It's the 2nd or third night in a row that fall asleep around 10sh and wake up around 2ish. ANd then have a phenomenally hard time getting back to sleep.
I did read some between 2 and 3 AM this morning, and I'm not sure how I stumbled upon the 9th circle group but if any of what I read is true... then.. wtf.
Sometimes I wonder how much of the news that we are exposed to is real and how much is fabricated. I wonder about Charlie Heddo for instance. Sounds like a ploy to get rid of more of our individual freedoms.
Anyways here is a link to an article I found, and what makes me believe it's true is that it does refer to incidents I have heard about. Of course the best way to make people believe what you write is sprinkle it with half truths.
I dunno what to think but whether imagine or real it's very CREEPY!
I wonder what my dad would think. Sadly he's not around anymore for me to ask.
Showing posts with label catholic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label catholic. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Mohawk children mass grave uncovered
More disturbing news uncovered regarding the residential schools. As a like minded individual on the Occupy Canada site said "It can NEVER be denied that a genocide of the Canada's indigenous peoples took place. Canada is a country that was built at the expense of an entire civilization; the whole Western hemisphere was built the same way. When will the common public begin to realize this? "
Sunday, October 16, 2011
More ugly scandals in the closet of the Catholic church
A BBC documentary claims that the Catholic Church in Spain removed in the neighbourhood of 300, 000 babies from their parents. You know the type. The girl is young and unwed and considered to be an unfit parent. She's told her child died and it is then sold to infertile couples, who don't know the baby they get has been kidnapped.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
The Catholic church in Quebec.
My daughter wanted to share this term paper related to History of Post-Confederate Quebec as a comment because she felt it related to my recent many Catholic Church blogs. She wanted to share in particular the part where the church was manipulative over people's lives.
______________________________________________________
The obvious decline in Quebec’s birth rate during the 1960s and following decades was due largely to the release of oral contraceptives. This was a pivotal time for women, as it allowed them to achieve freedom over their sexuality and their bodies. Effects of this newfound freedom were felt throughout Quebecois society with dire consequences for the Catholic Church. While the Catholic Church had played a great role in the lives and especially the sexuality of Catholic spouses during the beginning of the twentieth century, its position quickly became compromised in the latter half of the century. The widespread availability of oral contraceptives had other consequences, notably on birthrates, pre-marital intercourse, marriage and the discussion of sexuality in general.
Prior to the 1960s, methods of contraception ranged from abstinence to limiting intercourse during the woman’s cycle when she was least likely to be fertile. This combined with that fact that the Catholic Church had a staunch reputation against contraception, meant that women had limited control over their pregnancies and family size. They had even less control of their sexuality, since their enjoyment of intercourse was seen as an evil by the Catholic Church. This meant that at times when couples broke from their abstinence, the woman was not permitted to enjoy the act itself. However, women “were generally forgiven, provided that they did not take pleasure in and consented to relations only after unsuccessfully trying to convince their husbands about the merits of abstinence”.[1] It is interesting to note that while the Catholic Church had obvious disdain for contraception, they also viewed the act of intercourse as something un-pure and sinful, for which the couple needed forgiveness in the form of confession. Women then looked for absolution during confession, and most priests, with the exception of a few, gave it, since they felt a “desire to relieve women’s suffering” and many felt sympathetic to the distress they saw from numerous women about their sexual moral dilemma.
Some Catholic clergy argued that if the man withdrew before completing the act of lovemaking, it would not count as a sin, because they had not gone through the full act, there was intention but no completion.[2] While this method allowed couples to receive communion, the Catholic Church preferred couples showed their love and devotion to each other through others ways like “marriage characterized by permanence, fidelity and openness to life”[3] as well as “through virginity or celibacy”[4]. And when couples did decide to engage in “sexual love”[5], the Catholic Church firmly believed that “using the natural rhythms of the body to regulate fertility is a more humanistic way to live procreative responsibility than using chemical or mechanical contraceptives”[6]. The doctrine of the Catholic Church presents us with an interesting dichotomy between the fact that couples should be abstaining from intercourse in general, since making love was a sin, the fact that if couples were participating in the act of lovemaking that they should not be practicing methods of contraception and finally that if they were making love that women should not be enjoying themselves during the act.
