Department Of Not The Kind Of Story You Want To Start Your Day With
Sub-Department Of It’s Not “All In The Past”
( image from Newsweek story 9-18-19,
Illinois Opens 24 Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Cases That Were Never Investigated )
Dateline: last Wednesday, 6 AM, scrolling through LA Times headlines. The words Orange County, where moiself was born and lived most of my first 18 years, caught my eye; also, I thought I recognized the name of the reporter. [1] The article, by LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, is about the first big story Arellano covered as a cub reporter, that of a notorious Catholic priest and sexual abuser.
Father Eleuterio Ramos was a priest in Orange and LA Counties in the 1970s and 1980s. Ramos was transferred from parish to parish by church officials who knew about Ramo’s history of molesting (in Ramos’s own words, “at least” 25) boys, but – surprise! – never notified the police or removed him from the priesthood. Here is the entry (my emphases) for Ramos on bishopaccountability.org, a website which has documented the abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church since 2003.
“Full name Eleuterio Victor Al Ramos, Jr. Priest of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles CA, then the Diocese of Orange when in was created in 1976. In and out of treatment, kept in ministry. Placed on leave in 1985. Sent to a Tijuana Mexico parish in 1985 and put in charge of a children’s ministry. Removed in 1991. Died in 2004. Personnel file released in 1/2013. Wrongful death suit filed in 3/2017 vs the Orange and L.A. dioceses by the widow of an alleged victim who died by suicide in 2015….The victim was altar boy who met Ramos at age 10.”
The story of Ramos, and of what happened to his victims and their attempts to bring him to justice, haunts Arellano to this day, both as a reporter and as a human being.
“Ramos has cast such a specter over me that when I received a text from attorney John Manly that his firm had reached a large settlement in a clerical sex abuse case, I immediately guessed who the perpetrator was.
The plaintiff alleged that Ramos…molested him…during the 1970s and 1980s. Church leaders…did nothing to stop the abuse, despite repeated warnings from parishioners, staff and even a fellow priest, the lawsuit alleged.
The $10 million settlement…requires the Archdiocese of Los Angeles…to pay $500,000. The Orange diocese will cover the other $9.5 million….
… the plaintiff declined to speak to me. The Times does not identify victims of sexual abuse without their consent.
In a statement, spokesperson Jarryd Gonzales said that the diocese ‘deeply regrets any past incidences of sexual abuse,’ adding that ‘the allegations in this case date back more than 40 years and do not reflect the Diocese of Orange as it stands today.’ “
( excerpts from Arellano’s column, “A pedophile priest. A $10-million payout. A monster who won’t leave my life.” ( LA times, 1-25-24 )
Moiself is genuinely sorry that Arellano (and other reporters who’ve worked on the thousands of priest sexual abuse stories) continues to be haunted by the story he covered. What haunts me is the WTF? WTF?!?!? quote from that church spokesperson – about how the abuse “do not reflect what the diocese is today.” Okay, it doesn’t haunt me so much as it frosts my butt to think that people might read that obscene muddling statement and say, “Oh, well, yes, that was then and this is now.” It’s a line I’ve read about from so many other Catholic church spokes-folks I figure it must be in the first chapter of their, “How to Handle Those Pesky Sex Abuse Settlements” handbook:
“The allegations in this case date back more than ___years and do not reflect the Diocese of ____ as it stands today.”
WRONG. Excusez-moi, Mr. Spokesperson, but the abuse does in fact reflect what the diocese – what the Catholic church – is today. Of course it does. The whole point of your religion is that the past lives in the present, and that the stories and protocols of the past determine the future.
Yep, this shill spokesdude wants us to believe that this darned abuse thing is “all in the past.” Um, hello, the Catholic Church is *all about* the past! Roman Catholicism is, as all Christian religions are, based on stories and mythologies from Iron Age, pre-scientific cultures, and as such, it struggles desperately to concoct and maintain its relevancy in the present and future. The church clings to ancient legends and scriptures and bizarre rituals (e.g. the metaphorical cannibalism of the rite of communion), which they sometimes try to pass off as symbolic or allegorical despite their own theologies of literalism (i.e. transubstantiation). [2]
Their theologies and the power they hold over adherents come from the past; they continue to live in the past, and look how they react when their past catches up to them?
The Catholic church’s leaders have, for over a millennia, been appointed by a cabal of their brothers who claim to be voting in response to the spirit of their god. This spirit led them to elect centuries of buffoons and also downright evil men, including but not limited to Pope Stephen VI who ordered his deceased predecessor exhumed and his fingers cut off; Pope John XII, whose worldly ways included gambling, incest, murder (he himself was killed by the man who caught him in flagrante delicto with his wife); Pope Urban VI, who was disappointed that he didn’t hear enough screaming when the Cardinals who had turned against him were tortured. [3]
The church leaders and their brotherhood continue to cling to misogynistic, homophobic, medieval policies which were formulated and are enforced by a hierarchy of, as a self-described recovering Catholic once told me, “Men who’ll dress like women but refuse to ordain them.”
The RC’s sexual abuse scandals and their aftermath are not in the past – they are in the here and now, and shall continue to be, until RC adherents say enough is enough, and take their arses and their checkbooks ( how many RCs truly comprehend that their donations “to god” go to pay off priest sexual abuse lawsuits? [4] ) out of the pews and into the light.
