ikepot44

Academy Awards/Oscars Ceremony watchers will have noticed that Best Picture 2016 was won by SPOTLIGHT, the film uncovering rampant priest-paedophilia in Boston MASS in 2002. (249 cases admitted, involving 1000 children) And then the systematic moving-on of the guilty men to new parishes by Cardinal Bernard Law, Head of the Diocese in order to hide their terrible crimes committed on innocent young children, both boys and girls. A truly fine film - try to see it … Understated, calm, factual and totally unstoppable as a matter of history … News-watchers will also have noticed that the Australian Cardinal George Pell (Nº 3 in the Vatican hierarchy and in charge of the RC Church's global finances) is now being compelled on television to give testimony over his own multiple cover-ups and movings-on of priest-paedophiles while bishop of Melbourne/Ballarat in Australia. He is making a very poor show of the denials he offers - but don't take my word for it … just write his name into the BBC News website or Google it … and you will see for yourself. It's all very live at the moment. After that, then make your own mind up - and don't just believe what you are told. It's a bad, bad habit just to swallow the Church's line uncritically. But then we were all brainwashed into doing it when we were kids. It's taken a lot of time and a great deal of pain for all this to come out. Don't just shrug it off with the usual : The Church Knows Best . It doesn't.

Is there to be no end to it all … ? To all this revelation and exposure and calling to account … ? Now it's the turn of Pope JPII's reputation to be measured against the facts. As we have all been hearing and reading recently, JPII's letters to the love of his life, Professor Anna Teresa, a married woman, have now actually been bought and sold for public scrutiny - and have been put on show for us all by that doughty Catholic journalist (freelance at the BBC) Ed Stoughton. World rights can't be far behind, can they ? At a time in his career when he needed every second of time and every ounce of energy he could find (fighting Communism in Poland, heading the Papacy and The Church itself etc etc etc), we find that JPII devotes endless time and fine passion to writing to the woman of his life. And to secret meetings with her in several locations. As they say, there is no suggestion that the two of them ever were real lovers - but I was brought up by JPII's Church to observe as moral fact that the impure thought was just as damning as the actual impure deed itself. As even President Jimmy Carter once admitted about a woman he thought beautiful : "I have sinned in my heart …" In my own impressionable young days, I fully expected to be damned by my (entirely natural) impure thoughts and was expected to make full confession of them to a priest. So I now find it a bit difficult to be sympathetic to the double standards involved here with JPII. On the one hand, JPII was one of the most morally harsh, unbending and uncompromising Popes ever - and on the other, in his secret life, he gets up to Professor Maria Teresa … Her letters to him, by the way, she sold to the Polish National Archive where they presumably reside until a big enough bidder comes along. We can now expect a publishing bidders' war - there's millions in it … And as the baffled and confused moral dependants of the RCC, we do need the full story - don't we ? The thing that really pigs me off is this vision I keep having of millions of gawping, shocked, incredulous Catholics scrabbling and scratching for excuses and justifications for despicable, hypocritical behaviour - just like the Cardinal Law case in Boston MASS … Let's all just remember that the RCC is fundamentally a human and fallible, sometimes even criminal institution, that presents itself and convinces itself that it is divine and so untouchable by the mere prayer-fodder who sustain it … If you have the stomach for any more RCC scandal, buy yourself (or see at your local library) the latest edition of the London Review of Books - which details unstoppably the gross financial (and other) shenanigans within the Vatican … God in Heaven … !!

