Not News, But A Pattern

Today, it's the archdiocese of Chicago that's abuzz with what is being treated as news. The Catholic Church there shifted pedophile priests around from parish to parish. The Catholic Church took evil men and essentially handed them a fresh crop of children to abuse.

Dealing with the fall-out of a cover-up

This is not news.

This is further evidence of a pattern of behavior, a corporate policy to protect the firm at all costs.

The Catholic Church in Ireland was fully behind the concept of seeing no evil and moving that evil elsewhere, and then not allowing anyone to speak evil of the clergy. The bishops ran the scam for decades, on a grander scale than in America perhaps, but then there were all the industrial schools and Magdalene laundries to provide a ready supply of at-risk children to be traumatized.

Now the journalists in Chicago are yammering on and on about the victims, harmed for life, never to be made whole, massive payouts that cannot restore innocence. They could lift their stories from the archives of the  Irish Times and need only change the occasional location, and save themselves the time.

Where were the authorities? In Ireland and in America, they were covering up what was being done to children because child abuse is bad for business. A bishop can't be seen as a moral authority if his name is on a letter to an accused pedophile, assuring the pervert that his employer has his back and hopes to see him return to the job as soon as an acquittal can be declared.

Because when that happens, and the bishop decries the ease of abortion and lack of respect for life, he gets laughed off the podium by jokesters responding with quips about the bishop wanting more children for his underlings to abuse.

There are some at the United Nations who detect this pattern, but when called on the carpet, representatives from the Vatican have stated that these abuse issues are local issues. It isn't the Vatican to blame.

There is no smoking gun in the hands of the Pope. There is no directive signed by his hand, laying out some official policy of moving pedophiles from parish to parish and then swearing all to silence.

It is, rather, a pattern that has evolved from a corporate ethos, in which problems have to be suppressed lest the faithful lose faith.

However, they are losing faith. Church attendance in Ireland is next to nothing, which means collections are shrinking while the cost to maintain facilities continues to rise. To say nothing of the expense of liability insurance, which is being tapped fairly heavily these days.

The current Pope is called a reformer, someone put in place to clean house.

The princes of the Church recognize at last that their former habits are causing more harm than good. They didn't elect Pope Francis because of his charm. They elected him to alter the course of a floundering institution, to restore faith in a corporation that long ago lost its way and never had much incentive to get back on the right track.

Until the money stopped coming in and the customers stayed away.