How did he get away with it?
The Catholic church is not alone in turning
a blind eye to child abuse
Catherine Czerkawska
Brian Fitzpatrick (SR 245) has voiced my own response to Alex Wood’s ill-informed piece but probably more elegantly and thoughtfully than I could. I particularly like his, ‘being a minority from a global faith, we also have the odd experience of having our faith’s tenets explained to us and others, usually wrongly’.
However, perhaps I can also add to the debate. I once knew a paedophile. I couldn’t claim to know him well, but – this was some years ago now – he was the postmaster in a small Scottish village. We passed the time of day and he seemed like a fine upstanding chap. He’s dead now, and his paedophilia was an established fact, because he was eventually taken to court and found guilty.
As well as being a postmaster, he was a retired police sergeant, and an elder of the kirk. In short, he was exactly the kind of man you would advise your child to go to in times of trouble. He was also enticing various little girls into a very private place and doing what paedophiles do. He was taken to court and found guilty and – since this was the late eighties – he had his wrist slapped, gently, and was fined a few hundred pounds. I write this, not in any way to excuse the priests who have been guilty of the same crime, but as a reminder of how official attitudes have changed within a very short space of time.
A year or two later, he sold up and moved away and died a few years after that. Hardly anyone knew exactly what he had done, because the full details were not made public, but I remember talking to the mother of one of the children some time later and being shocked by the extreme gravity of what had happened and even more shocked that some complacent sheriff believed that all it merited was a rather small fine. In fact, given the failure of the legal system to address the gravity of the crime, I was surprised that somebody, somewhere, hadn’t taken the law into their own hands. But even the parents remained reasonably civilised.
Still, I do find myself demurring when I read pieces about the ‘special nature’ of the Catholic church, that makes it turn a blind eye to paedophilia. I suspect they are not the only ones. This was an elderly man, who had been in positions of extreme trust for the whole of his working life. And we are well aware that people with these propensities do not suddenly start to have them late in life. So he must have been indulging in this behaviour for a long, long time. And somewhere along the way, various people in positions of authority, must have turned a blind eye too.
As a Catholic, albeit somewhat lapsed, I can believe a number of impossible things, but I find it very hard indeed to believe that somebody, somewhere – perhaps several people – didn’t know what he was doing and didn’t cover up for him, in the way that the church was also guilty of covering up for guilty priests. All of which leads me to the thought that for some people, this is a heaven-sent opportunity to have a go at the Catholics while conveniently forgetting the shortcomings of other institutions. I repeat, he was a retired police sergeant, a postmaster and an elder of the Church of Scotland. Were no allegations ever made? Did nobody ever suspect that he was also a paedophile? If they did, why didn’t they do something about it? And above all, why, when he was eventually proven guilty, was the punishment so inadequate to the crime?
Catherine Czerkawska is a playwright, novelist and poet
For Alex Wood’s article, [click here]
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