■■■■■■■ seriously? Talk about your cliched evil organisation…
Then if it turns out he’s guilty? They’ve nailed their flags to the mast.
They’re a lobby group that exists for the sole purpose of getting away with corruption. Nailing flags to dodgy masts is bread and butter for them.
1 Like
Having lived there. Yep.
I was not living there at the time of the happenings, but people still talked about 15 years later when I was living there.
Leon Wiegard called them the Christian “Whack” Brothers.
Sounds like you had Brother Miller teaching maths. I never appreciated it much till I had him, and I liked him. All I remember him doing in an anger-sense was kicking someone’s schoolbag all the way down the aisle. You had heaps of homework (which is necessary for advanced maths) and a short test every morning and a Saturday morning test every month. If you didn’t get 80%, you had to redo it.
In my experience, the lay teachers were far worse than the Brothers. I don’t remember any of the brothers handing out beltings, but do remember Mr Tanner (grandfather of Xavier and of Simon O’Donnell) doing that in Grade 6, and this pee-wee Yank, Mr. Di Pasquale. He died of AIDS in subsequent years.
We had 47 in our HSC Pure Maths and Calculus and Applied Maths classes, and only one failed each class and a heap got special distinctions, @HarryJay and I included. We used to head off to the footy after our Saturday morning tests in those desolate days of 1970.
John Silvester had an article in the last few months about the Catholic policeman in Mildura who’d transferred there for his son’s health, and came up against the brotherhood of Catholic coppers who protected the perverts. Destroyed his career and recently, the police commissioner publicly apologised to him.
Haven’t read/seen Silvester piece (will have a look for said piece)
just posting this bit from Broken Rites piece as it refers to Det Ryan, who I think may be the one you are referring to.
'The priest and the prostitute
Police officer Denis Ryan has told Broken Rites that he first encountered Father John Day in Melbourne’s prostitution precinct at St Kilda one night in 1954-5. Father Day, then from the Apollo Bay parish in south-western Victoria, was visiting the fleshpots of Melbourne. Young constable Ryan found Father Day in a car, drunk, with a known prostitute. Such “consorting” by males was then a criminal offence but Ryan’s superior officer, a “loyal” Catholic, tipped off the Melbourne Catholic authorities who rescued Day from police custody.
In 1957, Father Day was appointed to the Mildura parish and became a Monsignor. This made him one of the most senior clerics in the Ballarat diocese, just below Ballarat’s Bishop James O’Collins.
Day was a two-faced enforcer of the church’s official line about virginity, celibacy, chastity and morality. One of his first public statements in the Mildura press in 1957 was an attack on a local parade of girls in bikini swim suits. “Degrading, indecent and unchristian,” he declared.
In 1962, Detective Ryan was transferred to Mildura, where he instantly recognized Day as the Melbourne prostitute’s companion in 1954-5. He also noticed Day’s hypocritical postures about “morality”.’
1 Like
Had family there that remember. Was quite common for parents to tell their kids not to go near the catholic priests. Particularly that one.
1 Like
My mum was never a big fan of Broken Rites because she thought the woman who was a big part of it (think her name was Christine McIsaac) was a married woman who got into a relationship with a priest and had a kid by him. The priest died, her marriage was wrecked and she had a major grizzle.
Unless she was raped, which to my uncertain knowledge was never accused, she had only herself to blame, but chose to blame the church.
“Only” one person to blame for a marriage breaking affair? Was he asleep at the time?
Only one of the couple was unfaithful in a “forbidden” relationship.
The vows would suggest otherwise.
The husband? Or are you deliberately being obtuse?
Pope Francis ousts Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Vatican’s conservative cardinal in charge of sex abuse cases
In a major shake-up of the Vatican’s administration, Pope Francis has ousted the head of the Catholic Church office that handles sex abuse cases.
The move follows the high-profile exit of fellow conservative Cardinal George Pell, who last week took a leave of absence to return to Australia to face historical sexual abuse charges.
A brief Vatican statement said Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller’s five-year mandate as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a department charged with defending Catholic doctrine, would not be renewed.
The position is the most important one that a pope fills in the Vatican hierarchy after the Secretary of State.
Most incumbents keep it until they retire, which in Cardinal Mueller’s case would have been in six years.
The 69-year-old cardinal, who was appointed by Pope Benedict in 2012, will be succeeded by the department’s number two, Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer.
Archbishop Ladaria, a 73-year-old Spaniard who, like the Argentine pope is a member of the Jesuit order, is said by those who know him to be a soft-spoken person who shuns the limelight — Cardinal Mueller, by contrast, often appears in the media.
“They speak the same language and Ladaria is someone who is meek. He does not agitate the Pope and does not threaten him,” a priest who works in the Vatican and knows both Cardinal Mueller and Archbishop Ladaria told Reuters, asking not to be named.
Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has given hope to progressives who want him to forge ahead with his vision for a more welcoming church that concentrates on mercy rather than the strict enforcement of rigid rules they see as antiquated.
Conflicts over divorce, remarriage
Cardinal Mueller is one of several cardinals in the Vatican who have publicly sparred with the Pope.
In 2015, both Cardinal Mueller and Cardinal Pell were among 13 cardinals who signed a secret letter to the Pope complaining that a meeting of bishops discussing family issues was stacked in favour of liberals.
The letter was leaked, embarrassing the signatories.
Cardinal Mueller has criticised parts of a 2016 papal treatise called “Amoris Laetitia” (The Joy of Love), a cornerstone document of Pope Francis’ attempt to make the 1.2-billion-member church more inclusive and less condemning.
Conservatives have concentrated their criticism on the document’s opening to Catholics who divorce and remarry in civil ceremonies, without getting church annulments.
Under church law they cannot receive communion unless they abstain from sex with their new partner, because their first marriage is still valid in the eyes of the church and therefore they are seen to be living in an adulterous state of sin.
In the document the Pope sided with progressives who had proposed an “internal forum” in which a priest or bishop decide jointly with the individual on a case-by-case basis if he or she can be fully re-integrated and receive communion.
But Cardinal Mueller has said there should be no exceptions, making him a hero to conservatives who have made the issue a rallying point for their opposition to Pope Francis.
Reuters
So Gerhard Mueller is actually Tony Abbott?
1 Like
I had Miller in maths. Kept telling me how useless I was but never gave me a clip like some of the others. Saw one kid get head slammed into a desk top for smiling during morning prayers.
Thanks for the memory of the smell of desk varnish.
I just don’t remember too many of the brothers in my time handing out hidings.
And Bro Miller thought my excement smelled nice, maths-wise.
Nailed it. These type of abuses happen because of protection from the highest level of society.
2 Likes