Counter-Currents
1,685 words
I attended Catholic high school at Cardinal O’Hara in Broomall, Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1979. I’d estimate that at the very most, 20 priests taught there while I was a student. At least six of them — Father Jones, Father Giliberti, Father McCarthy, Father Cannon, Father Gallagher, and Father Close — subsequently faced multiple allegations of sexually abusing schoolboys there.
To read this, get behind our Paywall
13 comments
The thing is, if I didn’t believe that God will ultimately punish all these horrible people there would be no point in this life at all. No point in anything ever. I can look at nature and see that isn’t possible. Because I can discern beauty from ugliness means there is a difference that is inherent. It is built into you to hate abuse and ugliness unless you are evil. Those priests and nuns ARE evil. And God will hold them to a much higher level of accountability because they did what they did in his name. If that’s not true I hope I drop dead today.
Still I’ll say that the afterlife is too long to wait for justice. Perps who harm children deserve to be put in a camp.
Wow, Goad under the pay wall, too, now? Going to drive down website views. Oh well…
It is called an incentive.
Dude, just take the plunge, you won’t regret it. While I still refuse to pay to listen to anything on TRS, the relatively small amount I shell out per month to read CC articles is well worth it.
Another great piece from Jim Goad, combining scholarship, statistics, and personal experience! As my background seems roughly similar, perhaps I might add a few observations.
Like Jim, I attended a Catholic grade school (nuns) and high school (priests), and even a college which, though secular, had been created a decade before by uniting a Catholic and an Anglican college (the first time in history) and still had priests (and monks!) on the staff.
The nuns were indeed pretty brutal, but in fairness, it might have been the only way to control us malcontents, and a lot of readers here likely wish for a return to the “good old days” of corporal punishment. What particularly strikes me is how often this brutality was used to reinforce a nun’s error in fact, or pronunciation, at the expense of a child who was, in fact correct. At college I learned from priests and laity that nuns were legendary fonts of ignorance and the despair of those teachers during the period when nuns were “breaking out” and seeking higher education; I was advised by a great Catholic scholar to ignore the famous Summa Theologica, as Thomas “had written it for nuns.”
I attended two high schools (my parents fled Detroit for the suburbs) and there was no hint of any kind of shenanigans in either. A Duck Duck Go search reveals no subsequent “revelations.” One school was reputed to be the finest high school (not just Catholic) in the state, so I suppose the Church might have kept things on a tight leash for PR purposes (offenders sent elsewhere, as per usual). The most revered teacher, who only died recently, did seem a little tightly wound — during a theology class he started shrieking “The Pharisees were not nice guys! They were vicious bastards! Vicious bastards!“); and ingratiated himself as “one of the boys” by mentioning alcohol at any opportunity; but otherwise he was perfectly normal. His brother had left the staff a few years before, to marry a nun, so perhaps he was still living down the shame. Nuns.
At the next school, same deal. But there was one priest who seemed a little off. He looked like John Lovitz (unknown at the time), all grins and pop-eyes, but was the color of an eggplant. I suspect some kind of Mediterranean or even Semitic background. There was always a suggestion of excessive lip-licking. He taught theater, of course, and produced an annual school musical. I had an acquaintance, not a friend, who had a bit of a stutter, not enough to be “special” but noticeable. Speaking of ‘noticing’ I recall see the Father whispering to him in the back row of a class, seeming to “take an interest in the boy” (good) or else perhaps “targeting the weak” (bad), who knows. As I say, no accusations seem to have arise there either.
So there, my past is a bust, scandal-wise. So may I add, scholarship wise, that more details on the Vatican Grindr circuit can be found in Martel’s In The Closet of the Vatican, which I reviewed here: https://www.counter-currents.com/2020/06/papa-francesco-vs-steve-bannon/
I guess I was lucky. I attended Catholic grade school in the fifties, and it was no worse than what I later experienced in boot camp, which is another totalitarian environment.
Since it never happened to me, and I never even heard it whispered about at the time, I have always been skeptical of the claims of widespread occurrence of abuse by clergy, especially after hearing about 200 people claiming to have been injured on a 40 passenger bus. Maybe that makes me something like a holocaust denier. I hasten to add that the real perpetrators of both the abuse and the coverup should be severely punished.
