(Above: just to show that the pond is down with wrestling, priests, wrestling priests and Fray Tormenta).The pond would like to have exposed Senator Nick Xenophon as a devotee of World Championship Wrestling - a crime of taste far worse than those who watched F Troop in the old days - but the Senator has already exposed himself.
I was a teenager and my whole family was mesmerised - I think as was the rest of the country - watching World Championship Wrestling. I did some scoping to see if I could raise the funds, which I couldn't, to get the money for a wrestling doco. Wrestling is a great metaphor for life. And Roland Barthes, the great French writer on semiotics, there's a chapter on wrestling he's written, which still gives me goose bumps when I revisit it and read it. Politics is a bit like wrestling. The theatre of it all. The agony and the ecstasy. I was brought up on a diet of politics at home. We would always discuss it. And all the rellos would come over and friends. Politics was a big feature. I think there's a saying, you know, "Two Greeks, three political parties." (LAUGHS) (here).
No matter. The pond at least can suggest that in that great agony and ecstasy of politics, Nick Xenophon is trying to become Helen Lovejoy, and match her cry of "won't someone think of the children". (Amazingly there's even a wiki on citing the interests of children as a rationale for why something should or should not be done, here).
Well that's the 'lightness of tone' bit done for the day, because more serious matters relating to children are afoot, according to Xenophon:
... the third priest named by John Hepworth still runs a parish in South Australia. Last night the Independent Senator Nick Xenophon threatened to name the priest unless the Archdiocese of Adelaide stood him down.
NICK XENOPHON, INDEPENDENT SENATOR: And right now there are parents sending their children to church unaware that their priest in their parish has been named as an abuser. (Xenophon names priest in abuse scandal).
Well it's now old news that Xenophon went on to name the man.
Not paying much attention to the turmoil that routinely bedevils the Catholic church, the pond assumed it was another case of child abuse, pedophilia run rampant, despicable and distressing, and so particular concern and attention should be paid to the children, but this was a disingenuous at best, and outright misleading and malicious at worst, turn of phrase by Xenophon, because it turns out that the allegations involved a matter of consent between two adult males.
Now there are a number of ways to view the matter, and Des Ryan - onetime unholy torturer of Don Dunstan with It's Grossly Improper, which contained allegations of a homosexual affair with John Ceruto (in the Dunstan wiki here) - takes a dim view of Xenophon's behaviour in Cappo resignation and an unholy can of worms.
But the key mystery is why a man who believes he was raped in his twenties by another man in his twenties didn't head off to the police, rather than simply making a complaint to the Catholic church.
The answer? Well for that we turn this week to Christopher Pearson and his piece Police not the answer in archbishop's abuse claims:
Cappo, acting on Wilson's behalf, had told Hepworth "if he was alleging any form of abuse, including rape, that this is a criminal allegation and that he should go to the police". But should he? Since 2007 Hepworth has said that he wasn't interested in retribution or compensation but in reconciliation with the Catholic Church. As Wilson, a canon lawyer, must know, the church has stand-alone internal procedures to investigate and resolve such cases.
It in no way diminishes the seriousness of the canon law charge if the complainant declines to pursue the matter in the civil courts. He or she is by no means obliged to do so.
Canon law?
Bizarre. You will of course recall that at any time of day in any day of the week, the commentariat can be roused to full cry by the notion of any hint of sharia law landing in Australia.
Here's the dolt getting agitated in Solution: emigrate to lands where your preferred laws run, and there's Piers 'Akker Dakker' Akerman getting agitated in Muslims kick own goal in PR stunt.
Well, we'd provide a link, but in the usual way of the intertubes, google seems to have lost it, but it can be found recorded amongst the faithful here:
As a German man at the back of the crowd said: “I’m German - then I could drive on the roads at whatever speed I want because that’s the law in Germany.”
Dr Matthews said he only wanted sharia to govern the domestic lives of Muslims. Driving on the roads would affect the good of the majority, so that’s different, he said.
But as my correspondent, former Reuter’s reporter Alison Bevege noted in her missive to me, it isn’t.
“Sharia law affects the legal pillars of equality before the law and the separation of church and state. Two far more important principles than a mere speed limit,” she wrote.
Indeed. Sterling points, and the separation of church and state a vital issue, except of course when it comes to the state being around to fund the teaching of creationism and Xenu.
It makes for pretty sport to alter a few words in Akker Dakker and Bevege's rant:
Church and state are separate.
“Priests do not make legally enforceable decrees from the pulpit. They can not interfere in daily life and the public are not obliged to listen to them.
“But canon law does not separate church and state. Catholicism (nee Islam) becomes not just a religion but a legal code and a political system.
