🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Angels🎶
Simplicity💬
The Pen and the Pedophiles🖊️
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- It’s Friday.
- Hearing from Boy The Elder on his honeymoon.
- The feel of my bald head right after I shave.
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Connections
Puzzle #362
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The song in my head when I woke up: She Talks To Angels, by the Black Crowes
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: She keeps a lock of hair in her pocket/She wears a cross around her neck/They say that the hair was from a little boy/The cross from someone she had not met/No, not yet
Commute Tunes: No commute yesterday.
Something I’m looking forward to today: An early end to the work week.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Rescheduled tattoo appointment.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Andy’s BYO jackhammer.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved an article about the need for more human interaction in the midst of all this push for automation and artificial intelligence.
What I’ve written: Simplifying the Science: The oral presentation winners at MBP’s Spring Research Symposium focused on making sure their work was easy to understand for those not in the biotechnology industry.
For four months, I wrote for a Catholic organization called the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. It presents itself as a noble organization, and certainly there are people doing noble things in its name. The organization is recognized in the Catholic machine as the ones who do the most difficult missions, who go to the most remote places on the globe, who help the poorest of the poor, who find the most abandoned.
That is good and, dare I say, closer to anything in the Catholic religion to what its patriarch preached during his brief ministry on Earth.
But underneath all that goodness is the same disgusting cesspool that undermines everything the Catholic church does — misuse of funds, abuse, coverup, murder and genocide.
I tried to make it work. For the good of my family, I did. But things started going south within my first week.
I was given the task of researching some priests to figure out a good topic for a story. In doing so, the Google Gods started feeding me court documents from a lawsuit in which some of the people I could have written about were present at meetings in which a person was tricked into signing an NDA about the abuse he suffered as a child. Allegedly.
Obviously, I skipped over that particular gentleman as a story topic. But I went home and told Wifey Poo that I was unsettled because the danger was I would eventually write glowingly about some priest without knowing that he had a checkered past involving sexual abuse and that some victim would read my words and be hurt by them. I don’t want my writing to hurt anyone who hasn’t created the situation that leads to his or her own hurt — especially children victimized by priests.
A few months later, I was asked to write a story about a priest who died. It wasn’t a big piece. Just some words from the funeral about this guy’s life of service. Cool. No problem. I wrote the story and submitted it for publication.
A few days later, I was asked to do some research for another story about priests who will be celebrating a jubilee this year — meaning, an anniversary of their ordination that ends in a zero or a five — 50 years, 55 years, 60 years, blah blah blah. Cool. no problem.
One of them celebrating 60 years of service is Donald Dummer. Bad name and, apparently, a bad man. Google him yourself. He’s not the kind of guy who should be around kids. That he essentially got away (allegedly) with possession of child pornography because the Church “handled it” is disturbing, to say the least. One of the allegations against him was that, naked, he approached a boy and asked the boy to beat him with a belt. Lovely.
Of course I went down the rabbit hole and started reading all the documents from Dummer’s personnel file that are online as part of a settlement. (You can too.) And what did I find? A letter from the priest who recently died who I just wrote so glowingly about. In that letter, which came after he was made aware of the alleged child porn found in Dummer’s residence and after some other sketchy incidents, the priest who recently died whole-heartedly recommended him to a new appointment.
What the actual fuck!?!?!?
My initial reaction when I saw the signature on that letter was to run to the bathroom because I thought I was going to puke. In the wake of it I felt rather unsettled, to say the least. Dummer was supposedly “laicized” (meaning, made to be just an ordinary rumdum like me instead of a priest) back in the last decade. So why is his name on the list of priests to be celebrated for his ordination? Good question. I raised it and his name was then taken out of the jubilee book just prior to publication. Wonderful. But he’s still living in the Oblate residence home, his old age being support by your Catholic donations.
I’m disgusted by having written glowingly about a recently deceased priest who, at best, kinda sorta was complicit in putting a pedo in a new assignment instead of, oh, I don’t know, turning him over to the motherfucking police!
I was under no illusion that I could change anything with the Oblates. The Catholic Church has its benefits and is good for a lot of people — and it has long, deep, wide, awful tentacles of corruption stretching back centuries. The thing is, none of the things like what I uncovered through a simple Google search seem to matter to enough Catholics to spark change. The masses keep showing up in the pews and keep putting money in the basket. That their money is going to pay for lawyers and obfuscation instead of missions is something they must be OK with, and if they are, well, who am I to say they are wrong?
Except they are. They are wrong. And if they stopped giving, they would force more change. Guys like the priest who died wouldn’t be venerated after his passing. He’d have been gone a long time ago because he wrote a fucking letter of recommendation for a guy he knew had child porn in his residence! And then rumdums like me wouldn’t accidentally write good shit about him.
Here’s the thing: I wanted to write about the priests and brothers doing actual good things around the world. And by and large, I believe that’s what I did. I just couldn’t stomach any more oopsie-steps onto landmines like that. So I stopped.
My four months writing for Catholics was a hell in more ways than one. The person in charge of my department shouldn’t have been in charge of a McDonald’s, let alone the fundraising operation for the entire order. She was mean, incompetent and a sign of what goes on there. But beyond that, I learned that the Catholics as a religious institution are exactly who I thought they were. The number of times I was told I couldn’t write about a particular subject or area because of their checkered past is disturbing. I essentially was told not to write about the entire operation in Canada. Why? Because the Oblates have a history of genocide. They can call it what they want, but when little native children are ripped from their families and sent to Catholic schools inside which they are beaten if they use their native tongue or talk about their native culture … and when their are unmarked graves of hundreds … hundreds … of people … that is fucking genocide. It’s the extermination of a culture. And it was done in the name of God.
I’m not quite sure why the Catholic church is still a powerful institution. I just know that I was made worse by my brief time as part of the machine. And now that I’m on the outside looking back in, I’m ashamed of myself for having every been a part of it.
Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?