4/6/23

Thursday, April 6, 2023

 In bed around 10:30, up at 7 after active intestinal night (leftover spaghetti w/ clam sauce?).  Bright, sunny Spring morning.  31℉, wind W at 16 mph, gusts to 32 mph, high of 48℉. Sun rose at 6:23, sunset at 7:23, 12+58.

Maryland AG Report on Pedophilia in the Catholic Church   More than 150 Catholic priests and others associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore sexually abused over 600 children and often escaped accountability, according to a long-awaited state report released Wednesday that revealed the scope of abuse spanning 80 years and accused church leaders of decades of coverups. . .  "The staggering pervasiveness of the abuse itself underscores the culpability of the Church hierarchy,” the report said. “The sheer number of abusers and victims, the depravity of the abusers’ conduct, and the frequency with which known abusers were given the opportunity to continue preying upon children are astonishing.” . . . The Baltimore report says church leaders were focused on keeping abuse hidden, not on protecting victims or stopping abuse. In some situations, victims ended up reporting abuse to priests who were abusive themselves. And when law enforcement did become aware of abuse allegations, police and prosecutors were often deferential and “uninterested in probing what church leaders knew and when,” according to the report.

During this Passover week, I'm reminded of Ma Nishtana.  And of Pope Pius X's1906  encyclical Vehementer Nos: 

It follows that the Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.

Ecclesiastical, hierarchical, happy horseshit. 

My FB Posting: Dobbs, Abortion, Prostasiewicz  "The ugliness of the Protaseiwicz-Kelly election reminded me of Justice Alito's bemoaning of the Roe and Casey decisions in his Dobbs majority opinion:. ""Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives."   As if Dobbs didn't have damaging consequenses,  inflame debate, deepen division, magnify and multiply it throughout the land.

My Detachment.  After a nap, I read some more of Tracy Kidder's memoir.  He writes of the summer of 1968 when he finished his course at the Army Intelligence School at Fort Devens, MA, had his orders to RVN and took his 30-day leave pre-RVN.  It reminded me  of a similar period 3 years before 1968 after I received my orders to MCAS, Iwakuni, Japan.  These are not pleasant memories in the main.  We drove from Yuma up to Las Vegas to put our Siamese cat Ralph on a flight to Cleveland, saw a show of some sort during our overnight in Vegas, then drove up to Yellowstone National Park where the snow alongside the roads was higher than our 1964 Pontiac LeMans, then cross-country to Milwaukee where we visited Ronnie Colby Devitt who was living in an apartment on the North Side off Sherman Boulevard.  Then down to Chicago to visit my family, an awkward visit at best, then to South Euclid, OH, where Anne would live for the next year while I was overseas.  We slept in her old bedroom.  I wasn't sure of how I felt about what was about to happen, what I felt.  My recollection is that I was in one of my emotionally frozen states, a state I developed as a child, probably as a defense mechanism because of my Dad's PTSD and maybe because of James Hartmann's crime against my mother, Kitty, and me.  Who knows.  In any event, I wasn't acknowledging any emotion, any analysis of the situation Anne and I were in, or the situation over the next long year.  After a largely sleepless night, Pink and Gert Smith and Anne drove me to Cleveland Hopkins Airport on the West Side and I boarded a plane to San Francisco and then a bus to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield CA, and then a Continental Airlines 707 chartered aircraft to  Narita Airport, Tokyo.  The transoceanic flight was my first experience of a REALLY long flight and I remember actually having a fear of running out of fuel during the flight.  The movie Major Dundee starring Charlton Heston was shown twice during the flight.  The approach to the Tokyo airport involved a lot of steep banking port and starboard and I recall that as scary too.  Then a military aircraft of some sort from Tokyo to Iwakuni, 30 miles south of Hiroshima, and I was finally at my assigned duty station, except the unit I had been ordered to join was no longer there; it had already packed up and moved to the air base at DaNang.  There was a rear echelon left at Iwakuni, however, and the Officer-in-Charge was my old friend from MCAS Yuma, Warrant Officer Ron Kendall, a native of somewhere in Iowa.  An enlisted man had died accidentally while working on the old car he owned and an official death investigation had to be done and Ron assigned me as the investigating officer to give me a little time to enjoy Japan before deploying to Vietnam.  That death investigation, plus the unavailability of seats on planes going to Vietnam, let me stretch out my initial time in Japan to more than 2 weeks, something I'm grateful for.  It was during that time that I was able to visit Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial there.  The Vietnam war was new business then, the 3rd Marine Division and 1st Marine Air Wing having arrived/invaded only a few month before my arrival.  I had no idea what lay ahead.  Tracy Kidder, on the other hand, was going to Vietnam six months after the Tet Offensive when it became clear to the entire world, including members of the military, that the 'light at the end of the tunnel' happy horseshit that the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and MACV had been dishing out for 2 and 1/2 years was all a lie.  As Kidder was leaving for RVN, I had completed my year over there, completed my last year of active duty at NAS Willow Grove, PA, and completed my first year of law school.  JFK had been assassinated in November 1963, MLK had been assassinated on April 4, 1968, RFK had been assassinated on June 5.  It was a year of total disillusionment about the war effort in Vietnam and about our country here at home, with urban riots devastating more than 100 American cities.  I, and I suspect many of my contemporaries, have never recovered from that period.  I guess the nation hasn't either.