While there are many similar structures in total religious institutions, there was something particularly pernicious about the particular Tridentine, triumphalist, ultramontane, antimodernist Catholic tradition which flourished between the restoration of the anciennes regimes in Europe in 1815 and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. This was a religious tradition which defined itself as in mortal conflict with the values of the Enlightenment and which regarded sexuality, and particularly female sexuality, as fundamentally suspect. It was dominated by a cult of Mary, the virgin, which "elevated" femininity into stratospheric asexual spheres; a virgin-mother it was safe for celibates to worship (although it was always denied that Mary was formally "worshipped"), while at the same time self-righteously condemning women who had offended by openly showing that they were sexual beings - usually, though not always, by becoming pregnant.
The irony is that it was this life-denying background which fostered the horrible virus of clerical (mostly "paedophile") sexual abuse, which has come to light all over the world in the past decade or so. As someone who, for nearly a decade at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties, bought into an alternative vision of Catholicism, before realising that the old power structures were still alive and well, I have no doubt that there was - and is - a causal relationship between this particular Catholic tradition and sexual abuse. Francis On 15 Jan., 07:50, tmanneke <[email protected]> wrote: > The Magdalena Sisters > Yesterday I saw the movie about the Magdalena Sisters together with my > wife. > She is going back to the clinic tomorrow. > A kind of concentration camps only for women, ruled by nuns, where > parents, government, almost everybody could put girls they would get > rid of. > Such institutions existed here in Flanders too. They were differently > called, differently considered, but the aim was the same. > The fierce terror of clericals on innocent and harmless people. > Why catholicism was that aggressive in Flanders and Ireland? > The border between these countries and their neighbours were only > religious ones. > The church here has always be on war. > That is what we suffered from, as the movie says, till the beginning > of the nineties. > Love and peace to all. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Minds-Eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
