A CRUCIAL DISTINCTION (3rd part of a 3 part sequence on pedophilia)

Somehow computers have made it legitimate to deal with forbidden topics so long as they are in terms of statistics, like “one in six men will be sexually molested in their lifetime”.  Or lab research produces charts like the one above by putting a pleismograph on a number of men’s penises to see what images they physically respond to.  (Which might not be what they think they desire.)  But also, more quietly, men have been openly testifying about what happened to them and the consequences of abuse.  Even the children are telling their stories.

http://sexresearchhoneypot.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-gay-men-have-more-sexual-interest-in.html#more

This chart separates out people who are sexually aroused by different age groups.  Also, the scientists were looking for differences between the desires of “heterosexuals” versus “homosexuals,” though the two categories are becoming pretty blurry.  

(Are two ninety-year-old women who are married sitting in their wheelchairs, wearing pink, and after forty years of sharing a household, really like an Act-Up parade of randy naked young men?)   “Gay” begins to seem more and more about specific kinds of activities and locations than about the nature of desire, which seems less and less binary.  But the researchers were hoping to break down the association of homosexuality and pedophilia as society understands them, and in that they probably succeeded.

But the most marked and significant difference I hear when I read the stories of children who have been used to satisfy sexual desire is never even noted.  That’s between those who mix sex with something like nurturing and those who mix sex with violence (possibly deadly).  Street boys doing survival sex for pay report that they will be paid extra if they forego safety measures like condoms (barebacking), but also that they will sometimes be paid even more if they will allow themselves to be beaten up or even tortured.  Some clients don’t ask or pay -- they just do it.  Some seem to replace coitus with violence and others mix the two, one fueling the other.  (The boys cope by using drugs.)

Similar reports come from those abused by family members, esp. step-fathers but even biological fathers.  Why isn’t the difference between inappropriate but non-damaging sexual use and violent, emergency-room level sexual abuse (often fueled by drugs) more discussed and studied?

It seems to me that pedophiles who actually love the children they desire and even try to please them, to “turn them on,” establish an empathic connection with the child that keeps them from physically harming the child.  But they don’t have enough awareness to know they may be mentally and psychologically confusing and crippling a developing child.

The other kind of pedophiles need a different name:  they seem not to realize that a child is a human being, so their desire is not for the child but for the opportunity to torture and oppress, to get a reaction.  It's a cruelty-philia.  The fact that the victim is a child is only about the inability of the child to escape, like a small animal or a weak woman.  It's not about sexual desire at all, but about rage, invasion, power.  And the scariest kind are the ones who sit idle and bored on the sofa, watching tv alongside a child and a dog, when suddenly they have an impulse to make something happen and reach over to press the burning end of the cigarette into either the child or the dog.  Is there any sexual component to that?

rough sex

I started thinking about the opposite: "maternal men," who will feed, comfort, reassure, guide and love children WITHOUT sexual elements -- innocently.  Even if they are desirous.  I think of Walt Whitman at the bedside of young suffering and dying soldiers, treating them as a mother would.  One would hope pediatricians were like this.  But at another point I was googling for images of “grabbed by the back of the neck”  (cats and rabbits do this to hold the female in place) and kept coming across the little motto above that had been repeated in different fonts and backgrounds.  It’s a celebration of rough sex, a frank inability to feel anything that isn’t violent.  If a person has conflated sex with violence, then they likely would be looking for someone whom they could treat violently.  

That still doesn't account for the man who leaves his wife sleeping in their bed in order to cross the hall to rape his small son -- though he created that child by fucking the woman he now deserts.  What kind of displacement is that?

Why is this cute?

Pedophile priests seem to desire transgression per se.  Not the kind of zombie-producing transgression where jungle maniacs force children to have intercourse with their parents and then kill the parents before their eyes and cut off the hands of the child.  But just indecent liberties -- fumbling, inviting sucking, pushing aside clothing.  This is NOT sexual desire for a child's body so much as wanting the knowledge of doing what is forbidden and knowing they can do it with impunity, that they will be protected in order to save the reputation of the church.  

Maybe it makes them seem to themselves more important or effective.  Maybe they feel they are being diddled by God.  The world of ministry, like the world of social work or teaching, is always frustrating.  One is constantly hitting limits of what one can do and constantly having to respond to trivialities that people could resolve for themselves if they tried.  Priests work alone far more than teachers or social workers.  It's not just a matter of not having sex with a wife, but also the comforting domestic life and ego support provided by a wife.

Ashes.

Researchers claim that one in six men is sexually abused over a lifetime.  I suppose mostly as children, but also as adults.  I wonder why EVERYONE is not abused?  What keeps the other five-sixths from being abused?  Is there some marker on the ones who are molested?   They say there is -- esp. after the first incident.  A stigma.  Maybe cringing or resentment.  Maybe false bravado.  Or maybe they felt it was a compliment, a privilege.  Maybe they just look confused, paralyzed like a bird in front of a snake.  Researching such markers is too close to blaming the victim.  But bruises, broken bones, STD’s, personality changes, are certainly markers that the victim neither plans nor enjoys.  Even if the predator takes care not to mark a face, behavior patterns can be giveaways.

In fact, it could be argued that the emotional confusion is the real damage. The distorted brain matrixes that keep people from intimacy, trust, joy, are harder to treat and heal than even broken bones or burst organs.  Yet emotional cruelty -- belittling, berating, bullying, mocking -- is so accepted and pervasive that it’s hard to convince people that it’s not normal and not harmless.  It is an effective way to control others, esp. children and dependents.

I read and think more about male victims partly because it gives me a bit of distance but also because I just like boys.  I have two brothers.  It’s not harder to think more about male than female perpetrators because most of them are male.  That’s who is more likely to mix violence with coition, indeed require violence in order to be aroused.  If they are grown men, equals, and in the SM context, they may share a universe of sensation that the rest of us would just as soon ignore.  The biochemical parameters and components of that have been investigated to some degree.  It’s pretty clear that transgression is a component -- doing socially forbidden things -- but within the intimacy.  

"Last Tango in Paris"

Probably there are accounts of sexual violence against children somewhere.  The most compelling accounts of NON-violent but physical desire for a child might be “Lolita” or “Death in Venice.”  Two films show men tenderly bathing “daughters” they are using sexually:  “Last Tango in Paris” and “Butterfly.”  The women are technically adult but have hebephilic personas.  At no point are they beaten up, there is no blood-letting, and they are not confined.  (Terrifying case histories in daily newspapers tell of girls being shut into boxes, tied into chairs for YEARS, raped and forced to give birth without medical help.)

These heads are made of cake and frosting for a joke wedding cake.

Our culture in general is so violent that I was surprised anyone was shocked by vids of public beheadings of journalists.  The movies show heads rolling around as freely as billiard balls on a pool table.  The technical ability to show recognizable heads on pikes means there must be prototypes on many storage shelves in Hollywood.  Kid gamers commonly watch beheading with great gouts of blood, and spectacular immolations that leave shriveled black remains.  We see people raped on television every evening, often represented as deserved punishment.  Blaming the victim.

