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And You Thought ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ Was Bad

May 27th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Keeping Faith; Columns on Religion, Religion, Talking Tough; Columns, Uncategorized

 

I wanted to be furious at “Angels and Demons.”

I wanted to be angry because I was tired of the hoary anti-Catholic hokum that Dan Brown and Ron Howard keep spewing to captive audiences. I couldn’t understand why audiences would rather gobble up convoluted conspiracy theories than nibble on a few facts. It isn’t like the Roman Catholic Church was bereft of juicy indignities. (Renaissance Rome, anyone?)

But Brown’s incense-and-intrigue Gothicism was beginning to grate. First, because it inflamed what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” anti-Catholicism; and second, because its slipshod approach to history is one too many Americans accept as Gospel.

I was actually finding myself in sympathy with the tetchy William Donahue of the Catholic League, who accused Ron Howard, director of “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.”

And then the report came out.

klew_priest_abuse

The report is the “Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,” a 2,600-page Gothic saga of depravity, dread and shame that rivals anything Brown could produce. It lays bare 60-years of appalling abuse by priests and nuns on tens of thousands of children placed in their care.

 

The report, nine years in the making,  details a climate of terror “created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment,” rampant in institutions for the destitute and unwanted. These were the places you were sent if you were poor, or your parents were ill. These were places you to which you were dispatched if your mother committed adultery or beat you with a broom. These were the places you were sent to be helped.

These were the places that would erase your shame.

What happened in these foul institutions? According to the report:

 Nuns stripped children naked and beat them with pokers. Children were punched, flogged and set upon by dogs, according to the report. They were routinely forced to perform oral sex. One of the more than 1,000 anonymous victims reported being “tied to a cross and raped whilst others masturbated at the side.” Girls were molested in confessionals – one, even on an altar.

The abuse, which the report characterized as “endemic,” occurred with the collusion of the Irish Department of Education, which the report authors’ condemned as “toothless.” One of the members of the report’s investigating committee resigned, accusing the education department of stonewalling.

The release of the report, which covers a period between the 1930s and the 1990s, was fiercely debated. The Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys, filed a successful lawsuit to suppress the abusers’ names. We don’t know their names But they sound something like this: Monsters. Criminals. Rapists. Hypocrites.

I want to be angry at Dan Brown but his silly contrivances and pallid “illuminati” conspirators seem like cartoon characters compared to the clerics of Ireland. Apologists will haul out their calculators and tell you that the percentage of abusive priests isn’t any worse that garbage collectors, or paralegals or newspaper columnists.

But the people who should speak up loudest about this anathema are not the atheists or the Darwinists or the secular humanists. They are Catholics – specifically Irish-Catholics, like myself – who cannot help but be revolted, incensed and humiliated by priests, brothers and nuns who gutted the childhoods of Irish children and left them unable to tell  whether these men and women of God were angels – or demons.

 

 

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Easter Lilies and the New Frugality

April 6th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Cultural Discontents, Keeping Faith; Columns on Religion, Religion

liliesAt Easter, the lilies appear.

They cluster under the gray, bud-less trees, wrapped in silly, fluorescent foil, their blossoms anomalous and expectant, a bit of an absurdity in New England’s brisk, mucky spring. Like their fat, squat cousins, the pansy, now assembling in the region’s otherwise bare garden centers, their appearance strikes me as ridiculous and hopeful. We need a little color these days, after this long winter of discontent.

Easter is all about hope and new beginnings, as is Passover, the Jewish celebration with which today is so intimately entwined. In Time magazine, I read that Americans need to hit the “reset” button, after a gluttonous spree in which our waistlines expanded while our savings shrank. In Forbes, I read about “America’s New Frugality,” a slogan inspired by the seismic 1 percent drop in consumer spending last December. Personal spending, the magazine reported, rose a “mere” 3.6 percent last year, the smallest gain since 1961.

For most of the last century, hope has meant more. Now it is supposed to mean less.

flatscreentvBut whether a 21st century American, raised in a home twice as big as that of his parents, shepherded around in cars as big as motorboats, suckled on 157 television stations and two dozen electronic gadgets, can rein it in is anybody’s guess.

After all, we’re talking about a country whose average home has three televisions, two DVD players or recorders, 1.16 digital cameras, one desktop computer and two cell phones. This country now spends an extra $200 it never spent before on these electronic gee-gaws, which may explain how per capita consumption in the last 20 years ballooned 45 percent.

fashionshow2007Every year, the average American throws out 68 pounds of textiles. One fashion designer estimates that the typical American woman owns more than $600 worth of clothing she has not worn in the last year. We are similarly imprudent with food. One government funded study found that 14 percent of the garbage we throw out is perfectly good food, in its original packaging, not out of date – perfect, in other words, for a food pantry near you.

Fatally, among those we classify as poor, money is squandered impetuously and foolishly. Some 97 percent of Americans the Census Bureau classifies as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of the poor have air-conditioning, a VCR and a DVD player. Conversely, 61 percent poor families have no books in their homes.

No books.

This year, 18 million people worldwide will die because they don’t have enough food. If you want to feel a little sheepish about your own economic anxieties, read “The Life You Can Save,” by Peter Singer, who argues that doing more to stave off these deaths is well within our capability. One can certainly hope; the World Bank estimates that, because of the economic crisis, an additional 22 children an hour will die of poverty.

