How We Treat the Least of These

From Matt Talbot at Vox-Nova.com comes this story taken from an investigative report produced by the Government of Ireland.

In Ireland, there is a system of Catholic-run schools for the children of the poor, and these schools were the scenes of utter depravity between the 1930s and 1990s.

One victim’s memory of sadistic torture at the hands of a nun:

I was hit for having red, curly hair. You had to have straight hair like Our Lady. This sister was a monster. She’d drag you into the office and take her long cane and just beat you and beat you. She had a bamboo cane four feet long. She’d be frothing at the mouth. She’d say, “You curled your hair last night,” and when I’d say, “Yes, I curled it,” she’d stop. She had castor oil, she would press it into my head, to make my hair straight. My face would be swollen from the beatings, the oil would be running down my face.

This next testimony is especially appalling:

I was an animal lover. There were wild cats and kittens going around starving, and I used to sneak them into the dormitory. i had a kitten. This nun called me one night. She said, “You see that kitten you have there?” She got me out of bed by the hair and brought me down, they had one of those stoves that you put coal in the top. She said, “Take that top off.” I had to go up on my knees. I had to put the cat in there and put the lid on it — and the screams. Then she said, “Go back to bed.” The next morning, she got me out of bed and she made me rake that fire out. I think I was about twelve at the time.

I am used to praying for God’s mercy on the souls of sinners, especially me. I prayed that God may be merciful to the man who paralyzed, and ultimately killed, my late older brother.

There are, however, some offenses that make such prayers very, very hard to offer. For a representative of Mother Church, a person whose job it is not just to teach the faith, but to model in some way God’s loving relationship with his children, to force an animal-loving, born-into-poverty little girl to burn her kitten to death is definitely in that fucking category. It would have been bad enough for the sister to kill the kitten; for her to make the little girl do it…like I say: incandescent rage.

Like others, I am left speechless. I am aware that the Catholic Church has no monopoly on such evil. As a member of the Body of Christ, however, I feel compelled to respond to this. These children and the world desperately need to witness a church leadership publicly admit complicity and seek forgiveness. And we all need to shine a light on this; evil only flourishes in darkness.

Maybe more important, I have to examine my willingness to quite often look the other way, keep quiet, offer excuses or simply not see what I do not want to see, both for myself and others. Yes I must forgive or ask for forgivenness, as impossible as that may often seem. But I cannot forgive, or seek forgiveness for, that which I do not acknowledge.