My wife and I attended Syracuse University in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War. I was draft age, making the war a constant cloud over me and all of my male classmates. It was also a time when social issues were coming to our attention daily. We were all ready to deal with them, as well as attend and work at our classes for our edu…
My wife and I attended Syracuse University in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War. I was draft age, making the war a constant cloud over me and all of my male classmates. It was also a time when social issues were coming to our attention daily. We were all ready to deal with them, as well as attend and work at our classes for our education and grades. The first Earth Day was a campus wide event filling our quad with displays of respect and solutions for our planet. Hendrix Chapel was both my nondenominational church and our near weekly national speakers forum. It was there that the student body turned out to hear a relatively unknown Bill Baird talk about women across the nation dying from coat hanger abortions. We already knew a some female students who had "back ally" abortions. One of my highschool classmates at SU had dropped out as a freshman when she got pregnant. Bill Baird made a tremendous impression on all of us on how brutal anti abortion laws were to women and families who for so many economic, health, age and family reasons could not carry a pregnancy to term and were seeking deadly and debilitating alternatives.
Planned Parenthood became my wife's first healthcare provider when we got married. Their family planning and birth control assistance were attractive as primary and preventive care services. We have supported Planned Parenthood ever since.
When I was less than 9 years old, my mother who was pregnant gave me instructions not to let anyone take her to the Catholic hospital in our community because she feared they would save the baby over her life if there were a problem. She explained that she had three children at home who needed a mother.
New York State legalized first trimester abortions in 1970, a few years after Bill Baird's talk at Hendrix Chapel, and three years before Roe v. Wade.
My wife bought a first edition of "Our Bodies Ourselves" a women's paper back health guide and referred to it frequently. Women's health had been a mystery even to many women until the abortion rights movement that focused as much on women's health as "pro choice" with the idea that knowing your body and your health choices make you a more healthy, productive and happier person for a better society. Certainly the cruelty of most "Pro Life" measures and many of their advocates are not pro life.
My mom experienced an ectopic pregnancy in 1956 when I was two years old. The doctors at the Catholic hospital my dad took her to would not perform surgery to remove the fallopian tube with the fetus inside. Had my mom’s best friend, who was a nurse, not intervened and convinced my dad to take her to a different hospital, she probably would have died.
I turned 18 in 1972. I voted for McGovern and so did my devoutly Catholic parents. Funny how a near death experience can clear the fog of what is moral and what isn’t. Pro birth is NOT pro life. Those bastards don’t care about anything except power, money and control.
Back to working to get out the vote and convincing my federal politicians to pass voting laws. Thanks for sharing this perspective David.
I would go so far as to say that CHA, a major Catholic hospitals association, has an anti-abortion policy of forcing closed non-sectarian community hospitals so that they are the only game in town. They will construct a new hospital with more services, (or purchase the original hospital,) tell doctors they cannot have admission privileges if they also see patients at the community hospital, then slowly bring that hospital to its financial knees. I know this because I once worked at the community hospital. An anecdotal story of another CHA hospital was refusing to perform a D&C on a bleeding woman, clearly in the stages of miscarriage, so that she was forced to go to the nearest city 60 miles away for treatment.
I want to clarify my own dilemma. I have loved ones who are devout Catholics, and I give to some excellent Catholic charitable organizations. There is much to like about the faith and their sense of community service. I do not like, repeat, do not like at all, the controlling conservative wing of Catholicism. It is more than anti-abortion. It is duplicitous, misogynist, and politically willful. It operates with a lack of transparency and with dark donor money. I wish there was a way to explore this, but alas they are a form of oligarchy with religious exemptions.
Despite some occasional good works, the Catholic Church as an institution has been mostly malign ever since Constantine decided to make them the official church of the Roman Empire. The priests were out killing off the "wise women" in the villages who could help people in ways the frocked moron never could (thus becoming an alternative power, which couldn't be tolerated), calling them witches; when the wise woman was killed, so were her cats. And then the rats, without a predator, gained in population, and when the Black Death came, it spread far more than it would have, had the priests not killed the wise women over the previous century. One of the good things of the Black Death is it killed so many people they began to question the Catholic Church, which ultimately led to the Reformation.
