...are emerging about sexual abuse in some Catholic institutions.
We really do need to stay sane and let facts speak. Some facts will be ghastly, and action will be needed. But many people are innocent and their association with schools or institutions will now haunt them in a most unjust way.
Mgr Georg Ratzinger, brother of the Pope, was choirmaster at Regensburg for some thirty years, beginning in the middle 1960s, after the events being recalled took place. But just to make his own position clear, he added that he had occasionally given boys a cuff round the ear, and now felt rather bad about it.
Oh, dear. I can remember being smacked a couple of times by the nuns at my school for misbehaviour, and I truly couldn't call it abuse, and cannot claim that I felt any dreadful suffering or horror at the time, or feel it now in retrospect. (If I am honest, what I actually disliked far more was the sort of punishment that one recieved when much older - such as having a detention, which had somehow to be explained away at home).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Well I don't believe in physical punishment..
Speaking as a mere male, I'm afraid I do believe in the occasional judicious smack . . . I certainly got a few - and was even caned once at school - and I don't think it has done me any long-term harm; perhaps the worst that can be said is that I am realistic about the effectiveness of mild physical punishment !
(That said, any physical chastisement around the head - such as Mgr Georg's 'clip round the ear' - IS unacceptable; one must stick to those body parts designed by God for the purpose, where there is some pain, but no risk of any sort of damage.)
"one must stick to those body parts designed by God for the purpose"
What a very unpleasant comment.I think smacking has done Dominic Mary considerably more harm than he realises.
Post a Comment