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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Saturday, July 23, 2011

300 Austrian clerics call for women priests, reform | National Catholic Reporter

300 Austrian clerics call for women priests, reform | National Catholic Reporter

meeting an archbishop

the formal bit was largely being in a room looking like a palace ane surveying beautiful things that must have cost a fortune. believe me there was no formallity in voice, address or contents of two survivors of clergy sexual abuse trying to get justice. he is not the cause of the origional injustice but has perpetrated another one in simple non-response or response so futile as to leave the one concerned victim sick to death of travelling to his house for cups of very nice coffee. her sister also a victim watches as the victim cries, shouts and thumps her wheelchair arms in rage and total articulation of the whole debackle called 'response'. ten years with the diocese and 8 years with him. nothing she said was unmerrited, everything she said was true, in that meeting of despair we looked at an archbishop filled with such incomprehension and face raw with utter bewilderment it was hard not to feel a little bit sorry for him. but when he asks what justice means for us you'd wonder whether he ever read the letters from the victim in all those 8 years. and when he asked us/her to write down our questions for the religious order and what we wanted by way of 'justice' we knew he hadn't because as i grabbed the file off the victim i dredged up a letter written to him in 2006 saying all these things.

i asked in no uncertain terms whether he would simple take a dumper truck through the walls of the religious order and obtain the truth. a reference to a man who did this through the Dail gates litterly!

but the order are in america, but i have no jurisdiction over the order, but they say we would have to go to court for any satisfaction. limp, limp, limp responses for an archbishop who has confronted all his own bishops for untruth, lack of transpairency and even publically washed his hands of fellow bishops. is he the archbishop of duplicity? or is he the archbishop of courage? hard know to know.

does he love and hurt only for the picked few?

after two hours , exhausted, crying, and totally bewildered by the archbishop's weakness and also care, for i suspect he does care, we ironically get into a plush taxi, merc, hailed off the road by archbishop's uriah heap, secretary, named monsignour but put the phone down on me last week, whose driver said "my wife's dad, now dead, was the cousin of the archbishop". are we in ireland so emmeshed by birth, by family, by culture we simply know too much and therefore hide too much. just as my sister-in-law's uncle was pushed from his diocese for inaction that led to a death of a survivor.

i have arrived in a beautiful country, but also a very unbeautiful country. the contradictions prolific. irish people outraged yet irish people unstired to action, only the survivors. only the survivors can hold both beauty and rage and action.

but we are silenced by the culture of a land too long obedient to pope, archbishops, bishops and priests.

as we lie exhausted today these victims still cry and await justice. but until everyone knows what justice means there will be no justice.