Historically, the Catholic Church, once Constantine approved it, has always come down on the side of those in power, has always opposed anything that questioned those powers. Right up to Pius XII going along with the Nazis about the Holocaust (since the Church was the greatest purveyor of anti-Semitism throughout its history - I have heard many stories from Jewish friends in many communities across this country about how in the 50s they all had to be careful during Holy Week when the local Catholic School pushed all the Irish hoodlums to hold a pogrom against the "Christ killers."
As an institution, the Catholic Church is "the enemy." The people like Pope Francis and John XXIII were and are anomalies, and the institutional church does its best to oppose them when they show up and to destroy their legacies as fast as possible when they're gone.
We won't even get into the Church's leading role in the genocide of the Americas once they showed up in the New World with Columbus, Cortez and Pizarro.
I want to make certain no one reads what I said as "anti-Catholic." I've known many very sincere Catholics, and they have been laudable people. I'll never forget meeting Ammon Hennacy, who with Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, and when I met him ran a house in Salt Lake City where anyone could come for shelter for as long as they needed it (so long as they were willing to become a part of the community and participate in keeping things going so others could be helped). But he, along with Dorothy Day, had been threatened with Excommunication by the Catholic Church in America for being "communists," so my critique of the institution stands. I think of him as one of the first people I ever recognized as a "saint," though the Church never would. I believe in "saints," but not the way the Church does. I believe in them as living measuring sticks for the rest of us to see how short the rest of us come up on the scale of being a good and worthwhile person who really Does The Right Thing. Most of the saints I have known would be considered Enemies of the Church were they Catholics (and some were).
You might add that Evangelical Christians, while they haven’t been at it for as long, are at least as bad, and probably worse, than Catholics on most issues, and their voting record is substantially worse.
This was built into the Catholic faith from the foundation.
There is a lot of question about exactly when and how the Jesus stories came into being, but historians tend to uniformly date Paul's writings around CE 50, well before the destruction of Jerusalem in CE 70; by his own account, he was running around "persecuting Christians" before becoming a convert and one of the first proselytes. These would all have been Christian Jews, and his letters (the authentic ones) are sent to communities all over Asia Minor and Macedonia. We know these communities were already widespread in Rome in the 50's, because we have Tacitus' record of Nero's infamous garden party in CD 64, in which he blamed the Great Fire on the Christians.
After CE 70, much of the population of Jerusalem was scattered as slaves throughout the Roman Empire, and these early Christians -- like the fundamentalist Christian sects in North America -- became extremely heterodox, syncretistic, and spread like wildfire through the slave class. They became a constant irritation to Roman power.
It wasn't until the early CE 300's, after numerous generational attempts to exterminate the religion, that Constantine convened the Council of Nicea to try something different: rather than try to destroy Christianity, he would unify it and make it part of the Roman Empire. The imprimatur under which the Nicene Council deliberated had the express objective of "unifying the Christian faith." The resulting document was The Bible, a selection of Jewish and Christian sacred documents.
The Nicene Council was the event that created the Catholic (universal) Church.
You can think of it as a massive historical redaction of the troublesome Christian beliefs of the early fourth century, and its entire reason for existence was Constantine's order that Christianity be unified.
Its primary function from the start was to suppress heterodoxy. Its authority derived from Emperor Constantine, who had just reunified Rome under a single Emperor (for a while) after defeating Licinius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, so the Church's authority in matters of religion was absolute.
It has never really deviated from that in its 17-century existence. It suppresses heterodoxy, and considers its authority absolute. I find it quite amusing that its absolute authority derives from a Pagan emperor.
Followed a few centuries later by Charlemagne who forced conversion to the Catholic Church at the point of a sword (and massacred 4,500 in Verden during the Saxon Wars), later followed by the colonizing Crusades and Inquisition.
Hi TC. I have read your comments with attention, particularly, in the last couple of days. Substance calmed the time. I would like to copy this post and email it to friend. Please reply when you have a chance. Cheers!