What the kids themselves, esp. the ones with enough self-awareness to market their own bodies (NOT their desire) describe is nothing so spectacular.  What they say is that they feel invisible, non-existent, shadowy, immersed in depression, alien.  They long for love, the kind of intimacy that makes marionettes and velveteen rabbits come to life.  Why not real boys?

EXPECTATIONS SHAPE POPE FRANCIS

A child, worried about his pet, asked a famous theologian whether dogs could go to heaven and whether they had souls.  The theologian thought for a moment and said there was really no way for us to know this, but we ought to act as though they DID have souls that went to heaven.  Then we would treat them with dignity and love.

There’s a second story.  The Hell’s Angels finally got to thinking about their image and resolved that they would improve it.  So they were roaring down the highway one day and came to a motorist stopped alongside, tinkering under the hood of his car, clearly broken down.  These guys were pretty good mechanics, so they stopped to help out.  The motorist, looking up and seeing these scary guys advancing on him, panicked, pulled out the oil dip stick and defended himself by slashing at them with it.  So they beat him to a pulp.

With those tales in mind, let’s think about the new Pope Francis presumably named for Saint Francis with all his associations, especially the Zefferelli movie “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” which was the favorite movie of Mother Teresa’s nuns.  There are three movies about Saint Francis but they won’t stream.  I’ve ordered the discs.

But what if the new Pope was thinking of Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral (1540 – 27 January 1596) who was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan Era, knighted by his queen in 1581.  He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He also carried out the second circumnavigation of the world, from 1577 to 1580. He died of dysentery in January 1596 after unsuccessfully attacking San Juan, Puerto Rico.  

Or how about Francis M. Drake, an Iowa governor and Civil War veteran.  (Union officer.)   Or what about Frances Drake (1912 - 2000), an American film actress best known for playing Eponine in Les Miserables (1935).  She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Pope” is one of those jobs that changes people because it reveals so much privileged knowledge to them that it transforms their understanding of the world.  “Dear Abby” became far more tolerant and human after reading her mail for a few years.  Something like the same has happened to most of the Supreme Court judges (not Scalia or Thomas who remains cloaked anyway.)  Everyone is looking for small clues: Francis said “Brother Cardinals” instead of “Lord Cardinals.”  What shoes are he wearing?  (I haven’t heard.)  At meals he looks for a space among the others instead of insisting on a reserved special place.  Suddenly everyone is reading up on Argentine history, which is very mixed.  How does this Francis fit into that?  Did he oppose cruelty and corruption?  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-eisner-pope-and-argentinas-dirty-war-20130317,0,166222.story  It sticks in my own mind that the worst of the Nazi torturers and genociders were finally found in Argentina.  (But also a major population of Jewish refugees.)  I don’t even know the specific story of their indigenous population.  Only 25% of the population is observant Catholic.  (45% in the USA.)  

Here’s a friendlier version. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/14/opinion/ghitis-pope-argentina/?hpt=hp_c1

 He strongly opposes gays but rides the bus.  He fights poverty and inequality, but he opposes Liberation Theology, a great source of reform.  He is friendly and cooperative with Jews (says he will open the Vatican archives to discover what really happened during WWII) but no one knows what he thinks about Buddhism or Islam or indigenous religions.  His “in-house” charge seems to be double:  get rid of the predators of children and get the money straightened out.  We’re not used to this face.  Does he remind you of Gomer Pyle or Jonathan Pryce? 

In seminary there used to be talk -- mostly when the denominational people were around -- about the way that congregations shape their ministers through their expectations and reactions.  This was why internships were so important: would the “teaching congregation” have enough patience to tolerate blunders, maybe fairly serious ones?  Would they expect or even insist upon the qualities that people want?  We know how our media invents and feeds on quarrels, exaggerates honest differences into deadly rivalries, does its part to create martyrs because that sells books.  (Even though no one seems to read the very books they vilify or exalt.)  But do reporters really dig deep for facts and dynamics?  Any more than congregations examine their ministers closely?  

In the major professions where people have great power (medicine, law), the practice in the past has been to depend upon peers to govern each other, but technically at least, the Pope has no peers.  Until now.  How much will Benedict interfere with Francis?  His assurances don’t mean any more than they did when he had no peers, but now he has an equal, too.  What if Francis finds out that Benedict’s dear attendant, nicknamed “Gorgeous George,” is more than a helper?  At some points in history such problems are dealt with quietly -- the offender disappears.  We don’t do that anymore -- except in Argentina in the recent past.

What a cliff-hanger.  Slightly mishandled, this papacy could be the end of the Roman-style Catholic Church.  We already have the Anglican, Lutheran and Episcopalian shards from past controversies.  But they say the real rival in the Southern Hemisphere is the Evangelical church -- going directly to God through the Bible, discarding the machinery of earthly institutions.  Everyone is his or her own Pope, Archbishop, Cardinal and Priest.

The wild card is poverty.  Whether one considers it a cause or a result, whether one thinks poverty is waxing or waning or just changing shape, it is the marker for the effectiveness of religion in guiding us to survival, whether individual or en masse.  And the even wilder card -- indeed, the whole deck -- is planetary climate change and the accumulating pollutions and erosions of the Anthropocene Era which will certainly require us to be fewer and possibly force the death of billions on us.  It does now -- except that the dying are mostly anonymously poor.  No one misses them -- not really.  Will the Pope lift them up?  With a blessing or a scourge?

It seems to me that the people who demand equality assume that it will mean lifting everyone up to a middle-class American standard of living and education.  This is impossible: there are not enough resources on the whole planet.  We assume that everyone everywhere will live the same, but this is also impossible.  Some will live where there is plenty and some will live on the desert.  The way we think about this, including the way our expectations affect our leaders, will deeply affect how we act.

___________________

NOTE:  The four ancient patriarchates (splinters of the original Christian catholic church) enjoy the highest prestige.  Patriarch means the same as Pope.  These men do not meet.  As Popes, they do not require celibacy but are otherwise quite conservative and ceremonial.

Two among the many sub-groups still have some power.  In the Greek Orthodox Church: Patriarch Theodore II is young for a Pope (b. 1954) and seems altogether honorable and progressive, devoting himself to art and charity.  He doesn’t seem particularly political, coming to power because his predecessor was killed in a helicopter crash, and unanimously chosen.

Head of the Russian Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kirill, who has extended friendship and suggested collaboration to Pope Francis.  He is in the midst of a scandal over a $30,000 wristwatch and other luxuries.  He and Putin are buddies.  Kirill is the man who had Pussy Riot, the female rock band, arrested for demonstrating against him in front of the church.  The women were imprisoned for five months.

Read more: Orthodox Eastern Church: The Patriarchs and Churches | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/society/orthodox-eastern-church-the-patriarchs-churches.html#ixzz2NitJbK3T

"A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE": 2 film reviews

There are no children in the 2003 movie about priests called A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE,  nor are there any Native Americans since it is about the Irish church, but it IS about the abuse of power -- which is always relevant.  Actually, this would be a good vehicle for discussion to separate several problematic aspects of the priesthood.

