Newfoundland and the Catholic Church

The St. John’s Diocese of the Catholic Church has to pay over $100 million to settle sexual abuse claims at an orphanage ▬ 

Sources: 

 → John Gushue and Terry Roberts, “$104M awarded to sexual abuse victims of Mount Cashel and N.L. priests,” CBC News, July 5, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/church-mount-cashel-settlement-1.7255755

→ “List of wealthiest religious organizations,” Wikipedia, updated July 5, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_religious_organizations

 → Newfoundland and Labrador Statistics Agency, “Population by Religion and Gender, Newfoundland and Labrador, St. John’s (CMA), 2021 Census,” 2021, https://www.stats.gov.nl.ca/Statistics/Topics/census2021/PDF/REL_Religion_NL_2021.pdf

→ Newfoundland Boy, “NLBoy - Episode 14 - Photo from Signal Hill,” Google Photos: Wayne Jones, https://photos.app.goo.gl/xawTi9R18HYNA1YKA

 → Rosie Mullaley, “Clients relieved after courts order $100-million payout for abuse by Catholic clergy, lawyer says,” NTV News, July 7, 2024,    https://ntv.ca/clients-relieved-after-courts-order-100-million-payout-for-abuse-by-catholic-clergy-lawyer-says/

→ “A society, not a monolith: what the Catholic Church is, and is not,” The Pillar, February 4, 2021, https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/a-society-not-a-monolith-what-the

→ “The Vatican’s wealth: a closer look,” Medium, September 21, 2023, https://medium.com/@contactjosey/the-vaticans-wealth-a-closer-look-22e12dc7bc7d ▬ 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about me and the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 14: “Newfoundland and the Catholic Church.”

The two most common religious denominations in Newfoundland are Roman Catholicism (32 percent) and Anglicanism (22 percent). And the predominant religion of the province is by far Christianity (82 percent). In passing, my own tiny minority, atheism, comprises a mere 0.11 percent.

The Roman Catholic Church arguably has the greatest influence in the province at the same time as it has caused the most harm. You already know what the problem is, of course, the same obscene atrocity that the Catholic Church happily allows to happen in its enclaves all around the world: priests, Christian brothers, and other employees of the corporation sexually abusing mostly young boys. This is bad enough, but it is compounded and exacerbated by the Church’s diligent efforts to conceal the crimes, to move the priests to other dioceses where they can lay low for a while before they start in again with new victims, and the dragged-out litigation to try to pay no compensation to the traumatized boys, or at least as little as possible.

You’re kind of left both livid and speechless at the deep hypocrisy of the whole thing. What would Jesus do?, as the popular meme has it. Well, I’m going to make a wild speculation and say that it wouldn’t involving raping boys and protecting his friends who did so. He faked a few things and called them miracles and spent his life spouting platitudes and promising people that they could come back to life after they died, but unless it’s in a part of the New Testament that I haven’t read, he didn’t have sex with any boys.

The big news in Newfoundland last week was the announcement that the Roman Catholic Diocese has to pay $104 million in compensation to about 300 people who were victims of Catholic clerics in the (now former) Mount Cashel orphanage and in other venues. The news stories stated that each victim would receive on average about $356,000. In anticipation of paying the bill, the diocese has been selling off property in order to amass a pot of money that it could use to pay for the settlement. There are a couple of things to note about this.

It’s a bit unseemly, to put it mildly, when the façade comes down and we see the Church for what it is: a business that collects and makes money, and has to sell off assets when it has a debt that’s too big to pay out of its bank account. Hey, what happened to all the community-building and happy happy thoughts that we used to hear every Sunday at Mass? No time for that now: there’s money to be raised for, you know, those crimes we committed.

The other thing to note is that the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican, has no interest (in all senses of the word) in this dirty business. It has conveniently organized the governance so that, as one source puts it, “The Catholic Church is a society, not a monolith. The Catholic Church understands itself to be a communion of people and institutions, not a singular organization. Its legal structures are designed to reflect that theology.” What that means in part is that the local dioceses such as the one in St. John’s are not administratively part of the Vatican as, say, the physics department would be part of a university, or the human resources department would be part of a company. That’s good financial news for the Vatican because it means that it has no financial liability in this insolvency which the St. John’s diocese declared when it realized that it couldn’t pay the wages for its numerous sins.

And in passing again, not that it’s going to help the local diocese, but the Vatican is filthy rich. It’s kind of impossible to find out their “net worth” or anything approaching a valuation of Vatican Inc. Or let me rephrase that: there are estimates online—yes, on the internet, the source of much exaggeration, deception, and inaccuracy, not unlike the Church itself—estimates that vary wildly. Wikipedia has a long list of the net worth of other churches, but lists the Vatican as “unknown.” Other sites online give a net worth of anywhere from $10 billion to $75 billion. And, yes, as they say, that’s billion with a b. So if they chose, the Vatican could likely come up with a mere $100 million (with an m) by poking around between the cushions of however many sofas they have in their Roman palace.

All the money and the institutionalized evil aside, it’s important to remember that the victims who will receive compensation are adults now—the scandal broke in the 1980s and the first claimant came forward in 1999—but they were not only children but mostly orphaned children when men of God, facilitated by a corrupt Church, decided that these were the people they wanted to have sex with. It kind of defies belief, if you don’t realize that humans are pretty much capable of any atrocity you can imagine.

A lawyer for some of the victims said about the announcement that there was “no huge exuberation. They were pleased to hear the news,” but that “no matter how much money I get, it’s not going to help cure or take care of the tremendous harm.”

Apart from the pedophilic Catholic priests and brothers, the other group I don’t understand in this whole thing is the people who still support the Catholic Church. They go to Mass on Saturday or Sunday. They give donations. They still have reverence for the Pope. And on and on. If you add in the facts that the Catholic Church is also a homophobic and misogynistic organization, I’m just—well, puzzled is a mild way to put it. What exactly does an organization have to do before you abandon it and move on to secularism or some other denomination?

I drove up to Signal Hill last week on Canada Day. It was great and typical St. John’s weather, a bit chilly, a bit damp. I was in short sleeves but loved it. The other thing I loved was the views it provides. You look one way and it’s the Atlantic Ocean and the entrance to the harbour, and you look the other way and it’s downtown St. John’s and beyond. It makes me happy that what they call simply The Basilica here—officially know as St. John the Baptist Cathedral Basilica Parish—does not dominate the cityscape as it used to years ago. It has competition in the great art gallery called The Rooms, which to me stands out more prominently than the church (another asset the Catholic diocese had to sell)—stands out more prominently and legitimately than that church does (see a photo in the show notes). Art will stand, and unfortunately so will Catholic delusion and blind faith, so the architectural dominance is just a tiny victory. But you take what you can get.

And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. And please join me again next Tuesday.