Hostage of Dolour

Quite simply, religion is a control mechanism which Man wields over himself. I think this has been quite horribly illustrated here in Ireland by the exposing of numbers of the Catholic clergy, both male and female, as abusers. Most recently, a lady here, treated with sadistic malicious and sexual contempt by those priests that undertook to raise her as a faithful, respectful and decent child, has received monetary recompense by the Catholic church.

For me, this raises a number of points. I think this is quite the most insidious form of domination whereby the priest or nun believes they are an embodiment of the requirement to suppress sin and the sinners responsible – to say nothing of the hypocritical methods employed therein! I think this abuse is simply the hushed, but logical extension of the cane of religion in its widest remit.

While I believe this abuse is meted by second-person abusers [those priests, nuns, teachers, we've heard also of elder abuse by care workers, infant abuse by nursery workers] I also believe there are as many third-person abusers too. In the case of this lady, she brought the truth of the horror to her own mother who told her [to paraphrase] not to be silly, that priests didn’t engage in such activity. And I guess at the time of these abuses, information wasn’t so freely available, yet the prevailing attitude was the same then as it is now: “Be quiet about it!” or “You’ll bring shame on all of us including yourself!” thereby impelling the conspiracy of silence within the Catholic church.

Without wanting to in any way, gloss over the horrors of these incidents, there’s another odd point to all this. And on the one hand I get it, yet on the other, I find it worrying – that victims settle for monetary compensation. In the case of this lady, she felt that the monetary recompense was in some way equivalent to an apology, yet it was neither an apology nor was it a punishment of any kind. The Catholic church is renowned as being particularly wealthy. A visit to St. Peter’s Basilica wil confirm that for any of you that have been. Therefore it’s far cheaper for the church to buy a silence than it is to shoulder the uncountable cost of an unequivocal admission of culpability and an unreserved apology.

On the other side of this argument – or perhaps it’s two sides of the same coin, while none of us would refuse money being offered to us, especially a “substantial five figure sum” at the same time, isn’t this at the cost of the integrity of the victim? I worry that there’s an underlying subtext to accepting a compensation which has been cold-bloodedly calculated as being “sufficient” by the Catholic church’s litigation professionals. I think that subtext is still, and will always remain, “Be quiet about it!” and “You’ll bring shame on all of us, including yourself!”

And so ultimately again we see the enactment of control over our fellow man by those who would abuse the power of an already abusive institution: orthodox religion. I think the indoctrination, not just in the faithful adherents of each religion, but in faithful non-attenders and society in general, is so great that we reconcile these hideous acts of abuse as being perpetrated by [and I despise the term] a “minority”. I say if Man accepted his own greatness and was able to realise his [or her] own untapped strength, there’d be no requirement for religion as a vehicle of societal control. If we realised our own powers; if we understood the notions of the Animal of Man and Man as god, we’d have a parity with each other that would be untreadable by the boots of control and indoctrination. When that day came, we’d finally apprehend freedom.