The main focus is to argue against celibacy as a requirement for priesthood.  (Some religious people try to slide the subject over to “chastity,” which is slightly different.)  The bases are loaded in this story:  those defending celibacy are old white men who plainly have not married God, which is what they purport without realizing what mental pictures someone might form about two powerful old white men in an intimate relationship (God/Jesus as man/boy anyone?).  Rather they married the Church for the power and status -- altogether a nice life -- and loyalty only to the status quo: not rocking the boat.  The lesser authorities think they are enforcing immutable rules from God but the major authority thinks the rules don’t really apply to him.  He does what’s strategic.

The kind of sexuality that must be denied in order to constitute celibacy is left open.  That is, the question of whether celibacy must be the same as virginity, never ever having had any sex at all, is not addressed, except that it seems to be assumed by the community.  It is clear from the plot that the only thing wrong with a “chaste” homosexual relationship (that is, faithful and nurturing) is that the church rules it wrong.  The idea card about Jesus kissing John the Favorite is not played, but the church instituting the celibacy rule in the Eleventh Century is framed in terms of property, authority and greed for wealth that families might claim.  NOT something Jesus prescribed.  Fair enough.

No repellent gay characters exist except for the revelations about high authorities -- these days so usual in terms of secular high authorities that they’ve lost plot punch.  Sex is framed in terms of two straight youngsters, both attractive, and an initiation so innocently seductive (a hayloft with loose hay -- not many of those now) that one imdb.com reviewer was horrified.  The friends and family of the youngsters are in favor of this and one suggests,  “Why not get out of there and go start your own parish?  You’d have a crowd in the church in no time.”  It worked for Luther.

All same-sex lovers here are male, though there is a lesbian female who despises men and yet is sympathetic to same-sex relationships.  There is just a hint at the problem of age -- an old helpless priest is the instrument of discrimination and cannot get his moral feet under him without losing his home.  One of the most important factors is the rage and helplessness of the protagonist's father, his vulnerability to the church influence on banks and government.  In the end the mask is ripped off the Archbishop so that we see that under the Church is the skull of the Mafia, quite willing to use violence.

This is not child abuse, but it is the template for child abuse, both in the home and in the church.  The same known elements of over-investment in appearance, domination, status plus a hidden vulnerability where the shriveled soul lives, craving some kind of comfort and warmth and instead passing on the suffering.  Hugh Bonneville, before he became responsible for “Downton Abbey” and the family of three girls, is here the voice of the True Christian. (Yes, I know I’m mixing reality and fiction.)  The good guys in this movie wear colored clerical shirts with reverse collars.  They do NOT let them hang open unbuttoned the way Jack Lennon did.

There is a second movie by the same name, which is on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asvl6kO1Vo8   This movie IS about child abuse: a BBC documentary about a case in Nebraska in 1990.  It is a rough cut because of being cancelled mysteriously before the editing was finished.   The beginning is a Boys Town case that accuses the Catholic-sponsored beloved institution of corruption and sexual abuse of boys.  This gradually moves over to being an indictment of a small group of Nebraska big shots playing games in Washington DC and using Nebraska boys for sex and drugs.  I suspect this is one source of the constant suspicion of victim testimony, because devastating discrediting accusations were made against these kids (now adults) when they were ready to testify.  The worst tactics were deaths.  Next after that was “blaming the victim” as inherently worthless and predatory trash.  None ever recovered money settlements.  Some left in the night.

For me, a key takeaway came from one of the investigators on the side of the “righteous.”  He remarked,  “This wasn’t just about some old men preying on little boys, it was about really important stuff and major figures in Washington, D.C.”  Seems to me that’s backwards.  The priority ought to be the little boys -- not the important big shots.  But I have no trouble at all understanding what they mean about corrupt state figures playing footsie with Washington, D.C.  That was twenty years ago.  These days the prairie state big shots fly to China and Russia.  The sex, drugs, and kids have probably not changed much.  I come from Portland, OR, where our much admired and progressive mayor was caught “shagging” the teenaged babysitter.  It was hard to believe the newspaper.

This week I’ve watched the first season of a new Swedish crime series called “Annika Bentzon, Crime Reporter.”  It’s fast, gorgeous, and engaging -- even with subtitles.  It appears that the idea of journalists as moralists is an idea that has not worn out, even though some of the major whistleblowers who release incriminating papers have not been treated well in Sweden.  In the BBC “A Conspiracy of Silence,” another source of reform comes from people of color, like the visiting alumni, a black man, who comes to give a lecture.  He explicitly says in the lecture -- which is disrupted almost as soon as it is begun -- that the more farflung and supposedly “young” branches of the Roman Catholic church are far more advanced and sophisticated that the old Brit fossilized center of power, let alone Rome.  So that makes four sources of renewal: media, internal people of conscience, achieving people of color, and the world-wide church.

I’ve also been watching TED clips all day -- those short presentations about cutting edge ideas.  One of them, a man of color, says that we are being asked to assimilate as many bits of information in a day than people in medieval times had to absorb and sort in a year.  This rings true.  It is also one of the reasons I’m living in a small town -- not that I can evade the avalanche, but that I can reduce most of the daily stuff to near-automatic so I can think about major issues.  The Internet makes research easy.

Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of paranoia that sets in.  I’m not so worried about the FBI as I am that some bedraggled eight-year-old, beaten and bloody, will knock on my door late one night.  Maybe he will tell me he is sexually abused.  Luckily, we have a good sheriff who will confront abusers.  I don’t have illusions about such a boy only needing a wash-up and a new set of clothes.  After the hospital, which hopefully won’t discover anything that will mean a lifetime of troubles, there will need to be more than just a foster home that’s sympathetic.  I’m not much impressed by foster homes.  And I know how twisting and distorting any abuse is to a child.

But I think it’s important to try to understand what dynamics in our society make old white men with power think that their reward is permission to torture children.  Why Boys Town in the first place -- created after WWI because of the many abandoned and suffering boys -- and why Jonestown?  I think the questions are linked, if not overlapping.  Good intentions gone not just bad but mad.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

People who don’t know Indians or reservations are having trouble believing the things I’ve been blogging recently.  I refer them to this video report so they can actually see the people they have a hard time believing.  Maybe body language will be more persuasive. In this story the Bishop actually acts like a Christian.  You need to see that, too.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-silence/

Mark Trahant is an American Indian journalist of considerable stature and accomplishment.  We were on the same “bulletin board” back in the Nineties, so his name always catches my eye.  I admire his work and am eager to see his book on "austerity."  (His glasses are just like mine!)

http://www.marktrahant.org/marktrahant.org/Mark_Trahant.html

So far I haven’t located a thoughtful piece about what a kid ought to do if he or she has been sexually abused, whether or not the kid is on a reservation or even whether or not the abuse is by a priest.  Two phases of this:  an immediate response and then the aftermath.  Neither do many adults know what to do if a child tells them they’ve been molested.  If a parent doesn’t respond or responds by punishing the child, then what?  Normally one goes to a priest or a cop for help, but what if they don’t help?  If you’re a kid, you can’t very well go to a lawyer for help. Kids end up resorting to other kids for help, which can at least get them emotional contact, but what do you do if you’re a kid and another kid confides in you that they’ve been molested?  