I would not give to any Catholic organization no matter what good works they do. I was a converted Catholic for about a decade, but no more. It does little or nothing for the millions who feed its machine for building wealth and exerting control over everything. I don't need to explore it, I just walked away from it and give to non-sectarian groups who are doing very good works without the repression.
I agree; I went to them thinking that it would be good for my young children and my husband's family was Catholic. The only thing they wanted to know was what I could do for them $. I ran the other way. Not a fan in any way, shape or form.
I worked for 6 months as a full time, live-in volunteer at an AIDS hospice/convent in Denver that was run by the Missionaries of Charity (Mother Theresa's organization). I was truly amazed at the selflessness of many of the other volunteers who donated a day or two here and there. I came to love so many aspects of the Catholic family that I came into contact with.
Yet... I also came into contact with the dark underbelly of the Catholic Church. So much hypocrisy, so much self-serving, so much lying to oneself... I'm not going to enumerate any of the negatives here, just suffice it to say that I came to the conclusion that the Catholic Church, at its best, does much more harm to humankind than good. For all of the good works, and there are multitudes, it is rotten to the core.
The Catholic Church has failed largely because it has no will, and no way to study the darker impulses of humankind. And without that study and implementation of increasing the light in humankind, it will always seek out the darkness.
Your recognition of this is what is powerful, Hope. There are layers of perspective in many things. I feel blessed that we as humans are given the power of discernment.
Yes, Hope, but look up the National Catholic Reporter, a lay run newspaper(ncronline.org) that has called out and investigated the many dark sides of the institutional church. See especially the early artcles from the 80's on clergy sexual abuse by Jason Berry and more recent articles about the money behind the anti-Pope Francis movement ( led by Cardinal Burke and one time U.S. Papal Nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, fueled by money from the Napa Institute's Tim Busch, among others.) There is pushback from progressives within the church but unfortunately the divide in the U.S. church mirrors that of our country, with the bulk of U.S. Bishops in bed with the ultra-right end of the culture war continuum.
The "roots" of the clergy sexual /power abuse can be traced right back through the power inequality lineage laid out by TCinLA below.
David, that same Catholic Hospital you mentioned, is the same one that heavy handedly convinced the single daughter of a friend who was raped in their parking lot to not take a morning after pill and "its the Lord's way" if she were to become pregnant. The Hospital insisted on "counseling" her through her situation. She did become pregnant from that rape and was forced to give birth to a Down's Syndrome baby that she, though wouldn't trade has had to raise alone.
"The Lord's way" has given misguided authority to too many for too long. As an ordained, graduate Seminarian I have long been angered by the abuse of Scripture to force specific ideologies upon people. All "in the name of Christ", no less!
"Beware the hypocrites." Beware the wolves who come to you dressed in sheep's cloth. I tend to shy away from quoting Holy Scripture because so many who do are the self-righteous apostates.
My parents divorced when I was 6. My mom was Catholic, my dad Protestant. I alternated churches every other weekend, which left me with a lot of questions about contradictory dogma.
In the early 60s, our next door neighbor who was Catholic, nearly died delivering her second child. Her doctor said complications made it likely that having a third child would kill her and recommended using birth control. She asked permission from the parish priest, who told her she couldn’t have communion if she did. So she didn’t and got pregnant again. When she started miscarrying in the second trimester, she was hemorrhaging and her husband took her to the community hospital. The miscarriage required surgical completion and while she was under anesthesia, her doctor talked to her husband. They agreed on a tubal ligation to avoid further risk. After she recovered, she told the priest what had happened and was denied communion. That was the end of my interest in the Catholic church
Not to mention the Catholic church's history of mishandling the molestation of children by priests... Oh damn, and I said not to mention that whole episode of its history. I will say that Catholic charities do an incredible job in so many ways with refugees and the poor, but they also take in an awful lot of money that is spent very wastefully as well.