This pressure placed undue stress on wives, as “one secularized priest expressed resentment […] ‘women were extremely distraught … I heard a priest say [to one woman] …. [that] when her husband takes her, she only has to say her prayers and she won’t feel pleasure’”[7]. The marital turmoil caused by abstinence also had its effects on Catholic French Canadian couples, who “found themselves in a moral dilemma, torn between the physical desire that they felt for one another, their desire to limit the size of their families, and their desire to live in a proper Christian way”[8]. This moral dilemma often led to sour marriages, since the constant sexual conflict did not help the mental state of couples, especially with priests breathing down their necks. The amount of sexual repression that Catholic couples were subjected to before the 1960s quickly led the Catholic Church become associated with negativity in relation to their interference in marriages and sexuality. Couples essentially ended up having to make the choice of “God over love or love over God”[9], where the first choice resulted in eternal conflict within the marriage and the second choice resulted in confession of sins to receive absolution from the Priest, and his endless hounding in face of their constant sinning.
The release of the oral contraceptive in the 1960s had a number of effects on Quebecois society. First, women now had the option of using this contraceptive to limit their family size without resorting to abstinence. Secondly, the Catholic Church rejected this new form of contraception, which placed them in the way of their followers’ ability to control their own sex lives. A great number of priests had hoped the Vatican Council of 1962 would accept the oral contraceptive, on the grounds that it would relieve them of their task of comforting countless women who wanted to limit their family size[10]. As aforementioned, previous to oral contraceptives, some methods did exist to control family size, including abstinence and the rhythm method. While practicing the rhythm method was did not always guarantee to prevent pregnancies, they did limit the number of pregnancies, and this had a modest effect on the birthrate. It was even recognized that among North American Catholics the “number of children per family among Catholics of the middle and comfortable classes is little more than half the average that obtained the families of their parents”[11]. This illustrates that while limiting family size and preventing pregnancies were not most effective previous to the oral contraceptive, the methods available were already a start in the right direction, when considering birth statistics.
According to Gervais and Gauvreau’s data, in Canada, from 1876 to 1886, the average number of children per married woman was 6.4, while 50 years later, from 1926-1931, it was 3.6[12]. In the span of 50 years, the average family size had already decreased by about half. Thus while older methods of contraception may not have been at their most effective, they still helped diminish the birthrate. Of course, since they were ineffective at preventing all unwanted pregnancies, many women still became pregnant, and in fact “the overall percentage of brides who were pregnant at marriage increased through the 1950s, reached a peak in the late 1960s, and only began to decrease among women married in the 1970s”[13]. Though birth control was available in Canada starting in the 1960s, the number of pregnant brides was still high, because not all women were educated enough to receive instructions about it, and the overall amount of sexual relations occurring in this decade rose dramatically, thanks to the pill itself.[14] Since women now believed sex to be safe, the incidences of women having intercourse increased, especially those who began having premarital sex. However, according to Cook, while women began having sex before and outside of marriage, some claimed not to have started using the pill until they were in a serious sexual relationship. [15] This meant that if they had intercourse with a man and were not in a relationship with them, they were more likely to get pregnant, because they were not in fact using the pill at that moment.
The pill also brought the concept of contraception into the medical sphere, since women had to visit a physician to get them. Thus contraception became less of a problem for the priesthood and a practice instead regulated by the medical profession. It “allowed physicians relatively painlessly to supplant priests as the new, less intrusive social gatekeepers of sexuality and reproduction in Quebec”[16]. Before the pill, no medical methods had been available and physicians had basically been respondents, there to treat the woman in the occurrence of “a miscarriage, an abortion or a birth”[17]. Abortions were illegal, but many women resorted to them in the face of their ever expanding family size. These abortions were done illegally, with “disastrous consequences when performed with makeshift devices”[18], and doctors were called onto the scene to clean things up afterwards, though they could not “finish illegal abortions themselves”[19] they were “expected to do what they could to save a patient”[20]. Thus they did have some part of pregnant women’s lives, but it was mostly when the pregnancy was already over, or for actual medical emergencies during the pregnancy. This clearly changed when women procured the pill by prescription from physicians, though physicians weren’t there to discuss marital problems, family size or contraception. Instead, they were there to provide a treatment for “a means of controlling irregular menstrual cycles”[21], which was very different from the so called responsibility of priests towards marital issues of family limitation.
