[Sca-cooks] OT: Re: Bread and wine in the Catholic church

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On May 21, 2006, at 7:35 PM, Ana Valdes wrote:

> What a sweet story! By I am going now to add a little turbulence to
> the list with a little own personal story showing the other side of
> the Catholicism, the one I don't want to accept.
>
> Nobody at the list know me or the reasons why I live in Sweden. I came
> here as political refugee in the late 70, after a four years jail
> sentence in my homeland, Uruguay. My life is easy to explain: 11 years
> in the cloister, 2 years in the student movement fighting against the
> military dictatorship, four years in jail and now 28 years in exile.
> Sorry if I violate some etiquette including controversial political
> issues in the list.
> This is the reflexion I posted to a list discussing human rights  
> issues:
>
> "I was 19 years old when I was tortured, in Uruguay, at that time one
> of South America's most 'exemplary' countries, with a long tradition
> of democracy and legality. Uruguay was then a country with a small
> army and without any military conscription.
>
> We were tortured by people we knew. I was raised in a family with
> several members in the military. I was beaten and tortured by friends
> of my uncles and my cousins.
>
> Some years ago, I went to church in Spain and confessed (I am a
> freelance Catholic, I accept some aspects of the Church and its
> doctrine, but about others I am critical or skeptical). I didn't know
> the priest was a member of Opus Dei, the Catholic right-wing sect who
> supported Franco and Pinochet. He asked me why I have not been in
> confession for so many years, so I told him briefly about my four
> years in jail, and my exile in Sweden. He asked me how I felt about
> the men who interrogated me. I was a bit struck by his question … up
> until that time, I had not given them much thought. Yet he insisted,
> and so I said "Today, I am not sure how I feel. I can accept that many
> of them believed they were right, and that torture or pressure were
> only methods to gather information, but …" He interrupted me and said:
> "But you should love the people who tortured you. They did it to save
> your immortal soul. If you died under torture, you should go directly
> to heaven. They were good Catholics, and only wanted to save you from
> the devil, and from Marxism." Torture is still in my body as a memory
> and as a trace. It's still a challenge for me to discover the reasons
> why friends of my uncles, and good Catholics, could torture and kill,
> and still go to church on Sundays.
>
> Ana

There's not much I can say to put those events in a better  
perspective, except to say that every religion has its idiots, and  
unfortunately some of the idiots are powerful, influential idiots.

I can only say I'm glad you made it through all that.

You might look at Anthony Burgess's novel "Earthly Powers" (if you're  
able to, under the circumstances) for a rather satisfying fictional  
account of a village priest in Italy (who, by the end of the book, is  
the Pope), the local Mafia, and an SS officer whom the priest  
persuades, using some of the rawest methods imaginable (methods with  
which the SS officer is all too familiar), to see the error of his ways.

Adamantius




"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04