Christine, your comment brought to mind the fact that for many things, like the anti-vaxxers against measles/mumps vaccine, who say, "Nobody gets/dies from measles any more", neglect to admit that's because the vaccines were so effective at eradicating it. Same with small pox, polio, etc. And same with the horrors of back-alley abortions. Young women today can't know the terror many women felt (and not just women who had sex 'outside of marriage'), when they were confronted with a pregnancy they knew they could not carry to term. For many married women, it was even worse, because they were expected to be brood mares, if that's what their husbands' expectations were. Forget that they may have been exhausted, physically and mentally, by tending to several children, usually under the age of 10. I believe one of my family member's mental illness can be traced back to just such a situation, with an abusive husband, to boot.
To those who have pointed out that this is, at the root, about controlling women, you are spot on. These misogynistic bastards know that by controlling a woman's reproductive life, you control her. We already know that part of why career women are paid less than their male counterparts is the red herring that, "you'll drop out to start a family, and all that training and time and effort we put into making you a good employee will be wasted." And of course, when they DO start a family, that heavily dings their retirement savings as well as their real time monetary wellbeing, whether or not they drop out of the work force permanently.
Thank you for sharing this. Before my time, the young woman who would become my mom barely survived a coerced back ally coat hanger abortion. Beginning with and because of that, this Catholic is an unapologetic Pro Choice advocate who, like you, finds the Pro Life movement to be disingenuous.
With much appreciation for sharing your wife's and your education concerning women's health, reproduction issues and abortion, included the horrors that illegal abortion brought to woman and there families -- that includes death.
NYS displayed bold action in 1970. At that time, Planned Parenthood in Syracuse, under the leadership of of Ellen Fairchild, provided safe, affordable 1st trimester abortion procedures at their outpatient clinic on E GeneseevSt. The focus was on "planned" parenthood and providing quality reproductive health care and services to prevent unintended pregnancies. The clinic was also the primary source of health care for most of the women who received services. Comprehensive care, including counseling and educational services were provided. The delivery of exceptional care to me Is "pro-life" and pro-choice.
East Genesee St PP is where we went. A former Victorian single family house with a large wrap around covered porch. The overall healthcare for my wife was our purpose.
Yes, PPC Syracuse believed in treating the "total package" and were committed to excellence in health care. Ellen Fairchild was a courageous and inspirational servant leader; her husband was a leader in palliative health care. They made the world a better place.
On 1971 I worked at a free clinic in Michigan, giving women phone numbers to get legal abortions in New York, and to get financial support for the trip. Lifesavers.
Thank you for that snapshot of time. I'm a bit younger than you (I was attending Jackson Elementary in 1968) and really appreciate the "I was there" component you've shared.
I completely lack any sort of Christian education (both of my parents left their churches as young adults; my Dad a Methodist and my Mom an Episcopal) and as such really have a "missing link" as to how something such as religion can be so influential in a way of thinking when what is being espoused clearly makes no sense or is contradictory.
to clarify, William Baird was a leader in the case Eisenstaft v Baird 1972 for promotion contraception for all women, married or not. (Unfortunately his promotion of vaginal foam was somewhat misguided and problematic-allergies etc. and what about male responsibility?) But Massachusetts law was stuck down that forbade the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried women after Griswold V Ct:)
I worked for an abortion clinic asa patient educator, for those that chose the procedure and wanted to get ‘their tubes tied’ after, I had to refer them to the non-sectarian health system, because the Catholic health system wouldn’t accommodate their request. And that wasn’t very many years ago!
My wife and I attended Syracuse University in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War. I was draft age, making the war a constant cloud over me and all of my male classmates. It was also a time when social issues were coming to our attention daily. We were all ready to deal with them, as well as attend and work at our classes for our education and grades. The first Earth Day was a campus wide event filling our quad with displays of respect and solutions for our planet. Hendrix Chapel was both my nondenominational church and our near weekly national speakers forum. It was there that the student body turned out to hear a relatively unknown Bill Baird talk about women across the nation dying from coat hanger abortions. We already knew a some female students who had "back ally" abortions. One of my highschool classmates at SU had dropped out as a freshman when she got pregnant. Bill Baird made a tremendous impression on all of us on how brutal anti abortion laws were to women and families who for so many economic, health, age and family reasons could not carry a pregnancy to term and were seeking deadly and debilitating alternatives.
https://www.veteranfeministsofamerica.org/legacy/Bill_Baird.htm
Planned Parenthood became my wife's first healthcare provider when we got married. Their family planning and birth control assistance were attractive as primary and preventive care services. We have supported Planned Parenthood ever since.