When the Catholic Church decided that they would oppose contraception, it appeared to be on grounds of women belong to the domestic sphere. Since the oral contraceptive allowed for greater control over the number of children a couple would have, some Catholic clergy argued that it would “weaken women’s commitment to an ideal of domesticity founded upon maternity and this, in a larger sense, would erode one of the central pillars of Quebec’s laboriously constructed post-war synthesis of democracy and authority, that is, the close identification of married women with family roles.”[22] The idea that the women’s sphere was the home and the private, domestic life, had already been struggling in the advent of World War II, when many women went to work because of a shortage of men. Easier, readily available contraception could be coupled with this newfound independence and project women from the house into the workplace, since they were not subject to constant pregnancies, taking care of children and managing the household. The pill meant that women could finally have some measure of control over their lives and “take the more equal status that the assertion of the right to sexual pleasure and greater freedom from constant maternity conferred to argue for greater equality and independence in the wider public sphere”[23]. Not everyone was content with this jump women were about to make, including some physicians that were treating them during the release of the birth control. As one said “birth control had evolved from a moral issue involving husbands to a women’s decision exclusively and thus a source of concern for husbands”[24], making it clear that physicians, as men, may have been threatened by the idea of the pill.
In Quebec, conservatives were trying to keep women in the home, in the domestic sphere and “frequently evoked the image of women attending to motherhood and household in the hope of creating a psychological placebo that would deflect married women away from seeking fulfillment through economic equality in work roles”[25]. They were attempting to convey the image that women belonged in the home, and should return there to take care of their family and children. There were others who were of a different opinion, who regarded women’s roles with the potential “of wife, mother, widow, and single person, which offered the possibility of a variety of activities and careers”[26]. The pill came at a time when the ideas of a purely women sphere were becoming eroded, and the chance for women to migrate into the men’s sphere, albeit difficult and subject to many obstacles, was starting to be possible and not at all uncommon. It was a positive development for women who wanted to be single or even married without the pressures of motherhood.
Prior to the 1960s, methods of contraception ranged from abstinence to limiting intercourse during the woman’s cycle when she was least likely to be fertile. This combined with that fact that the Catholic Church had a staunch reputation against contraception, meant that women had limited control over their pregnancies and family size. They had even less control of their sexuality, since their enjoyment of intercourse was seen as an evil by the Catholic Church. This meant that at times when couples broke from their abstinence, the woman was not permitted to enjoy the act itself. However, women “were generally forgiven, provided that they did not take pleasure in and consented to relations only after unsuccessfully trying to convince their husbands about the merits of abstinence”.[1] It is interesting to note that while the Catholic Church had obvious disdain for contraception, they also viewed the act of intercourse as something un-pure and sinful, for which the couple needed forgiveness in the form of confession. Women then looked for absolution during confession, and most priests, with the exception of a few, gave it, since they felt a “desire to relieve women’s suffering” and many felt sympathetic to the distress they saw from numerous women about their sexual moral dilemma.
Some Catholic clergy argued that if the man withdrew before completing the act of lovemaking, it would not count as a sin, because they had not gone through the full act, there was intention but no completion.[2] While this method allowed couples to receive communion, the Catholic Church preferred couples showed their love and devotion to each other through others ways like “marriage characterized by permanence, fidelity and openness to life”[3] as well as “through virginity or celibacy”[4]. And when couples did decide to engage in “sexual love”[5], the Catholic Church firmly believed that “using the natural rhythms of the body to regulate fertility is a more humanistic way to live procreative responsibility than using chemical or mechanical contraceptives”[6]. The doctrine of the Catholic Church presents us with an interesting dichotomy between the fact that couples should be abstaining from intercourse in general, since making love was a sin, the fact that if couples were participating in the act of lovemaking that they should not be practicing methods of contraception and finally that if they were making love that women should not be enjoying themselves during the act.
This pressure placed undue stress on wives, as “one secularized priest expressed resentment […] ‘women were extremely distraught … I heard a priest say [to one woman] …. [that] when her husband takes her, she only has to say her prayers and she won’t feel pleasure’”[7]. The marital turmoil caused by abstinence also had its effects on Catholic French Canadian couples, who “found themselves in a moral dilemma, torn between the physical desire that they felt for one another, their desire to limit the size of their families, and their desire to live in a proper Christian way”[8]. This moral dilemma often led to sour marriages, since the constant sexual conflict did not help the mental state of couples, especially with priests breathing down their necks. The amount of sexual repression that Catholic couples were subjected to before the 1960s quickly led the Catholic Church become associated with negativity in relation to their interference in marriages and sexuality. Couples essentially ended up having to make the choice of “God over love or love over God”[9], where the first choice resulted in eternal conflict within the marriage and the second choice resulted in confession of sins to receive absolution from the Priest, and his endless hounding in face of their constant sinning.
