Salvation Army , Chaplains, child abuse, and bad timing.

There is currently a very important court case being fought in the Australian High Court. Ron Williams is talking the Australian Government to court of it's funding of Chaplains in Australian schools. The website gives the reasons and methods, and it's certainly a cause worth fighting for.
 Today the Queensland Govt decided to intervene on the Federal Govt side, not really surprising, as they are getting free money for schools. Although the timing of the announcement cold have been better. I do like this comment :-

 Minister for Education and Training Geoff Wilson said the constitutional challenge threatened the good work of school chaplains.
“Chaplains have been working positively with students in our State schools for two decades,” Mr Wilson said.
“School chaplains are the Salvos of the school yard. Just like the Salvation Army representatives who work in the wider community, school chaplains provide a vital and valuable service within our schools.
“Chaplains are a friend to those in need, and touch the lives of thousands of students every year.

He is referring to the Salvation army, who in the last few years have seem to have become increasingly evangelical. They have always had a good name in Australia, as they do a lot of good work, until the recent child abuse claimaints came forward.
This press release was also released the same day as the one above:-

An advocacy group for former child wards is urging the nation's churches and charities to sell assets to fund compensation for children who were abused in their care.

The call comes on a day where the Salvation Army will formally apologise to those people who were abused in its care.
More than 500,000 Australians were raised in institutions over the past century.
The Salvation Army was responsible for around 30,000.

So Geoff Wilson has just said that the wonderful chaplains are just as good as another Christian group who are guilty of  the abuse of children in their care. The Salvation Army finally said sorry last year, I'm sure there are more stories out there, about what really happened in these awful places.




It is just part of an extraordinary story of how migrant children where abused in Church run institutions in Australia

 The Salvation Army is also known for it's anti - gay stance.

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." -- Albert Camus

What is Black Collar Crime?

 Thanks to http://tirelesswing.blogspot.com/ for the title picture.

                I believe the first use of the  term "Black Collar Crime " comes from the Australian group Broken Rites who began operation in 1993, when the victims realized the absence of any support for the victims of Church based abuse coming from the Church. This was when the realization that the hierarchy of those Churches are really only interested in protecting their own Priests/Ministers. But it was not yet clear just how much the churches where covering up for their own.


Currently the US based Freedom From Religion Foundation publish the Black Collar Crime Blotter  that tracks and monitors crimes committed by those involved in the churches,  it's very US based but does have the occasional story from Australia and Europe. Locally the site  http://www.tor.id.au/ is updated regularly and is more Australian centric, while also concentrating on the Catholic Church.

http://www.clergyabuseaustralia.org/ is a site from a survivor of Clerical Abuse, it's quite personal, has links to help groups, books and resources. but does not look to have been updated for some time.

For those people that have been through abuse and wish to network with others Survivors Australia are quite active.

Recently the Pope commented the current church scandals are because of the change in society in the 1960s. But that would mean there was no abuse before the 1960s wouldn't it?

So lets see...

After WW2, Britain, as did most countries, had a lot of orphans,  so here begins another chapter of the child migrants to the Empire. This is probably a story unknown outside Commonwealth countries, but the national Library of Australia has a short paper on it here. But, basically children as young as three were sent out to Australia, Rhodesia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the idea they would be leaving Britain behind to go to orphanages and possibly families for a better life. But on arrival they where generally used as a cheap labour force. In fact the Christian Brothers used the children as labours to construct the buildings they all lived in.

A support group for the Forgotten Australians has been formed. But without going in to much detail, again it's a story of the supposedly Godly members of our society abusing those to young to defend themselves. This was first brought to the attention of the public with the 1989 book  Lost Children of the Empire that was later made into a film.

Just this story would prove the lie about the Pope claim.

Andrew Murray was an Australian Senator, as well as a child migrant, he writes a history of the recent events of this incredibly sad story, concentrating on the despicable history of the Christian Brothers.

For more information on Child Migrants the Child Migrants Trust should be your first call. But it's one of  the most shameful events in Australian history

Finally, the EROS foundation have a site on Clerical Abuse, I can't say how accurate it is, and it looks not to be updated for sometime. Also the Foundation is very much Pro-Porn, as the Churches are against it. While some of the information on here would be useful, I can't help thinking it also has another agenda.

The Christian Brothers is looking to be a blog post by itself, it's evil activities have been all over the world, currently the Irish are investigating them quite closely.



As men's prayers are a disease of the will so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.-
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Black Collar Crime in Germany

From a Press Conference given by Marion Westphal last Friday, the comments in italics are mine.

Munich - Germany's Catholic church systematically covered up cases of sexual abuse within its own ranks for several decades, according to an expert study of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, presented Friday.

The lawyer commissioned by the Archdiocese to conduct the study, Marion Westphal, said its records revealed huge gaps between 1945 and 2009.
(So what about pre 1945, or are the records distroyed?)

Westphal described a 'systematic system of cover-up,' in which few abuse cases were criminally prosecuted.
'Only 26 priests were convicted for sexual offences,' Westphal added.
'We have to assume there is a large unknown number (of abuse cases),' the lawyer said. 'We are dealing with the extensive destruction of files.'(Maybe eaten by Rats?)
She said the records were also severely lacking during the years of 1977 to 1982, when the diocese was led by Archbishop Josef Ratzinger - who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

During this period, she only found a single document, regarding an abuse case that Ratzinger himself had dealt with, Westphal said. The file contained a letter from Ratzinger, insisting that an abusive priest be removed from his parish.
Westphal said church employees destroyed records of abuse cases because they were more concerned with avoiding a scandal than protecting the victims.
    (So nothing new here)

The study involved more than 13,200 files, of which 365 contained evidence that 'acts of abuse had taken place in an almost commonplace manner,' Westphal said.
These cases implicated 159 priests as well as 15 deacons, 96 religion teachers and six pastoral employees. Rural areas were particularly affected, the lawyer said.

Some of the files were stowed away in private apartments, others were locked away in places that few had authority to access. Criminal verdicts were not included in the files out of principle.
(It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".' -- Douglas Adams.) 

In many cases the victims' suffering could only be guessed at, Westphal said, as the files described reported abuse in evasive language.
She insisted the church had given her free rein in her research.
Munich's Archbishop Reinhard Marx said this year's revelations of sexual abuse by clerics had come as a shock.
'For me, these were surely the worst months of my life. I felt shame, grief and dismay,' Marx said.
(Getting caught does that to everyone )

Thanks to Dw-world.de


The Christian Brothers were fairly mangled fellows in Navan. Some men speak highly of them. Unfortunately I never saw that. I just remember the brutality. The Paddtbats, the straps that would fly out of the soutane like vipers' tongues, the beatings amidst the prayers - whack!
Pierce Brosnan