When I was less than 9 years old, my mother who was pregnant gave me instructions not to let anyone take her to the Catholic hospital in our community because she feared they would save the baby over her life if there were a problem. She explained that she had three children at home who needed a mother.
New York State legalized first trimester abortions in 1970, a few years after Bill Baird's talk at Hendrix Chapel, and three years before Roe v. Wade.
My wife bought a first edition of "Our Bodies Ourselves" a women's paper back health guide and referred to it frequently. Women's health had been a mystery even to many women until the abortion rights movement that focused as much on women's health as "pro choice" with the idea that knowing your body and your health choices make you a more healthy, productive and happier person for a better society. Certainly the cruelty of most "Pro Life" measures and many of their advocates are not pro life.
My mom experienced an ectopic pregnancy in 1956 when I was two years old. The doctors at the Catholic hospital my dad took her to would not perform surgery to remove the fallopian tube with the fetus inside. Had my mom’s best friend, who was a nurse, not intervened and convinced my dad to take her to a different hospital, she probably would have died.
I turned 18 in 1972. I voted for McGovern and so did my devoutly Catholic parents. Funny how a near death experience can clear the fog of what is moral and what isn’t. Pro birth is NOT pro life. Those bastards don’t care about anything except power, money and control.
Back to working to get out the vote and convincing my federal politicians to pass voting laws. Thanks for sharing this perspective David.
I would go so far as to say that CHA, a major Catholic hospitals association, has an anti-abortion policy of forcing closed non-sectarian community hospitals so that they are the only game in town. They will construct a new hospital with more services, (or purchase the original hospital,) tell doctors they cannot have admission privileges if they also see patients at the community hospital, then slowly bring that hospital to its financial knees. I know this because I once worked at the community hospital. An anecdotal story of another CHA hospital was refusing to perform a D&C on a bleeding woman, clearly in the stages of miscarriage, so that she was forced to go to the nearest city 60 miles away for treatment.
I want to clarify my own dilemma. I have loved ones who are devout Catholics, and I give to some excellent Catholic charitable organizations. There is much to like about the faith and their sense of community service. I do not like, repeat, do not like at all, the controlling conservative wing of Catholicism. It is more than anti-abortion. It is duplicitous, misogynist, and politically willful. It operates with a lack of transparency and with dark donor money. I wish there was a way to explore this, but alas they are a form of oligarchy with religious exemptions.
Despite some occasional good works, the Catholic Church as an institution has been mostly malign ever since Constantine decided to make them the official church of the Roman Empire. The priests were out killing off the "wise women" in the villages who could help people in ways the frocked moron never could (thus becoming an alternative power, which couldn't be tolerated), calling them witches; when the wise woman was killed, so were her cats. And then the rats, without a predator, gained in population, and when the Black Death came, it spread far more than it would have, had the priests not killed the wise women over the previous century. One of the good things of the Black Death is it killed so many people they began to question the Catholic Church, which ultimately led to the Reformation.
Historically, the Catholic Church, once Constantine approved it, has always come down on the side of those in power, has always opposed anything that questioned those powers. Right up to Pius XII going along with the Nazis about the Holocaust (since the Church was the greatest purveyor of anti-Semitism throughout its history - I have heard many stories from Jewish friends in many communities across this country about how in the 50s they all had to be careful during Holy Week when the local Catholic School pushed all the Irish hoodlums to hold a pogrom against the "Christ killers."
As an institution, the Catholic Church is "the enemy." The people like Pope Francis and John XXIII were and are anomalies, and the institutional church does its best to oppose them when they show up and to destroy their legacies as fast as possible when they're gone.
We won't even get into the Church's leading role in the genocide of the Americas once they showed up in the New World with Columbus, Cortez and Pizarro.