The release of the oral contraceptive in the 1960s had a number of effects on Quebecois society. First, women now had the option of using this contraceptive to limit their family size without resorting to abstinence. Secondly, the Catholic Church rejected this new form of contraception, which placed them in the way of their followers’ ability to control their own sex lives. A great number of priests had hoped the Vatican Council of 1962 would accept the oral contraceptive, on the grounds that it would relieve them of their task of comforting countless women who wanted to limit their family size[10]. As aforementioned, previous to oral contraceptives, some methods did exist to control family size, including abstinence and the rhythm method. While practicing the rhythm method was did not always guarantee to prevent pregnancies, they did limit the number of pregnancies, and this had a modest effect on the birthrate. It was even recognized that among North American Catholics the “number of children per family among Catholics of the middle and comfortable classes is little more than half the average that obtained the families of their parents”[11]. This illustrates that while limiting family size and preventing pregnancies were not most effective previous to the oral contraceptive, the methods available were already a start in the right direction, when considering birth statistics.
According to Gervais and Gauvreau’s data, in Canada, from 1876 to 1886, the average number of children per married woman was 6.4, while 50 years later, from 1926-1931, it was 3.6[12]. In the span of 50 years, the average family size had already decreased by about half. Thus while older methods of contraception may not have been at their most effective, they still helped diminish the birthrate. Of course, since they were ineffective at preventing all unwanted pregnancies, many women still became pregnant, and in fact “the overall percentage of brides who were pregnant at marriage increased through the 1950s, reached a peak in the late 1960s, and only began to decrease among women married in the 1970s”[13]. Though birth control was available in Canada starting in the 1960s, the number of pregnant brides was still high, because not all women were educated enough to receive instructions about it, and the overall amount of sexual relations occurring in this decade rose dramatically, thanks to the pill itself.[14] Since women now believed sex to be safe, the incidences of women having intercourse increased, especially those who began having premarital sex. However, according to Cook, while women began having sex before and outside of marriage, some claimed not to have started using the pill until they were in a serious sexual relationship. [15] This meant that if they had intercourse with a man and were not in a relationship with them, they were more likely to get pregnant, because they were not in fact using the pill at that moment.
The pill also brought the concept of contraception into the medical sphere, since women had to visit a physician to get them. Thus contraception became less of a problem for the priesthood and a practice instead regulated by the medical profession. It “allowed physicians relatively painlessly to supplant priests as the new, less intrusive social gatekeepers of sexuality and reproduction in Quebec”[16]. Before the pill, no medical methods had been available and physicians had basically been respondents, there to treat the woman in the occurrence of “a miscarriage, an abortion or a birth”[17]. Abortions were illegal, but many women resorted to them in the face of their ever expanding family size. These abortions were done illegally, with “disastrous consequences when performed with makeshift devices”[18], and doctors were called onto the scene to clean things up afterwards, though they could not “finish illegal abortions themselves”[19] they were “expected to do what they could to save a patient”[20]. Thus they did have some part of pregnant women’s lives, but it was mostly when the pregnancy was already over, or for actual medical emergencies during the pregnancy. This clearly changed when women procured the pill by prescription from physicians, though physicians weren’t there to discuss marital problems, family size or contraception. Instead, they were there to provide a treatment for “a means of controlling irregular menstrual cycles”[21], which was very different from the so called responsibility of priests towards marital issues of family limitation.
