Sunday May 31, 2009
Power addiction harms vulnerable children
It sounds sickening familiar – children ripped from their families, locked up in residential schools, abused sexually and emotionally by authority figures representing a church that consistently covered up for its iniquities…
But this is not Canada.
It\’s Ireland.
The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse – commonly called the Ryan Report – was released a week and a half ago. Its 2,600 pages documented systemic rape and molestation in more than 250 church-run institutions.
Over some 60 years, from the 1930s to the 1990s, more than 30,000 children “deemed to be petty thieves, truants, or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland\’s austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels,” in the words of the Guardian\’s Henry McDonald.
The report took nine years. It investigated more than 1000 allegations of abuse, the majority against the Roman Catholic Christian Brothers.
Disturbing parallels
The parallels with the Canadian experience are stunning.
There are superficial differences, of course. Canada had 146 residential schools, not 250. The Canadian system was based on race; Ireland\’s on class. Canada incarcerated about five times as many children – Prime Minister Stephen Harper\’s apology, almost exactly one year ago, referred to 150,000 pupils. And the Canadian schools involved five religious bodies – Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist, later taken over by the United Church, as well as the Roman Catholic Church.
But the patterns are almost identical. Well-intentioned but wrong-headed officials believed that a particular group of children needed to be separated them from their home environments, in order to provide education that would assimilate them into a superior society.
In both countries, the residential school system was ostensibly run by the government, but turned over to churches to operate.
In both countries, government inspectors could have stopped the chronic abuse, beatings, and humiliation. But they didn\’t.
Neither did church authorities, despite letters drawing the abuses to their attention.
Indeed, like the Boston Archdiocese in the United States, when Irish Catholic leaders heard of priestly misdeeds, they typically moved them to new locations rather than expose the church to criticism.
Institutional foot-dragging
One of the Irish victims, Colm O\’Gorman, attempted to sue the Pope. O\’Gorman argued that by moving pedophile priests to new parishes and concealing their indiscretions from local authorities, the Vatican had failed to protect children like him.
When the Pope claimed diplomatic immunity, O\’Gorman called it “an obscenity; I remain outraged.” But he did successfully sue the Irish Catholic Church, winning 300,000 Euros and a public apology.
Other apologies are now flowing freely. Since the Ryan report, Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh, Dublin Archbishop Dairmuid Martin, and Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam have all issued formal apologies.
Cardinal Brady acknowledged that “great wrong and hurt were caused to some of the most vulnerable children in our society.” The report documents “a shameful catalogue of cruelty…”
But, as in Canada, lawyers defending church and government worked to a different agenda.
The original head of the Irish Commission, judge Mary Laffoy, resigned in protest over charges that the department of education was withholding documents.
And the Christian Brothers delayed the investigation for more than a year, as Henry McDonald wrote, “with a lawsuit that successfully defended their members\’ right to anonymity… even in cases in which individual Christian Brothers had been convicted of sexual and physical attacks on children…”
Power addictions
Those who see religion as the root of all evils will treat the Irish experience as another nail in the church\’s coffin. I disagree. Because it was not just church authorities at fault. Government officials were equally guilty.
The problem, I submit, is power itself.
As Lord Acton stated, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The adults in residential schools had unrestricted power over the children in their care – even if many considered themselves powerless against uncaring bureaucrats and administrators. Consider – the children could not go home. They could not retaliate. If they complained, they would not be believed.
Some of those adults – not all, fortunately – were corrupted by the power they had.
I\’m not sure that they behaved any worse than, say, sergeants in military boot camp. Or guards in wartime prison camps. Or some minor hockey coaches.
But those supervisors and priests abused their power in the name of the Absolute. That\’s what made their actions seem so heinous.
Increasingly, I believe that there is no such thing as benign power. I would amend Lord Acton\’s aphorism to say that “All power tends to corrupt…”
Yet I have never heard of any school – and certainly no seminary – that includes a course on power. It\’s taken for granted that power can be a good thing. Power should be exercised responsibly, of course. It should be used to “em-power” others. But never that power itself is corrupting.
Several professions prohibit members from indulging in sexual relations with patients, parishioners, or students. The policy wisely recognizes that their position gives professionals power – which can corrupt all too easily.
Society needs to keep a watchful eye on all persons who wield power – in church, in school, in politics, and in families. No one is immune to being corrupted.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
My goodness. I just checked the folder in my e-mail program. It seems I got no responses at all to last week\’s column about the airlines actually being responsible for the baggage they undertake to deliver. Maybe none of you have ever had a bag damaged or lost?
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we\’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don\’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul\’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul\’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I\’m not sure he\’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn\’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters\’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I\’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I\’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don\’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site,
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