Abandoned Altars

Courageous survivor and journalist Kay Ebeling, in her latest blog post at the excellent City of Angels blog, writes about how the priest mangled Matthew’s version of the Parable of the Sower when she went to her old parish recently. If you’ve ever seen a Catholic lectionary, you might notice that almost all the readings skip around. Very rare is it to find a reading without serious editing.

But there’s another version of the same parable that’s a little different, in Luke, chapter 8. It is much the same except there is no mention at all of the harvest, just that the seed sown on the good ground produced a crop “a hundred times more than was sown.”

The interesting thing is that it’s followed by one of the most enigmatic passages in the entire Bible. One that I’m sure is never quoted in church:

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There are some eloquent survivors with great insights who only lack a means of getting their message out.

One of these is Vinnie Nauheimer. I am pleased to host one of his recent writings, Who Changed the Church?

I hope to publish more materials by other writers. If interested, please email me.

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This weekend, SNAP’s National Conference will be held in Chicago. Since the demise of the Linkup, this is the biggest and most important event around for victims and survivors. Unfortunately, a recent illness has kept me from attending, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it.

Lately, I’ve been watching more news clips from when the crisis started back in 1992. There was a fascinating Oprah program very early on, in September or thereabouts of 1992. It featured several victims including David Clohessy, as well as Richard Sipe, and a bunch of people I recognized in the audience – Jeanne Miller, Tom Economus, Nancy Briggs, etc. Most are long gone but there are a few who might be there at the Conference right now.

Once again, though, I was struck by how much was exposed in plain view right at the very beginning of the crisis. Sipe was already proclaiming that the reason the Church was so scared of exposure because abuse “went to the highest echelons of the Church”. We still haven’t seen just how high it really goes…

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