Oh dear, patfitzbally … perhaps not the most clear-headed and sober reaction … As you say, the world of film can truly be "pretend" - but the actual reality of this child-abuse case is - not the film -but the law-court in Boston MASS which awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to local victims of priest-paedophilia - and the diocese had to pay up. Cardinal Law meanwhile, the arch-denier, got his promotion to Rome … No smoke without fire, eh ? Especially when the flames are hundreds of millions of RC dollars burning up to Heaven … The law is the law, not The Law is The Law … if you see what I mean. So just who was doing the pretending in Boston MASS in 2002 ? In the same way, the De La Salle order has just lost its final appeal in the UK Supreme Court and now has to find £7 million to compensate child victims of its abuse. The law is the law and is not easily hoodwinked. Even here. Unless they are pretending in this case as well, of course … Last year, the United Nations published a big report detailing massive RC child abuse worldwide. Do you think they have got it wrong, too ? Do you think the UN is pretending ? I suggest you go and see the film SPOTLIGHT and try to work out for yourself who is more important : the priests or the abused kids. And please do remember : not everything you learnt way back from somebody in a black cassock is necessarily true or useful or permanent … And please be aware that I come from a rough-ar**d Sheffield background just as tough as yours … But I try to think for myself, some of the time …

I have just been to see the new film SPOTLIGHT - about the paedophile scandal and child abuse by priests in Boston MASS, USA in 2002, tolerated by their then Cardinal Bernard Laws. Laws, as you will remember, dealt with a proven 249 cases of serious abuse by his priests by moving these men on to a new parish, after giving them a slap on the wrist … He then wriggled and twisted and double-dealt behind the scenes to hide it all, years of it, estimated at affecting on the way to 1000 children. When caught out finally, he had to admit it all and be removed himself to another parish - in Rome, and a big promotion. The Boston diocese had to pay American levels of compensation - and came very close to being bankrupted. This all actually happened in real life. And at the end of the film, there is a very long list of other comparable RC paedophile scandals - and it's global in reach, and includes the good old UK. It is a fine film, even though its content is wholly disgusting : the large-scale corruption of children by RC men of God and the Church's subsequent completely unforgivable attempt at cover-up, as if the priests were more important than the protection of innocent children and the lives they ruined. Go and see the film - it is wholly true and it is even understated. And let the scales fall from your eyes about RC Men of God and how they are ALL saints worthy of our highest respect. Wise up, brother …

I remember one lad who undoubtedly had something of an affair with one of the (lay) teachers - we all knew about it and laughed at the lad's puffish stupidity. But that was all I ever came across of sexual abuse and jiggery-pokery while in six years at DLSCS. You might bear in mind, Torontony, that not only has the UK Supreme Court found against the DLS Brothers (£7 million compensation to victims ordered !) but in February 2014, the actual UN published a long official report condemning the whole Catholic Church for covering up child sexual abuse by brothers, priests and the like … the Sinner supported by his Hierarchy, eh ? Do you think these people and their seniors were (are !) fit to be let near children ? A complete shambolic disgrace …

There is a vengeful God, after all … Though perhaps not vengeful enough … Read this from The Times of 4 January 2016 … It reports the third substantial prison sentence of a De la Salle brother - and a judgment by the UK Supreme Court against the Order and requiring it now to find £7 million in compensation for victims of its covered-up child abuse … The former head of a children’s home run by a Roman Catholic order who has already served 21 years in prison for sexually abusing boys was jailed for a further nine years yesterday. James Carragher, 75, was head of St William’s community home in Market Weighton, East Yorkshire, an approved school for boys with behavioural problems run by the De La Salle order, from 1976 to 1990. He previously had been jailed for seven years in 1993 and a further 14 years in 2004 for offences he committed at St William’s. Anthony McCallen, 69, the home’s former chaplain, was also sentenced at Leeds crown court. He was jailed for 15 years after being convicted of 11 counts of sexual abuse. Judge Geoffrey Marson told the men: “Each of you has a longstanding, deeply engrained sexual interest in teenage boys. It’s an interest, I have no doubt, that continues to persist. “It’s perfectly clear that each of you targeted some of the most vulnerable boys. You groomed them, abused them for your own sexual gratification, then threatened them to ensure they did not complain.” St William’s is the subject of the largest compensation claim arising from sexual abuse at a single children’s home. More than 20 brothers from the De La Salle order, which runs 1,000 schools worldwide, are accused of abusing 170 boys at St William’s between 1958 and 1992. The school is now closed. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the order must share the cost of paying an estimated £7 million compensation to boys who were sexually and physically abused. It said that the order, known formally as the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and the Roman Catholic Church were both liable for compensating victims of abuse at the home. The ruling means that organisations that care for children will be held liable for the abuse of children in their care if their work creates a risk of abuse. Previously, victims had to show that an organisation had employed or closely controlled the abuser. Compensation claims by the victims were suspended pending the outcome of the criminal trial. David Gibbs, a chartered legal executive in the specialist child abuse department at the law firm Jordans, said that victims “have had to endure not only the abuse itself, but not being believed by police and social workers who they told, incomplete police investigations and years of delays caused by legal delay tactics of the home’s Catholic operators. “Legal technicalities are to this day being used to prevent them getting compensation and restoring some dignity to their lives.” If you Google "Carragher De La Salle", you will see that the idiot innocents of the DLS order reinstated him as Headmaster of School once he had served seven years of his first 14-year stretch for child abuse - on the grounds that they and God forgave him … But have the boy victims been able to … ? Let us all just hope that the £7 million judgment against the order will now be sufficient to close it down …