When the Catholic Church decided that they would oppose contraception, it appeared to be on grounds of women belong to the domestic sphere. Since the oral contraceptive allowed for greater control over the number of children a couple would have, some Catholic clergy argued that it would “weaken women’s commitment to an ideal of domesticity founded upon maternity and this, in a larger sense, would erode one of the central pillars of Quebec’s laboriously constructed post-war synthesis of democracy and authority, that is, the close identification of married women with family roles.”[22] The idea that the women’s sphere was the home and the private, domestic life, had already been struggling in the advent of World War II, when many women went to work because of a shortage of men. Easier, readily available contraception could be coupled with this newfound independence and project women from the house into the workplace, since they were not subject to constant pregnancies, taking care of children and managing the household. The pill meant that women could finally have some measure of control over their lives and “take the more equal status that the assertion of the right to sexual pleasure and greater freedom from constant maternity conferred to argue for greater equality and independence in the wider public sphere”[23]. Not everyone was content with this jump women were about to make, including some physicians that were treating them during the release of the birth control. As one said “birth control had evolved from a moral issue involving husbands to a women’s decision exclusively and thus a source of concern for husbands”[24], making it clear that physicians, as men, may have been threatened by the idea of the pill.
In Quebec, conservatives were trying to keep women in the home, in the domestic sphere and “frequently evoked the image of women attending to motherhood and household in the hope of creating a psychological placebo that would deflect married women away from seeking fulfillment through economic equality in work roles”[25]. They were attempting to convey the image that women belonged in the home, and should return there to take care of their family and children. There were others who were of a different opinion, who regarded women’s roles with the potential “of wife, mother, widow, and single person, which offered the possibility of a variety of activities and careers”[26]. The pill came at a time when the ideas of a purely women sphere were becoming eroded, and the chance for women to migrate into the men’s sphere, albeit difficult and subject to many obstacles, was starting to be possible and not at all uncommon. It was a positive development for women who wanted to be single or even married without the pressures of motherhood.
It is clear that with the widespread availability of new methods of contraception, the character of Quebecois society was permanently changed and many of these changes can still be felt today. The influence of the Catholic Church waned, due in part to its loss of authority over sexual relations and its opposition to the new oral contraception. It was also an important stage for women on the road to independence and equality in a patriarchal culture.
Written by Samantha Orianne-Walker
Bibliography
Andrews, Gilly, ed. Women’s Sexual Health. Edinburgh: Elsevier Ltd, 2005
Andrews, Gilly, ed. Women’s Sexual Health. Edinburgh: Elsevier Ltd, 2005
Beaujot, Roderic and Don Kerr. The Changing Face of Canada: Essential Readings in Population. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc, 2007.
Cook, Hera. The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex & Contraception 1800-1975. New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 2004.
Dickenson, John and Brian Young. A short history of Quebec. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
Gauvreau, Michael. The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
Cook, Hera. The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex & Contraception 1800-1975. New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 2004.
Dickenson, John and Brian Young. A short history of Quebec. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
Gauvreau, Michael. The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
Gervais, Diane and Danielle Gauvreau. “Women, Priests and Physicians: Family Limitation in Quebec, 1940-1970.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 293-314.
Szreter, Simon, Nye, Robert A. and Frans van Poppel. “Fertility and Contraception during the Demographic Transition: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 141-154.
Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Catholics and Contraception. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Szreter, Simon, Nye, Robert A. and Frans van Poppel. “Fertility and Contraception during the Demographic Transition: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 141-154.
Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Catholics and Contraception. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004.
[1] Roderic Beaujot and Don Kerr, The Changing Face of Canada: Essential Readings in Population (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press Inc, 2007), 63.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Gilly Andrews, ed, Women’s Sexual Health (Edinburgh: Elsevier Ltd, 2005), 133.
[4] Ibid.
[5] George Weigel, The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explained (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 106.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Diane Gervais and Danielle Gauvreau, “Women, Priests and Physicians: Family Limitation in Quebec, 1940-1970.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 304.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, 307.
[10]Ibid, 306.
[11] Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), 17.
[12] Diane Gervais and Danielle Gauvreau, “Women, Priests and Physicians: Family Limitation in Quebec, 1940-1970” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 295.
[13] Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception (New York:Oxford University Press Inc, 2004), 329.
[14] Ibid, 333.
[15] Ibid, 334.
[16] Simon Szreter, Robert A. Nye and Frans van Poppel, “Fertility and Contraception during the Demographi Transition: Qualitative and Quantitative Approach”, Journal Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 152.
[17] Diane Gervais and Danielle Gauvreau, “Women, Priests and Physicians: Family Limitation in Quebec, 1940-1970” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 309.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid, 311.
[22] Micheal Gauvreau, The Catholic origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 204.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Diane Gervais and Danielle Gauvreau, “Women, Priests and Physicians: Family Limitation in Quebec, 1940-1970” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 312.
