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Otherwize:
This article was more about criticizing the Church than it was about Madeleine.

How arrogant of you to criticize a man who lived a life of self-sacrifice, but didn’t live up to YOUR personal standards of fixing the whole world and its problems. Perhaps you should consider what you’ve done today, completely outside of self-interest.

The fact that you are a dissident Catholic makes you a non-Catholic; sorry, you can’t pick and choose according to personal whims. It is a shame that so many who label themselves Catholic are truly ignorant of theology.

Challenge to you: read an encyclical or two! You’ll understand that the Church teaches FREEDOM through its view of sexuality, not slavery, which is the result of the modern - “un-ostrich” view of it, the latter with excellent results, of course: exploitation of women, high abortion rates, high divorce rates, confused children, and rampant pedophilia - inside and outside the church.

Ok - I’m done.

Well the Church needs criticising Edie. Of course I’m non-catholic technically. Question, criticise, disobey and it’s hellfire. The Pope is infallible. Nothing can change. No place for disagreement except for the Devil’s Dustbin. I accepted that for years and counted myself out but slowly but surely realised that my central relationship with Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, St Francis, St Antony of Padua, Therese of Lisieux - what I mean is the actual personal experience through prayer and not encyclicals and Papal Bull - remained alive and true. A study of history made it not difficult to cleanly separate Christ and his Mystery from the doings of Rome and all the other pretender religious hierarchies which are no more than political control mechanisms. I’m not talking Borgias here. My father, as a young and fervent Catholic relief worker who at that time thought the Spanish Civil War was about protecting the faith against Communism, was in Guernica at dawn after the bombing and would never set foot in a Catholic Church again following not just what he saw but what he heard in justification.
John Paul was a great prayerbook pin up, wonderful at looking comforting and spiritual but his sweet fatherliness turned a blind eye to you if you did not fit the mould. No doubt you are a comfortable Catholic and not homosexual, nor poor and female and surrounded by men who don’t take no or an answer, not divorced at a young age from a violent alcoholic (for example), not pregnant and terrified for a myriad of reasons YOU cannot control. The gentle Pope cuts a different figure when the only answer the Church gives is to dismiss you as “non-catholic” with all that implies to a believer, especially one within a Catholic monoculture. The faith is not just there to comfort the middle-classes in affluent countries though God knows denial of service to practising homosexuals is pretty universally damaging.
And that brings me to the point of the piece (which was not an article originally but a post in response to others so is slightly out of context) - or what I believe is the point of it appearing here, and that is not Catholic bashing (frankly despite all I say here I still don’t think Catholicism has too high a ranking in the League Table of Bloody Stupid Religions).
The religious view on sexual activity is that it is a choice. I agree and believe we are and must strive to be personally responsible for our sexual activity with the knowledge that we can harm as well as give love and fun and joy. (and besides Personal Responsibility is Personal Freedom)
But Religions (I’m using the general term from now on) teach us that everything beyond the reproductive necessity, which is at the service of God’s Will (Man’s Social organisation), is sinful (though there is a little leeway for some comfort and pleasure with the lights out within a marriage and modern thinking even cuts the woman in on that). Beyond that, masturbation, homosexual love, extra-marital sex are all considered sins that we can choose not to indulge in. Religions do not accept homosexuals as natural occurrences just like heterosexuals and neither does the majority of secular society which, although mainly non-churchgoing in the UK for instance, still falls back on religious prejudice when it suits it to exclude those it wishes to be outsiders. The churches don’t so much deny the homosexual urge, they can just about accept you’ve got it but you are directed not to act on it, to pray for help to contain it. For generations homosexuals have therefore entered convents an d monasteries in the vast majority of cases in the belief that this was a good solution and that a life of prayer and self-denial would keep them from sin. But we as humans just don’t tick like that and religious fervour, prayer and clerical vows are actually no match for our sexual urges of whatever nature. The result is ultimately destructive in many cases. But the churches fail to address the blatantly obvious truth that they are wrong about sexuality and that the advice they give to those outside a very narrow band of accepted normality is false, inadequate, misery-making and potentially dangerous.
Nowadays as we contemplate the horror of what has probably happened to Madeleine we have to add another dimension to the way we are looking at sexuality. It is apparent that some peoples’ sexual urges are really really destructive at core - way way outside what the vast majority of us would consider normal. Even the most “normal” of us have been through puberty and experienced the birth of our own sexual feelings and know that they come as if from nowhere into a largely unsuspecting young person’s consciousness. My point is that paedophiles must BEGIN somewhere. There must at this moment be child rapists of the future out there who have so far done nothing wrong at all. Not all of them are sitting in dingy garrets communing with the Devil and rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of the horrors they will unleash. I believe Operation Ore found many men who were actually horrified at their own sexuality and struggling to contain it - completely alone. In fact as things are the “community” of paedophiles on the web probably appears to be the only source of friendship in a lonely, shameful existence. So I repeat my question to churches and tabloids and society as a whole. Where is a young man (or woman perhaps) who finds himself attracted to children, fantasising about violent sex or otherwise experiencing the early stages of a potentially dangerous sexual career to go for help and advice? Science needs to provide some real answers not based on psychological fads that addresses the real cause and origin of disastrous sexual aberration in the human psyche. Only then can the young man in that situation be given adequate advice and measures taken to help or even ensure he does no harm. Are we for instance looking at a form of autism affecting the sexual centres of the brain? Is there a definable chemical pattern or some such? These things need to be addressed because all the press hysteria, forum insults, parental vigilance (or vigilanteism in some cases), hatred and fear is not going to protect little children like Madeleine one iota.
Our religious conditioning from a whole range of faiths predisposes us to a certain kind of thinking about normality and aberrance. The concept of sin prevents us from looking at this thing practically. If the faiths cannot accept normal consenting sex between adults in the face of overwhelming human experience that there is nothing more essentially harmful about homosexuality than there is about heterosexuality, if they cannot care for their members as the humans they are rather than according to unrealistic encyclical diktats then they become irrelevant and the field is open for society to be governed by lurid, bullying, sniggering and distorted tabloidism. With this situation in place there is no hope at all that we can address REAL, dangerous aberrance and discover what the nature of this beast really is scientifically. We absolutely must make this jump and find some way of reaching out to these men before they harm or it’s going to continue to be yellow ribbons in the wind.
That’s going to be my last long post on the subject, I never intended more than getting into a quiet little forum discussion away from the general scrum on this and don’t have much spare time to give it. But this is a longstanding and heartfelt viewpoint I am grateful for the opportunity to throw into the arena.

