JB1975
Brownlow Medallist
I agree. I cannot understand how anyone can be a practicing Catholic. As for any Jesus comparison, crucifixion would not be an inappropriate conclusion to the Pell saga.
On the bolded, I suppose being born and raised as a Catholic is a big part of it. It was part of my upbringing. My religious sentiment evaporated long ago, didn't survive my childhood, but others have the faith until death.
My Grandma was a practicing Catholic, and her faith and the church gave her strength until she died in 2012. She was only 74, had never smoked, hardly touched alcohol, walked constantly, and then one day her stomach pains were revealed to be cancer. They told her she had 2 weeks to live; she stole another week on top of that.
The one concern she had was her soul. She wanted her priest. I made it my responsibility to go to her parish and organise for the priest to visit her, which he did. He assured her that she would see God, and throughout those ghastly weeks of blood and vomit into a bucket and convulsive pain and with only the promise of death to relieve the anguish, it was her priest's comforting words which gave her an unworldly strength to look it all in the eye. His words, and her faith.
I don't like the Catholic Church. My own religious upbringing instilled a vision of Christ in me, a vision far removed from the greed, spiritual bankruptcy and plain evil of the institution of the church, and my reverence for it has long been replaced with disgust and anger. Even the priest who comforted my Grandma managed to incite me, as he presided over the requiem service to send her off and described her as an 'eccentric woman'. He also told the congregation that he knew she was going to die 6 months before, that 'the angel of death had visited upon her', but that she was ready to meet the Lord. Well f*** me, I wish he'd passed on this important info to a medical practitioner, because if they'd detected that mass in her stomach even a few weeks earlier, she would likely have beaten it.
I'm not sure why I'm writing all this. To vent, I guess, because it's the thread for it. I'm angry because the Church in indefensible, and I'm angry because the custodians of the Church my Grandma believed in so deeply are self-serving egotists with a gobsmacking blind spot for anything akin to ordinary human feeling.





