Church Abuse Scandal: My Dad the Abuser

Nov 18, 2024 | The words of John Smyth’s son PJ - one of his earliest victims - in an exclusive interview with this programme.

The Makin review detailed Smyth's horrific abuse of those he met at public schools and Christian summer camps. What is less well known, is how Smyth senior controlled and abused his own family, who are only now facing up to the devastating toll on their lives.

Warning, this report contains extremely distressing details.

Canada's Dark Secret - Featured Documentary

The story of Canada's residential school system and the indigenous survivors who bear witness to its abuses.

Muslim Mother 'Beat Daughter, 19, and Locked Her to a Bed after She Was Seen Speaking to a Boy'

MAIL ONLINE: An Iraqi woman has been accused of beating her teenage daughter and padlocking her to a bed after she was seen speaking to a young man.

After Yusra Farhan was arrested in the Arizona hospital where her daughter was being treated for her injuries, she told police she wanted to punish the girl for violating her 'culture'.

Farhan, 50, faces charges of aggravated assault, unlawful imprisonment and resisting arrest. She was being held in a Maricopa County jail. Police did not identify her daughter by name. Read on and comment » | Daily Mail Reporter | Saturday, February 11, 2012

Pope Likens the Rise of Atheism in Britain to the Nazis as He Admits His 'Shock and Sadness' Over Abuse Scandal
Pope Benedict XVI. Photo: Mail Online
'Search for him [Jesus Christ], know him and love him, and he will set you free from slavery to the glittering but superficial existence frequently proposed by today's society. Put aside what is worthless and learn of your own dignity as children of God.' – Pope Benedict XVI, Bellahouston Park, Scotland
MAIL ONLINE: Pope addresses 65,000 Catholics at open-air Mass in Glasgow / Queen and Prince Philip welcome Pope in Scotland / He invokes Nazi Germany in attack on 'atheist extremism' / Aide axed from trip after ill-judged comments about UK / Pope: 'I was shocked and saddened by sex abuse scandal' / Staunch Catholic Susan Boyle sings ahead of Papal Mass

The Pope tonight urged Catholics to speak out in defence of their faith amid a 'dictatorship of relativism' which 'threatens to obscure the unchanging truth about man's nature, his destiny and his ultimate good'.

Speaking to a crowd of 65,000 in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park, Benedict XVI argued that the 'evangelisation of culture is all the more important in our times'.

Just hours earlier he had controversially likened the rise of atheism in Britain to Nazi Germany and warned against 'aggressive forms of secularism' as he began his historic state visit.

Risking sparking a new row after one of his aides likened the UK to the 'Third World', the former member of the Hitler Youth invoked Nazi Germany in an attack on 'atheist extremism'.

Tonight he addressed the crowd from almost exactly the same spot in Bellahouston Park as Pope John Paul II in 1982 - albeit to a much smaller crowd of 65,000, compared to 250,000 then.

The 1982 gathering was the largest crowd in Scottish history.

Pope Benedict said: 'The evangelisation of culture is all the more important in our times, when a "dictatorship of relativism" threatens to obscure the unchanging truth about man's nature, his destiny and his ultimate good.

'There are some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse, to privatise it or even to paint it as a threat to equality and liberty.

'Yet religion is in fact a guarantee of authentic liberty and respect, leading us to look upon every person as a brother or sister.

'For this reason I appeal in particular to you, the lay faithful, in accordance with your baptismal calling and mission, not only to be examples of faith in public, but also to put the case for the promotion of faith's wisdom and vision in the public forum.

'Society today needs clear voices which propose our right to live, not in a jungle of self-destructive and arbitrary freedoms, but in a society which works for the true welfare of its citizens and offers them guidance and protection in the face of their weakness and fragility. Read on and comment >>> Daily Mail Reporter | Thursday, September 16, 2010

Hellish Work: Tobacco Workers in Kazakhstan


LE FIGARO: Des enfants produisent 
du tabac pour Philip Morris : Au Kazakhstan, les fermes produisant du tabac pour le cigarettier Philip Morris font travailler de force des migrants et emploient des enfants, selon un rapport d'Human Rights Watch. L'entreprise américaine reconnait les faits mais tarde à agir. >>> Par Tristan Vey | Vendredi 16 Juillet 2010

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG: Tabakindustrie – Zigaretten bleiben ein tolles Geschäft : Die Tabakindustrie lebt mit Lokalverboten, Werbebeschränkungen und hohen Steuern. 50 Prozent Gewinn vom Umsatz sind trotzdem immer noch drin. Nur die Jugendlichen machen der Branche Sorgen. Sie rauchen weniger. >>> Von Winand von Petersdorff | Freitag, 16. Juli 2010

Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys
The Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, with hands together, at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin in 1960. Photograph: The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger. >>> Laurie Goodstein | Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Father Hans Kung [sic] Blames Catholic Views on Sex for Clerical Child Abuse
TIMES ONLINE: A leading Roman Catholic theologian has linked clerical sex abuse with priestly celibacy, blaming the Church’s “uptight” views on sex for child abuse scandals in Germany, Ireland and the US.

Father Hans Kung [sic], President of the Global Ethic Foundation and professor emeritus at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said that the Church’s attitude was also revealed in its opposition to birth control.

The German church rejected any suggestion that abuse was linked to celibacy, homosexuality or church teaching.

