Spotlight?

Professor Leon Podles, who has a very scholarly book on the Catholic church abuse scandal, reviews the new film "Spotlight".

The film (and his book) are not for the faint of heart.

I agree with the professor that the church there was like a club rather than a religion.

As for abuse: As a doctor, I mainly worked with girls, some of them incest by dads or step dads. I'll write up some more of the details on my boinkie blog when I get around to it, since it concerns cases I know about, including an abusers in my extended family.

But I also should note that in the late 1960's, when I was in medical school, that our professors said that once the Victorian sexual prohibitions were lifted, that schizophrenia and mental illness would disappear...(Freudian ideas were behind these ideas)

Many wrote back then about it would be good for loving adults to have sex with children so the children would lose their inhibitions. I remember Newsweek, in the "incest" kerfuffle that if a counselor came across the problem, that they should not report it to the cops, since it would "break up the family". And then there was the decision of California to treat "non violent" sex offenders by counseling, and the papers rejoiced because these "non violent" types would be abused in jail.

So it's not just the Catholic church, of course.

When I worked on one Indian reservation, one of my nurses said that many of the men in her AA (alcoholics anonymous) group had been abused. The boarding school abuse was big in Canada, (Michael O'Brien has testified about this on his blog) but abuse in family also occurred, alas.

And it is continuing. The "rape" kerfuffle in universities that I am reading about on some blogs is because right now there is no sexual morality at all in universities, and this is pay back for all the "date rapes" where the woman sobers up and finds out she was taken advantage of. And the internet has made many think such things are normal, so people now are acting on their impulses.

Freud would be proud.

So I agree with the professor:

I am no prophet, but I detect the hand of Providence in all this to purify a church which had grown corrupt.

Hopefully it will awaken a public conversation about preying on teenagers and pre teens to use them for sex.

however, here in the Philippines, the newfangled bishops are more worried about the environment (marching last weekend) and in stopping the pill from being given to our multipara moms than the sexual abuse of street kids.

As the professor noted: poor countries have more to worry about than if their young girls and boys find a rich friend and can milk them for money so the family can eat.