The milk of human kindness
Compassion is at the heart of every great religion.
Laurie Taylor kept a diary when he was at school, filled with the doings of himself and his best friend Richard.
But nowhere in the closely written pages is there a single reference or a solitary allusion to the most significant feature of my life at boarding school with Richard. There is not a word about the fact that at the time we were both being sexually abused by two of the priests who ran the school…We talked to each other about what was going on. We knew that it was not right but both of us were caught in the trap that has been described so well by other victims of the Catholic priesthood. Our deeply ingrained religious beliefs made it almost impossible to believe that priests could be anything other than holy men. Somehow we must be the sinners. And, of course, the priests knew how to play upon this belief. “Look what’s happening to you,” they’d say when their gropings produced an involuntary erection. “Look at that. You’re a very naughty boy. But if you keep quiet I won’t say anything about it.”
Yet they did eventually summon the courage to go to the headmaster and complain about the two priests. He brushed them off. A few weeks later Richard was expelled – for ‘being a homosexual.’
There’s compassion for you.
This article made me furious when I first read it.
“Archbishop Connell told the Commission that giving access to archdiocesan files “created the greatest crisis in my position as Archbishop” because it conflicted with his duty to his priests. “I think you’ve got to remember … that confidentiality is absolutely essential to the working of a bishop because if people cannot have confidence that he will keep information that they give him confidential, they won’t come to him. And the same is true of priests.”
Archbishop/Cardinal Connell, a doctor of the church, was more worried about his position in the church and his duty towards his priests, than little children who –like Laurie Taylor — were sexually abused at the hands of (by their own admission) “very holy men”.
Who, in their right minds would want to go confession to paedophiles? The Church uses confessional boxes as ways of controllng people.
Education is power and unfortunately a lot of child abuse which occurred in industrial school institutions and boarding schools was perpetrated mostly by the religious, who were very highly educated.
I would like to thank Laurie Taylor for talking out about child sex abuse and industrial school abuse. I would wish for him to challenge philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, educators around the world, who, imo, have mostly gone to ground about this delicate issue.
Well most philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators have other work to do and don’t have access to the mass media in any case. It’s not necessarily a matter of having gone to ground, but academics in general aren’t particularly well placed to make public fusses about all subjects. Laurie Taylor does have access to the mass media, but not everyone does.
Yeah, what OB said. I’d dearly love to have more access to the mass media, but getting any access at all is a struggle if you’re not a politician or a celeb, or already a successful journo of some kind. It burns up time and energy, often totally unproductively.
A coincidence – just today at a long and demoralizing faculty meeting we (my colleagues and I who work with teachers in the public education at the US/Mexico border) were gently told that most of the work, awards, grant funding, etc that we do is not of interest to the local media.
Marie-Therese, there is absolutely no equivalence between a strong man pushing children out of the way to get at food and somebody peacefully blogging about a topic that you happen to consider “insignificant”.
In my case, I don’t blog about child abuse because it’s not something on which I have expertise. Are you seriously suggesting that when I blog about such things as freedom of speech or the problem of evil or the relationship of religion and science, or even my personal life (which happens to be important to me) that all this “this is terribly insignificant”? Are you seriously suggesting that none of us get to blog about anything else until we’ve done enough blogging about child abuse? Are you seriously suggesting that peacefully blogging about something that interests the blogger concerned or strikes her as important is in any way comparable to the conduct in Haiti that you referred to?
If so, that is incredible – not to mention offensive. Furthermore, nothing in my comment or the tone of it called for that kind of response. And why make this sort of vicious attack on my comment, in particular, when OB said something similar? I’m personally offended and I’m not going to hide it. If you want me to have anything to do with you in future, you will apologise without equivocation.
Mo – I’m sorry but this is offensive stuff. You can’t just decide that everyone has to talk about child abuse before talking about anything else, or to the exclusion of talking about anything else. It’s rude to abuse people for not talking about child abuse – it’s rude to accuse all these ‘very educated people’ of ‘stupid irrelevant chat.’ It’s rude as hell to compare them to men walking on children in Haiti. Whether you mean to or not you’re making wild generalizations and being very impolite.
And it’s bizarre to say even a child could see there is no equivalence when you’re the one who made the equivalence.
I’m sorry, but I can’t defend you here.
The strong man pushing the child out of the way to grab at the food is equivalent in a lot of senses to the strong blogger stepping over the weak blogger to make his/her views heard. Both child and weak blogger are walked over by stronger human beings, hence weaker ones being ignored and left hungry. It is survival of the fittest.
I know the child suffers more, as it is in all probability left physically starving. Nonetheless, selfishness and greed play a part in the survival mechanism of the strong. Evolutionary!
Marie-Therese, it’s a new day here. I’m no longer angry with you – life’s too short for sustained anger with good people – and of course I’ll continue to interact with you.
Still, the points that I made, put better by Ophelia just now, stand. I know that you feel strongly about this, and I even understand why, but it’s not going to help your cause if you continue think and talk as if people of good will who are doing nothing wrong are somehow wicked people or your enemies. Apart from the fact that you are saying impolite things, you are thinking in a self-destructive way. Forget about my wounded feelings yesterday; please try rethinking this for your own sake.
Quite so. You know I’ve told you this many times, Mo…