PS for some reason I can’t figure out I appear to be logged in here as “Anonymous” not “Otherwize”. Don’t think anyone’s bothered - that last is evidently no Troll!!

I am an atheist so some might think me unqualified to contribute to this debate on the Catholic Church. In fact, I was/am the child of a mixed marriage - my father Protestant, my mother Catholic. In the early 1950’s in Scotland, it was expected (may still be the case?) that in instances of such ‘mixed’ marriages, the Protestant partner undertook that any children of the union would be brought up as Catholics. That I was not brought up as a Catholic was a deliberate act on the part of my mother and stemmed from the bullying/physical/and sexual abuse she and her brothers’s experienced at the hands of the nuns and priests at the Catholic schools they attended in the 1930/40’s.

It is now more readily accepted that the Catholic Church contains amongst its number lesbians, homosexuals, and paedophiles. Yet too often, it has seemed that the Church cares more for the perpetrators of these evil deeds than it does for the victims. Those who suffered abuse are disbelieved, left alone with no support/counseling while the ‘abusers’ are given the full protection of the church. The abused are left with emotional/psychological scars that last a lifetime. The abusers ‘confess’ - when they are caught out - ‘repent’, say a few ‘Hail Marys’ and everything is then hunky dory.

It was fear that I might experience the same abuse she and her brothers experienced at a ‘faith’ school that determined my mother that I would not be brought up as a Catholic. ‘Anonymous’ is right to say that the RC Church has a fundamental problem understanding/dealing with sexuality. It also needs to show more compassion to the victims of abuse from those amongst its own ranks than it has heretofore shown.

[[And just to clarify that the overwhelming majority of the abuse cases where homosexual, not pedophile.]]

so f*cking a 8 year old boy is not as bad as f*cking an 8 year old girl?? get a grip mate !

You know, and ive thought thought about this a lot. I was abused as a child, bt thankfully through counselling and understanding I have come through it relatively unscathed.. But how awful it must be for a young hetrosexual boy to have a 1st sexual encounter FORCED upon you by another man.. That Sh*t must really f*ck you up !!

sorry thats the 1st ever comment I have sworn on, but that last comment really hacked me off !