Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/373141
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 31 AUGUST 2014 20 I assume everyone here will be familiar with the expression that translates (very roughly) into English as: "If it isn't raw, it will be burnt to a crisp." Well, I think we might have just overdone things (pun intended) even by our rather loft y national standards of leaping from one absurd extreme to another. Still too early to say, of course… but our latest pole-vault between extremes may even be worthy of a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. In the space of two weeks, there have been two much-publicised arraignments over allegations of 'child abuse'… I use the term very loosely, by the way, for reasons that should become manifest quite soon. One of these cases involved a clergyman from Gozo, accused of molesting a number of teenage girls. Another involved a MUSEUM teacher, who stands accused of ' brushing a 10-year- old boy's genitals' as he helped him out of the sea. In both these cases a direct or indirect link can be made with the Catholic Church, which (let's face it) has suffered of late from a global epidemic of paedophilia scandals. Other than that, they are chalk and cheese really. Except in one detail. Both cases have exposed an unprecedented thirst on the part of the public for DETAILS… accompanied by an equally unprecedented zeal on the part of the forces of law and order to have the suspects pilloried on mere suspicion alone. And before even turning to the specifics… this in itself marks a clean reversal of the way similar cases had been treated in Malta up until very, very recently. Compare these two arraignments to the situation just a few years ago, when the Dar San Guzepp scandal was only just beginning to break. For those who've forgotten the details, Dar San Guzepp was a home for orphaned boys in Santa Venera, formerly administered by the Missionary Societ y of St Paul. Its spiritual director, Fr Godwin Scerri, had been appointed to that position in the 1980s by former Archbishop Joseph Mercieca, soon after returning to Malta from Canada. He was retained in that role even after it transpired that a warrant for his arrest, in connection with child abuse allegations, had been issued by the Canadian police in 1983. Along with Fr Charles Pulis and the late Bro. Joseph Bonnett, Fr Godwin Scerri was later accused of having sexually molested a number of boys at the institute. The local Church 's reaction? Roughly comparable to countless analogous incidents of clerical sex abuse worldwide: Archbishop Mercieca appointed an ad hoc tribunal, presided by retired judge Vincent Caruana Colombo, in order to 'try' the three prelates according to the Curia's own in- house laws. It was only when the victims turned to the police in 2003 that the case went to court: where it was duly heard behind closed doors, and the two surviving suspects were eventually convicted. But the accusations themselves had already become public knowledge by the late 1990s. I remember the case quite clearly because it posed a dilemma for the newspaper I worked for at the time. There was, as I remember, a marked reluctance to report the full extent of the allegations: not so much for fear of angering or offending the Catholic Church, but more for fear of angering or offending our own readers…who were in the main incensed that what was viewed as a sensational and generally insalubrious case was even being given so much media prominence to begin with. Matters came to a head when Lou Bondi – who back then still considered himself a journalist – exposed more details than most viewers could actually stomach in an edition of Pjazza Tlieta on TVM. Again, I remember the reactions quite clearly. Bondi (who later, during the 2008 visit of Pope Benedict, also doubled up as the victims' official spokesman) was accused of milking the victims for all they were worth, of sensationalising the issue, and using it to tar the entire Catholic Church with the same brush, and variations of the same theme. Why did he not also make programmes about the good that the Church does in Malta and the world? What was his hidden agenda? Etc., etc. There was, in brief, a knee-jerk reaction among certain sections of the public to somehow imply that journalists like Bondi were exaggerating the story in order to 'harm the Church ' (the same questions were asked of my colleague Karl Schembri when he wrote about the same subject; and of me, too, when I commented about it in my own column). You could almost say this was the standard reaction to similar allegations of sex scandals involving Catholic priests back then. In 2006, another priest from Gozo – Fr Anthony Mercieca – was accused by disgraced US senator Mark Foley of having molested him 40 years earlier in Florida, at a time when he (Foley) was an altar boy. These allegations formed the basis of a lawsuit filed by the Miami civil courts against the Miami Archdiocese, which was eventually settled out of court. The reaction in Gozo, however, was to come out in full force to defend Fr Mercieca. This is how the Associated Press described it in 2006: "People on the Maltese island of Gozo defended a native priest accused of molesting a former U.S. congressman as a boy, saying Saturday he was a well-liked, private man with a Opinion Raphael Vassallo Raw one minute, burnt to