kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sins One. A Very Political Entry. Sins One Although I’m about as lapsed as lapsed could be, I always had a lively affection for the Catholic Church. The sound and shape of my childhood was the echoing walls, the stained glass, the rattle of priestly robes like the snap of the oiled silk of angels’ wings. Like many Catholics and ex-Catholics, however, each revelation in the priest-rape cases has cracked and crazed that memory further, and removed me farther from the church. And I was pretty far away to begin with. “On a stormy March night in 1999, the Reverend Sean Fortune lined up a lethal combination of sleeping pills and pain medication and washed it down with a pint of Powers Gold Label whiskey. He left a sealed envelope with his hill on the dressing table, along with his prayer book and a poem titled “A message from Heaven to My Family” that he asked be read at his funeral. Then he lay on the bed in his priestly garb to die.” --By Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, from MSNBC.com, regarding the suicide of rapist pedophile priest Sean Fortune of Ireland. I suppose, as an agnostic, I don’t really have a say anymore. I have a big old “I Don’t Know….Really, I Don’t Know” checked off in the Religious Preference box. But not really having a right to an opinion has never stopped me before…. While the priest rape scandals broke in Boston, and most of the nation seemed horrified and shocked, I can’t say as anyone around here was even particularly surprised. The Church’s Dirty Little Secret was never little or secret. What still horrifies—and DOES surprise me-- about it all is the quiet collusion that many parents seemed to enter into with the priests. I had the full quota of horrible things happen to me during my childhood, dear NSR’s. You could go down the checklist. It’s not as extensive as the list the Darling Husband has, but then, he has an actively psychotic mother. But all the usual, I had, given that my parents were kind and clever and just a teensy bit clueless. And you know, parents are not mind-readers, and especially if you’re attempting to actively conceal something from them, it’s not that surprising that they don’t catch on in time to rescue you. My parents had instilled a scary work ethic into me from an early age, and by the time I was 12, I was babysitting for a drunken amateur whore who apparently scattered keys to her home like manna upon the waters amongst her drunken friends, who wandered in and out freely. I sat for her children most nights with a baseball bat in hand. In retrospect, I probably wasn’t in much actual danger, but it was incredibly unnerving, to say the least. I didn’t tell my mother what was going on at the time because I KNEW I had to earn money for college so I wouldn’t live in a box on the street, and that was the only way I could earn it without a work permit. Which I wasn’t old enough for. So yeah, if you squint sideways and have an enabling therapist, I suppose I could blame mum for putting me at risk with drunken idjits, but not really. I knew what I was doing and what would get me out of it, and didn’t say a word. Over the years, a few things have come out in front of Mom that she didn’t know at the time, like the boy who was sexually harassing me in high school; and the time I was rocked on my bicycle coming home; and the time some jerks in a jeep tried to kill my sister by shoving her into a stone wall while she was out bike riding. And her remorse and regret is real. And her cry of “If I’d known, I would have DONE SOMETHING” is sincere, and I know she would have if she could have. If we’d told her. Which we didn’t, for whatever reason. And truly, it’s not her fault. I understand about children keeping silent. I kept silent for a number of reasons—afraid of the foo-fa-rah that would erupt if I told, afraid of retaliation from my attackers if I told, afraid of losing a source of revenue if I told, afraid that I would be blamed if I told. All of those fears I understand. I hope that now people are educating their sons and daughters a little better, and they are becoming better educated themselves….I hope, anyway. I’m not sure if terrifying children away from potential predators is any better than ignorance that the predation could take place is actually any better, but you gotta do something, and I think people are trying. That’s a good step. But Mom never, ever would have sold us off to a priest or a pederast or any such person knowingly….and yet, that’s what happened, as near as I can make out, to a number of kids. You have to wonder. When the news originally broke, I was quite sure that all the priests involved, ever, were the ones to blame and were clutching in concert at the handrail on the handbasket. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the parents of those children aren’t going to be there already, to break the fall. Knowingly trading your son or daughter for the dubious “blessing” bestowed by a pederast priest sickens me. The headlines about Father Sean in particular frighten me. He was a predator, and a violent one. He was an evil man, who used his position in the church to gain money and sex. And yet, some of us –including the writer of the article, given the poetic language used to open it—still persist in seeing the grandeur that those small, child-raping, ghastly trolls of men used so many years to hide behind. We can’t help it—we were raised in the shadows cast by that glorious stained glass, forgetting that it was lined with lead. The old folks in various churches who are defending their local rapist, saying things like “Well, it only happened once and that was 30 years ago” are still boxed into that multicolored, shining cell. I have to open my eyes wide, look directly at someone like Father Sean, and clear the dazzle out of my senses, the incense in my memory clouding my judgement. I have to remember the priest I never dared to be alone with, because something about him made me nervous. I am resisting the urge to defend the beauty that was the churches I attended when I was young, and instead remember that they were defiled before I ever even got there. If we forget that these men have ruined children forever, if we allow colluding parents to escape prosecution, if we say “oh, it’s gone on forever” as if that even begins to excuse them….then we also collude, and sin, and are evil. I will miss the snap of angel wings, and the smell of the censer, and the other memories I have laid by in the treasure box of time and memory. But to do less than look at things squarely, and hate the sinner and the sin…. the only angel I ever truly understood was Michael of the sword. I’m still checking off the “I don’t know” box when it comes to religion…. but I’ll cheerfully check the “Smite” box when it comes to those victimizing priests, and everyone who offered up a sacrificial child to the lust of the Church.
10:19 p.m. - 2002-08-13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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