I want to make certain no one reads what I said as "anti-Catholic." I've known many very sincere Catholics, and they have been laudable people. I'll never forget meeting Ammon Hennacy, who with Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, and when I met him ran a house in Salt Lake City where anyone could come for shelter for as long as they needed it (so long as they were willing to become a part of the community and participate in keeping things going so others could be helped). But he, along with Dorothy Day, had been threatened with Excommunication by the Catholic Church in America for being "communists," so my critique of the institution stands. I think of him as one of the first people I ever recognized as a "saint," though the Church never would. I believe in "saints," but not the way the Church does. I believe in them as living measuring sticks for the rest of us to see how short the rest of us come up on the scale of being a good and worthwhile person who really Does The Right Thing. Most of the saints I have known would be considered Enemies of the Church were they Catholics (and some were).
You might add that Evangelical Christians, while they haven’t been at it for as long, are at least as bad, and probably worse, than Catholics on most issues, and their voting record is substantially worse.
Oh yes, indeed. Interestingly enough, they didn't get really bad till Jerry Falwell came along to organize them in the "Moral" Minority.
Amen.
LOL, and Ah-women! (This is just messing around, and real language gender fixing could go on forever!)
Love this Ellie, lol.
Yes.
Wherever there is power to be grabbed and people to be exploited, predators will be on the prowl.
This was built into the Catholic faith from the foundation.
There is a lot of question about exactly when and how the Jesus stories came into being, but historians tend to uniformly date Paul's writings around CE 50, well before the destruction of Jerusalem in CE 70; by his own account, he was running around "persecuting Christians" before becoming a convert and one of the first proselytes. These would all have been Christian Jews, and his letters (the authentic ones) are sent to communities all over Asia Minor and Macedonia. We know these communities were already widespread in Rome in the 50's, because we have Tacitus' record of Nero's infamous garden party in CD 64, in which he blamed the Great Fire on the Christians.
After CE 70, much of the population of Jerusalem was scattered as slaves throughout the Roman Empire, and these early Christians -- like the fundamentalist Christian sects in North America -- became extremely heterodox, syncretistic, and spread like wildfire through the slave class. They became a constant irritation to Roman power.
It wasn't until the early CE 300's, after numerous generational attempts to exterminate the religion, that Constantine convened the Council of Nicea to try something different: rather than try to destroy Christianity, he would unify it and make it part of the Roman Empire. The imprimatur under which the Nicene Council deliberated had the express objective of "unifying the Christian faith." The resulting document was The Bible, a selection of Jewish and Christian sacred documents.
The Nicene Council was the event that created the Catholic (universal) Church.
You can think of it as a massive historical redaction of the troublesome Christian beliefs of the early fourth century, and its entire reason for existence was Constantine's order that Christianity be unified.
Its primary function from the start was to suppress heterodoxy. Its authority derived from Emperor Constantine, who had just reunified Rome under a single Emperor (for a while) after defeating Licinius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, so the Church's authority in matters of religion was absolute.
It has never really deviated from that in its 17-century existence. It suppresses heterodoxy, and considers its authority absolute. I find it quite amusing that its absolute authority derives from a Pagan emperor.
Interesting history.
Followed a few centuries later by Charlemagne who forced conversion to the Catholic Church at the point of a sword (and massacred 4,500 in Verden during the Saxon Wars), later followed by the colonizing Crusades and Inquisition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Verden
And of course, only the Muslims are accused of "spreading religion by the sword" as they "swarmed out of Arabia."
If the Crusades weren't a holy war, I don't know what is!
Hi TC. I have read your comments with attention, particularly, in the last couple of days. Substance calmed the time. I would like to copy this post and email it to friend. Please reply when you have a chance. Cheers!
All my stuff here is "open source" Fern, so copy away.
Thank you.
I would not give to any Catholic organization no matter what good works they do. I was a converted Catholic for about a decade, but no more. It does little or nothing for the millions who feed its machine for building wealth and exerting control over everything. I don't need to explore it, I just walked away from it and give to non-sectarian groups who are doing very good works without the repression.
