UNITED STATES
skipshea
Posted on November 13, 2013
It is no secret that I am a survivor of clergy sexual abuse. Nor is it a secret that it has fueled a lot of my artwork. For most of my life. You can only imagine the excitement I felt when “Ave Maria” my horror short with very Catholic themes was accepted to the Interiora Horror Festival in Rome, Italy. For me that was a major artistic achievement. One that would be hard to top.
And then it won the Premio del Pubblico or Audience Choice Award for Best Film. This may be hard for many to believe, but I was actually rendered speechless. Which worked out fine because I can’t speak Italian anyway.
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The fact that those in attendance at the festival picked my very politically charged Catholic film was incomprehensible to me. I was literally on the doorstep of the Vatican and somehow my message was roundly embraced.
But I was viewing this with an American eye. We have distance from the church with it’s centuries of abuses and corruption as an institution. The Crusades, Inquisition, the encouragement of castrato, and sexual abuse of children all happened there. Only a quarter of that equation happened in the USA.
Which is why stories like this play so well here.
Recently Pope Francis made a speech where he said: “Jesus says ‘It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea’,” because “where there is deceit, the Spirit of God cannot be”.
He said this in reference to the corruption with the whistleblowers and the Vatican Bank. They recently passed a law that made whistleblowing a major crime in order to get things back to normal, controlling the narrative while claiming that the corruption is over.
Right.
But the quote he used about the millstone ad nothing to do with corruption. It is in refernce to a quote by Jesus that made three of the gospels. Matthwe 18:6, Luke 17:2 and Mark 9:42. It says: But whosoever shall offend one of these little ones who believe in me, it were profitable for him that a great millstone had been hanged upon his neck and he be sunk in the depths of the sea.
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