[25] Micheal Gauvreau, The Catholic origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 206.
[26] Ibid, 208.
Maria hit Newfoundland with a whimper
For all the hype, this particular Hurricane didn't have as much hot air as we were led to believe. This isn't a bad thing, the folks in Newfoundland got some rain and wind but no major wind storm or loss of power. No one is complaining that Maria was a less intense!
Also I want to add a note to my previous entry, where I finish off by saying "religion". One friend asked if I didn't mean the Catholic religion. No I didn't mean just them. But saying religion is wrong too. My dad would have called me on it as well. It's not religion, it's not even Christian religions. I think those I want to blame are those particular denominations who felt that in order to save those "savage souls" they also had to destroy who these people were, their societies and their way of life. Those denominations are in part the ones who are being banished but they probably aren't the only ones.
I really have no use for organized religion and it probably comes out a great deal in my criticism. I'm part of a larger group of Quebecois who were born at the end of the quiet revolution and for whom religion and in particular the Catholic Church is like an enemy. The Catholic Church controlled so many aspects of the Quebecois life in the past that my generation grew up with a profound distrust of religious institutions.
For me this is despite the fact my mom taught in the Catholic School board, she had several friends who were priests and the fact my step-dad was a Catholic priest before marrying my mom. My aunt also taught in Catholic school board for her entire career and had several friends that were nuns. I spent more time with clergy as a child then with children. [In generally I spent more time with adults then with children as a child].
As far as I can remember I've not had a bad experience with nuns or priests, I've never had fear of them and as it goes I've never met a nun that didn't like me! Including the Organic Chemistry teacher that would find me in the cafeteria after I'd skip her class, to tell me what we covered in class and that her door was always open if I needed help!!!
To get back to my point - no one should be forced or pushed into a faith. If a particular religion works for you and matches your morals and beliefs then great, a match made in heaven! However no one should be forced to change who they are to fit within the confines of a particular religion.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
As of September 18th
PUBLIC BANISHMENT ORDER: Issued against the Corporations known as the Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Church, and United Church of Canada
This is a step towards healing in Native Communities. They have undoubtedly been hit the hardest by sexual and physical abuse perpetrated by the clergy of the said churches over at least a century. The reason I say this is because native children were put into residential schools run by the clergy. These poor children had nowhere to go during the entirety of their formative years. I could go on about things clergy did which amount in some cases to genocide.
This is a positive step and I hope that it will encourage healing of the various communities the hardest hit by "religion".
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Catholic church sex abuse victims want ICC prosecutions
Article on Al Jazeera says that victims want the pope and 3 others prosecuted for crimes against humanity. I hope they do take it to court. The sexual crimes of the Catholic church have been going on for too long and it's about time that they be held accountable.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
It's about time the Catholic Church be held accountable
Finally someone took it to the international court. Finally the Catholic church may actually be held accountable for it's pervasive tolerance of priests who abuse children. I'm not holding my breath, but this is a good first step. At least maybe now they won't spend all their time trying to hide child molesters amidst their ranks by moving them around from parish to parish and hiding their bad deeds.
The Catholic Church has to be held accountable for the damage it's pedophile priests have done to it's image and the harm it has done to generations of Catholic children.
If I remember correctly my class was Canadian Literature but it was also coming of age stories. Another book included Sheila Watson's "The Double Hook" and a 4rth fiction which I cannot remember but will bug me for hours.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Too Casual for the Catholic Church
Not that I disagree with this article but who is the Catholic church kidding? They want to tell people how to run their lives and they can't even control what priests do?
On my last blog about the Catholic church, a friend, who's Greek Orthodox pointed out that it doesn't make sense that Catholic Priests cannot marry, unlike in her form of Christianity. I'm am in total agreement with this and couldn't have said it better.
I'm sure if priests could marry there would have been a lot less pedophiles joining the church and married men with children do not take too kindly to others who abuse children, I'm sure the rampant paedophilia wouldn't have been so spread and kept hidden for so long.
To get back to the article, I'm from a generation who's felt casual was the way to go. I work for a company with no dress code, and love it because it gives me the option of how I chose my wardrobe. However I do agree that it sucks that there is no where to dress up anymore. Most occasions now people can and will go casual.
