Years ago well ceremonies are taking place at locations across the city throughout the day it was exactly 30 years ago on the night of november 989 that east germanys communist regime surprised the world by lifting all travel restrictions on east german citizens the move allowed ordinary people to cross freely to the west for the 1st time since the wall was built in 1961 it enabled friends and family to reunite after being separated for decades and it paved the way fluent german reunification just a year later. Well the w. Will be covering events throughout the day taking us through this mornings activities r. T. W. Thomas aspira the berlin wall memorial here in the capital and in the studio im joined by john beric great to see you both thomas id like to start with you then because tell us what is in store where you are. We are right here as you said in the wall memorial in the center of. The wall divided this city you can probably see part of the memorial behind me on a such this was
Church now will transform the global catholic. Palmo warman survivor and fighter against sexual abuse welcome to the show its great to have you with us today so you have been complaining for accountability of clerical child abuse for more than 20 years what kind of change have you made over this time what are your successes. Well i think our gracious success has been finally exposing the fact not just that the abuses happened on us on the scale that weve been talking about for many years but that its endemic within the Roman Catholic church that its systemic. And that the cover up of abuse by Church Authorities was a willful intended program that was designed to protect the institution its power and its money and that it was operated and directed by the vatican at the global level and that its been a global cover up i think thats something weve never really clearly exposed so were going to go through all of that step by step but 1st ireland is a very catholic country when you came out
I made a documentary with a European Television station in 2002 and when that aired there was a very very strong in support of response from people here in our in our into particular but of course there were people who didnt want me to speak about what was happening i mean i got people warning me that i should spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder i got Death Threats but in the main i got a huge amount of support i think people were uphold not just the the the crimes of rape and abuse that reflected on me and many others by the priest in my own case with more by the cover up of those crimes the facilitation of the collusion with them that we were able to expose by catholic bishops and indeed by the vatican itself so how hard was it for you to make your case how did church resistance change things for you where you prevented it from speaking out what was i mean 1st of all it was very difficult to get to the point where i could challenge my own. I suppose internal inhibitors
Rape and abuse that reflected on me and many others by the priest in my own case with more by the cover up of those crimes the facilitation of the collusion with them and that we were able to expose that by catholic bishops and indeed by the vatican itself so how hard was it for you to make your case how did church resistance change things for you where you prevented it from speaking out what was i mean 1st of all it was very difficult to get to the point where i could challenge my own. I suppose internal inhibitors the the the only spoken authority of the church wasnt something that was external to me it was internal so when i 1st start to think about in the mid 1900 about 1904 about doing something about what had happened to me more than a decade earlier. My 1st instinct was to contact the bishop from as opposed to contacting the police so i had bought into this idea that the church was the ultimate authority and that it was it was to them that i needed to look to thankfully i didnt
Of the church wasnt something that was external to me it was internal so when i 1st start to think about it and in the mid 1009000 about 1904 about doing something about what had happened to me more than a decade earlier. My 1st instinct was to contact the bishop from as opposed to contacting the police so i had bought into this idea that the church was the ultimate authority and that it was it was to them that i needed to look to thankfully i didnt instead i decided about 6 months later in february of 1905 that i would make a complete complaint directly to the police here in arlington thats what i did. The priest who would abuse me the priest who raped me when i was 14 years of age was known to be a sexual abuser when he was ordained a priest the church knew about his offending behavior and they were doing to him he continued to abuse from his ordination right through his entire career as a priest and he was still a priest and active ministry when i went to the police in 1905 he was o