Recent events in the Catholic church have disturbed me to the point that I feel compelled to put the proverbial pen to paper. What has been going on within the church is nothing short of abhorrent.
Not only were children abused at the hands of men who they and their families saw as figures of trust and authority, but the abuse and misuse of power seems to have spread all the way up to the very top of the Catholic church; Bishops, Cardinals and even the Pope himself - all of whom appear guilty of failing to act with appropriate seriousness and judgment in dealing with the situation.
Child abuse leads to massive trauma for often the entire lifetime of the abused and, because the injury is psychological, it remains invisible to all but those closest to the afflicted. I see it all the time myself in my work as a psychiatrist where I facilitate a variety of interventions from spiritual self help all the way to medication and hospital admission in severe cases and I have witnessed countless devastated lives over my career stemming directly from a period of abuse. No verbal apology can ever make up for the tidal wave of suffering that the Catholic church is today responsible for. Yet, beyond words of apology, very little action seems to have taken place.
The one group within the Catholic church who spoke out about the abuse was the nuns and yet, as a body, they themselves are now under investigation by the church hierarchy for their supposed insubordination. The nuns have, in fact, been the light trying to break through from within the church itself, while all the while being closeted away as much as possible by the male hierarchy.
Yet it is within this very male hierarchy that the problem exists. For any organization to be exclusively male in its upper echelons and management is wrong in any event. That is where the problem starts in the church. This is then further compounded by the celibacy order. The human sex drive is as natural as our appetite for food. In some people it is more and others it is less, but to ban it out of existence for an entire swathe of people can never be healthy.
It is in these two aspects that the seeds of the Catholic church’s cancerous growth sit. They are clearly in need of some spiritual self help of their own.
Dr Russell Razzaque is a practicing psychiatrist based in London, England. He earned his medical degree from the University of London, he is a member of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists and in 2009, after several years of clinical development, he launched SILEOTHERAPY - an innovative online self help program...
www.meditation-therapy.net
Sileotherapy is a unique synthesis of meditation techniques and Internet therapy, and this new approach to personal development is the basis of an ongoing series of articles in this blog.