On my last blog about the Catholic church, a friend, who's Greek Orthodox pointed out that it doesn't make sense that Catholic Priests cannot marry, unlike in her form of Christianity. I'm am in total agreement with this and couldn't have said it better.
I'm sure if priests could marry there would have been a lot less pedophiles joining the church and married men with children do not take too kindly to others who abuse children, I'm sure the rampant paedophilia wouldn't have been so spread and kept hidden for so long.
To get back to the article, I'm from a generation who's felt casual was the way to go. I work for a company with no dress code, and love it because it gives me the option of how I chose my wardrobe. However I do agree that it sucks that there is no where to dress up anymore. Most occasions now people can and will go casual.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Vatican still in heavy denial
Personally I don't think the Catholic church has any credibility left. The fact that priests and higher ups in the Catholic church were able to abuse children, in particular boys is appalling. The fact that the catholic church has been denying it for years is downright disgusting.
The Nile isn't just a river in Egypt!!! The worst part is that it wasn't just one lone priest in ONE country. Catholic priest sex scandals have popped up on several continents and I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. A large percentage of people affected would rather never talk about it again.
The only way to make restitution and to have any semblance of belief is to apologize. Trying to hide what happened makes it worse. Nothing can be worse then telling someone who has been raped, molested and/or physically abused, that nothing happened.
Not only does the person feel enormous amounts of guilt, and sometimes also feel responsible for their own misfortune, but saying it never happened is like removing any kind of right to having any kind of emotion for suffering as a child in the hands of morally bankrupt deviants who get to say whether we go to heaven or hell?
If the Catholic Church does not start being transparent instead of secretive and repentant instead of defiant, there will not be much of a church to talk about. Personally if I was still a staunch catholic I would not let my children ANYWHERE near a priest. In fact I'd worry about any person who was too interested in my children. I'd wonder what kind of ulterior motive they might have.
There are some Catholics that have had it with the Vatican as well. I can understand personally I was six when I decided that there were more hypocrites, liar and cheaters then real pious Catholics. It was all about saying you were a good Catholic and concealing all the immoral things you did in the background when it wasn't Sunday.
The Nile isn't just a river in Egypt!!! The worst part is that it wasn't just one lone priest in ONE country. Catholic priest sex scandals have popped up on several continents and I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. A large percentage of people affected would rather never talk about it again.
The only way to make restitution and to have any semblance of belief is to apologize. Trying to hide what happened makes it worse. Nothing can be worse then telling someone who has been raped, molested and/or physically abused, that nothing happened.
Not only does the person feel enormous amounts of guilt, and sometimes also feel responsible for their own misfortune, but saying it never happened is like removing any kind of right to having any kind of emotion for suffering as a child in the hands of morally bankrupt deviants who get to say whether we go to heaven or hell?
If the Catholic Church does not start being transparent instead of secretive and repentant instead of defiant, there will not be much of a church to talk about. Personally if I was still a staunch catholic I would not let my children ANYWHERE near a priest. In fact I'd worry about any person who was too interested in my children. I'd wonder what kind of ulterior motive they might have.
There are some Catholics that have had it with the Vatican as well. I can understand personally I was six when I decided that there were more hypocrites, liar and cheaters then real pious Catholics. It was all about saying you were a good Catholic and concealing all the immoral things you did in the background when it wasn't Sunday.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The Catholic church and Douche-Bags.....
Interesting article on the Catholic church, about documents that make it clear that the Catholic church knew some priests were molesting children and kept it hidden. I don't get that the priests were kept and just moved around from parish to parish exposing more and more children to these pedophiles. My understanding was that priests should be celibate and abstain from sexual relations.
Of course not all priests are bad. My step-dad was a Catholic priest before he married my mom in 1972, and he was just a really good man. With the qualities you'd hope to find in a priest. I was really lucky to have him as my father, he was the best father a girl could wish for and I wish he was still around...
I watched a Dennis Leary special and giggled myself silly. Douche-bags everywhere he says, and starts by making fun of the pope in particular and the Catholic church in general.
My favorite Dennis Leary skit though has to be the one called "My kids". After a bad week, that skit never gets old. Especially "Dad, dad dad dad dad dad dad daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad, dad .." "WHAT" "Can I have a cookie?"
