As long as Pell is protected by the Pope no one can trust the catholic church

I’m not intentionally making an anti-Catholic statement here. Child sexual abuse is bigger than that, and will always be hidden from view. But in the case of Catholicism, the root problem is a circular one, perhaps not often recognised.

Catholic-educated people are arguably (and deliberately?) less-broadly equipped for life (unless things have changed in Catholic schools over the past few decades). My Catholic-educated (in the 1960s), ex-Catholic partner was stunned as an adult to discover the existence of humanist writers and philosophers she’d never heard of in high school – they were rigidly excluded from the curriculum because they were atheists, Protestants (or even worse then, ‘Communists’) who challenged the one-and-only doctrine. (There wasn’t even mention of the French Revolution in her History lessons, presumably because of the Catholic Church’s culpability in its fermentation.)

And of course, this kind of broader depth of humanist understanding would have already been missing from the educations of those who taught her and her female and male contemporaries – and consequently missing from the educations of any future teachers from her generation. And so the circle of only half-understanding reality was continued.

Then there’s the probability that to deliberately choose – or accept being manoeuvred into – an adult life of relative social isolation and sexual abstinence, many aspirant priests and nuns must be vaguely disturbed at some level or another, which makes the emotional maturity of Catholic authority figures fairly suspect. Many of them surely have to be denying something when they make such a ‘career’ decision – not the most appropriate basis for being put in charge of impressionable children whose parents, themselves pre-indocrinated, would have already convinced them that priests and nuns were holier-than-anyone people they could/should trust.

In my opinion, all religions are a threat to balanced understanding of the human condition and reality, and it seems that none of them has come out of this Royal Commission looking good. But more so than others, the Catholic Church is nothing more than a multinational corporation in which fat-salaried executives exploit a poorly-paid workforce in factories turning out products that will constantly return tax-free income, and its boardroom and branch offices will always try to ensure that nothing upsets its carefully-designed marketing structure. And, regardless of the predictable ‘shocked and sorry and it won’t happen again’ spin we’ll now get, it’ll go on doing whatever’s necessary for damage control in order to maintain its customer loyalty program and keep its cash flow ticking over.

Which will include its CEO hiding George Pell somewhere down in the Vatican catacombs.

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