My local Catholic church did not see it in the same way. When I attended catechism class for for the first time, I was put into the class of older children the public school administration decided I was not ready to join. So, I was thrust into a school room full of unfamiliar children who were all older and bigger than me. That in itself was a life-changing childhood experience and then I had to go to the bathroom.
I raised my hand and asked the nun if I could go to the bathroom. She said no. I wet my pants. When my mother picked me up and saw what had happened she would not allow me to go back to catechism. Thus, I became a lapsed Catholic at a very early age.
Though I continued to go to mass for several years, I never received Confirmation. The beauty of the Latin mass still rings in my head and I would have liked going to confession and to have been a part of the ornate ritual and ceremony of the Catholic church. Maybe it was all for the best. A friend of mine was a devout Catholic and after we saw The Exorcist together he told me he suffered from horrible nightmares; I experienced the movie as one would a roller coaster and nothing more. God works in mysterious ways.
There was one more thing about the Catholic church I learned when I was young. It was from my mother who told me her aunt, who brought up my mother in the Sudetenland of the 1930s, warned her about the priests. My mother’s aunt told her not to go anywhere alone with a priest. My mother passed along this little bit of wisdom.
So it is with mixed feelings I entered a Catholic hospital this week to visit a friend and neighbor who suddenly discovered he has lung cancer. About a week ago he was suffering from lung congestion, a nagging flu, or so he thought. It was pneumonia and in the x-ray of his chest the doctors saw a small tumor. The tumor is cancerous and was the cause of the pneumonia. He faces either an operation to remove the tumor, which may or may not be possible, or chemotherapy. He has no health insurance and not enough money to pay for an operation nor therapy. The hospital took him in, did the tests, put him in a private room (they feared the pneumonia would spread to other patients) and are working with him to apply for Medicaid. His survival might be in the hands of God, but because he is in a Catholic hospital, his prognosis might include seeing his two small children grow up.
There is no bitter language being spared by church critics to describe the comfort with which the Catholic church has abetted its pedophiles. The least persuasive way the Church defends itself is by pointing out sexual abuse of children is not exclusive to any large organization entrusted with the care of children.
That, of course, is malarkey. Because, as we now sadly realize, nobody, nowhere, no time, no way, no how knew the extent, depth, or horror of this scourge, nor how to adequately address it.
If my mom, a poor little girl, living with her aunt and uncle (who ran a small tobacco/candy/newspaper store), and who was not even 10 years old when WWII started, was warned about priests, it cannot be too "malarkish" to expect responsible adults, professionals, especially those who oversaw the clergy, to have known what was happening in their own institution. And yet the Catholic church certainly is not the only institution that harbored pedophiles; it is malarkey to believe in the exclusivity or near exclusivity of celibate priests engaged in pedophilia or even to blame the sexual abuse of children on celibacy. I imagine if we examined the juvenile justice system, for one, we would find similar institutional neglect on an even greater scale.
I said it was with mixed feelings I entered the hospital.
It is with similar mixed feelings I heard and watched the health care debate unfold. It will take years to discover if the recently passed health care reform will actually start our secular health care system on the road to universal coverage. I have my doubts. It will take a long time for all of us to receive the medical care that we all support with our taxes, but we do not all receive. My friend does not have years to wait. Meanwhile, despite the experience and doubts about the Catholic church, one of its hospitals is the only institution that stands in the way of my friend and lung cancer. God works in mysterious ways.
I would like to raise my hand and ask that the forces now bitterly engaged in fighting for and against universal health care, for and against the Catholic church and its behavior regarding pedophiles, respond with common decency. There is enough cruelty in life, acts of God we cannot control. Whatever suffering we can alleviate should be done without horribly angry rhetoric that serves neither man nor God.
While it is easy to be angry at the Catholic church, institutions like it are the only protection some of us have when facing illness.
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