Meanwhile, across the Pond…

the Thirsty Gargoyle weighs in on whether Cdl. Brady, the bishop of Armaghs should resign. He thinks not. I’m not sold on his argument, mostly due to the notion that the busk should stop somewhere and a cardinal archbishop ought to be grownup enough to take responsibility for something.

By the same token, as a layman who has, for years, said that it is grossly hypocritical for laity to get all high and mighty about the sins of clergy while we labor with might and main to create a sexually deranged cultural sewer, I was taken aback by this:

No, the Cardinal shouldn’t have to resign, and he shouldn’t be blamed for what happened. He’s tainted, sure, but it’s hard to find anyone who knows anything of an abuse case that isn’t. Look at the SAVI report from 2002. Aside from finding that one out of every 250 Irish adults had been abused as a child by a clergyman, it found that almost one 1 in 4 Irish adults had been abused by somebody else. How many of us know somebody who was abused? How many of us know abusers? And how many of us do nothing about it?

I wonder what the stats are here in the States? Offhand, I can think of one rape victim I’ve known and a guy who was homosexually assaulted as a kid. I myself was, as a child, locked in a shed by the neighbor teenager and told I could not come out till I took off my clothes (I got rescued before he got his demand met and it did not occur to my six year old mind that this was a sexual assault. I just regarded it as one of those things stupid big kids do. It left no permanent scars–which is probably why I haven’t thought about it for years.) That’s just off the top of my head. If I dig down further, I have a funny feeling I would recall other friends and neighbors with tales to tell. But man! One fourth of the Irish have been abused through sex and/or violence?

I have a feeling that the whole “This is the Church’s fault and we laity can do better by abandoning the Church” solution that the Irish are currently all agog to try will not fix the problem.