UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
James Preece of Catholic and Loving It comments on my recent post, The Pattern, and affirms what I suggest, which is (to quote James), “The problem is that we haven’t tried to fix the culture that enabled sex abuse, we’ve just made sex abuse a special case.”
I encourage you to follow the link and read his very well-written article. In it, he strikes upon an apt metaphor.
I don’t think it would be fair to talk about a “culture of abuse”, because I’m quite sure the majority of Catholics are not in favour of abuse and do not encourage or perpetrate abuse. What we are talking about is a culture which is favourable to abuse. It’s like storing raw meat in a warm place. Warmth itself is not food poisoning, but it is better to keep food in the fridge.
Indeed, this bad spiritual food-hygiene leads to abuse of many varieties. As in spoiled meat, the culture that springs up is a bacterial and a poisonous culture.
Preece describes this culture and hits upon the heart of the problem …
Looking at the definition of “abuse” we find that the word essentially means “misuse”. That’s why there are so many kinds of abuse such as verbal abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, substance abuse and so on. We call it abuse when somebody misuses a person sexually but we also use the word in other ways, like “I let my daughter have access to the biscuit jar but she abused the privilege”.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.