A Matter of Faith

So the Catholic Church is coming up with over $600 Million in settlement money in LA to pay out to plaintiffs and make the current caseload go away. Cardinal Roger Mahony is off the hook and Cardinal Bernard Law is operating in Rome these days.
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I was brought up as an Irish Roman Catholic. Lots of guilt. Lots of terrifying doctrine. As a public school kid, I was second rate to the nuns at St. Joseph's School in Lynn where I went for my Sunday School Catholic indoctrination. We all felt that the nuns preferred the parochial school kids, who were repressed maniacs by the time they came out of St. Joseph's in the eighth grade.
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Easily the most violent kids at Eastern Junior High School were the transferees from St. Joseph's Catholic Elementary School from Green Street in East Lynn. I still have scars on my forearm from the maniac who took my ruler, split it in two, and stabbed me in the arm with one of the sharp pieces. When I proposed to meet him after school to settle up, he looked at me in a fearful and incredulous manner and asked, "What did I do?"
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That was the product of a St. Joseph's Catholic education.
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Luckily, I was never diddled by a Catholic priest. I was slammed up against the wall and slapped by a nun, but nothing that would turn me into the pitiful protoplasm of the victims who were sexually abused by the priests in Boston, LA and elsewhere.
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Those people have my sincere sympathy. As kids, they were victimized by the ultimate authority figures, priests, who used them for their temporary perverted pleasure. Dispicable!!!
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By the way, the fact that the Catholic Church has $600M to make them go away is a travesty in and of itself.
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Years later, as the Executive Director of the Lynn Housing Authority, I bought the St. Joseph's School with state funds and turned it into 40 units of elderly public housing. At the time, I didn't think of it as revenge, but now I do. By the way, the priests at the St. Joseph's Rectory during the price negotiations were among the rudest, most inappropriately acting people that I have ever encountered in my professional life.in their behavior to the wait staff and cooks of the Rectory.
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All in all, the Catholic Church has produced a completely dysfunctional social system in it's ministerial system, and wide scale reform has to occur. It's probably too late anyway, because the dogma is so non-sensical. I truly don't see how a thinking person can buy into the cosmology of a heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo, etc. Everything seems to be based upon fear and a medieval form of social control.
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This has nothing to do with belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, his Blessed Mother Mary, or a host of other things that the Catholic Church exposed to me. The Church and my faith are distinctly separate to me, and I am certain that I will pray to Christ for mercy when I eventually contemplate my own demise.
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But I won't need a Priest to perform the Last Rites.