Hope, for those people, means something different than being able to maintain a gym membership.

miracle-of-the-hudson-plane-crash_625x3521After the “Miracle on the Hudson” on January 15, 157 fortunate souls who might have lost their life in the icy river, got a second chance. Many of them swore they would make their lives matter. They’d cut back on work. They’d quit smoking. They’d be more patient, more generous, and less selfish. A month later, The New York Times contacted several of the survivors and discovered that those commitments had waned. “It kind of lasts a real brief amount of time,” one survivor said of his vows. “Then the realities of life set in. I think it’s really easy to fall back into those old habits.”

I know what he’s saying. For my Lenten sacrifice, I decided not to speak negatively about anybody for 40 days. That lasted until about noon on Ash Wednesday. I would like to believe I will be more tenacious about my commitment to live frugally, and hew to that charming New England adage, “Use it up; Wear it out; Make it do; or do without,” but I fear that, like most Americans, that’s a resolution that will last, if I’m lucky, only until Pentecost.

Reply: Tracey@traceyosh.com

 

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His Mind is Alive But His Body Isn’t

January 20th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Friends and Family, Keeping Faith; Columns on Religion

WATERBURY, Conn. – Bob Veillette doodled.

In the endless news meetings that held us captive over at the small Connecticut newspaper at which we worked, he scribbled geometric honeycombs on plain white paper, the effect something like a hybrid of M.C. Escher and Sol LeWitt. I used to wonder where his mind went in those abstracted sketches he made. Perhaps to the Shakespeare stanzas he had memorized, or the construction of jazz harmonies he conceived on piano.

The question has become more poignant now, a year and a half after Bob, my managing editor at the Republican-American here, was felled by a massive stroke. The stroke left him fully aware but mute and paralyzed, imprisoned in his own skin. The stroke hit his brain stem, a kind of neural funnel that pours the brain’s impulses into the spinal cord. Disabled, it leaves the mind blisteringly aware and the body utterly lifeless; hence, its name, locked-in-syndrome.

Bob’s Poe-like condition is the same that afflicted Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle, whose book, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has now been made into a film by Julian Schnabel. Bauby’s book was “dictated” by blinking his left eye, a system in which I have become painfully proficient. Bob’s former speech, an animated ramble that he peppered with Shakespearean quotes such as “a good deed in a naughty world” and “with malice toward none,” has been reduced to a series of eye movements. His visitor recites a series of letters, “E, T, A, O, I,” used most frequently in the English language. When the visitor arrives at a letter Bob desires, he raises his cerulean blue eyes.

It is a laborious process, and I have learned to curb my temptation to guess. (“Revolt? Is the word revolt, Bob?”) Often, as I jot a long-arrived-at letter onto a yellow legal pad, I remember the lightning liquidity of Bob’s fingers on the computer keyboard, a movement hauntingly reminiscent of his fingers on his piano keyboard, the place where he felt most at home and most alive.

Bill Evans, Dave McKenna, Art Tatum. These were lions to Bob, jazz geniuses along the lines of Chopin, whom he could not listen to without feeling his own inadequacy. I cannot play a lick of piano, but I was an attentive and appreciative audience member, and Bob accepted with delectation the recordings I copied for him, explaining the delicate points of jazz with an animation and precision that enlightened and engaged me. I had not understood how the “stride piano” of Marian McPartland created a particular cadence before. But I now visualize Bob’s simulation of it whenever I hear her play.

Bob and I are Catholic and have a catechist’s predilection for memorization. But I was no match for Bob’s fluency with Shakespeare, whole passages of which he would recite as nimbly as if it were the Nicene Creed. There were deeper divisions in our approach to our faith. I am an avid, though clumsy reader of theology, a discipline Bob adamantly dismissed. “I question everything else in my life,” he told me. “My faith,” and here he slapped his heart. “My faith is something I never question.” I was irritated at his dismissal, and then envious. I longed for Bob’s ability to make the thorny more basic.

Today, I wonder what Shakespeare snakes through his brain, and how stanzas so dear now, like this one, from Hamlet, reverberate with new resonance:

O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt

thaw and resolve itself into the dew

or that the everlasting had not fix’d

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter.

Self-slaughter, of course, is what many of us presume we would choose over being trussed by our own “mortal coil.”

On the day that I learned of Bob’s stroke, a colleague, dissolving in tears, blurted, “I’d rather he was hit by a truck.” I believe my colleague was thinking of Bob’s restless energy, of his strapping physicality, of his long runs and hypnotizing hours at the piano.

But after a year and a half of Bob’s physical imprisonment, I have learned that the soul is a plucky, persistent beast. In 2005, as the Florida courts were debating removing the feeding tube from comatose Terri Schiavo’s inert body, I remember Bob making an unplugging motion with his arms. “If it were me, zip,” he said.

And then suddenly it was him. And, defiantly, he wanted to live.

When your brain stem has been wounded, surprisingly, there are two things you can still do. You can cry. And you can laugh. In the early days of his illness, when he realized the paralysis was irreversible, Bob cried a lot – long, wounded howls of anguish that would dissolve a stoic. Today, I tell him stories about the newsroom, and he laughs. Oh, his laughs are messy and contorted, but they are gorgeous.

“I bear my cross ruefully, and with grace,” he said. The mind flies to all manner of imaginary heavens, I have learned. Bob’s flies often back to the piano, where he dreams he is playing again, a favorite song we can recite by heart, Johnny Burke’s “Here’s That Rainy Day:”

Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams

Funny, but here’s that rainy day

Here’s that rainy day they told me about

And I laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way

 For more information, visit www.bobveillette.com.

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