chooling is adept at rooting out individuality and enforcing compliance. In his book, Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky writes:
In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
This filtering process begins very early in a child’s schooling as conformity is rewarded and divergence is punished.
PUBLIC SCHOOLING BREEDS OBEDIENCE
Most of us played this game as schoolchildren. We know the rules. The kids who raise their hands, color in the lines, and obey succeed; the kids who challenge the rules struggle. The problem now is that the rules are extending beyond the classroom. Parents are increasingly required to obey, to conform to a school’s demands even if they believe such orders may not be appropriate for their child.
Pope Francis, you and I have never met; but unless you want the Catholic Church to ultimately get sued out of existence, from the huge numbers of cases like this ready to break, you have got to acknowledge that there is an institutional cultural illness in the Church, which has to be rooted out like a cancer.
Priests should NEVER believe that their positions in the hierarchy EVER give them the right to abuse children, period, end of discussion.
Now, if you know your church's history, you know that there was a time when priests could marry, as stated in the following: The Church was a thousand years old before it definitively took a stand in favor of celibacy in the twelfth century at the Second Lateran Council held in 1139, when a rule was approved forbidding priests to marry. In 1563, the Council of Trent reaffirmed the tradition of celibacy.
Your Holiness, I would like to politely point out that since that time, this policy has not worked out very well, either for the priests who were doing the abusing, or the children abused; in fact, one could, reasonably, characterise this policy as a multi-generational epic fail.
The big difference, in the 21st century, is that those children who were abused now have a voice against those they accuse of doing this foul deed, in a court of law.
But if we are going to stop this practice, for future generations, I would suggest that the Church only recruit future priests from men who are married, and have happy, thriving, emotionally healthy wives and kids. Start elevating women in your communities, and give them voices which they still do not have, even in this part of the 21st century.
You are welcome, Pope Francis!!
Also, there is a companion piece from globalresearch.ca: The Conviction that dare not speak its name: the Conviction of Cardinal George Pell