The Spectator’s Notes | 3 April 2010

One of the weirdest articles I have ever read appeared in the Times last week. It was by Ken Macdonald, and it was about child abuse in the Catholic Church. It was clear that the author has a ferocious hatred of the Church in which, he said, he was brought up. He described Catholic parents as being ‘sold at birth’ into believing in the rightness of the Church. He pronounced that the Church is not repentant about child abuse and thus ‘mocks the sacrament’ of confession. He accused the Pope of refusing, in his recent letter to Irish Catholics, to admit the failings of an authoritarian Church, although in fact, Benedict’s letter explicitly laid part of the blame on too great a deference to ‘clergy and other authority figures’ and ‘a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church’. The article was extreme, unfair, tinged with hysteria. But what made it really alarming is that Sir Ken Macdonald was, until 2008, the Director of Public Prosecutions.