Catholic church children abuse cartoon
© Mike Scoll

When an institution sexually abuses children on an industrial scale, you won't win back trust easily. You need to demonstrate you truly understand the scale of what you've inflicted, preferably by going without breakfast one morning


It's a measure of how unique the Catholic Church is as an institution that this Pope who's on his way to Ireland is referred to as a radical tearing up the old values - maybe at times even too militant - because he's opposed to all child abuse.

Presumably, when he announced this policy, a room of cardinals gasped, "What? We're not allowed to do ANY?"

As ever when someone tries to change things too quickly, there are moderate voices who suggest a slower pace of change. Maybe they would prefer a workable compromise, such as restricting paedophilia to twice a week except for Easter.

But this Pope is an extremist, ignoring centuries of tradition to announce opposition to all of it at once, like a papal Che Guevara.

He's even going to offer "a prayer and fasting" in Ireland, as a "penitential exercise". Because when an institution sexually abuses children on an industrial scale, you won't win back trust easily. You need to demonstrate you truly understand the scale of what you've inflicted, by going without breakfast one morning.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child noted that in Ireland the church was guilty of "torture and other cruel or degrading treatment" and "the sale of children, trafficking and abduction".

Yes, but instead of dwelling on the negative, let's think of the good things they've done.

To be fair, the UN committee accepted the church in Ireland did other things as well. It also set up laundries to which unmarried mothers were sent, where "girls placed in those institutions were forced to work in slavery-like conditions and often subjected to inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment as well as physical and sexual abuse".

I expect the alt-right people will say, "Yes, but if you ban this, you'll end up with men not even being allowed to flirt."

It's easy to see the flaws in this behaviour, but maybe we should accept this was a different generation with different values. Back then nobody saw anything wrong with torture and inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment. Everyone did it, sometimes as a treat for your birthday.

The UN report went on: "Unmarried girls who gave birth before entering or while incarcerated in the laundries had their babies forcibly removed from them."

Obviously the Catholic Church didn't have time to look into any of this, as they had to attend to the more serious problem of boys wanking. They can't do everything at once, can they?

So they set about investigating the matter themselves, which seemed the best way to go about things. They didn't go to any outside authorities, possibly because they weren't aware any of this behaviour was against the law. The priests were probably asked by the cardinal, "Now Father, when you were child-trafficking this morning, you didn't break the speed limit did you?"

And if they believed the laws of the land were being upheld, they could deal with these matters internally. Maybe they considered putting skunk in the incense so the priests would be too dozy to abuse anyone.

The Church did take one measure, which was to ensure any priest who was known to have abused children was moved to another area. Then he could start all over again, which is the sort of new challenge they must have appreciated in a stressful job like that.

Jimmy Savile must have watched all this in admiration, thinking, "I am a mere amateur."