Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Lingering Effects Of The Problem

Xavier College - Burke Hall in Melbourne, Australia
High-profile members of the campaign group Protest the Pope, an umbrella group of organizations opposing the visit, will meet Smith on Wednesday. They have planned a march on 19 September to coincide with his visit to the capital, which will culminate in a vigil in Hyde Park. Organisers meeting Smith include the g@y rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, Andrew Copson, the chief executive of the British Humanist Association, and Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society. He said he would not be "lectured" by the archbishop. "There is a defensive tone in what [Smith] is saying," he said. "It is an indication of the church's fear that something will happen to bring the pope into disrepute. I think something should happen to embarrass the pope into, for example, confronting the child abuse scandal. We're not going to be kind to the Pope because he does not deserve to be respected." Although there is a rainbow coalition of groups opposing the papal visit, they have agreed a strategy that will focus on the stories of sexual abuse survivors. Organizers are planning to to fly abuse survivors into London from across the world for a press conference on 15 September, the eve of the visit. They include Mark Fabbro, an Australian who says he was s@distically r@ped by a priest at a Jesuit school (Xavier College-Burke Hall) in Melbourne in 1971, when he was 11.
Link (here) to the full article at The Guardian 

1 comment:

TonyD said...

Lessons are provided not just for individuals, but for organizations -- in the hope that they will learn.

Unfortunately, just as for individuals, lessons can be hard to recognize (let alone learn.) After all, not every difficulty is a lesson.

When we are so distant from the basic value – “love your neighbor” – how can we expect to be able to discern lessons? If we cannot take the values of others seriously – more seriously than even our own values – how can we hope to hear an explanation that we cannot really hear?

Our decision-making must be improved. And we will be exposed to things, painful things, which cannot be successfully addressed without an accompanying internal change.

To this end, "love your neighbor", is good advice. It tries to get us to focus on balance, humility, and self-sacrifice in service of our society as a whole. Of course, it is not sufficient. A deep understanding of “love your neighbor” is just one component of the judgment that is required to successfully navigate an interdependent existence -- The underlying values that contribute to a judgment are more important – even more important than the actual action that results from the judgment.

We are, in many ways, like colonies of bees or ants. We must recognize our interdependency in order to survive. And more, we must recognize that this interdependency requires self-sacrifice for the common good. Further, we will be given lessons until we are able to become someone capable of existing in such an interdependent environment.