opinion@dailylobo.com
This subject isn’t exactly popular, but when children are endangered and adults are to blame, the abusive adults should be brought to justice for what they have done. If a cult in your neighborhood abducted your kids and did bad things to them, we’d want to disband the cult, lock their leaders up and throw away the key.
Sinéad O’Connor, an Irish pop and folk musician, appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1992 and tore up a picture of the pope, whom she called “the real enemy.” Her young, promising career was pretty much sunk from that point on because the U.S. press and public crucified her, so to speak.
Now she’s revealed that when she was 15, she was tossed in prison for petty theft and forced to work as a slave laborer for several years, until her father was finally able to procure her release.
For most of the last century, the Roman Catholic Church ran laundries and sweatshops where women were used as a free workforce, and where abuse and mistreatment were rampant.
Single mothers, many of them victims of domestic, prison or workplace assault, had their babies taken from them and sent to orphanages or the church adoption agency — for a healthy handling fee, of course. The church ordained that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was always the woman’s fault and, in complicity with the state, operated a lucrative human-trafficking ring that stretched around the world.
Birth certificates were routinely forged or destroyed, and mothers and children who have tried to contact each other through the church have been stonewalled with a steady and consistent dose of refusal and obfuscation. Curiously, most of the records regarding these events were conveniently destroyed in separate fires all around Ireland. This, of course, defines the modus operandi of the Roman Catholic Church whenever it is covered in shame and blame.
A monsignor from a Connecticut diocese has just been indicted on charges slightly less repulsive than child abuse, but a bit shocking nonetheless: He was reportedly running a crystal meth business out of his church.
So here we go again with the same old lies from the Vatican. The parishioners will have to pay if they’re to keep the law at bay.
We see it in the news every week — child molesters harbored by the church, moved around in the cloistered secrecy of a shell game to hide the guilty and absolve the church of responsibility in these most lurid of affairs, allowing them to victimize new communities.
A conspiracy of stealth and perversity.
Condoms, AIDS, birth control — the church insists on its role in dictating morality to society. But it seems to be losing that part by turning denial into art. The church’s opposition to abortion is rather out of proportion when we consider that it deems exploitation of the weakest members of communities perfectly acceptable.
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A cult with a smaller membership would not be permitted to protect so many pedophiles among its leaders. We should see through the church’s Dark-Age mentality and condemn the sexually perverted clergy, who have long plagued humanity. We should condemn this institution which drips in hypocrisy as it uses every lie to defend itself. Counting the thousands of families and people the church single-handedly destroyed and crushed, it is mind-boggling that it has the gall to preach to us about social harmony and justice.
There’s a movie called “The Shoes of the Fisherman” about a pontiff who sold off all the church’s wealth to buy food for starving peasants and hence prevent global war. The setup for a similar situation can be seen in current events involving North Korea’s litany of threats against the U.S. and other nations as it obsessively expands its nuclear arsenal — all while its economy collapses. But don’t expect to see the land and gold that was reaped from the sweat of parishioners’ backs being relinquished any time soon.
So child abusers are protected, and if there’s one sure way to stifle hope, it’s with misery decreed by the pope. When you read about the latest cover-up coming out, don’t be misled by the church’s lies — just look deep into the clergy’s eyes.
You may wonder what I know. Well, I’ll tell you. I was one of those born in a prison of despair run by evil that didn’t care and sent off to people who didn’t even know me. I’ve had enough experience with their kind to know that when authority speaks of love but then steals and assaults children, there’s a name for it: evil.
It is up to us to condemn the church’s inappropriate behavior, its disregard for the meek and its legacy of hate and sleaze. People are going to have faith in whatever they come to choose, but when churches run the state, everyone will always lose.
I tell you that it’s a curse, this knocking people to their knees and pushing them down into the dirt. It was pure insanity, their obsession with my profanity, while I was being slapped and beaten across my back, just for all the luck I lacked.
No, it’s not much fun to live with violence when you’re young, forced to suffer in silence and always told to hold your tongue.
It makes us cross-eyed and numb, withdrawn in shock, used to keeping feelings under lock. But the ghosts that haunt us and the psychic scars from being told no one wants us are always there, waiting to pounce down upon us in the darkness of our solitude.