After reading so many bad, bad posts regarding our old school, perhaps the defining question for us all is : Would we send our own sons to such a school ? My own answer is : despite the true excellence of some of the civilian teachers, NO - not in a million years. The place was run on brutal lines, failed too many of its pupils and has - very clearly - created lifelong bitter resentment in large numbers of them.

So that's it, then - official … The Catholic Church has been abusing our children in large numbers and for years … You can't get a lot more authoritative than a United Nations Report - and the one that came out last week states that the Catholic Church, all the time the child abuse it knew all about was going on, was far more concerned to protect its name and personnel than to protect innocent and defenceless kids … Our kids … Us … It just hushed things up and moved on its evil criminals, called "Priests" and "Brothers" to the next parish or school - and when these monsters "sinned" or more accurately committed their very serious and life-poisoning crimes again … well, yet again the Church or its teaching Order moved them on - again. God will, of course, forgive these monsters in Heaven - but I wonder what help was given the abused children by our wonderful Catholic Church ? And I wonder what the record for moves was - and who racked it up ? About time we did away with all the secrets and shrieking hypocrisy ! Ireland and the USA were the worst, it seems - remember all those 'isolated' cases over the years ? Well, it seems they weren't so very 'isolated' after all …

If you want to read up how the law and criminal courts have viewed some more of the activities and failings of the Holy Brotherhood we all suffered under at Scott Rd (NB: the literal Spanish for Holy Brotherhood is LA SANTA HERMANDAD, aka the Spanish Inquisition) - then just select the BBC News Channel via Google and put in : Carragher. You will see how Brother Pervert was found guilty of sexually abusing his inmates, served his prison sentence, came out - and was then fully reinstated in his job as Headmaster by the holy male-virgin innocents who directed our own education. Carragher was then convicted again of the same offences - and is currently serving 14 years … Read all about it !! The same holy male-virgin innocents who prayed for and forgave Carragher have now been found guilty again of incompetence and stupidity - let us hope they have to pay punitive damages to their victims. There is not a lot of consolation for us in this too-late swoop by Justice - but at least our grandsons may be a bit better protected than we were …

