Author: Elisabeth

On confession, impure thoughts and the priests

Over the past two weeks I watched the documentary, Revelations. A three-part series only two of which are available to watch on ABC iView.

The third was taken down after the verdict came in on George Pell and he was set free.

We can only wonder why. 

The documentary essentially deals with the stories of several paedophile priests, two of whom are showcased to demonstrate the degree to which the Catholic hierarchy as a whole was complicit in perpetuating their crimes by keeping them secret.

Tears welled behind my eyes the whole time I watched, and a familiar feeling slid through my veins. A feeling I have written about before. The confusion people have, priests and laity, about the nature of the priesthood. 

Priests were holy men chosen by God to represent him and the Pope. The Pope at the top, infallible. Their teachings were sacrosanct and what they said and did inviolable.

So, we worshipped them or avoided them in equal quantities. At least I did. 

My mother most of all loved her priests. She talked about what lonely lives they led every night alone in their presbyteries with only a housekeeper to cook and clean, but no other companionship. 

No wonder some turned to drink, she said, as if their loneliness became an excuse. But she preferred her priests unmarried. If they married then they might be tempted to tell their wives about the activities of the parish, they might even reveal secrets from confession. 

How could she ever trust her priest in the confessional, if at night he should go home to his wife full of the day’s sins and not want to offload some of the burdens on her? 

My mother preferred her priests chaste. And the nuns she knew had also taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Chastity was an admirable quality, one we were taught from the onset even before we knew what it meant.

When I was seven and first entered the holy sacrament of confession, I sat in Our Lady of Good Counsel church in Deepdene underneath the row of stations of the cross. The images that tell the story from the rosary of the sorrowful mysteries. 

I could rattle off these words by heart, as we sang them out loud in unison during religion.

The agony in the garden, the crowning with thorns, the scourging at the pillar, the carrying of the cross and the crucifixion. 

Pure poetry. I knew it as well as I knew Wordsworth’s poetry, in those days when I rote-learned everything in order to get by. It did not matter that I did not understand. It only mattered that I could repeat the words to the satisfaction of the nun in charge. 

Question: Why do we call that day good on which Jesus Christ died? 

Answer: We call that day good on which Jesus Christ died because his death has given us so many blessings and showed us how much he loved us.

A strange love. To suffer and then die. 

The message was clear. Suffering was good. Suffering was holy. Suffering was a useful element in your life. While pleasure, especially pleasure associated with impure thoughts was not. 

Impure thoughts. I did not know what they meant, only that they snuck in unbidden and had something to do with bodily sensations that were also forbidden. 

They could sneak into your mind while you were watching the television and saw a man take a woman into his arms and the two kissed. 

They could sneak into your mind when you went into the toilet and took off your underpants to take a pee. 

They could sneak into your mind when you opened the pages of your father’s art book and saw there the naked bodies of people, mainly women with breasts, white and bulbous, hanging out of their gowns or hidden under veils. 

They snuck into your mind when you saw statues of naked men in the museum, a fig leaf strategically placed between their legs, along with a bunch of grapes or some other hint at things unmentionable. 

They snuck into your mind when your mother told you to wear a t-shirt and not run around on hot days like your brothers because you were a girl, even though your body looked then exactly like your brothers’ bodies. At least on top. 

Still, the time would come when unmentionable things might happen to your body and impure thoughts were part of it. 

I never understood the impure thoughts. I only knew they slipped into my mind, and that it was my moral duty to report them to the priest in confession for fear of eternal damnation.

A mortal sin sent you to hell, as against a venial one which might land you in purgatory where you at least had a chance of moving back to heaven after you’d done your penance. 

Everything geared towards penance, sin and reparation. Doing the deed in secret but not letting anyone know, even maybe including yourself, but when awareness slipped into your consciousness and guilt took over, then you needed to visit the priest and tell him about it such that he could forgive you your sins and you went away lighter. 

These were the feelings I saw in these priests, only their sins were of a magnitude higher than mine. Mine only involved my own body, not that of others, not until I was older, did I sin with others apart from my explorations with my sister, but we were more or less the same age. Though I sometimes felt I led her astray as the older one. 

The paedophile priests on the other hand were confused about their own seniority. They lacked any sense of being the adults in charge when it came to the sexual abuse of children. They might as well have been children themselves, only they were not. 

They were grown men and the things they did to the children in their care, the grooming, the raping, the masturbation left those children confused and distressed, many to the point of suicide and if not suicide then drug addition or alcohol abuse or abuse of others, anything to rid themselves of the unspeakable pain, the not knowing what they did wrong to make this happen, while in the meantime, the priest and the holy men of the church went about their business in their gold vestments to say Mass and lead the congregation in prayer.