I’m impressed that in Mark’s Frontline story, the woman who is more-or-less the protagonist of the story has not only left and recovered (she appears to be both prosperous and educated) but has gone back to her roots to do something about it.  One is first a witness, then a testifier.  I also spot another role, which is the person who stands with the testifier to support testifying, physically and emotionally.

There is a role for the website that simply accumulates evidence.

http://www.rickross.com/groups/clergy.html   The list of cases on this website is stunning.  Most of them are from the media.  Since newspapers like big money amounts, there are a lot of accounts of settlements.  For those who think the people molested as children are simply milking the system for money, consider that the church could just as well “disown” convicted priests, set them out on the street, and telephone the police to come get them.  Of course, that would lead to even more questions.  But maybe they need to be asked.

The following document includes excellent and explicit information about reporting child abuse, detecting child abuse, and the actual law.  It's specifically for Montana where there are enough Indian reservations to sway elections.

http://www.dphhs.mt.gov/publications/mtschoolguidelines.pdf

If you’re not in Montana or even in the United States, it will take a bit of research to find the equivalent and there might not be one.  I must warn you that when I’ve turned in cases of sexual abuse of children, I’ve had to kiss the job goodbye, but in those days I didn’t have tenure and there was no hotline.   

MONTANA’S STATEWIDE TOLL-FREE CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE at 1-866- 820-KIDS (1-866-820-5437). This Hotline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you’re a kid reading this or if you’re an adult who is wondering what’s going on in some kid’s life, I encourage you to keep a journal.  Date it, note the time, keep it as fact-focused as possible.  Over time it might very well form a pattern that can be reported, and even prove to be valuable evidence in court.  Be careful where and how you keep it -- maybe online in a “cloud” of some kind.  I use blogs, which can be set not to allow access by anyone but yourself.  Be careful where you record your password. 

If you are being bullied or cornered, I recommend a “screamer” that’s about the size of a chapstick, easy to carry in a pocket or attach to a keychain.    It’s VERY loud and will often make a dog run away, which is how I started using them when I was an animal control officer.  No one has to monitor as with a GPS or "smart" phone.  Screamer false alarms don’t cause as much trouble as bear spray or MACE.  As some friends have pointed out, MACE won’t phase an attacker full of meth.  Even a canister stored in a locker can go off accidentally and clear a school.  At the level where a taser or gun might be necessary, the police need to be involved. 

If the Catholic church wants to recover its credibility, it will, as Father Fitzgerald advised, carefully identify those who are molesting children, immediately laicize them (this is asking a lot), and set them outside the gates for secular authorities to process according to the law.  Then they should follow the example of the Bishop in Alaska who went to the victims and asked their forgiveness, anointing and blessing each one.  No doubt the church is afraid that if all the pockets are turned out, they will no longer attract either parishioners or priests.  This is probably true.  But then those looking for a safe place with a true message can come back.

Evidently a deadline has passed -- the big ads from the lawyers soliciting clients seem to be gone.  I’ve said about everything I have to say.  Probably unless there is another local incident I’ll be quiet on the subject, except that as I turn up movies that seem relevant to the public understanding of priesthood, I’ll review them.  I’m also looking for books about Indians plus professional religious people.  Why has no one made a movie from one of the Louise Erdrich books?  Law & Order SVU has had an American Indian cop (Adam Beach) but never a religious molester.  Too hot, I expect.  Was it an echo that the Adam Beach character was overwhelmed with anger and left the SVU unit or did the actor just get a better offer so the scriptwriters needed an excuse to drop him?  Where is a script about Native American officers on a reservation trying to cope with sexual abuse of children?  Maybe a priest should write it.  I hope it won’t be a lawyer.

PLOT LOOPS

This discussion of priests on reservations (special reference to the Blackfeet) leads me to think about what I’ll call “plot loops.”  They’re really continuums, but bent around to join at the other side.  The rationalization for writing fiction is the ability to speculate and make assertions about characters who don’t exist, thus escaping lawsuits and a punch in the nose.  (Maybe.)  

The loops are sort of the same as the paragraphs I wrote about in the post called “culture loops.”  This is what I mean in terms of priest/Blackfeet interaction:   Choose your kind of priest and your kind of Blackfeet.  Is this a young green priest who needs his corners knocked off?  Does a wise old Blackfeet woman console him, maybe even redeem him?  Does this have a happy ending?  (Check out “I Heard the Owl Call my Name.”)  Is this a young priest who is miserable about being gay who runs into a shrewd Indian in black leathers who rides a Harley?  (Take a look at “The Fancy Dancer.”)

But you could also (this would be more daring) create a story about an old, ill priest who is somehow saved by a little child.  (I just watched “Silas Marner.”)  Or an old priest who once raped an altar boy and is now revenge-raped by that boy grown up. Might be a bitter little God-defying tale with Satan laughing in the corner or you could have enlightenment arrive with orgasm, either character or both.   (Egad.  No one has ever gotten something like this into print that I know of.)  You could even write a story with both endings and either present them as alternatives or mix them so that the reader would be confused -- on purpose.

Thinking along these lines, I went to Netflix streaming -- carefully avoiding the denominationally produced believers’ propaganda -- not because I’m disagreeing with it but because it’s so predictable.  Seen one, seen’em all.  I’m trying to break out of the cultural assumptions.  Two films have priests but no Indians.

__________________

“Priest,”  (1994) was written by Jimmy McGovern, who devised and wrote “Cracker,” the crime/mystery series.  You can always trust Jimmy McGovern.  This is presented as about a young gay priest, but actually addresses the relationship between love and sex.  Christianity, with its naked dead man hanging in front of everyone, is surely the most carnal of religions.  Three taboos:  a priest who has his female sexual partner (subintroducta with benefits) in the house, a father who is forcing sex on his daughter, and the protagonist young priest who has a male lover.  Two are excused but the third, the father, is not.  If one digs down beyond the surface conventions of society or an institution, the question is not about taboos, but about obligations and consequences. 

The ability of a father to dominate his daughter to the point of forced sex is, in HIS eyes, performing an act of love.  But it destroys his daughter, destroys his wife, destroys the institution of family.  The question then is whether the priest who loves his female housekeeper destroys the church.  (Does their intention to marry absolve them?)   Does the priest who is not just gay but also actively sexual with a man where love is present destroy the church?   I would say that they at least challenge it.  But they do not destroy the religious ground on which that institution was founded, which is salvation in the face of stigma, persecution, but only the interests of a institution that has left its original charisma, that of love and inclusion.  McGovern loads the issue by presenting the defender of the Faith as grim and punishing, the male lover as nearly Jesus-like.

