“Sweat was beading down my forehead, my collar was too tight, and my knees were hurting. The priest was speaking in a foreign language they called Latin. It was time for the longest hour of the week: Catholic Mass. I looked over at my buddy; he too, seemed to have had the same aura of confusion. Why were we here, why did we have to stand, kneel, stand up, kneel, stand up, kneel down, sit down, and be quiet?”
These are the words of a story and inspired by a memory of an eight-year-old boy: myself. It was 1964 and I had already endured three years of the dreaded regimented lifestyle of the Catholic-run Aboriginal residential school of Grollier Hall in Inuvik, NT. I was to endure another ten years especially the longest hour of the week; Catholic Mass. I escaped that system finally in 1975; still confused but extremely relieved. It is now 2009 and I still have not and will not step into another Catholic church again.
The Catholic church is fundamentally flawed in its doctrine of instilling guilt, repetitive teachings and prayers, lack of compassion, aloofness, and full of hypocrites who are mighty in words but not in deeds.
In recent years the Catholic Church has been under fire for its physical, sexual, and mental abuses it had afflicted on to the former Aboriginal students. One could surmise these abuses have been going on since the 1860s when the residential school system was established by the federal government. Now, in 2009, we see and read the story of Father Raymond Lahey. The church would do well to abolish its idea of celibacy. It has not and will not be in the best interests of the clergy and especially potential victims in the years to come.
Priests, Nuns, Bishops, and even the Pope are held too high as Celebrities and can not and will not live up to their titles of, Your Holiness, Your Excellency, and Your Eminence.......and will not live up to Celibacy.
