found dead in a friend's apartment
In August, Mr. [Father,ex-] Geoghan was strangled and beaten in prison; another inmate was charged in the killing.The article mentions a group called Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. And of course it's absurd to think of starting a group called Survivors Network of Those Abused by Those Abused by Those Priests Who Were Themselves Abused By Survivors of Abuse.
"I said when Geoghan died, at least he'll never molest another child again," Mr. Oberle said. "But he's still molesting them. He's still affecting these children."
Because it's more fun when it stops at one.
Then we can take out all our revenge fantasies on a deserving subject. And feel good about ourselves. It's hard to feel all spiritually clean about punishing someone who was abused though isn't it?
So let's not think about Geoghan's childhood, because it doesn't matter.
He did it. Or maybe the Church did it. Or the devil. Or God.
You see? Once you start being logical there's no place to stick the blame. It all just rolls on out from somewhere so dimly far back none of us can see it anymore.
And don't get me started on putting people in jail for drug crimes who are doing drugs because they were violated. Between AA and the Republicans and the Catholic Church, I've got more evidence than I need.
There's nothing here worth saving.
-
Updated 8:52
Alright there's lots worth saving. But I'm more bitter than I can stand right now.
Probably because I'm not numb, so that's why it hurts.
My father was molested by a Catholic priest. When he was 8 years old.
The grip necessary to not hate, starting with my father and working back and out to the entire human race, takes a lot of energy to maintain. Of course the victims of my own blind hurtling fall can pass their own anger and bitterness back through me.
Which for a while there seemed like what was up. I forgave everybody that came before me, and everybody who came after me on the chain blamed me.
That's the personal side of the sarcasm above.
And McSorley there, a kid who knew a lot more about the damage done than he was allowed to say. There was no healing for him. And more importantly, the healing his honest testimony might have done was itself taboo. He had to be maintained as an innocent victim, the damage somehow having been done to him, but not showing as anything more than depression and apathy. Any psychiatrist would say there were bound to have been other more complex reactions, more ambivalent, more shaming. In an attempt to keep the priest as scapegoat, the blame gets lifted off the boy, even for his suicide. But the boy became a man.
My father became a man. How sick he was is hard to measure now, he's been dead for 13 years. What he did to me, when I was too young to know what was right or wrong, is impossible to prove now. My memories are fragments and unreliable for a task that serious.
The bitterness is real.
AA, with it's insistence on personal responsibility, has abandoned a consistent percentage of the very people it was founded to save.
The Catholic Church, to preserve itself as an institution, again, has abandoned the very people it was founded to save.
The Republican Party is beneath discussion.