“Mass Appeal”  (1984)

This one is by a Broadway playwright and has had legs in that form, being performed all over the planet.  Jack Lemmon leads off on an interpretation of the Catholic Church as an “old boys' network.”  (That’s why you can’t have women priests.  Or defiant boys. Or, well, go off in pairs.  It’s a function of group, not individual.)  This is prosperous American suburbia.  (The kicker watching it now is that Zeliko Ivenka, who plays the rebellious young seminarian, has matured into playing the part of the cynical politician on police procedurals.)  Mostly this plot loop is a reflection on the rebellions of what they call “the Bangladesh Granola Herd.”  At least they didn’t knock Berkeley -- not directly.  But in the end the movie defends the individual as a source of reform.

This is an American version of BBC class critique, NOT the Irish confrontation with the Devil.  It’s slow and bland, like a sit com.  But it makes some good points.  The rebel calls this Teflon parish a vendor of “song and dance theology.”  It is based on manipulation and evasion.  But this movie is the first I’ve heard to “daylight” the relationship between Jesus and John, which some interpret to be sexual.  The movie just doesn’t deal with it after bringing it up.  (It’s a history loop.  One of the Apocrypha plus the Gospel of John is the evidence but they don’t say that.)

Don’t think this is about Catholicism.  It’s exactly the same in all prosperous suburban American congregations of any denomination.  Synagogue as well.  So what’s the screenwriter’s solution?  It comes down to the kind of community that becomes family.  (I like the idea -- though I thought the young priest’s sermon was icky.)  There is redemption in the end but, again, there isn’t all that much depth.  Still, this is a PG movie starring Jack Lemmon.  What did you expect?  I’m sure that most priests, ministers, and rabbis will approve of it.  Even though it’s mildly subversive.

Another movie is one I’ve had so long that it’s on tape rather than disc.  The Third Miracle (1999).  “A skeptical Bishop sends a broken priest as Postulator to investigate the possible beatification of a simple, devout woman whose death caused a statue of the Virgin Mary to bleed upon and cure a girl with terminal lupus. The politically weary priest unknowingly embarks on a spiritual journey that rebuilds his shattered faith and life.” (from imdb.com)  It’s conventional but very well done because of Ed Harris playing the priest.

The Mission (1986).  This one has both priests and Indians.  “18th century Spanish Jesuits try to protect a remote South American Indian tribe in danger of falling under the rule of pro-slavery Portugal.”  I have this one on tape as well.  DeNiro and Irons make suffering ever so sexy.  Historical culture loop intersects with some rather subversive S/M elements.

_______________

Twice I’ve heard young local Blackfeet men propose plot lines based on a rez dog, from the dog’s point of view as it interacts with kids, street people, and finally a home -- the ever-present longing.  Neither went on to develop the story beyond a short video so far as I know, nor did either proposal include a priest, but it’s still a great idea -- isn’t the way we treat animals part of Sacredness?  Or you could let this dog be a sardonic atheist or meet a Napi coyote.  Surely a border collie has a priest's instincts.

The reconciliation between individual and group must be remade again and again because all these “loops” are actually moving wheels that draw in new forms and issues, open new possibilities even as they crush old ones.  Stories and images are hub-spokes-and rim of the wheels.  It’s all a road trip.  Keep rolling.

SHADOW SCHISMS

War is always sexualized, one way or another, but the Indian wars of the 19^th century were intensely and explicitly focused on sex, women and children.  The accounts of what was done by uniformed cavalry and free-lance white avengers include rape, infanticide, and ingenious violence like pounding vaginas full of sand.  They sound like contemporary atrocities in Africa.  This was seen as retribution for attacks on whites which often included the capture and enslavement of children and women, so terrifying that women were given guns with instructions to kill themselves rather than to allow capture.  

“The Searchers” shows the effect of belief in this heinous fate on John Wayne, who is convinced that the recapture of a young female relative will be the equivalent of rescuing her from Hell.  In reality raising consciousness took several rebellious recaptured people, desperate to return to what they now considered “their People”.  This was also the time period in which the conviction that unfamiliar humans were not just enemies, but also varmints to be eliminated the same as wolves and coyotes, was being broken up by Darwin and nascent anthropology.  A benighted general, justifying the killing of babies, famously remarked, “Nits make lice,” thus providing AIM with one of its most inflammatory quotes. 

This attitude was countered by the Catholic church which had done enough missionary work to realize that all humans had “souls” and therefore should be converted rather than slaughtered.  Of course, once they were converted, their lives were meant to be “useful” to white people, not self-determined.  I don’t know much about “Progressivism” but it seems to me subtly connected to Protestant Calvinist values, which could be twisted into forced improvement, and the displacement of government obligations (conflated with “Christian virtue”) onto denominations on grounds that they would be virtuous (as well as providing funds).  So -- in the usual effort to get rid of costly treaty requirements and to counter howls about the corrupt Indian agents -- the Blackfeet were assigned to the Methodist denomination, despite the Catholics having been on the ground and working hard for many decades.  Not only did this set up rivalries that wasted a lot of energy, it drove yet another schism into a tribe already divided in several ways, not least by the “Medicine Line” of the border with Canada which sliced off the Piegan group from the others.  Even today the shadows of sexualized violence and religious schism persist.  Celibacy is easily seen as either a sign of deviance or power, Methodists can be considered intruders (a venue for dissenters from the Catholics and for white or assimilated people), while the Pentecostals find quiet niches of their own.  

Closely interwoven with religion, sex, and babies is alcohol and drugs.  Diminished self-control, confused morality and notions of salvation by “falling in love,” are at the root of much of the rez disorder and economic failure.  I could give a lot of examples except that it would mean breaking confidence.  Keeping and trading secrets is also a way for the serpent of dysfunction to bite its own tail, keeping the pattern alive.  No one is supposedly allowed to talk about such things, partly because this was learned from early mission prudery and partly because disclosure seems to be a white interest, mixing therapy with anthropology and the keeping of secret files (FBI).  It never seems to get through to outsiders that it’s DANGEROUS for locals to tell them anything.  Then the issues are confused again because those outsiders, especially misfits, come in with romantic notions of how they can be “adopted” without realizing that might only expose them to the usual bad behavior of poverty-stricken people.  Since the Sixties and Seventies -- maybe since the beginning -- so many of the outsiders are running away from issues of their own.  Even the grownup “mission” groups who come from Iowa for the summer to upgrade buildings and teach little kids never really make contact.  They are tourists.

In my experience most religious professionals try to establish their lives on the rez as islands.  Priests are less able to do this because of confession, though I suspect the persons who most need to repent are not the ones who show up to confess.  Maybe Pentecostal-style public transformation is more useful  -- if being struck once by the Spirit were enough.  Sometimes it takes considerable repetition, but relying on supernatural intervention is a very old practice on the tribal prairies.  Signs and stories, “luck” and omens, are still powerful and don’t exactly mesh with modern-style secular law codes or justice-based court systems.

