Some Serious Misgivings about Beyond Belief (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Monday, July 09, 2012, 00:54 (319 days ago) @ James

James, thanks for your observations. I didn't read the paper through the eyes of a lawyer. As you suggest "much of what it describes has been well documented before". What I thought was valuable in the book was that he had assembled a lot of that evidence in one place. What I don't think can be disputed either are the general observations that flow out of the evidence — essentially backing up what you yourself have written in various places — that those at the very top have not taken responsibility for the crisis and, in various ways, endeavoured to protect the reputation of the institution in preference to either attending to the needs of the victims or taking effective measures to ensure the incidence of abuse was reduced or eliminated.

I do believe whoever posted the article on Elephants in the Living Room could have provided some further background information. It was even confusing initially in that the article seemed to be attributed to Bishop Robinson. From the slim reference at the end of the article, and also from Yallop's website and Amazon, it seems this paper is taken from a chapter (or chapters) in his book "The Power and the Glory: Inside the Dark Heart of Pope John Paul II's Vatican" originally published Mar 7, 2007. (The edition presently available on Amazon is a 2009 edition.) The paper on the Elephants in the Living Room seems to be a draft of the Kindle Edition, or possibly a draft of a paper he delivered somewhere at some stage — there are a heck of a lot of typos in it — and the Amazon Kindle page says the Kindle Edition of Beyond Belief has been updated to August 2010. This "draft" paper on Elephants would seem to be not updated but finishes its evidence back around 2005, or possibly 2007.

Given all the criticisms — both yours and mine — I still view the assembly of this material as a valuable contribution to what is a generally damning indictment of the manner in which this institution has handled this entire scandal around the world. What seems to motivate the entire institutional hierarchy these days is this constant need to pretend that this church and its leaders are perfect and never make mistakes and no teachings ever need to be reversed because that will diminish their reputation or authority in the eyes of humanity. It is not Christ-like behaviour but the behaviour either of bullies who are prepared to trample over anybody — including abused children if necessary — in pursuit of their ego satisfaction, or mummy's boys who have never matured (weren't those statistics from Eugene Kennedy's research in the early 1970s interesting? and the later one's quoted from a separate study?) whose entire lives seem centred around trying to prove to their mothers what nice, powerful, clever, intelligent, or "good" boys they turned out to be. It might impress this small remnant and conservative minority in the church are into that sort of stuff, and who all the energy is expended on, but I sense the vast bulk of the population in the Western world are well and truly over it.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]