Monks no longer allowed to run St Benedict’s school where children were abused;    ENGLAND: London Ealing: St Benedict’s School

Guardian, 24 October, 2019…

A “sadistic and predatory” atmosphere and a culture of cover-up and denial in a Catholic school allowed sexual abusers to commit crimes against children for decades, an independent inquiry has found.

Senior figures at Ealing Abbey and St Benedict’s school in west London, part of the English Benedictine Congregation, were perpetrators of abuse over a 30-year period. Staff members failed to raise concerns because of a “mafia-like” atmosphere and the fear of losing their jobs.

Since 2003, four members of staff, including a former abbot, have been convicted of multiple offences relating to the sexual abuse of more than 20 children. The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) said: “The total scale of abuse can never be known, but it is likely to be much greater.”

…The inquiry heard evidence over five days in February. It sought a witness statement and documentation from the pope’s representative in the UK, the apostolic nuncio, which the Holy See refused to provide.

…“The Catholic church needs to be held accountable for its criminality…”   Click here to read the entire, horrifying, newspaper report

Comment:

There is nobody on this blog who, on reading the above report, will even remotely seek to justify such disgraceful abuse.  The behaviour of all involved is summed up simply as “evil”.

However, such shocking reports of this evil behaviour, which is the very opposite of everything Christ taught, should not, for a second, shake our faith in the four marks of Christ’s Church, which is that it is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic.  The holiness of the Church comes primarily from Christ, not from the members, although when we speak of the Church as “holy” we are thinking, too, of the entire Church, from the beginning – the Church in Heaven (the Church Triumphant); the Church in Purgatory (The Church Suffering) and the Church on earth (The Church Militiant).

Those who look at such evil behaviour perpetrated by some members of the Church on earth at any given point in history and see it as evidence that the Church is not holy, are revealing ignorance of the composition of the Church, which is not confined to the visible body of the Church on earth.

This is not to minimise, in any way, the gravity of what is happening in the Church today, least of all the complicity of the Vatican in evil.  We have just been discussing, on other threads,  the Pope’s own complicity in the utter scandal of promoting the worship of pagan idols within the Vatican itself and various churches around Rome. The breaking of the First Commandment is about as serious as it gets for a Pope.  And Our Lord has warned us that it is not only pagan idols which are to be tossed into rivers:   “…he that shall scandalise one of these little ones that believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck and that he should be drowned int he depth of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)

“…he that shall scandalise one of these little ones that believe in Me,
it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck and that he should be drowned int he depth of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)

The questions for discussion here must, therefore, surely include

1) why on earth would the Vatican refuse to co-operate with the authorities investigating the Ealing scandal?

2) how many Catholics actually understand the composition of the Church themselves? 

3) does it all come back to the failure of Catholic education across the board – schools at every level, seminaries, etc?

4)  what sort of episcopal oversight is there of religious Orders within each diocese?

5) How confident can we be that absolutely everything is being done to rid the Church of this evil – abuser priests? 

6)  Or is this evil irrevocably linked to the loss of the supernatural within the  Church since the so-called “reforms” (the rvolution) of Vatican II?