8/1/2026

 Saturday, August 1, 2026

1959 Pope John XXIII published the encyclical Sacerdotii nostri primordia

2025 Trump ordered the deployment of two nuclear submarines near Russia for potential military action against Russian forces in response to statements made by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and current deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation regarding Trump's previously-stated deadline for ending the war in Ukraine.

In bed around 9, up at 5:10.  0525. 113/69/57  109  204.0; POWER OUTAGE; .88/58/70/64, BEACH HAZARDS, rain

Morning meds at noon.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.  I started, and expect to finish, this novella today.  I remember seeing the 2024 movie starring Cillian Murphy and being touched by it.  It's only 70 pages long, and I read the first 25 or so this morning.

The hero is a coal merchant named Bill Furlong, whose name reminds me of Andy Furlong, a friend I met at the end of January in 1964 at Naval Air Station Glynco outside Brunswick, GA, where we were both in training to become air defense control officers, providing guidance to fighter pilots tasked with shooting down enemy aircraft approaching friendly troops or other targets.  Andy was a Navy ensign from northern New Jersey, and we became good friends over the two months we spent together there.  He had been an English Lit major in college, and at the time I was trying (mostly vainly) to read and understand William Blake's prophetic poetry, which may have been (who can remember) how we met at the bachelor officers' quarters where we lived while there.  I have warm memories of Andy, including our many visits to the barrier islands beyond the tidal salt marshes of Glynn immortalised by Sydney Lanier's eponymous poem, our futile attempt to visit the Okeefenokee Swamp, and the night I still remember at Shone's Big Boy where Andy declined to have his coffee replaced into which he had dropped his cigarette ash, with the memorable: "No, I smoked it; I'll drink it."  What I regret now, so many years later, is that we allowed our friendship to lapse when we left NAS Glynco, he to report to some ship and I to report to MCAS Yuma, AZ.  Why didn't we stay in touch?  Why didn't I stay in touch with Bob Hillary, with whom I served at Yuma and again in Vietnam, and with John Kroll?  With Larry Stack, my best friend in high school, or Cathy Semrau and his wonderful parents?   With Ara Cherchian and Vicki Conte?  How foolish I've been throughout my life.

Back to Small Things Like These.  I finished it this afternoon.  It's teaching is encapsulated on page 67:

. . . he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?  Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

This short novel is an indictment - of the Irish Catholic Church, of Irish Catholic religious orders, of Irish Catholic culture, of Irish society, and of the Irish govenment.   It is set in a small Irish town in 1985.  It's hero is Bill Furlong, son of an unwed mother who gave birth of him at age 16, after which both he and his mother were kept by their Anglo benefactress, Mrs. Wilson.  Bill is a deeply empathetic, compassionate, kind man who learned of the cruel treatment of the girls and women kept as virtual prisoners at the town's local convent., named after "The Good Shepherd."  The nuns at the convent ran both a girl's school for fortuante and good girls and a Magdalen laundry for unfortunate and bad girls.  The novel tells the story of his rescue of one of the girls and of his inner turmoil leading to the rescue.  His wife and the whole town advise him not to concern himself with the girls in the convent's laundry business, nor to even think about them, but he can't not think or be concerned about them, and indeed about all the unfortunates in life who must deal with cruelty, neglect, and suffering in our "vale of tears."  

Keegan dedicated Small Things Like These to "the women and children who suffered time in Ireland's Magdalen laundries," but the main focus of the narrative is on Furlong's moral and emotional struggle with his conscience, especially as a Christian but more broadly as a human being.  The last Magdalene laundry in Ireland was not shut down until 1996.  These evil instituions were managed and financed by the Catholic Church in active concert with the Irish government.  No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalene laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013.

Another wicked religious institution operated by the Irish Cathoic Church was the Mothers and Babies Homes for unwed mothers.  An recdnt official report from the Irish government revealed the 9,000 children died in just 18 of the homes investigated.  In 2014, the historian Catherin Corless made public her discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home in County Galway.

This is not ancient history. These institutions were operated during my lifetime by the Church of which I was a member.  At the age of 15, following her acts of shoplifting and truancy, Sinead O'Connor was placed for 18 months in the Grianán Training Centre in Drumcondra,[29] which was run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity.  From Wikipedia:

On 3 October 1992, O'Connor appeared on the American television programme Saturday Night Live (SNL) and staged a protest against the Roman Catholic Church. After performing an a cappella rendition of Bob Marley's 1976 song "War" with new lyrics related to child abuse, she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II taken from her mother's bedroom wall eight years earlier, said "fight the real enemy", and threw the pieces to the floor.  A month later, O'Connor said she felt the Catholic Church bore some responsibility for the physical, sexual and emotional abuse she had suffered as a child. In describing her actions, she said the church had destroyed "entire races of people", and that Catholic priests had been abusing children for years. Her protest took place nine years before John Paul II publicly acknowledged child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

In 2002, ten years after O'Connor's dramatic accusation against the Church, the Boston Globe published it's exposé of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and its coverup by Church authorities.

Knowing what we know, what are we to think of the Church as an institution?  as a religious authority?  as an infallible guide in matters of faith and morals?  Just askin'.