attorneys, diocesan officials, jail authoroties, for decades that Lawrence C. Murphy was molesting scores of them; and in the examples of the Irish and German pedophiles, Catholic authorities up to and including the present Pope -- the victims, their parents, even their jailers, repeatedly over decades complained. Murphy was never disciplined and was buried in his priestly vestments. Peter Hullermann was suspended only last month, 30 years after first being convicted of molesting boys. Social workers and psychiatrists in both cases testify neither Murphy nor Hullermann felt any remorse.
The paralysis of the German people in the conduct of the Nazi genocide is a phenomenon much studied and highly controversial. I am no expert on it, but my carefully considered opinion is that it has its roots in Martin Luther's belief that peasant revolt is the devil's work. Revolution is of the devil, and obedience to the [Lutheran] prince, who were naturally among Luther's first converts, is God's will for us. Without knowing that much about Catholicism, I submit there are grounds here for comparison.
Second, the refugees of genocide in UNHCR refugee camps are -- like the inmates of all other institutions -- viewed as pools of forced labor, conscripts and sex slaves by their host countries, the countries they fled, and the surviving warlords of said former countries who set themselves up in camps as masters of disbursement. (I think either Harrell-Bond or Simon Turner, both eminently Googleable, is the author of this insight.) I submit that the child residents of orphanages, schools for the deaf, the vocational schools of Ireland, all under the auspices of various monks and nuns, are viewed the same. The children in institutions are viewed as forced labor, conscripts and sex slaves both by the monks and nuns who run the place and by the society which consigns them to such institutions. The Ryan Report on the rampant sexual, physical and emotional abuse in the children's institutions of Ireland pinpoints -- among the nuns especially, corroborating other evidence that in an egalitarian genocide culture, women perform equal crimes -- sadism by nuns who felt part of their job was to let the children "know their place." (I recall similar tales from French Canada; and point out that pedophile Irish priests were sent to North America.) Whether this had to do with being bastards and God's hatred for such, I do not know. Keeping inmates in their place makes them, of course, more malleable as forced labor (which, with other and racial aspects, is genocide, btw), conscripts and sexual slavery.
Third, the savagery and privilege with which socially damaged children are kept in their place is akin to the hygienic mindset of genocidaires, all of whom, across time and culture, speak of extirpating their victims as cleansing the body politic of cancer, infection or vermin. Cockroaches, the Tutsi were called. The insistence by the Irish nuns that the children know their place (as bastards?) is the moral equivalent of the pedophile Murphy's argument that homosexuality was rampant among the teenage deaf boys and his boning them was sex education. This, as he told the social worker who interviewed him extensively, to no avail, fixed the homosexuality problem. All the South American Catholic girls I used to know were into anal sex for the same reasons of purity -- it preserved their virginity. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that pedophile priests believe similarly that non-vaginal sex with boys, or children, is not a violation of their vows of celibacy. Slicing and dicing the morality so one remains hygienically pure and may enact one's genocide or pedophilia, has, I submit, a lot to do with the idea that you're keeping your sexuality/race clean by killing, or raping, the other people.
Fourth, the remarkable argument by Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, voiced in St. Peter's Basilica on Good Friday, that the Catholic church itself is being persecuted as were the Jews, is, I submit, a remarkable echo of the genocidal grievance culture nurtured by genocidaires. For the Germans, it was the terms of the Versailles Treaty. For the Cambodians, it was the land reform and racial discrimination of the French colonialists which caused a grievance nurtured for decades before the massive US bombing, in which more bombs were rained on Cambodia than were deployed in all of World War Two, recruited Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge. Hitler and Pol Pot both harped much on the persecution of Germans or Cambodians by Europe, as (without having studied it closely) did the Hutu, their victims the Tutsi, and the Yugoslavians of every stripe. Persecution, and genocidal persecution is the stuff on which national myths are built, as demonstrated by the remarkable tale of how Ben Gurion switched the official socialist antipathy of Israel toward the Nazi genocide survivors after he saw the TV ratings for the Eichmann trial. Cantalamessa -- and eons of Catholic martyrdom -- is co-opting anti-semitism to claim persecution of the Catholic church as a religious entity. This sense of grievance is much succoured by genocidaires, and I submit the pedophiles and child abusers in the Catholic church exploit this tendency of the corporate culture in which their crimes are permitted.
