The Depths of Denial

The inclusion of the stories of the people who were players in this documentary was often disturbing to me.  I almost wish it was made by a Catholic because I feel like there is a mythology about the religion.

It's ironic because while the papacy and church officials profess a code that is ridiculous in today's world, it is also one of the religion's most concerned with education and higher learning.  How these two things can coexist is beyond me.

I was raised Catholic because it was important to my grandmother who was born in 1906.  My grandmother was devout but no one else in my family was.  I was also molested but not by a priest.  I feel like child molesters in general aren't prosecuted as fully as they should be.  I think that all this attention put on Cathiloc priests ignores the millions of other pedophiles. 

What bothers me is that the children and parents are obviously destroyed by this and it doesn't seem to make any difference.  I feel like the main perpetrator was treated with too much compassion and should be behind bars.  The documentary doesn't attempt to offer any ways to help deal with this issue.  Bush shouldn't have pardoned the Pope.  It might have cost a billion dollars for the Cathiloc Church to fight these cases in court but how much do they have left?  A lot.  And it is just about accension and gaining power. 

Learning that the reason the Cathiloc church started their celibacy restriction so that the church would inherit their estates makes perfect sense.  It is an incredibly sexist institution.   And the scariest part of their impact isn't in upper and middle class America it's in Latin America and the poorest countries.  As the people in the film said, protection of children should be the most important goal of the church. I think they think its normal.

The website didn't seem very connected to the film.  I wish that there was some sort of follow up.  Like they provide a list of controversial statements but they don't say whether the statements are true or false. I think it would have been helpful to show examples of people who have managed to make peace with their past, which isn't to minimize the crimes of the priests but if everyone is just falling apart it's kind of a dead end.  Like maybe if the film showed a support group, and talked about the father losing his job. Or why was the invitation suddenly withdrawn?

There are a lot of powerful, people who can't accept that what they believe is false, that the people they trusted are crooks, I don't know the documentary makes me feel more hopeless than ever.  From my Google search it's still happening, there are still problems and there are going to be problems until people are willing to look at the very structure.  The latest headlines is that an Australian born human rights lawyer is calling for the Pope to resign because of child abuse.  This is an article against the lawyer from New Zealand which asks "is he serious?", that I can hardly understand because of the language but shows how deeply entrenched resistance to change is internationally.