(can we call it "Tradwatch" for short?) is written by "The Raven" who is a Catholic priest. The strapline is:
A blog where we are fairly sure that good taste is not always nearest to godliness and that the cut of your maniple has little bearing on your orthodoxy.A good post "Throwing Blame" looks at Gerald Warner's recent article It's the Pope's turn to retaliate in Catholic civil war.
I agree with The Raven that the problem of child abuse does not relate only to the last 40 years but goes longer and deeper into our history. The best book I have read on this is After Asceticism which I reviewed for Faith Magazine a couple of years ago.
2. Laodicea
"a filthy puddle of popery" is a Scottish Catholic blog. Yesterday's post was an important one: Peter Tatchell and Child Abuse, giving the link to Peter Tatchell's call for lowering the age of consent to 14. Berenike comments:
Presumably he was out at Westminster Cathedral yesterday protesting that The Church wasn’t defending the right of adult men to have sexual relationships with teenage boys.3. Dolphinarium
"Cynic: a person who smells flowers and looks for the coffin" is written by Red Maria. She has been working hard on various issues recently, including Crimen Sollicitationis, and digging up the murky history of the Paedophile Information Exchange and various people associated with it. The most effective campaigns against The PIE was led by Mary Whitehouse and Family and Youth Concern (formerly called "The Responsible Society"); their action led to the Protection of Children Act 1978. The PIE only finally closed down in 1984.
4 comments:
Goodness. Thank you.
I can't see Fr Stephen Wang's blog 'Bridges and Tangents' on your blog roll. I think it's excellent - gentle and thought-provoking.
Many thanks, Delia. I have put Bridges and Tangents on now.
Richard Dawkins:
“Priestly abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time of hysteria about pedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692… All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defense, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).
The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America… We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. This is so counter-intuitive that juries are easily swayed by sincere but false testimony from witnesses.”
(The God Delusion, pp. 315-16)
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