First, is the paralysis of bystanders, of civil and church authorities to whom -- in the example of the Wisconsin deaf boys who complained to social workers, town attorneys, diocesan officials, jail authoroties, for decades that Lawrence C. Murphy was molesting scores of them; and in the examples of the Irish and German pedophiles, Catholic authorities up to and including the present Pope -- the victims, their parents, even their jailers, repeatedly over decades complained. Murphy was never disciplined and was buried in his priestly vestments. Peter Hullermann was suspended only last month, 30 years after first being convicted of molesting boys. Social workers and psychiatrists in both cases testify neither Murphy nor Hullermann felt any remorse.
The paralysis of the German people in the conduct of the Nazi genocide is a phenomenon much studied and highly controversial. I am no expert on it, but my carefully considered opinion is that it has its roots in Martin Luther's belief that peasant revolt is the devil's work. Revolution is of the devil, and obedience to the [Lutheran] prince, who were naturally among Luther's first converts, is God's will for us. Without knowing that much about Catholicism, I submit there are grounds here for comparison.
Second, the refugees of genocide in UNHCR refugee camps are -- like the inmates of all other institutions -- viewed as pools of forced labor, conscripts and sex slaves by their host countries, the countries they fled, and the surviving warlords of said former countries who set themselves up in camps as masters of disbursement. (I think either Harrell-Bond or Simon Turner, both eminently Googleable, is the author of this insight.) I submit that the child residents of orphanages, schools for the deaf, the vocational schools of Ireland, all under the auspices of various monks and nuns, are viewed the same. The children in institutions are viewed as forced labor, conscripts and sex slaves both by the monks and nuns who run the place and by the society which consigns them to such institutions. The Ryan Report on the rampant sexual, physical and emotional abuse in the children's institutions of Ireland pinpoints -- among the nuns especially, corroborating other evidence that in an egalitarian genocide culture, women perform equal crimes -- sadism by nuns who felt part of their job was to let the children "know their place." (I recall similar tales from French Canada; and point out that pedophile Irish priests were sent to North America.) Whether this had to do with being bastards and God's hatred for such, I do not know. Keeping inmates in their place makes them, of course, more malleable as forced labor (which, with other and racial aspects, is genocide, btw), conscripts and sexual slavery.
Third, the savagery and privilege with which socially damaged children are kept in their place is akin to the hygienic mindset of genocidaires, all of whom, across time and culture, speak of extirpating their victims as cleansing the body politic of cancer, infection or vermin. Cockroaches, the Tutsi were called. The insistence by the Irish nuns that the children know their place (as bastards?) is the moral equivalent of the pedophile Murphy's argument that homosexuality was rampant among the teenage deaf boys and his boning them was sex education. This, as he told the social worker who interviewed him extensively, to no avail, fixed the homosexuality problem. All the South American Catholic girls I used to know were into anal sex for the same reasons of purity -- it preserved their virginity. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that pedophile priests believe similarly that non-vaginal sex with boys, or children, is not a violation of their vows of celibacy. Slicing and dicing the morality so one remains hygienically pure and may enact one's genocide or pedophilia, has, I submit, a lot to do with the idea that you're keeping your sexuality/race clean by killing, or raping, the other people.
Fourth, the remarkable argument by Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, voiced in St. Peter's Basilica on Good Friday, that the Catholic church itself is being persecuted as were the Jews, is, I submit, a remarkable echo of the genocidal grievance culture nurtured by genocidaires. For the Germans, it was the terms of the Versailles Treaty. For the Cambodians, it was the land reform and racial discrimination of the French colonialists which caused a grievance nurtured for decades before the massive US bombing, in which more bombs were rained on Cambodia than were deployed in all of World War Two, recruited Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge. Hitler and Pol Pot both harped much on the persecution of Germans or Cambodians by Europe, as (without having studied it closely) did the Hutu, their victims the Tutsi, and the Yugoslavians of every stripe. Persecution, and genocidal persecution is the stuff on which national myths are built, as demonstrated by the remarkable tale of how Ben Gurion switched the official socialist antipathy of Israel toward the Nazi genocide survivors after he saw the TV ratings for the Eichmann trial. Cantalamessa -- and eons of Catholic martyrdom -- is co-opting anti-semitism to claim persecution of the Catholic church as a religious entity. This sense of grievance is much succoured by genocidaires, and I submit the pedophiles and child abusers in the Catholic church exploit this tendency of the corporate culture in which their crimes are permitted.