There was an interesting recent letter in The Times which may go some way to explaining the undoubted brutalities inflicted on some boys at DLSC at different times. The Times letter refers rather more to a general public-school culture than specifically to our school - but then our school did ape some public-school practices, didn't it ? (Houses, snooty prefects etc) . . . The writer makes the point that the teachers who wielded the strap in the 1950s had themselves been at school in the 1930s - when we still had an Empire . . . which provided many careers for non-manual school-leavers. These careers in harsh climates and involving many privations made it important that schoolboys of the time be trained in enduring hardship. Hence, they were badly and cruelly treated while at school, in order for their characters to become a base for putting up with anything when they later pursued careers in the Empire Service. Training in Endurance was more important than training in matters academic or technical. So - beat 'em up . . it's the best preparation for life when they leave school By the 1970s, older teachers formed in the 1930s had largely disappeared into retirement or mortality - and the teachers of the 1970s had been formed in the 1950s and they had vowed not to work professionally via the brutalities they had come to hate when pupils themselves. So we began to get teachers who pursued academic goals and not endurance goals. How about that, then ? It might explain why i950s DLSC boys are so resentful of the staff who beat them, while the 1970s kids never had to go through it . . .

Such a spate of new messages detailing the daily brutalities of the De La Salle Brothers at our school, back in those good old days . . . ! But what we went through was as nothing to what the top Brothers inflicted on other lads, through their unbelievable naivete and stupidity. Just put BBC and James Carragher into your search engine, such as `Google', and see if you can believe your eyes. Forgiveness is all very well - but think of the truly ruined lives you are reading about . . . And these people, our Brothers, had a licence to supervise the teaching and development of tens of thousands of vulnerable young boys. Including yours and mine . . .

I wonder if we Catholics and ex-Catholics have enough of a self-deprecating sense of humour to take the mickey out of ourselves, in the same way that Jews can do with their Jewish jokes ? I am not talking about those racist Irish jokes (mostly not funny) but proper Catholic jokes, made to stop us taking ourselves so damn seriously . . . Dave Allen (d. 2005) used to do this very well : really funny, but with edge enough to puncture pomposity and sanctimoniousness. Here's one to start us off : A drunken bloke, really drunk, stumbles into a Catholic church at confession time, not that he is aware of anything very much. He falls into a confessional box and dozes off. The priest on the other side coughs lightly to engage his attention. No response. The priest coughs again, more loudly. No response. So he coughs really loudly. No response - again. In desperation, the priest wallops really hard and loud on the wooden wall between them. The drunk starts awake and shouts : " 'Tis no use in the world a-banging on the wall like that - there's no paper this side, neither !! "

Like everybody else, as I grow older the past looms larger . . . One thing I seem to come back to again and again is that contact there used to be between the boys at DLSC and the girls at Notre Dame HS, as at Christmas school dances. I remember those chaste dance steps painfully and embarrassingly learned at Constance Grant's on West Street - but at least you could legally lay hands on your partner in those days, instead of just helplessly watching untouchable pelvic and inelegant twitches, as today. I often wonder what became of an especially attractive NDHS girl who, unusually, did 'A' levels in Maths, Physics and Chemistry - and went on to become a metallurgist back in those days (1960s/1970s) when Sheffield still had a world-leading steel industry. Not much else, but the city did still have Big Steel . . . Her name was Elizabeth R-something and she lived in Dore with her three sisters (Mary ? Bernadette ? Julie ?) and two brothers (? and ? - who both went to DLSC). Her dad was an accountant and her mother was a terror. It would be nice to know she married, had kids and led a happy life . . . Anybody know the girl I mean ?