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Catholic Church should clean house
I was born into a French Canadian Catholic family and by age 6 I'd chosen to not be a Catholic because I really didn't like how hypocritical Catholic adults could be. I mean the bible tells us to do onto others as we would like others to do onto us. However I saw more of a "Do as I say and not as I do". I also saw too much 'sinning' done on a regular basis, and it was all good so long as you confess to your sins and atone for them. Then start all over again the next week.
Obviously not everyone in the Catholic church is a serial sinning hypocrite, but there were enough who were to turn me off the Catholic religion by age 6. I'm just as turned off now by the statements made by the Vatican in regards to 'gossip' about sexual abuse by priests.
Just because everything was done hush hush and no one talked about it back then does not make it any less bad. Anyone who was sexual abused, raped or molested, whether as a child or an adult, knows that it leaves PERMANENT SCARS and some unfortunately identify with their abuser and perpetuate the circle by abusing others around them. Trying to tell someone who was abused or molested that it never happened keeps the deep seating guilt and shame alive and spoils their lives. Haven't they suffered enough? Can't those who abused at least take responsibility for their actions?
What the Vatican and Catholic church SHOULD be doing is cleaning house. ANY PRIEST who has been accused of molesting children should be retired from being a priest. If this had been done years ago as they were found AND NOT RELOCATED TO other places so they could continue to ruin lives, they wouldn't be trying so hard right now to pretend it never happened. Also trying to sweep what happened under the carpet is asinine. The people who were abused need an apology and not be told "This is vicious gossip". Usually when there is smoke there is fire. Denial isn't just a river in Egypt. Benedict should step down for his cover ups of abuse in the past
And what about the residential schools in Canada for Native Americans, who were taken as children from their family and beaten/molested/abused into becoming little white people clones. Beaten for talking their language or being native? The reason we have so many problems on our reservations have more to do with the CHRISTIAN priests abusing Native people then any other intervention the white men did.
Personally I think Jesus would be horrified with all that has transpired and wouldn't want to be associated at all with the Catholic church. How can a priest who has abused little boys think he can be a SPIRITUAL LEADERS for others? I would think one should show by example ....
As for my current beliefs, it's summed up in one phrase "And it harm none, do what thou wilt". Meaning that the first rule is to not HARM anyone or anything, including pets & other animals, the environment, mother earth and of course ourselves. Jesus would have no problem with my beliefs, even if I'm not a "Christian".
Obviously not everyone in the Catholic church is a serial sinning hypocrite, but there were enough who were to turn me off the Catholic religion by age 6. I'm just as turned off now by the statements made by the Vatican in regards to 'gossip' about sexual abuse by priests.
Just because everything was done hush hush and no one talked about it back then does not make it any less bad. Anyone who was sexual abused, raped or molested, whether as a child or an adult, knows that it leaves PERMANENT SCARS and some unfortunately identify with their abuser and perpetuate the circle by abusing others around them. Trying to tell someone who was abused or molested that it never happened keeps the deep seating guilt and shame alive and spoils their lives. Haven't they suffered enough? Can't those who abused at least take responsibility for their actions?
What the Vatican and Catholic church SHOULD be doing is cleaning house. ANY PRIEST who has been accused of molesting children should be retired from being a priest. If this had been done years ago as they were found AND NOT RELOCATED TO other places so they could continue to ruin lives, they wouldn't be trying so hard right now to pretend it never happened. Also trying to sweep what happened under the carpet is asinine. The people who were abused need an apology and not be told "This is vicious gossip". Usually when there is smoke there is fire. Denial isn't just a river in Egypt. Benedict should step down for his cover ups of abuse in the past
And what about the residential schools in Canada for Native Americans, who were taken as children from their family and beaten/molested/abused into becoming little white people clones. Beaten for talking their language or being native? The reason we have so many problems on our reservations have more to do with the CHRISTIAN priests abusing Native people then any other intervention the white men did.
Personally I think Jesus would be horrified with all that has transpired and wouldn't want to be associated at all with the Catholic church. How can a priest who has abused little boys think he can be a SPIRITUAL LEADERS for others? I would think one should show by example ....
As for my current beliefs, it's summed up in one phrase "And it harm none, do what thou wilt". Meaning that the first rule is to not HARM anyone or anything, including pets & other animals, the environment, mother earth and of course ourselves. Jesus would have no problem with my beliefs, even if I'm not a "Christian".
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