Thechurchissorry
The church in Australia is also saying how sorry it is. Sorry sorry sorry. Oh dear, so sorry. It doesn’t know what came over it. It was a moment of carelessness that lasted for decades. It’s terribly sorry, unless anyone can think of a way it can dodge culpability of course, in which case it isn’t.
It is believed at least 150,000 Australian women had their babies taken
against their will by some churches and adoption agencies between the 1950s and 1970s.
Think about that for a minute. A period of thirty years, in which the church yanked away the babies of 150,000 women.
But hey, the church is sorry. Maybe.
In fairness to the Catholic church in Australia (which I despise, as I despise it in other countries, for other reasons), I don’t think this is a peculiarly Catholic problem, but rather an Australian one. For all of its “G’day mate, throw another shrimp on the barbie” public face of the 21st century, Australia has had a deeply racist and conservative background; and to find that this lasted until the 1970s with regard to single mothers is not too surprising. The bright side of this dark past is that they are prepared to acknowledge it.
Could the Church survive saying it was wrong? Unfortunately, I suspect so.
150000 over 30 years. That’s over a dozen a day. Every day. For thirty years.
That is evil on a scale that I find difficult to comprehend.
Think of the bureaucracy that kind of scale would require. How many people spent a part, or all, of their working hours breaking apart families? How many of them would count themselves as “moderate” believers?
Reminds me of the South Park episode where BP (renamed DP, hah!) ‘apologizes’ for the oil spills.
But wait, if they were wrong about that, what else might they be wrong about… ?
“Man, we need more children around here.”
“Yeah. O hey, you know who has children?”
“Yeah?”
“Pregnant women.”
“Mate, you’re a genius!”
(Not intended to be a factual statement?)
100 kids a week? There were only 10 million Australians in 1960. That can’t be right, can it?
(scratch that last sentence, we all know how busy the Christians can be when they have their goody-shoes on)
Yep. The Infallible Catholic Church says ‘sorry’. Yeah, right; noted.
Kiwi: No, sorry. It’s a worldwide Catholic problem, manifesting in various ways in every Catholic country.
The whole Europhone world has had variants of colonialist conservatism and colonialist racism. But in many important shifts and reforms, Australia was as early as any off the blocks. For example, in women’s suffrage.
The “G’day mate, throw another shrimp on the barbie” public face as you call it was an advertising campaign aimed at luring US tourists (where they are called ‘shrimps’, to Australia (where they are called ‘prawns’). Note: not to be confused with the chess pieces of nearly the same name. That was an advertising campaign designed to sell the country via its traditional egalitarianism, via the charismatic, down-to-Earth Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger turned multi-millionaire Paul Hogan.
The trouble is that every Eurpoean colonialist country was ‘deeply racist and conservative’, and that, unsurprisingly, carried over into their colonial societies. However, racism and conservatism have never been exclusive traits of Europeans alone.
I personally maintain that in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, there was a largely unpublicised frontier race war in Australia that entirely wiped out the ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal male population in Tasmania, Victoria and NSW, as well as in the southern parts of Queensland, SA and WA. Even so, I do not think that Australia was an especially racist colonial society of the time. (Google ‘windschuttle, macdougall’ and see what you get.) Similar barbarities were all the go everywhere else.
But finally, about 25% of the present Australian population is Catholic, and largely descended from Irish Catholics. Hence both the legendary Australian hail-fellow-well-met egalitarianism, and the pig-headed, bloody-minded conservatism. Oh yes, and lest I forget, all the attendant shrimp-on-the-barbie bullshit.
Reminds me of the “I’m sorry” song from Calvin and Hobbes. And, almost as sincere.
Oh, and they’re called “Prawns” over here, too…
@ Ian MacDougall: Word on both world-wide spread of RCC-related scandals and the deeply conservative and racist culture of colonial countries. Alas.
Joe @ # 9:
Bewdy bottler. But where’s ‘over here’?
And in Canada, as usual, we use both terms. I always enjoy the tasty oxymoron of “jumbo shrimp”
This suggests a marine-themed chess-set, with prawns for the pawns, pointy-headed squids for the bishops, a king crab, a chambered nautilus for the rooks, sea horses, and an octopus queen.
And continuing the excess of imagination (before I go back to my boring task of work), when I first saw the headline of this post, I briefly speculated as to what piece of the building architecture the “churchissorry” would be (and then, rather more darkly, wondered if it might instead be an instrument of torture.
Theo @ # 12:
I would go along with that, except that perhaps the bishops would be better represented by members of the shark family: say the hammerhead or the tiger shark. The Great White would have to be the Pope, in a re-designed game of course.
The Pope, being infallible and therefore omniscient, would be able to jump from any one square to any other square of the board in one move. A bit like what he does anyway.
Sorry, Kiwi, this is VERY catlick or each-and-any religion.
First they made raped women have the children (please look up since when there is an abortionforbidding law in your country, I do bet that it is between 1850 and 1900, just like in Europe),
and then the churches put the children in church-institutions where they would have no chance to think about having a better life than their mothers, but filled up with victim-blaming.
The virginity craze dates from the witchburning (“Witches Hammer” published 1489) and had some waves of stricter and lesser enforcements among the poor, but most of the time ALL girls grew up helpless against rapists and fearful of their emotions and body changes because they knew nothing.
The tradition of women sharing and amassing their personal experience into knowledge over generations was destroyed that way, absolutely in Central Europe, and with few glimpses of the former life style in the colonies (that were the places where some of the overpopulation of Europe was put to use their typical born-unwanted aggression to subdue the natives).
Well they are a very sorry lot , aren’t they?
150000? That’s more than seven times the population of my town, that’s staggering
#1 Kiwi,
More hypocritical Oz bashing by a New Zealander, what is your problem? Sour grapes?