Euren asks if other Sheffield schools beat their pupils as much as DLSCS did. I don't know for sure - but at least Sheffield LEA schools had to record their canings in an official log : The School Punishment Book. A pal of mine was at one time Deputy Head at a big Sheffield Secondary School - and he was the only person authorised to hit pupils there, and in a measured and recorded way. Do you think DLSCS had a Punishment Book ? Everybody seemed to hit the pupils at DLSCS - not just one authorised person. Don't forget : DLSCS was a Direct-grant school - money direct from Government - so could the mechanisms of control and monitoring have been at London- distance, not on Leopold Street ? One possible pointer : perhaps it all had to did with a mindset that beating the boys was a way of keeping them obedient enough for their souls to be guaranteed saved. And such an objective in those days justified any amount of flogging, didn't it ? Another : the Irish tradition of CP was very deep-rooted, again perhaps to save souls - just watch the film THE MAGDALENE SISTERS. Yes, it's about girls and CP - but it shows the same thing. And the Christian Brothers (who were not DLSC Brothers, but same line of business) were absolutely infamous for running junior concentration camps. And there were plenty of Irish-background people at DLSCS . . . a mindset. Another : the pre-Unification Papal States in Italy kept the adult population at a literacy level of 2% in to guarantee them God and Eternal Life. Bah ! And to exploit them like profitable livestock - in order to maintain the Papals in the manner that centuries of exploitation had accustomed them to . . . a mindset. Beat the Body if you must - but Save the Soul ! And by the way, did anybody at DLSCS ever tell you about the barbarities of the Spanish Inquisition ? The bottomless corruption of the medieval Popes ? The money ? The gold ? The Papal ******** ? Why did we have centuries of exclusively Italian popes, until Woytila, the Polish cardinal ? Could it be politics ? Ecclesiastical mafiosi ? The family business ? Cosa Nostra ? There was - and is - a lot of lying and hypocrisy about . . . . But all that said - there were some really good teachers at DLSCS and we should all be glad and grateful for that. The school did a pretty good job (for some pupils, not all) inside a malevolent context. I'm just glad that times have moved on. How long do you think the prison sentences would have been these days for harsh, every-single-day-beaters like, say, Camillus - and Wilf himself . . . ?

The point about the Direct-grant to grammar schools like DLSCS was that they governed themselves, by-passing the Local education Authority, with 70% of the Governors selected from Catholic sources, making their own school rules. ('Ordinary' schools run by the Local Education Authority, Sheffield in our case, could only have 30% Catholic governors.) So DLSCS ran its own show, appointing but (very rarely) sacking teachers according to its own lights, running the school exactly as it wished, subject to occasional and not very deep HM Inspection. The price Direct-grant schools played for this was that, while all their revenue costs (such as teachers' salaries, electricity, educational supplies etc) were met by the grant direct from Government - all the school's CAPITAL COSTS had to be met independently by the Governing body. No state help on this. Now . . . if you remember Bro Wilf's predecessor, Bro Leonard, life was a bombardment of begging letters, fund-raising stunts etc , in order to pay the capital costs of eg the new block/science labs/library. And all that went up and we all benefitted. But I cannot remember Bro Wilf himself ever raising funds from us and our families. Perhaps he approached local Catholic rich people - or perhaps he took the money he needed from DLSC's Brothers' teaching salaries. So maybe the brothers worked only for pocket money . . . Maybe this is where Wilf failed. Fund-raising. The school's capital provision ran down and ran down (no Technology workshops, very limited range of subjects) and dwindled to nothing, to zero by the time 1976 came and so the school therefore had to incorporate with the existing LEA-run secondary modern All Saints into a 'comprehensive'. Notre Dame did not. What was the difference ? What Wilf did was buy real estate : remember Crabtree ? Beauchief ? both primarily cricket campuses ? And he/the school ultimately had to sell them both off, as perhaps the only way to raise capital, to keep the school up to date, as far as it could. Imagine if Wilf's fund-raising abilities under those old rules had had to keep raising continuous big money to buy successive generations of computers, essential in today's education . . . So I think his failure was less about being the legendary Smiling Sadist and more about not being an Enterprise Head with a business mind. The school was doomed to dwindle and die under him - it took years, but it did happen. Just why wasn't he best mates with Michael joseph Gleeson ? Anyway, I still salute him - he did a good job for me personally and for a (too small) number of other academic kids. But he did fail DLSCS' C-streams and D-streams. But then all the other grammar schools failed theirs - and that was their built-in tragedy. If you don't already know, Bro Wilfrid died on 26 February 2003 in his 63rd year of 'Religious Profession'. He rose to the very top of the DLS UK order and he was in many ways a capable bloke of very high intelligence. He had a lot to put up in health terms, including losing a foot, amputated to diabetes. If you still pray, remember him, eh . . . ?