Most of the morality supplied by Euro-religionists are “rule-based,” like the Ten Commandments, partly because of the difficulty of working through principles like the New Testament “golden rule.”  Rules make enforceable bright lines, but principles must be absorbed over time and may, once again, cause individuals to be opposed to their groups.  Consider pot, gayness, gambling and so on.  All moralities are easily blurred or discarded by intoxication.  

Bob Scriver, who for a decade was both a Justice of the Peace and a City Magistrate in Browning, used to say that people will do whatever they can get away with.  Part of this is peer pressure -- the “norming” of behavior.  If it is considered normal and predictable for people to get violently drunk and for men to be sexual predators, even against children, even their own relatives, then it will be easier to believe that religious celibates are sexually abusive to children.  The stories want to say, “these authority figures are no better than myself.”  Of course, they are right, but that’s not the point.  The point is restraints that prevent behavior that harms the innocent.  The attention ought to be on what prevents that, regardless of what social category they belong to.  Some years ago a school counselor published a national survey of Indian kids about their drug, alcohol, violence, and sexual habits.  Almost immediately the parents got him fired.  They had taken personally what were national statistics.  People don’t necessarily want to know.  

When waves of gang violence shook one of the communities (may still be doing it, for all I know), everyone said, “Oh, that’s just the way it is here.”  Even the priest said there was nothing anyone could do.  Most of the solutions anyone can think of are about money and that’s certainly true: in vast lands with few officers, let alone technical support and decent jails, keeping order is expensive.  Consider the gas bill when patrolling a reservation fifty miles on a side.  Consider the difficulty of mastering the web of two-tracks that connect the homes.  Even the well-marked and plowed highways disappear in blizzards.  Radios, GPS, computer databases, and vehicle maintenance are expensive.  The tribe wants the BIA to pay, the BIA wants the tribe to pay, the FBI . . .  ‘nuff said. 

Among people who were forbidden to practice their religion or even do beadwork;  where 600 people died of starvation one winter because the government never delivered the commodities they were supposed to; where the Blackfeet suffered a grisly massacre of an innocent band by cavalry revenging the murder of Malcolm Clark on what is now the Baucus ranch; where children were kidnapped to force them into schools -- the people learned to be secret and hidden.  Pull into a yard in the Sixties and you’d be lucky to see children’s backs disappearing into the nearest coulee or aspen grove.  

This serves bad behavior.  Get lawyers involved and things become very complicated indeed, but even more about money as the main expression of justice.  Among poor people, this is a popular point of view.  Darrell Kipp used to say,  “The difference between rich people and us is that rich people have money.”  The logical next step is to try to get that money.  The Cobell settlement checks have been sent.  But they are only a settlement for government-embezzled trust funds, the People’s own money.  There’s got to be more to it than that.

MORDECAI: Fiction

The boy was in the dumpster.  As though it were his coffin.  He looked like Eddie Redmayne except not.  Those saint’s pale blue eyes, that shock of red hair, that vulnerable mouth, except ear rings and cuffs, eyebrows -- full sleeve tattoos with Celtic figures, Maori tatts around his neck -- and the red hair was bleached white in streaks.  His open shirt showed two tit rings and two words tattooed on his chest, a little off center because they were supposed to be over his heart.  “Jesus wept.”  He had wanted, paid for and endured these embellishments.  Now the blood caked on him was not requested but it was contagious.  He had late stage AIDS, which meant he was fragile in the first place, vulnerable to many things but maybe hatred most of all.  The real infection was self-hate.

Let’s make him Irish.  That way we can import a whole stereotypical backstory and won’t have to write it out.  Let’s call him “Mordecai” but he’ll need a nickname.  The father, of course, was abusive and deserted them; the mother had had too many children too close together and might have been very pious but maybe only dependent on the parish for help.  All the children were pretty, when they were clean, but Mordy had a different quality, kind of other-worldly, floaty.  He was a good student, intellectual but mystical, and mixed the pagan stories in with the Christian stories, even though he was an altar boy.  (Of course he was  -- what did you expect?)

His priest was his hero.  He was a large bitter man, but fond of Mordy.  More than fond.  He’d run his hand through that red hair, take the boy by the chin to tip up his face so he could see into his eyes, but no one thought anything of it.  At first.  Until the day the priest kissed him on his soft mouth.  Mordy already worried a bit about being too girlish.  He was twelve.  He’d never thought about men who abused boys sexually because he didn’t know such a thing was possible.  His brothers and playmates were rough in their play and took for granted the hard-ons that were just there -- didn’t mean anything.  When the priest initiated him -- let’s be honest -- raped him, he told the boy it meant that he was chosen, special, that it was a beautiful thing that God approved of, that it meant love.  But Mordy didn’t quite believe it and suddenly the priest left the parish.  

Things were bad at home -- no money, not even enough food -- so Mordy took off.  As easy as a river eel he slid into sexwork.  But he didn’t stay out of libraries and one day he was picked up by an American professor, an older guy on a research sabbatical, looking for his youth.  The professor took him back to his American university, treated him well, and gave him books to read:  “Lolita” (Mordy thought she was a spoiled little snot.) and “The Persian Boy,” which he loved.  It was a liberal urban university and no one was very shocked by Mordy.  They loved his accent and hinted that they knew secret things about the IRA.  He didn’t hang with students, but the ones he met shared drugs.  He thought of himself as enrolled in a special course, rather elite.

Then one night the professor gave a dinner party, everyone got more drunk than usual, and the professor’s rival colleague took Mordy into the bedroom.  The next morning the professor bundled the boy into the car, stopped at an ATM for some twenties that he stuffed in Mordy’s pocket, stopped at a sports supply place to buy him a warm jacket and a backpack, and drove a long ways while Mordy slept off his hangover.  He woke when the professor pushed him out of the car along a highway like a cat no longer wanted, and drove off.  For a while the boy just sat there and wept.  He was fifteen. 

Life was never as good after that.  “Jesus wept” was his first tattoo.  You can find the rest of the story in many places: the do-gooders love them.  Misery eaters.  The short version is that the older he got, the tougher his clientele became and the more he defiantly embellished his identity.  

The next marker was the day he was diagnosed with HIV.  He wasn’t making enough money for the meds but he found clinics and programs, which was more complex and ambiguous than reading at the library about the search for the cure.  Finally he saw that the economic collapse meant that all poor and needy were going to be losers.  After that, powerless, he went for long spaces without prescribed meds, depending on street drugs to keep from committing suicide.  At least he thought he wasn’t committing suicide -- he remembered it was a sin.  But how would Hell be different?

Beatings were part of the job, some in order for the trick to get it up and some afterwards as regret or expiation or projection -- whatever.  He just looked away with his pale eyes and left his body.  His nickname became “Sky Eyes.”   

