RE: Joni and the Catholic church (NJC)

[Sarah]

Mary, I don't have time to respond properly to your post right now, but it deserves a full response, so I'll try to later, and thanks for sending it.

Briefly, there's a book and film called Lamb, can't remember the author. A strange and simple story: Catholic priest in Ireland, works in a boy's home, a home for orphans, where the boys are dreadfully abused by the priests - not in a sexual sense, but oppressed, disrespected, bullied. Maybe sexual too, although that wasn't brought out.

This priest feels very sorry for a young boy who catches his eye as being particularly miserable. The boy suffers from epilepsy and tells the priest that in the moments before his convulsions, he feels happier than anyone could imagine, and that it's like he's dying and going to heaven. And that this is the only time he's ever happy.

The priest decides to run away with him, and off they go, they escape together. This is an act of madness on the priest's part, of course, because he's kidnapping a child, and in Ireland where the church is all powerful (and I think this was set in the 50s, so even more so). And he has no job, the boy's too young to work (as I recall, he's about 12), they have barely a change of clothes, and an older man and young boy stand out together in the Irish countryside. So it's only a matter of time before they get caught. To make things worse, the boy runs out of medication.

As the police close in on them, the boy has an epileptic fit. They are on a beach when it happens. The priest picks the boy up, rushes into the water with him, and holds his head under the water until he drowns.

And so the boy dies in ectasy, as he previously described. Dies and goes to heaven.

The priest then tries to drown himself. He spends several minutes in the water, thrashing around, weeping, wailing, begging god to take him, to help him kill himself. But he can't do it. Too weak or too strong, depending how you look at it, or not good enough, and now a murderer, so god doesn't take him. The police find him and he's led away.

What's my point? That film summed up catholicism for me. The individual good priest and the wicked institution, ostensibly doing a good, charitable job, but doing it miserably, making people's lives a misery, breaking people's spirits, oppressing them. And the idea that maybe death is better than life, than heaven is better than earth, that maybe the best thing you can do to a young innocent boy is to kill him while he's happy, so he'll be happy forever. Like the 9/11 hijackers preferring the next life to this one, and choosing that for others too, just as the priest chose heaven for the boy, and had no right to. And I suppose this is my bottom line - the imposition on people often unable to defend themselves intellectually (because they're usually children) of ideas that are, in my opinion, wholly false or, even if you disagree with me, definitely questionable, and which can have such terrible effects (e.g. Catholic gult - my mother is a Catholic so I know all about that).

Anyway, I'm going on too long, and I'm not sure I'm making sense.

Sarah