This is the end of the road for me. I now officially count myself with the 86%! (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Sunday, July 22, 2012, 12:38 (332 days ago) @ Roy

Overnight I have just finished Robert Blair Kaiser's book "The Politics of Sex and Religion" [FREE download available HERE]. Just now I have watched this 1996 Four Corners video that has become available. Further up the forum Angela has brought us a story of Benedict stripping a university in Peru of the right to call itself "Catholic". Kaiser's book has had the most impact on me. I have long been under the illusion, or delusion, that this religion I was born into was primarily interested in this nebulous thing called "the pursuit of ultimate truth". Reading Kaiser's book I can now see that is an absolute lie. That the scandal that is revealed by Kaiser's book has never been refuted by John Paul II or Benedict XVI makes them complicit in the further perpetrating of an enormous lie. These people are simply not interested ultimately in the pursuit of "truth". They are primarily interested in perpetrating the myth that they alone can read the mind of God and they are the only people on earth who are custodians of "truth".

To put it very bluntly: the game they have all been playing is an attempt to deify themselves, and their moral authority, at the expense of God.

They began to squander any authority they might have claimed to superior moral insight when Paul VI caved into the likes of Alfredo Ottaviani and the Jesuit "nutter" John Ford back in the 1960s.

What a sad, sad, discredited institution this has become? It is no wonder that Barry Hickey (my former boss and who appears in the 1996 Four Corners' documentary) has said recently that all he wants to do is "retire into obscurity". It is totally embarrassing, Barry, and I understand how you feel. The "crooks" in this though are the people who are still at the very top of this institution and who fail (a) to undo the damage done by Ottaviani and John Ford; (b) who fail to accept responsibility for the systemic failings in institutional Catholicism that made the entire sexual abuse of children possible; and (c) who refuse to acknowledge, and correct, the bullying behaviour perpetrated against a man like Bishop William Morris (which is symptomatic of the entire crisis in authority Catholicism today faces).

I join Roy in encouraging people to view this 1996 episode of Four Corners "Twice Betrayed". It might be historical but, together with the recent 2012 episode of Four Corners, "Unholy Silence", it demonstrates that little has changed in the attitudes of the Church in the past 16 years. In fact the admissions of Monsignor Cudmore in the 1996 program show if anything there was more honesty in the senior ranks of the clergy back then than there is today. If I was a bishop or cardinal today I too would be embarrassed to show my face in public or to try and defend the pontificates or behaviours of John Paul II (not only in the cover-up of the behaviours of Marcial Maciel Degollado, but actually promoting the man as an "efficacious guide to youth") and his successor Benedict XVI in attempting to "press on" trying to defend the authority of the institution to be a moral authority about anything.

I urge every thinking Catholic to go read Robert Blair Kaiser's evidence for yourself and also to re-visit this 1996 Four Corners' documentary. Remember the sexual abuse scandal did not really break as a world-wide scandal until the revelations in the United States in about 2001. This 1996 Australian documentary was aired long before this scandal and crisis emerged as an international crisis. I'm going to try and facilitate the documentary's uploading to YouTube to make it easier to view and I trust this might encourage the ABC to make a higher quality copy available for viewing online somewhere. This documentary is a matter of continuing public interest today particularly in that it was one of the first public affairs documentaries to "open the lid" on this scandal internationally.

I can only suggest to Benedict that rather than playing these games of trying to withdraw the name Catholic from a university in Peru, you look to trying to re-establish any tiny shred of moral credibility you have left by accepting responsibility for the failings of yourself and your predecessors in this morally reprehensible effort to try and bolster the moral authority of the institution and its popes at the expense of ultimate truth. This constant, constant endeavour to bolster the certitudes and insecurities of "the little people", and "the simple people" (your expressions not mine) at the expense of lifting them in the search for ultimate truth in their lives is reprehensible beyond faith or belief. You ought hang your head in abject shame at what has been perpetrated in the name of Almighty God, Jesus Christ and the entire Communion of Saints. To be proceeding today to try and elevate the late John Paul II to some pedestal of "greatness" or "saintliness" only makes the moral bankruptcy of all of you all the more palpable and transparent.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]