This week saw the demise of ACORN followed by its most solid vindication from the California Attorney General's office, juxtaposed with the Catholic Church's spiraling descent into incoherent babbling as more than half a century of criminal conspiracy in hiding and protecting child molesters finally threatens to demand a full accounting.
The fact that ACORN could be destroyed by lies despite no criminal activity, while the Catholic Church has avoided any criminal penalties for engaging in conduct that the Mafia wouldn't forgive speaks volumes about the state of hegemonic struggle in America and the world today.
This is not about Catholic-bashing. The countless victims of these unspeakable crimes were all Catholics. It's about the patriarchal hierarchy, which has long outlived not only its usefulness, but its moral credibility as well. Sinead O'Connor--herself a victim of (non-sexual) child abuse by the church--in an eloquent Op-Ed put it squarely when she called the Pope and his co-conspirators the churches "alleged leaders", after explaining:
To Irish Catholics, Benedict's implication -- Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem -- is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn't believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That's how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.
On Monday, Democracy Now discussed the Church's pedophilia coverup crisis with Bridget Mary Meehan, a dissident female bishop, who is part of a growing movement to reform and transform the Church from below, along transparent, egalitarian, non-sexist lines. (Her blog is here.) In the interview, she said:
This is very, very serious, because standards of accountability must apply from the top down. There needs to be an entire shake-up of the whole Catholic system. And we need to begin by truth-telling. Roman Catholic Womenpriests are calling for a truth commission, made up of the non-ordained, the victims, and people of integrity, to examine the crisis in its implications for Church structure, for renewal, for reform. And we believe that any structural change must include the end of mandatory celibacy, married priest, and women priest. We must really change the way the Church does business and become a more accountable, open, transparent and just Church.
Hopefully, this extremely painful episode (an "episode" only in millenia-long history of the church sense) will eventuate in a radical transformation of the Church that will leave it much closer to the original communal and collegial form it had when it was the church of the Roman Empire's multi-cultural, multi-racial underclass--not the church of the Empire.
Movies like Cast Away and I Am Legend derive most of their effective suspense from a dilemma no one would ever want to face: what it would mean to be, as far as you knew, completely alone in the world. So alone that you had to rely on dolls to preserve a thin illusion of companionship and remain invested in waking up every day.
Among elderly individuals, the medical profession has known for 150 years that the death of a spouse creates a significant mortality risk for the surviving spouse. Chances are that when most people are in their 80s or 90s, their spouse is one of only a handful of people left, if not the only person left, with whom they felt a strong peer relationship.
As I've highlighted before, and will again, solitary confinement in prison can drive people permanently insane, such that we can infer the company of other criminals and prison guards to be healthier than being alone all the time.
Yet as evidence mounts that it's our connections to other people that give our lives meaning, keep us healthy, keep us sound in mind and body, we find ourselves having to constantly struggle against institutions dedicated to the glorification of objects, abstractions and anthropomorphized Jungian archetypes over real human beings and their needs.
The ongoing pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church is merely a symptom of this collective, self-abasing masochism people seem prone to. Particularly, that seen among segments of society that enshrine pre-teen gross out reactions to sex, a very normal part of adult human life, as some sort of binding moral arbiter.
STATE BLOGS
Powered by: SoapBlox