Informant38

father's day


the Catholic Church is impossible to describe simply as an organization, as a spiritual discipline, as anything. it is too big, too complex. even the most rigorous definition brings an excess of structure, of complexity.
this is a church whose leaders claim direct descent from Jesus Christ himself. whose leaders have claimed over the years to bring the word of God to earthly presence. it is one of the richest organisations in the world. the Vatican stores art treasures that are worth fantastic amounts of money. it has real estate holdings that are vast and economically important.
and it has a membership of millions. many of them willing to continue to contribute small amounts of money regularly through its parishes and dioceses, with no stipulation on its use. though many of the people contributing are themselves poor and the amounts negligible by themselves. William Randolph Hearst made a sizable fortune in just the same manner. a small amount of money from many many people, collected regularly.
my father was molested by a catholic priest when he was very young. he never told me about it. his brother did, after my father had died, and now his brother has died, and there isn't anyone I know that I could go to for more information about what happened.
according to my uncle my father told my grandfather about the molestation, my grandfather went to the monsignor of the parish, and in the quiet uproar that followed, my grandfather found it expedient to move the family to a different parish, in another part of the city of, I believe, Rochester, New York.
so, essentially, a priest molests a boy, the boy's father complains, the church leans over and breathes hard, and the boy's family is intimidated and uprooted, blown away.
the levels of cynicism and bitter helplessness that this makes inevitable are not hard for me to understand, now. when I was 14 and in a preparatory seminary they would have been.
and I think now how strange it must have felt for him, to see me there, in a cassock, in a boarding school run by priests. but how much sickness he carried, how much he bore and how much he denied, is impossible for me to know.
I was never overtly molested in a sexual way by any of the priests and Christian Brothers I had contact with through 9 years of 'parochial' schooling. but there were many incidents of violence, much of it the result of sexual attraction and repression, and more than a few when I was alone with some black-robed man, and the air was thick with something I didn't recognize then for what it was.
still, I'm not writing this to accuse, or even complain. what I want to explore is the idea, that it's perfectly acceptable in most people's minds for this institution, or any other for that matter, to teach children religious 'truths', no matter how far-fetched, no matter how obviously absurd, no matter how destructively misleading, as long as those truths are not sexually permissive. I'm writing this to say that misleading children about spiritual things is a form of molestation at least as, and often more, violating and damaging than many forms of sexual abuse.
I think most people are themselves so blinded by sexual taboo that they can't see that. it's a form of hypocrisy that is itself one of the cloaks behind which a horrendous amount of sexual molestation has taken place, quietly, for hundreds of years, in the dark corners of catholic churches.
it wasn't until the valiant insistence on political franchise by the so-called gay and lesbian community that it became possible to speak of these things publicly. to speak of any sexual 'abnormality' publicly, including rape and venereal disease.
these hypocritical taboos are still in effect, though not as invulnerably as before. now we have an outcry and a public shame, and, in the context in which they appear, an appropriate outcry, and a deserved shame.
but why is it all right for these same priests to teach children that masturbation is a sin that will cause them to be thrown into hell for all eternity, unless they 'confess' and are absolved, and do 'penance'? why are they allowed to do this to millions of children? and that's still a sexual subject. there are a multitude of other strange and illogical teachings the Catholic Church is free to inflict on any child that comes under its influence.
and not only the Catholic Church. the Mormon Church. The Jehovah's Witnesses. the remarkably named Christian Science, and on and on. the sickness isn't just sexual. and it isn't confined to the Catholic Church, or even to religious organisations for that matter. but it is most visible there.
the rebuttal begins with the concept of religious freedom, but I'm not convinced. obviously a religion that teaches that pedophilia is a way to pass on the experience of divine grace wouldn't be allowed to practice, that being one of the offered causes for the firestorm of Waco, as I recall. and a religion that teaches that human sacrifice is a way to make it rain wouldn't be allowed to practice, in America at least. but these other 'debatable' teachings are permitted, I think, because the process of denying sanction to erroneous teaching would lead uncomfortably close to the very doors of the people to whom the power to grant and deny sanction has been given.
so we live in a time of unbelievably rapid accumulation of scientific knowledge, when the progress of technology approaches the magical, and we are trained to look down on 'savages' who believe in 'tree spirits' and 'ghosts'. we are united in condemning those who use their positions of trust to violate and damage the innocents placed in their charge, as these crimes are made clear to us.
but I think time will show, if we have that time, that there were many other forms of violation, and subtler forms of damage, taking place right before us, with the same invisible protections, our hypocrisy and fear, as so recently protected the pedophile priest.