I agree; I went to them thinking that it would be good for my young children and my husband's family was Catholic. The only thing they wanted to know was what I could do for them $. I ran the other way. Not a fan in any way, shape or form.
I get it. That you continue to give is good and godly.
Its a powerful patriarchy with no accountability. Nothing charitable about that.
Oh, for a minute I thought you were describing the Party of Sedition Against American Democracy AD: 2016-2021+.
I worked for 6 months as a full time, live-in volunteer at an AIDS hospice/convent in Denver that was run by the Missionaries of Charity (Mother Theresa's organization). I was truly amazed at the selflessness of many of the other volunteers who donated a day or two here and there. I came to love so many aspects of the Catholic family that I came into contact with.
Yet... I also came into contact with the dark underbelly of the Catholic Church. So much hypocrisy, so much self-serving, so much lying to oneself... I'm not going to enumerate any of the negatives here, just suffice it to say that I came to the conclusion that the Catholic Church, at its best, does much more harm to humankind than good. For all of the good works, and there are multitudes, it is rotten to the core.
The Catholic Church has failed largely because it has no will, and no way to study the darker impulses of humankind. And without that study and implementation of increasing the light in humankind, it will always seek out the darkness.
Your recognition of this is what is powerful, Hope. There are layers of perspective in many things. I feel blessed that we as humans are given the power of discernment.
Yes, exactly! Albeit, good discernment requires good standards. In this day and age, that can take some digging.
I agree. In the Catholic Church - as in many souls and institutions - the Devil can be found in at least some of the details.
Yes, Hope, but look up the National Catholic Reporter, a lay run newspaper(ncronline.org) that has called out and investigated the many dark sides of the institutional church. See especially the early artcles from the 80's on clergy sexual abuse by Jason Berry and more recent articles about the money behind the anti-Pope Francis movement ( led by Cardinal Burke and one time U.S. Papal Nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, fueled by money from the Napa Institute's Tim Busch, among others.) There is pushback from progressives within the church but unfortunately the divide in the U.S. church mirrors that of our country, with the bulk of U.S. Bishops in bed with the ultra-right end of the culture war continuum.
The "roots" of the clergy sexual /power abuse can be traced right back through the power inequality lineage laid out by TCinLA below.
David, that same Catholic Hospital you mentioned, is the same one that heavy handedly convinced the single daughter of a friend who was raped in their parking lot to not take a morning after pill and "its the Lord's way" if she were to become pregnant. The Hospital insisted on "counseling" her through her situation. She did become pregnant from that rape and was forced to give birth to a Down's Syndrome baby that she, though wouldn't trade has had to raise alone.
Your Mother's fear of that Hospital was accurate.
"The Lord's way" has given misguided authority to too many for too long. As an ordained, graduate Seminarian I have long been angered by the abuse of Scripture to force specific ideologies upon people. All "in the name of Christ", no less!
Indeed. Christ had/has a good many things to say to hypocrites.
"Beware the hypocrites." Beware the wolves who come to you dressed in sheep's cloth. I tend to shy away from quoting Holy Scripture because so many who do are the self-righteous apostates.
:’-(
My parents divorced when I was 6. My mom was Catholic, my dad Protestant. I alternated churches every other weekend, which left me with a lot of questions about contradictory dogma.
In the early 60s, our next door neighbor who was Catholic, nearly died delivering her second child. Her doctor said complications made it likely that having a third child would kill her and recommended using birth control. She asked permission from the parish priest, who told her she couldn’t have communion if she did. So she didn’t and got pregnant again. When she started miscarrying in the second trimester, she was hemorrhaging and her husband took her to the community hospital. The miscarriage required surgical completion and while she was under anesthesia, her doctor talked to her husband. They agreed on a tubal ligation to avoid further risk. After she recovered, she told the priest what had happened and was denied communion. That was the end of my interest in the Catholic church
Not to mention the Catholic church's history of mishandling the molestation of children by priests... Oh damn, and I said not to mention that whole episode of its history. I will say that Catholic charities do an incredible job in so many ways with refugees and the poor, but they also take in an awful lot of money that is spent very wastefully as well.
