Protecting our kids from religious predators

Part I of II

There are a lot of people out there who believe in religion but don’t believe in God. These are the churchgoers and church-leaders that are the least criticized and least taken to task in most religions. One reason is, they have most of you fooled.

Recently the Irish Catholic Church have been revealed as having covered up cases of child sexual molestation from 1975-2004. Given the far-famed and infamous history of the Irish as a bunch of drunken brawlers just looking for a reason to fight, I am mystified as to how they could pass this up. Is there any better reason for Danny Boy to smash his way into his Church’s office and take Bishop O’Reilly to task? A lot of you look upon that guy seen carrying little Shaniya Davis away as being despicable, but will remain silent when this happens in your very building of worship. What’s going on here is, the churches are the original promoters of "Image is Everything" and the direct result of that is something I call RSM (religiously sanctioned molestation).

According to the BBC "four Archbishops turned a blind eye to child abuse;" John Charles McQuaid, Dermont Ryan, Desmond Connell and Kevin McNamara. Churches over the decades successfully used threats of expulsion and excommunication as penalty for reporting child sex abuse going on with members of their congregation. Not a bad deal actually. Let me see now, you want me to trade in my manhood and sense of right and wrong by protecting an innocent child, in favor of preventing mandatory police and medical assistance from access to the child... and remain a member in good standing. You lose!

More facts and figures on the complicity of the Irish Catholic Church come from the "Report of the Commission of Investigating into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin." The BBC states in order to simply avoid public outrage and high-profile prosecutions, the church’s leaders and state officials created a "culture of concealment" from the persistent cover up of "vulnerable children in their care."

It wasn't just the bad publicity they feared, chief on any Clergy’s mind is having his services interrupted by civil authorities or law enforcement with himself being escorted out of God’s building in handcuffs, or his mugshot plastered on TV. As of now three of those Archbishop’s are deceased. They are noted in the report for their constant refusal to hand over their information about child sexual abusers to the authorities even though the four were considered highly educated. Their success in this had much to do with certain key police (senior officers) actually believing the Church was higher than themselves on some "reported abuse complaints to church authorities instead of carrying out their own investigation."

Strange that some members of the Irish Police were literally returning letters of complaint back to the Church. In the Jehovah’s Witness faith any letter of complaint regarding congregational or inter-religious issues sent to their Watchtower headquarters was immediately sent back to that congregation’s body of elders in the form of a copy and shown to the individual in question or a family member, with of course nothing being addressed about the issue. But though still wrong, it was understandable because it was all in-house. What excuse does the Irish Police have? They’re not officially tied to the church. Education is also important here. How do four men of such learning and position allow this to happen to children of their followers? This isn’t like Mario McNeil (Shaniya’s alleged rapist and killer); a repeat violent offender of probably very limited schooling or the Phoenix, AZ parents of an eight-year-old girl who shunned her after she was gang-raped by four boys. The Phoenix girl had extremely dimwitted parents who shunned her in part because they are from Liberia where ignorance and superstition rules and kids have had limbs cut off just to protect the diamond industry.