Sorry, I couldn’t read the entire article because I am not behind the paywall. But I went to Catholic Grade school in a Chicago Suburb and it was beautiful. All my teachers for 8 years were either nuns or Catholic lay women. One of the nuns (my 4th grade teacher) was one of the sweetest ladies I have ever known. She read to the class “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis during lunch time and all of were on the edge of our chairs. The boys were all required to wear light blue shirts with a dark blue tie every day and the girls were required to wear plaid jumpers. There was no pedophilia among the priests and I would know if there was because I was an altar boy for 4 years. There was one nun who rivaled the wicked witch of the west from “The Wizard of Oz” but she was an exception. After grade school, I went to a public high school and I think I was better prepared for high school than my contemporaries who went to public grade school. Anyway, I am an agnostic now but I would reconsider Catholicism as soon as they 1) get rid of this evil Pope and 2) clean up the pedophilia once and for all.
I miss hearing church bells intermittently throughout the day as I grew up with in Pennsylvania.
You can’t blanket-dismiss religion. The music’s too good.
I live in the least-churched part of the country now, the Northwest, though there are plenty of churches.
Unless they have white supremacist bake sales, you don’t hear about them.
Is it a coincidence that it’s also the phoniest part of the country? Of soulless rhetoric-reciting politicians and dour, pissy Seattleites and bitchy “grunge” enthusiasts?
The highest suicide rate?
The most virulent anti-religious people are former Catholics, apparently with plenty of good reasons besides rampant child abuse.
About half the kids we knew attended Parochial schools, in our case, Bonner, as in Monsignor Bonner High School. If Jim was a decade or so older, it’s where he would have gone. Upper Darby PA.
So we grew up with nun horror stories and were grateful for having been raised in our vague Protestant religions.
The people I’ve known in life lugging around the biggest, most unwieldy theological constructs and decrepit, dust-covered dogma and wanting to tell you about it at every turn, are the people with the worst personal histories of betrayal and disloyalty.
See if you can work through the intricacies of The Golden Rule before pontificating on your dime-store “spirituality.”
Yeah, “before you abuse, criticize and accuse.”*
*Walk A Mile In My Shoes, Joe South.
“But there seems to be a delusion floating around the weird and severely online world of neo-traditional Catholicism that pervert priests are the result of post-Vatican II modernity.”
Directly over the target, Mr. Goad.
Two-thousand years of Pozz didn’t just manifest itself overnight.
And it certainly didn’t happen because one sect stopped giving its magic rites in a language that most people don’t understand, or stopped emphasizing that the Jews killed Christ ─ nor because birth control is readily available and unhappy marriages in all 50 states can now be ended with irreconcilable differences instead of by invoking the leverage of wretched accusations.
The important thing is that no creed should have the power to unilaterally ordain the law of the land, or to escape rebuke for the mischief wrought by its mostly well-meaning bluestockings and hair-shirted proctors.
Any (((tribe))) sufficiently beyond the bounds of legitimate censure is problem enough.
🙂
The stock “progressive” position on religion is good fun:
Christianity is bad. Unless it’s blacks doing the Christianizing. Then it’s kinda neat.
What the hell does that say?
Whites are to be scorned and reviled for their antiquated, backwards beliefs.
Blacks are to be patronized and indulged in their quaint customs and colorful superstitions.
Read you loud and clear, progressives.
Very true, sir. See also: (1) distrust of government; (2) distrust of the medical establishment (the brown people pass on that one is generally muh Tuskegee Experiment, despite the fact that most blacks have no idea what the hell that is); and (3) loud, boisterous behavior in public.
A friend of mine was at a work camp when police arrived to arrest one of his co-workers for murdering a child. I asked my friend what the guy was like.
My friend said the child killer was ostentatiously pious. He would get up in the morning and proclaim, “Oh, What a blessed day!” I filed that little piece of data in my warning box.
Never learned from it though, I rarely identify sadists and sociopaths during interactions. Perhaps because it’s the very safe and gentle up-bringing and a touch of autism.
I did avoid being raped by instinct, but this was almost entirely unconscious. I never even suspected the would-be rapist had anything but benevolent intentions, not until my situation was explained to me by a seasoned criminal.
Thank Yahweh for my Jewish lawyer. Cleared my name and got me out of that shithole.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.