I will just throw in--- have you seen the movie Philomena?
such a sad story
John, I cried like a baby at that movie.
Well, David. You just explained some more history. Thank you to you and your partner’s and your mom’s stories. That’s what makes history.
Christine, your comment brought to mind the fact that for many things, like the anti-vaxxers against measles/mumps vaccine, who say, "Nobody gets/dies from measles any more", neglect to admit that's because the vaccines were so effective at eradicating it. Same with small pox, polio, etc. And same with the horrors of back-alley abortions. Young women today can't know the terror many women felt (and not just women who had sex 'outside of marriage'), when they were confronted with a pregnancy they knew they could not carry to term. For many married women, it was even worse, because they were expected to be brood mares, if that's what their husbands' expectations were. Forget that they may have been exhausted, physically and mentally, by tending to several children, usually under the age of 10. I believe one of my family member's mental illness can be traced back to just such a situation, with an abusive husband, to boot.
To those who have pointed out that this is, at the root, about controlling women, you are spot on. These misogynistic bastards know that by controlling a woman's reproductive life, you control her. We already know that part of why career women are paid less than their male counterparts is the red herring that, "you'll drop out to start a family, and all that training and time and effort we put into making you a good employee will be wasted." And of course, when they DO start a family, that heavily dings their retirement savings as well as their real time monetary wellbeing, whether or not they drop out of the work force permanently.
Thank you for sharing this. Before my time, the young woman who would become my mom barely survived a coerced back ally coat hanger abortion. Beginning with and because of that, this Catholic is an unapologetic Pro Choice advocate who, like you, finds the Pro Life movement to be disingenuous.
With much appreciation for sharing your wife's and your education concerning women's health, reproduction issues and abortion, included the horrors that illegal abortion brought to woman and there families -- that includes death.
Thank you for your comments.
NYS displayed bold action in 1970. At that time, Planned Parenthood in Syracuse, under the leadership of of Ellen Fairchild, provided safe, affordable 1st trimester abortion procedures at their outpatient clinic on E GeneseevSt. The focus was on "planned" parenthood and providing quality reproductive health care and services to prevent unintended pregnancies. The clinic was also the primary source of health care for most of the women who received services. Comprehensive care, including counseling and educational services were provided. The delivery of exceptional care to me Is "pro-life" and pro-choice.
East Genesee St PP is where we went. A former Victorian single family house with a large wrap around covered porch. The overall healthcare for my wife was our purpose.
Yes, PPC Syracuse believed in treating the "total package" and were committed to excellence in health care. Ellen Fairchild was a courageous and inspirational servant leader; her husband was a leader in palliative health care. They made the world a better place.
On 1971 I worked at a free clinic in Michigan, giving women phone numbers to get legal abortions in New York, and to get financial support for the trip. Lifesavers.
Thank you for that snapshot of time. I'm a bit younger than you (I was attending Jackson Elementary in 1968) and really appreciate the "I was there" component you've shared.
I completely lack any sort of Christian education (both of my parents left their churches as young adults; my Dad a Methodist and my Mom an Episcopal) and as such really have a "missing link" as to how something such as religion can be so influential in a way of thinking when what is being espoused clearly makes no sense or is contradictory.
As we’ve seen, religion isn’t the only source of ideological fervor.
I was so happy to read that book back then.
A great snap shot of life at that time, David. Thank you for this.
to clarify, William Baird was a leader in the case Eisenstaft v Baird 1972 for promotion contraception for all women, married or not. (Unfortunately his promotion of vaginal foam was somewhat misguided and problematic-allergies etc. and what about male responsibility?) But Massachusetts law was stuck down that forbade the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried women after Griswold V Ct:)
I worked for an abortion clinic asa patient educator, for those that chose the procedure and wanted to get ‘their tubes tied’ after, I had to refer them to the non-sectarian health system, because the Catholic health system wouldn’t accommodate their request. And that wasn’t very many years ago!
such and important story, David. Thank you for posting.