Last week the Regensburg Diocese in Germany revealed that a former chorister claimed he was abused while a member of its choir, which was led for three decades by Father Georg Ratzinger, brother of Pope Benedict XVI. The Holy See said that it backed the diocese’s attempts to investigate the scandal by analysing “the painful question in a decisive and open way”. Also last week, in the Holy See, an adult chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a Papal usher.

Robert Zollitsch, Archbishop of Freiburg and head of the German bishops’ conference, branded clerical abuse “outrageous” and begged forgiveness from the victims but denied any link between abuse and celibacy.

Writing in The Tablet, Father Kung, who in 1979 was stripped of his licence to teach Catholic theology after he rejected the doctrine of Papal infallibility, welcomed the apology but described the denials of any link between abuse, celibacy and other teaching as “erroneous”. >>> Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent | Monday, March 08, 2010

'The Catholic Church Failed Me. I Despised Myself and Lost All Confidence'
THE TELEGRAPH: An inquiry into child abuse by Catholic priests is published today. Its impact will be seismic, says victim and author of new book, Colm O'Gorman.

In his autobiography, Colm O'Gorman courageously describes being abused by a Catholic priest . Photo credit: The Telegraph
Few men have made such an extraordinary personal journey. Raped and abused in his early teens by Father Sean Fortune, one of Ireland's most notorious paedophiles, Colm O'Gorman ran away from home when he was 17 and lived rough on the streets of Dublin. It was the Seventies, when both church and state were in full-blown denial that any priest could be guilty of sexually abusing a child, and Colm felt only shame and fear. His future could not have been bleaker.

Yet, with effort and determination he fought back, spoke out about the abuse, and in 2002 even tried to sue the Pope arguing that, by moving paedophile priests like Fortune to different parishes and deliberately concealing their actions from the local authorities, the Vatican had failed to protect children like him. He was outraged when the Pope claimed diplomatic immunity but, undaunted, continued to campaign that the authority of the Irish church should not be above that of the State.

Today, nearly 30 years since he was abused, Colm's hour has finally come with the publication of a long-awaited inquiry into child abuse by Roman Catholic priests. The investigation has taken nine years, during which time it has heard the testimony of thousands of former residents of state schools and orphanages over more than 60 years in the Irish Republic.

A second report, due to be published in the summer, is expected to criticise the handling of sex-abuse complaints in cases involving up to 500 priests. Colm believes the result of the inquiry will be "seismic."

"It will show that the state has an obligation of care to those who live in the country and can no longer declare that religion and politics don't mix, or that the abuse of children by Catholic priests was not a matter for the state."

The report coincides to the day with the publication of his extraordinary autobiography, in which Colm courageously describes the lows and highs of his remarkable life – a life that has included founding a charity for victims of sexual abuse, becoming a Senator, making a documentary for the BBC called Suing the Pope, and being appointed Ireland's director of Amnesty International. >>> By Angela Levin | Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Teachers 'Beat and Abuse' Muslim Children in British Koran Classes
TIMESONLINE: Muslim children are being beaten and abused regularly by teachers at some British madrassas - Islamic evening classes - an investigation by The Times has found.

Students have been slapped, punched and had their ears twisted, according to an unpublished report by an imam based on interviews with victims in the north of England. One was “picked up by one leg and spun around” while another said a madrassa teacher was “kicking in my head - like a football”, says the report which was compiled by Irfan Chishti, a former government adviser on Islamic affairs.

Almost 1,600 madrassas operate in Britain, teaching Arabic and the Koran on weekday evenings to about 200,000 children aged from four to their mid-teens.

While there is no hard evidence to indicate how many are involved in the physical abuse of children, The Times has uncovered a disturbing pattern in one town - Rochdale - through interviews with mainstream school teachers, Muslim parents and the children themselves.

One woman told The Times that her niece Hiba, 7, was slapped across the face so hard by her madrassa teacher that her ear was cut. It later became inflamed and she had to have emergency medical treatment.

When the teacher refused to apologise, Hiba's aunt, Jamila, insisted that her niece should be moved to another madrassa. “I have absolutely no respect for religious teachers who behave like this,” she said. >>> Richard Kerbaj | December 10, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback & Hardback) – Free delivery >>>

Somebody, at Last, Speaks Some Sense on the (British) Family!
DAILY MAIL: Family breakdown is a "cancer" behind almost every evil affecting the country, a senior judge will declare today.

Mr Justice Coleridge blames youth crime, child abuse, drug addiction and binge-drinking on the "meltdown" of relations between parents and children.

He warns that the collapse of the family unit is a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs or global warming.

The speech to family lawyers contains a fierce attack on the "neglect" of successive governments.

The 58-year-old judge, who is married with three grown-up children, will say family breakdown is an epidemic affecting all levels of society from the Royal Family down.

It is "on a scale, depth and breadth which few of us could have imagined even "a decade ago. It is a never-ending carnival of human misery. A ceaseless river of human distress.

"I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family."

The judge, who is in charge of family courts across South-West England, will say he has a duty to speak out.

He will call on the Government to put the family at the top of its agenda, alongside the economy and the war on terror - and make it "rather more important than taking oaths of allegianc" [sic].

His speech will say: "Families are the cells which make up the body of society. If the cells are unhealthy and undernourished, or at worse cancerous and growing haphazard and out of control, in the end the body succumbs.

"In some of the more heavily populated urban areas, family life is quite frankly in meltdown or completely unrecognisable . . . it is on an epidemic scale. In some areas of the country family life in the old sense no longer exists." Family Life Is in 'Meltdown': Judge Launches Devastating Attack on Our Fractured Society >>> By Steve Doughty

Mark Alexander