UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
October 12, 2017
By Peter Isely
“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.” — Virgil
This quote in Latin is not a Catholic one. It is from Virgil, the great first century Roman poet. It can be translated in various ways, most literally, “If I cannot deflect the superior powers, then I shall move the River Acheron,” and more commonly, “If I cannot bend the heavens, then I shall move the powers of hell.”
This is the epitaph I would give to my generous, difficult and “mad” friend of over 25 years, Barbara Blaine, whose sudden death Sept. 24 I am still finding incomprehensible. I place Virgil’s defiance, spoken by the goddess Juno, an infinite distance from Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s quote in The New York Times obituary for Barbara: “May God have mercy on her soul.”
Sigmund Freud famously placed Virgil’s quote on the title page of his masterwork, The Interpretations of Dreams. It is the motto for any radical change. It points to the need for disturbing and interrupting the unexpressed, underground structure of our daily life. Of all forms of violence, the one with the most catastrophic consequences is not personal or interpersonal but “systematic”: the kind of violence imposed by the fluid, seemingly natural functioning of our economic, political and religious systems.
It’s one thing to try to change the written laws, difficult as that is (as Barbara knew very intimately from years of trying to push for reforms in sexual abuse statutes), but real change only erupts when the unwritten laws of a system are disturbed. It was Freud who, through his clinical work on the unconscious, recognized that what bonds and binds individuals to a system are its secret, half-spoken, shadowy rules. What really cements group loyalty and submission is not the open agreement on which laws to keep but the “somehow always already known” ones that everyone secretly agrees to break.
My favored translation of Virgil’s saying is, “If you cannot move the upper regions, dare to move the underground.” Was this not Barbara’s supreme wager and ethical act? If you cannot move the upper regions of the Catholic Church, its pope and hierarchy, then dare to move the underground of its child sexual abuse survivors. Create a path for the upsurge from within its actually existing hell, not the one of theological fables, but the real one where across the centuries the bodies of hundreds of thousands of children have been sexually violated and dumped into the great black hole of institutional Catholicism to suffer and disappear. Bring these stories from hell to the surface, raise them up, speak to them: Shake the underground.
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