It's enough to make you sick

Coincidentally, on the very day I decide to start blogging about my atheism, I come across this article from the Mirror's website:

A child protection official for the Catholic Church has been caught with 4,000 pictures of child porn.
Father-of-four Christopher Jarvis was arrested after uploading pictures of children being abused to a website.

Married Jarvis, 49, a former social worker, was employed by the church following sex scandals about pervert priests.

His job was to monitor church groups to ensure paedophiles did not gain access to children in the church’s congregations.

But he was caught by police in March with more than 4,000 child porn images on his home computer and his work laptop.

He admitted 12 counts of making, ­possessing and distributing indecent ­images when he appeared before ­magistrates in Plymouth and is likely to face jail when he returns to court for sentencing next month.

Jarvis, who has been sacked from his job as child safeguarding ­officer, worked the Diocese of ­Plymouth for nine years.

Church spokesman ­David Pond said: “Mr Jarvis was suspended from his position as soon as the diocese became aware in March of the police investigation.

“The Bishop took that action and since then the Church has worked closely with the police.”

First, the alleged misdeeds of the Catholic or of any other church are mostly irrelevant to whether one should believe that God exists or not. If I were God though and all these children were being raped by clergy supposedly operating in my name, I think Vatican City would be receiving some Exodus-style plagues by now.

A few thoughts on this particular case. First, the irony that the very person that they hired to protect children from paedophiles was in fact one himself. Irony does not seem a strong enough word. It is profoundly sad that children were victimized by someone who was himself charged with protecting kids from predators.

Secondly, I find it curious that the church has "worked closely" with the police in this case when in other cases they have not.

In what is probably the most famous case of a cover-up in the myriad of Catholic Church child-rape scandals Cardinal Bernard Law, formerly the Archbishop of Boston resigned his position after it was found that he actively participated in the cover-up of the molestation of  children. Pope John Paul II accepted his resignation. Instead of ending his career in disgrace as it would appear he richly deserved, he was given a post in the Vatican. He ranks high enough in the absurd Catholic heirarchy that he participated in the selection of the current Pope. There have been many other cases of cover-up, all over the globe.

It begs this question: Did the church cooperate with the police in this case because of ever-increased scrutiny of the church because of these ongoing scandals or were they quick to cooperate because Jarvis was not a member of the clergy?

There was a report commissioned in 2004 called The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States. It's commonly known as the John Jay Report. This report found that American dioceses "had been able to substantiate 6,700 accusations against 4,392 priests in the USA, about 4% of all 109,694 priests who served during the time covered by the study."

So one in 20 American priests is a paedophile? Speaking of begged questions: How is it, with those odds, that some parents still send their kids to Catholic schools?

In a personal connection, it happens that when I was a child, I met a person who had been a clergyman and who would years later be convicted of having sexually abused boys in a residential school in northern BC decades earlier. At the time I knew him, he was a member of the church that my parents were posted to in Hazelton, BC. This man who I would later see referred to in print as a "devious sociopath" who would "brazenly call young boys out of class for "medical exams" and "fishing trips;" then corner them in the school basement or in his private quarters."

http://www.harbourpublishing.com/excerpt/SpiritDanceatMeziadin/399

During the time that I knew him, there was at least one instance when I was left in the care of this man and his wife when my parents needed to be out of town for a few days. Nothing untoward happened but it is frightening to look back and think what could have happened, given the circumstances.

What is most frightening to me now is that this rape and torture of children is obviously still going on. This is not a historical problem but a current one. Hopefully Christopher Jarvis is punished to the fullest extent that British law can punish him. 

Hopefully, catholic people will start demanding that paedophile priests be handed over to police to be jailed. Hopefully society will stop viewing "Men of God" as anything special and demand that any bishop who covers up the rape of children should feel the full weight of the law landing right on their pointy hats!