Support groups include for those considering doing so include
* FCC- Former Catholics Connect
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Department Of Everything You Know Is Wrong
Well, not everything, but it turns out….
“Psychology is a bit of a double-edged sword, because it is so intuitively interesting to all of us. And the positive side is that we’re all psychologists in everyday life.
We all know — or at least think we know — something about love and memory, and friendships and dreams and things like that. The downside though is that because something seems familiar it may sometimes seem understandable. There’s a very hungry, very receptive audience for psychological books on positive psychology, emotions, love, relationships, infidelity. That’s all good.
But the danger, I think, is we can very easily push our wonder buttons and push our interest buttons using pseudo-science rather than science.”
That teaser ( my emphases) is a quote from Scott Lilienfeld, clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Emory University, from his interview with host Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics podcast, “Five Psychology Terms You’re Probably Misusing” ( my emphases ). Lilienfeld authored a paper called “Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases,” and the book Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology. For this interview, he (and other guest scientists and journalists) stick with a mere five common myths of psychology. Dubner’s take on the book:
“…this book is incredibly fun; I love it. It’s hugely enjoyable on the one hand, but also hugely sobering on the other…. Because basically you’re saying that all these things — all these ideas that people love to embrace and talk about and pass on — are somewhere between bogus and trumped up.“
The things-we-get-wrong include believing that the following concepts are true:
* statistically significant = statistically reliable
* bystander apathy
* personality type
* Some people are left-brained while other people are right-brained
* The brain is “hard-wired”
Sharon Begley, a journalist specializing in neuroscience and the neuroplasticity of the brain, joined the conversation to discuss this latter myth.
LILIENFELD:
I think in the overwhelming majority of cases in which it’s used, “hard-wired” is really misleading and I think sometimes potentially pernicious because it can lead people into assuming that certain behaviors cannot be changed….
BEGLEY:
If you say it’s hard-wired, implicitly — or actually not that implicitly, quite explicitly — the message is, you can’t change that.
Just as if you wanted to go into your computer’s hard drive with a teeny little screwdriver and start messing around with those integrated circuits to change something, that will not work out very well.
But the hard-wired idea didn’t originate with computing.
The history of neuroscience has shown us that even going back centuries, whatever was the prevailing cool mechanical machine, device, whatever, that was the metaphor that people appealed to. So the brain was compared to a counting machine, to a clock. And then computers burst on the scene and so people said, “Well, then the brain is like a computer.” But one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience over the last few years has been, in fact, that all that hard-wired stuff is completely wrong in very fundamental ways.
LILIENFELD:
There are very few — if any — psychological attributes that are strictly genetically determined, strictly hard-wired into the brain.
BEGLEY:
This realization has also led to treatments for major depressive disorder, because there’s a clear neurocircuitry underlying it. O.C.D., which reflects over-activity in a particular circuit, through the form of therapy called cognitive behavior therapy, the over-activity in that circuit can be quieted just as much as if people take the medications that are prescribed for O.C.D.
After a brief discussion of how the brain’s flexibility, including the fact that it can be trained to control different body parts after a stroke, Begley suggests it may be time to “trade in the hard-wired metaphor for a less misleading one.”
BEGLEY:
… The brain is more like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can seem to incise lines on it, and they look for all the world like they’re real, but with a little bit of shaking up, you can make significant changes.
I recommend a listen to this fascinating topic, presented with, as host Dubner puts it, “a dose of humility, along with a plea for good science.” And, on the topic of bystander apathy, after the guests debunk much of the infamous Kitty Genovese story, Dubner has a cogent warning for us all:
“The moral of the story, I guess,
is to always be careful of what you think you know.”
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Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself. Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [5]
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [6]
“… the Vatican issued its first new policy statement since a torrent of sex abuse cases around the world began last year….
But what the new guidelines could have done, but failed to, was to require churches to report complaints of sexual abuse to law enforcement. Nor do they set up any chain of accountability for church hierarchy who may abet sex abusers….
As if all that weren’t enough to make that vein on your forehead throb just a little more insistently, in among all the strong words for sex abusers and heretics was the classification of the ordination of women to a ‘grave crime,’ punishable by excommunication.
Let me think: women ministering the sacraments, priests raping children. Women ministering the sacraments, priests raping children. Still not seeing them on quite an equal level yet….”
Mary Elizabeth Williams, American writer, in
“The Vatican’s new sex abuse guideline misstep: The church’s tougher new stand on the issue still disappoints — and manages to insult women.”
salon.com 7-15-10 )
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May we be careful of what we think we know;
May we stop thinking, How did it get to be February?;
May your brain be more organized than any of moiself’s Etch-a-sketch drawings;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] Turns out, I didn’t.
[2] The doctrine of transubstantiation holds that “the bread and wine at the consecration become Christ’s actual body and blood.” Yum! If you want to delve deeper into this primitive, Jesus-is-the-ultimate-animal-sacrifice shit ritual, read the explanation in the primer written for Catholics by Catholics, in the website Catholic Answers: Transubstantiation for Beginners
[3] More fun and links to the lives of “The Bad Popes” are just an internet search away, or here on Wikipedia.
[4] In figures only through 2018, over $1.2 billion in the USA alone (from “Settlements and bankruptcies in Catholic sex abuse cases“, Wikipedia).
[5] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