“Canon law (nee sharia) means religious laws and religious leaders being able to make legal decrees. “Canon law (nee sharia) is a Catholic (nee Islamic) system of jurisprudence agreed on and issued by holy men."
And the piece builds to a firm conclusion:
Oh heck, no need to be twee. Let's just do a straight transcription:
“Catholics are very welcome in Australia - there are many very wonderful Catholic people, especially the Italians and the Germans and their pope, who are my personal favourites,” she wrote. “But in Australia we will not have canon law, so all Catholics must first decide that religion is to be a personal and private matter not a legal matter for the state, before they choose to move here.
“Otherwise they are free to leave.”
Or some such thing.
Seemingly Christopher Pearson and Cardinal Pell are now free to leave Australia, and we look forward to their immediate departure to countries where canon law still runs amuck.
Meanwhile, if you want an extensive set of apologetics for the man at the centre of the storm, Archbishop Hepworth, you can revert to Pearson, as he explains the man's fragile state:
When Hepworth first told me about the grim events of more than 40 years ago, back in May 2008, he said he urgently wanted to regularise his position with the Adelaide archdiocese, for which he had been ordained a priest. He hoped Dempsey, who strenuously denies the allegations, would leave active ministry without any public fuss. Hepworth dreaded a lengthy trial and the prospect that its outcome might well be inconclusive, given the difficulty of proving the charge beyond reasonable doubt after more than 40 years. As the global primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, which is in the process of corporate reunion with Rome, he is also a very busy man, obliged to travel constantly.
He dreaded a trial and he travels constantly, so he can't pursue a charge of rape, which has ostensibly devoured his soul these past forty years?
These are murky waters indeed, as Ryan explains from one side, and Pearson the other, and the murk comes from the politics of the Catholic church, and as always Pearson is ready standing by with a political axe to grind.
Suddenly the matter of accusation and denial between two men becomes transformed into internal Catholic politics:
Pope Benedict's first major speech after his election set out ecumenism as the first priority of his pontificate. In doing so, he wasn't referring to Rome's relations with the Baptists or the Assemblies of God but to groups with enough in common with Catholicism to make sacramental reunion possible: the Eastern Orthodox, the TAC and the conservative Lefebvrist Catholics who rejected some of the post-Vatican II changes in the late 1960s and 70s.
Uh huh. But what do these weighty matters have to do with an alleged crime, which could lead to a prison sentence? What of secular courts and laws and evidence, as opposed to a trial in absentia involving a politician using the power of parliamentary privilege to put the matter on the public record, and talk of institutional intrigue and institutional yearnings and longings?
If the Pope and the curia decide this has just been an ill-conceived clunky process leading to a personality clash between two stubborn individuals, nothing much may come of it. If the Holy See judges that Wilson has been trying, for whatever reasons, to make life miserable for Hepworth as the TAC's chief negotiator and perhaps to delay or even forestall the dissident Anglicans' return to the fold, he will have a lot of explaining to do in Rome next month.
There you go, there's canon law at work for you.
It's not about the truth of a matter involving a serious charge of rape, it somehow involves a personality clash, two stubborn individuals and the question of dissident Anglicans returning to the fold.
Roll on the days when talk of Catholic canon law and Islamic sharia law at work in Australia is but a fading dream, and charges of rape between adults are dealt with in an appropriate secular forum.
It would have helped the Catholic church clean up its act decades ago when it came to the matter of suffering children, and it would have produced a cleaner, less sullied and muddied approach to the current matter in Adelaide.
We're standing by for endless weeks of howling of righteous rage from the conservative commentariat about the way canon law is expected to be applied in Australia in a case of alleged rape involving adults, but as always in such matters the pond advises you not to hold your breath, not when sharia law goes on providing the easy, obvious piñata ...
In a recent interview, Eamon Gilmore, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, said that Ireland had asserted its role as a “modern democracy.”
ReplyDeleteNo longer would the church enjoy its previous privileges and powers as in times past, when it, with the government’s collusion, “effectively dictated the social policy of the state,” he said.
“Historically, there was a view within the Catholic Church that there was a parallel law, that they had their own system of law, and that was the law to which they were accountable,” Mr. Gilmore said. “At a minimum, that blurred the understanding of the necessity for full compliance with the law of the state.”
He added: “The Catholic Church is perfectly entitled to have its own view and its one rule and to view matters according to its own light. But this is a republic. And there is one law.”
When it comes to protecting children, Mr. Gilmore said, “Everybody in the state — irrespective of whether they’re ordinary citizens doing everyday work, or a priest or a bishop — has to comply with the law.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/world/europe/ireland-recalibrates-ties-to-roman-catholic-church.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp