Footballers of colour and IICSA

An old man has just been hounded out of footie-management in this Kingdom because he used the phrase "C*loured Players".

I can remember being instructed by my Father, well over half a century ago, that it had become impolite to refer to Blacks as Blacks; we were, instead, to call them C*loured.

The morning after that defenestration, some W*man of Principle used on the Beeb the phrase 'F**tballers of Colour'. So that's clearly OK,, then. The old man had to be disposed of, with ignominy, for getting two words the wrong way round. Or, as the tyrants and their even more contemptible toadies are putting it, for "using out-dated language"!

But every news is good news for somebody. F**tiegate, combined with 'the vaccine', kept the IICSA report on chld-abuse in the English Catholic Church confined to a low rank in the order of News items. (And poor Ted McCarrick got not a mention!!!)

I had better be clear here.

Vincent Cardinal Nichols is not really my cup of tea.

But I believe he is at this moment the victim of a considerable injustice. An injustice which has the capacity to become even more monstrous.

The Inquiry did, indeed, take care to get straight that the Archbishop of Westminster, even if a Cardinal, is not 'Head' of the Catholic Church in this country. Every diocesan Bishop is responsible for his own diocese. But they still elevated Nichols, for their convenience, to the position of Figurehead and Official Scapegoat. You have to otch people up a bit in order to get them onto the Pillory and enable the mob to take aim.

Fairness would have involved holding him to account solely for what he got wrong when he was Archbishop of Birmingham. And would have situated that in an accurate historical context.

Just like the vital matter of which way round you put the words 'colour' and 'people', so the question of how one deals with the vile problem of sex abuse, and the vile abusers, can, er, improve almost by the day.

These Inquiries or Royal Commissions, here as in Australia, never probe far below the surface. When IICSA 'did' the C of E, the real narrative ... at least arguably ... was Establishment Cover-up; how a manipulative and highly sadistic epheberast, Bishop Peter Ball, was able to use his Establishment status and contacts to get away with his career of abuse. He was so successful that, even after his conviction and imprisonment, somebody, earlier this year on the anniversary of his death, put into The Tmes newspaper a notice describing him as "loved by many".

I don't remember how many in his networks ... Archbishops, Public School head masters, High Court judges, heirs to thrones  ... were were made to resign in disgrace (until, in some cases, a long time later when they had already become ruined men ... when they were down, and therefore Fair Game for kicking, like poor dim Carey).

I suspect that when Jimmy Saville's career of abuse was at its height, most of the (many) people who had a pretty clear idea what was happening had their own agreeable little covert dirtinesses to take care of ... and that does rather inhibit openness, doesn't it? Rife promiscuity in the Media, at least arguably, was the real narrative here. How many Grand People in broadcasting were made to resign in disgrace?

And Ball and Saville were refreshingly candid about their predilections. Ball once preached a sermon before several hundred young people (and their mentors, including me) in which he said that, if a bishop told you to take all your clothes off, you should promptly do so. Saville, asked on a popular BBC programme what luxury he would most like to have with him if he were marooned on a desert island, replied "A twelve year old girl."

It was the view of Benedict XVI that, with regard to the horrible flood (sporcizia) of clerical sexual abuse cases in the seond half of the twentieth century, the real narrative was the corruption in the teaching of Moral Theology in seminaries and universities in the post-Conciliar period. He is no fool. He is, at least arguably, a great deal cleverer than the cheapskates who sneered at him and at his analysis. 

But has anybody examined the prosopographical interrelationships of 'Ethics' lecturers in that period, what they taught and where and to whom, and correlated the evidence with subsequent abuse cases?

All the 'Inquiries' down to and including IICSA have been exercises in the copious use of sticking plasters to cover over the symptoms of deep maladies, combined with a fastidious disinclination to spend time on aetiology. At least arguably. Witness how sometimes they grope, like drowning sailors, at the planks of  abolishing Clerical Celibacy and/or the Seal of the Confessional.

And, occasionally not entirely absent ... or am I oversensitive? ... is a whiff of our traditional British 'world-beating' Anti-Catholicism.