his red cape flapping in a stiff breeze:
"In our personal lives and in our communities we can encounter a hostility, something dangerous, a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created.SMH 18.Jul.08
[..]
He told the young people not to be fooled by those "who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty and subjective experience displaces truth."
The Pope railed against domestic violence and abortion, asking, "How can it be that domestic violence torments so many mothers and children?
-
The first time I was struck in public by someone in authority was in the fourth grade, standing before the class, being disciplined by the principal, a Catholic nun. Later that year humiliation of an acutely embarrassing form, the favorite discipline of our teacher, Sister Mary Daniel. Physical humiliation. She made Duncan eat three sheets of binder paper at his desk because he'd been nervously chewing some and she caught him. She humiliated Jean Slaughter the smartest girl in the class so intensely she peed her pants, as I sat right behind her this was incontrovertible. Fifth grade was the delusional and vicious Sister Emmanuel whose authority was kept with rage mostly and long dithyrambic monologues none of us could understand, sprinkled with God and Jesus and Mary this-and-that. Then sixth grade a good one, mercy.
Then at a different school, seventh grade, a different order of nuns, a woman in a long black dress having a nervous breakdown stretched out over months while we sat pinned to the desks, some of her symptoms were the by now expected abusive ridicule, others I can't remember.
Then in eighth grade another good one. Mercy.
Then the seminary, a boarding pre-seminary for ninth grade. The list of violent acts and masculinist sadisms I witnessed and experienced there would be if complete very long indeed. The "Dean of Boys" the Jesuit Brady, with his high camp bitchiness vaulting into study hall and swirling my desk around on the freshly waxed floor just the most accessible memory from that year.
Then Catholic high school and the musty sadisms of the Christian Brothers. The little one with the bitchy snide cuts, the big ham-handed one with the one-two slap the second coming from out of nowhere that gave me a minor concussion. The pockmarked one that hated life and the liveliness of his students, the rodent-looking one that threw things like chalk and erasers and hit us in the face when we answered wrong or daydreamed.
How can it be that that.