All this was revealed in the documentary but nothing can let us see the full impact of such atrocities unless we enter more fully into the minds of those small children whose minds were taken from them. 

Infections can creep inside

There’s a tension in his voice that suggests annoyance. More than that it suggests irritation. A quiet brewing discomfort that anything might be wrong and might need some effort. Or I’ve got something wrong and should better understand, in his mind at least.

This is the stuff that leaves me edgy in my gut.

It’s been such a holiday, five days caught up in someone’s else’s discomfort.

A time of troubled rows and deep discontent when all I hoped for was rest. Jig saw puzzles and walks with the dogs. 

We have a run of water coming down the left side of our house which my husband tells me is caused by our neighbour’s blocked stormwater drain. Some time ago someone approached him and asked if our drains could unite but he refused. It would cause an overload, he said. 

I’m left wondering is that the neighbourly thing to do? 

But I don’t want to upset any carts of apples in our otherwise already unsettled household. 

After all, he’s just out of hospital after a foor day stint in solitude to tackle an infection, one that gave him a fever. 

Any person over sixty-five, the emergency doctor told us on Thursday, the night of the Last Supper in Catholic terms, must go into isolation and be tested for Covid. So now two members of my immediate family are among the numbers tested for the virus who turn out not to be so inflicted.

My husband came out clean four days layer and with his urinary tract infection in check. But it’s been quite the drama.

Now it’s over, we settle back into ordinary social isolation, again. Not the enforced one that required me to gown up every time I visited my husband in hospital, mask, gown, goggles and blue rubber gloves.

At least they left my feet alone. Elsewhere, I understand people also cover their shoes in protective gear to keep the virus out.

Like many people, I wake up most mornings and wonder, is it still here or can we go back to days not punctuated by such abstinence. By avoidance of others, in a world marked by fear. And every morning I recognise, we’re still in the thick of it.

People have their plague stories from the past. Mine comes in the form of a memory.

I was playing over the road from where we lived in the Canterbury Road house of one of the kids from our neighbourhood. We played with dolls in her back garden. A garden that abutted her house whose front was a shop window. And whose middle was a shop storage space and loungeroom of sorts, kitchen, bathroom and two small bedrooms where my friend and her parents slept.

On this day, spring had arrived in their back garden and the air was thick with jasmine which crawled in tendrils over the side paling fence. 

Deep in play, dressing and undressing dolls and having them undertake the daily activities of their imagined lives, my friend’s mother’s words came as a shock.

‘You have to go home,’ she said’ ‘Your sister is ill. They’ve taken her in an ambulance.’

I hesitated too long before putting down my doll.

‘Go now,’ my friend’s mother said, anxious to get me out of her house.

As I made my way through the front of her shop out onto the street I over heard her say to her husband who stood at the counter of his shop ready to serve the next customer, and fearful perhaps there would be no more customers if word got out. 

‘It could be polio.’

This was in the early sixties well after the polio epidemic had left its mark on people the world over. 

Turns out my sister had developed rheumatic fever. They sent her to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases hospital where she stayed for several months while they worked to get her infection under control. 

Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, more or less abandoned, today

My sister went there as my older brother had gone earlier, he too suffering from rheumatic fever that later developed into osteomyelitis.

Rheumatic fever involves bacteria creeping into your heart. Osteomyelitis into your bone marrow. 

I do not know the whys and wherefores, only I have heard the prevalence of rheumatic fever is greater in communities of indigenous people, or in places where people live close together, often in squalor. 

Ours was not entirely a life of squalor, but nine children in a four bedroom house with two parents must have been tight.

My husband’s brother also developed rheumatic fever when he was a child and their family only had six children, but again in tight spaces. The number of children uncontrolled given contraception was prohibited in Catholic families.

Yesterday, I overheard Emily Maguire talking about her book on the history of certain poorly recognised feminists.

How sometime, soon after Federation in Australia, our forefathers gathered together because they were alarmed at the drop in the birth rate. They held one of those enquiries, a Royal Commission of sorts and interviewed some 96 witnesses, 95 of whom were men.

Needless to say, they came to the conclusion at the end of their deliberations that the drop in the birth rate occurred because women were selfish. Because women had discussed among themselves ways of reducing their chances of endlessly falling pregnant.

This was a problem for the community in the early nineteen hundreds because the country needed a population. 

Ever since the story of Adam and Eve, women are to blame.

I prefer to blame patriarchy which is more of a system than a person or even a gender. It’s a way of being that presupposes the superiority of one group over another. And will always lead us into trouble. 

Even in a time of Covid, the inequalities are writ large. 

Those already under the pump are even more so, forced into further abjection because the system is built to uphold the strong and leave the vulnerable behind. 

It’s not just individual, but is inherently unfair. 

And so it was ever thus.