Eventually he ended up in that dumpster.  It was winter and all the street guys had the flu so they were dosing on Nyquil and meth to keep working.  They’d duck back into the alley to shit and puke behind that dumpster.  It was as close to a toilet as they could get and they did have a little modesty left, even then.  Sky Eyes, who was a natural caretaker, kept telling the tens and twelves to get liquids into themselves before they passed out from dehydration and were taken to a hospital where they would be surrendered to juvvie authorities.   When the real dangerous guys came, the kids scattered.

This isn’t real, you’ll remember.  It could be.  But mostly I’m just making all this up as I go along.  Now I’ll tell you about something real.  I was living in Portland, working for the city, and living in an apartment across the alley from a bigger apartment building where a couple of gay guys lived.  I was ironing a blouse to wear to work.  The ironing board was set up in front of the kitchen window, which faced onto the gay guys’ back porch.  A different man came out and sat down on the steps to put on cowboy boots.  He was tough-looking, shirtless until he shrugged into an old leather vest.  He checked a wad of bills from the pocket of his cut-offs and lit a cigarette, the smoke curling up.  Then he looked over and saw me across the sunken service alley where the dumpsters were.  Maybe forty feet across.  Window open.  Curtains back.  Me in my underwear, holding the iron, a little steam wandering around.

Nothing happened.  We just looked at each other.  No thoughts, no words.  Just two human beings early in the morning, starting the day, equals.  Empty and innocent as deer in a misty field.

So did Mordecai survive his ordeal in the dumpster?  I have no idea.  You finish the story and then ask yourself why you finished it the way you did.

FATHER FITZGERALD'S ATTEMPTS TO INTERVENE

GF TRIBUNE, 1-27-13  

Hollidaysburg, PA.  Police say a Franciscan friar accused of sexually abusing students at schools in two states killed himself at a western Pennsylvania monastery.

Blair Township police Chief Roger White said an autopsy by the county coroner confirmed that Brother Stephen Baker, 62, died of self-inflicted wounds.

White said officers were called to St. Bernardine Monastery in Hollidaysburg on Saturday morning after another resident had found Baker not breathing.

_______________

It seems obvious that priests who molest children should be addressed by the priests themselves, not by trying to suppress knowledge of the individual cases but by trying to understand why such things happen:  how did these people get into the priesthood, what in their formation did not address this tendency or even their developed perversion, and what should be done with them once they are detected molesting children while in active ministry?  I had not known until just now (by Googling) that there HAVE been efforts to understand and prevent.

“Gerald Michael Cushing Fitzgerald (October 29, 1894 Framingham, MA - June 28, 1969) was a Roman Catholic priest  who began his ministry as a diocesan priest in Boston and later became a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, founded by Basile Antoine-Marie Moreau, who was born on February 11, 1799, in the final months of the French Revolution. Moreau was raised in a time when the Catholic Church was facing intense pressure and was being stripped of land, resources, and rights. When Moreau decided to enter the priesthood, he was forced to undergo his seminary training in secret for fear that the French government would arrest him. He completed his studies and was ordained for the Diocese of Le Mans in 1821. The French government continued to work for the removal of the Church from the educational system, which left many Catholics without a place to be educated or catechized. It was out of this environment that Fr. Moreau and a fellow priest came forward to form what is now the Congregation of Holy Cross.”

Non-Catholics, even Protestant clergy -- much less secular laymen or, say, Buddhist or Confucian or Jewish religious leaders -- are not always aware of a basic division inside the Roman Catholic clergy.  Some are part of the place-based parish church structure governed by Bishops where priests guide and support their congregations besides providing the Rite of Communion Mass.  Others join “gathered” communities with a mission that addresses a specific issue or practice, such as constant prayer for the world or education.  Some of these men (both in the parish or in gathered communities -- never women) may be qualified to perform Communion Mass.  Their hierarchical responsibilities are mixed between the authorities of their own order and those of the regular diocese.  Sometimes these purpose-based orders come into active conflict with the Pope’s diocesan authorities.  Sometimes the Holy Orders themselves interfere with each other.  They were founded in quite different times over the millennia, with different missions.

The Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete was founded in 1947 by Father Gerald Fitzgerald in Jemez Springs, NM.  Because of the history of his earlier order, the Congregation of Holy Cross, Fitzgerald must have been sharply aware of the potential opposition between secular government and religious communities.  He felt that priests should be dealt with in a religious context.  When he founded the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete, he seems also to have become trapped by the times in the ongoing class between science and religion.  More specifically, the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete began as a way of helping priests struggling with alcoholism, addiction, mental and emotional problems.  Fitzgerald was awakened to the need by a down-and-out man who had once been a priest, something like today's discarded and homeless veterans of war.  “Paraclete (Gr. παράκλητος, Lat. paracletus) means advocate or helper. In Christianity, the term most commonly refers to the Holy Spirit.”  Soon after the order was formed there were priests seeking help because they molested children.  Also, homosexual issues arose, sometimes confused with child abuse.

Fitzgerald believed that faith was both salvific and transformative: that is, he thought that religion could save people without the intervention of psychology and other scientific strategies, and that the people could change through faith.  He was opposed to Alcoholics Anonymous and felt that at least temporary withdrawal from the larger world could be healing if it were an experience of devotion.  Over the tumultuous post-WWII years the order expanded worldwide to a network of centers where troubled priests were often sent by their superiors.  As experience evolved, Fitzgerald came to believe that sexual abusers of children could not be reformed.  Some who had been certified by secular expert psychologists as now being “recovered,” had turned out to continue to offend.  Towards the end of his life Fitzgerald had put a down payment on a Caribbean island where such priests could be confined like lepers for the remainder of their lives.  Perhaps this is an extreme of the practice of assigning troublesome clergy (of all kinds) to remote jobs where they are presumed to “do no harm,” but one can never avoid children without a walled environment.

He and the others in the order also began to learn the hard way that those who help the stigmatized will soon be stigmatized and shut out themselves.  Fitzgerald constantly wrote letters to whoever had power, trying to persuade them to do more about priest-predators, advocating that they be “laicized” -- which is to say “defrocked.”  When his papers were opened after his death to show that he had recognized and vigorously addressed the problem, the information was used to indict the bishops who had claimed they knew nothing about it and tried to hush up the matter.

Today, much diminished, the community still exists and the remaining centers still try to help, but they are more agreeable to psychological methods and secular help.  Soon if not already, no doubt they will be looking at neurological research to see if there are organic reasons for the initiation and perseverance of inappropriate sexual behavior -- which, of course, begs the question of what is appropriate.  (Is celibacy appropriate?)  But scientific approaches evade the whole issue of whether spiritual conviction and practice really “works”.  In a pluralistic society with many forms of religious devotion -- including “devil worship” -- how can the Paraclete not shatter into meaninglessness?  What does shielding spiritual communities do for justice when the law is not obeyed?

It appears that history in its circular way is again coming to the French revolution’s desire to strip the Catholic church of its property and power.  The people want punishment, a guillotine of the treasury.  Communities of the Holy Spirit as “helpers,” which have always been in ambiguous relationship with Holy Communities as “missionaries”, must work hard to understand even for themselves what they are doing.  It might be smart for secular authorities to learn from them or alongside them.

One great need is the elimination of the stigma of having been a sexual victim as a child.  The stigma of the status acts as an invitation to more violation and continues the violence.  I’ve heard their anguished testimony, years later.  In intimate and powerful situations children think everything that goes wrong is their fault: their pain, their confusion, their failure to escape, and their secrets all seem like sins to them.  No Paraclete comes to help them.  Science tells them there might be something wrong with them.  Society tells them they are pariahs and condemned to a life outside the law.  Medicine becomes a vampire, both in the clinic and on the therapist’s couch.  I don’t know whether there is already a community of Holy Orders that defends and supports child victims of priests, but it might seem like a good idea to someone out there.  I wouldn’t be surprised if that person were Native American.  Come to think of it, can a Holy Order be founded by children?  What would a Rite of Absolution be like if there was nothing to absolve, as in the case of child victims?

PRIESTS ON THE PRAIRIE

A major oversight on the part of those trying to understand the dynamics of the 19^th century prairie clearances and the confinement of indigenous persons to reservations is the impact of the larger world:  what was going on throughout the planet but particularly in Europe where the generating forces of politics and economics often directly impinged on tribes in America.  It was a perfect storm.  Not just empire building by nations, but also the ideas that are always sweeping through populations, from romantic notions about nature; to the obsession with sexuality that became such a force against the separately evolved cultures of Indians;  to rivalries among religious bodies that prompted emigration as missionaries.  For instance, in France in 1817 the Rev. Jean de Lamennais formed an institute to “supply Christian teaching to areas unable to afford Christian Brothers.  When the French government outlawed all religious teaching orders in 1904, many of these brothers found work in other countries.” (p.95 of the unpublished thesis by Hugh Black.)  Two worked at Holy Family until 1909 when their order sent them elsewhere.

Reading Hugh Black’s history of Catholic missionaries on the Blackfeet reservation, I’m struck by their obsession with polygamy and birth outside church-sanctioned marriage.   (When it came to atypical gender roles, they seem to have covered their eyes.)  Alcohol (the drug of the times) was as much a curse then as now.  (Why do I never hear tales about drunken priests among the Indians?)  Priests had to share constantly the need for food created by the decimation of the buffalo, and the need for shelter in a climate of harsh and quickly changing conditions.  Canvas and cabins weren’t enough: fuel was a constant pressure.  For many, these things have not changed, neither for the Indians nor for the priests.

Because the priests felt an emergency response was demanded by the need to save souls, they often made strenuous life-threatening trips in bad weather. They were literally self-sacrificing. The Indians had evolved “Indian time” in part as a safety adaptation: no need to travel if the weather doesn't allow it.  For themselves, as contrasted with the Indians, the priests’ markers of success were baptism (preferably after instruction), and taking the sacraments to the ill.  Their conviction was that this provided entry into the afterlife of Heaven and they were so convincing that many Indian people would keep away from them when they were ill, for fear that the real goal of the priest was to push them over the line into that unseen place.  

Black robes were seen as wizards with special resources but also inscrutable goals.  No doubt much of the strategy of priests had evolved after the Black Plague of Europe reduced the population to a third of what it had been.  Some orders, like Cistercians, were clearly a response to that emptying of the land.  The Euro-values of cleanliness, obedience, farming as a privileged land-use, and the arbitrariness of God could probably be traced back to that time.  These were THEIR evolved response to conditions so severe that only belief in an afterlife could make it bearable.  

Euros came onto the prairie as creatures from an alien planet with a “more advanced” technology: guns, mostly.  They claimed to “know better.”  There is still insistence that white people are specifically obligated to be successful, admired, and worthy of imitation.  A slovenly, drunken, stingy, criminal white person bears more stigma than the same character if Indian.  Simple failure, economic or personal, is seen more harshly if the failing person is white.  They have no excuse.  The power and “magic” of the priests came largely from their access to the white world far away -- their ability to make contact with people who had resources, by-passing the politicians and power-brokers of the new territory.  They could read and write and the early religious people made haste to learn the Indian languages, so they could interpret.  Like Hudson’s Bay factors, they sent a steady stream of letters and collected artifacts back to headquarters, even to Rome.  It’s said that the world’s finest collections of tribal artifacts are in Rome.  This assertion has never been documented or inventoried, but occasionally something will surface on loan.

Many letters to Rome and patrons would have been begging for money.  No professing religious person on the Blackfeet Reservation that I know of has ever lived any better than their congregation and many have worked hard to bring in resources for charity and to build.  The mission schools were able to save children from starvation.  That IS documented.  I’ve never seen an accounting of how much money the Catholic church has spent on the Blackfeet Reservation but it would be significant.  And that would discourage criticism if there were little slips here and there.

The great advantage the contemporary reservation has is that it is still land-based and the identity rooted in that land is still alive.  This means that when the white rancher’s son goes off to a good college, earns degrees, takes an urban job, marries a city girl, and creates a busy life in that context, he doesn’t come back.  But the Blackfeet offspring still yearn for home and DO come back, even returning as retirees.  Some of them return as soon as they have the skills they need to do some good on the rez.  Things are changing.

Those educated tribal members have solved the problem of food and shelter, earning a living, though they might find they have assimilated more than they had intended. They find that on the rez drugs and sex remain as sources of violence, property loss, stigma, and damage to children, intensifying at adolescence.  One Browning priest said sadly,  “I came here thinking I could help to change lives, but instead I only bury young people.”  But the problem is so intense that the reservation can serve as a test ground for the world -- because the same forces affect the whole world.  It’s as though the tribe as a whole could become nearly a religious order of counselors, but one with responsibility to succeed in place rather than missionizing through some hierarchy someplace else.

One of the interesting people thinking about these issues is David Brooks in the NYTimes.  Recently he brought up the issue of working class kids getting fancy educations that separate them from home forever. A link follows.  He is curious and even admiring about tribes (the really aboriginal ones) but feels excluded.  Of course, this is obtuse if he thinks about how Euros have generally treated indigenous people: eliminated them either with death or conversion, or patronized them as “natural” or “deprived.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/books/review/the-world-until-yesterday-by-jared-diamond.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=davidbrooks

Brooks still thinks there is something “magic” about Indians, a kind of romantic reverse of the old priestly assertion of magic; in fact we are all simply human and doing the best we can with the conditions we’re stuck with.  Here’s Brooks’ bottom line:  “People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice — commitments to family, God, craft and country.”  In the constant struggle between individual and group, he votes for group.  Most Indians would do the same.  ("Shroud" is an unfortunate choice of word.)

I am uneasy about Catholic restitution that takes the form of large amounts of money, especially when the lawyers will take a major cut.  I even get nervous about the repatriation of artifacts when things like Chief Joseph’s shirt turn up at auction. I would rather see restitution in the form of translation of the archives of all those letters to Rome that were written in French and Italian.  Then posting on a website accessible by the tribal colleges and the growing number of personal computers on the rez.   If Hudson’s Bay can do it, so can the Catholic Church.