OK, What is all this stuff I write about the Church failing children?
It was nearly forty years ago when I saw a girl about 11 on top of a 9 yer told girl on the pavement smacking her on the face. I separated them and they told me they were sisters. "I'll get her when you're gone" snapped the older girl. "No you will not, I will walk her home" I replied.
It turned out they were daughters of a struggling single mother who had very little support in her own life. As I got to know the family better I realised that the children were so deprived of the things other children had that any hope that they would grow up, marry, and live a secure life were very slim indeed. The children actually went to a Catholic School and there were I am sure very caring people in that school who did their best for the children but I am sure in their hearts they knew what I knew that the future of these girls for a fulfilled life and a happy marriage were slim indeed. They did not have a Father to come home and lift them up and cuddle them and call them his little Princesses. I took my son to a club one night run by the mentally ill and found a young girl there with a mentally ill mother. She was only fifteen. But just a few words of praise and she was my friend for life. She had a sister Jenny when I met. Both girls also grew up without a father and their lives proved a disaster in many ways. The common theme was that they could not make lasting relationships with men. They did however conceive children outside wedlock and the daughters are repeating the pattern of inability to form lasting relationships and becoming single parents. I could go on with many more examples but I will just add that all the girls were baptised and are nominally Catholic. My next question is not why is this happening but why is the Church totally ignoring the suffering of these young people? Yes, we are great at giving to the poor through charities, we might even be what we like to think we are 'communities of faith' and we might talk of Catholic Social Teaching and the rights of people but we never never even look at this problem just beyond the front door. We prefer to ignore it and perhaps it will go away. Although baptised and nominally Catholic none of these girls come to Church because what really has the Church done for them. They know more than the so called experts that a child needs a Father and a Mother because they have suffered and I mean suffered all their lives from the absence of one. They have grown up with little believe and confidence in themselves because when young someone who should have been there had totally ignored them and considered them worthless. I remember a girl running into the Church during Adoration and telling me how she had found out the phone number of her birth father and phoned him. He had simply shouted abuse at there and told her he wanted her to stop pestering him. In every school the numbers of one-parent children is now beginning to outnumber the child with two. But it is OK says society they get along pretty well. Not the ones I know. Yes they may find a job and they may support themselves but what of those who turn to drugs, who become prostitutes, who become criminals. Authorities are almost scared to look into their backgrounds.
But we have no answers some priests will cry. But if there idea of Community is to agree with the divorced that marriage is just an ideal then what support is that. Perhaps we should all read Mark 10 again and think why Jesus was so angry, for angry he was.
It turned out they were daughters of a struggling single mother who had very little support in her own life. As I got to know the family better I realised that the children were so deprived of the things other children had that any hope that they would grow up, marry, and live a secure life were very slim indeed. The children actually went to a Catholic School and there were I am sure very caring people in that school who did their best for the children but I am sure in their hearts they knew what I knew that the future of these girls for a fulfilled life and a happy marriage were slim indeed. They did not have a Father to come home and lift them up and cuddle them and call them his little Princesses. I took my son to a club one night run by the mentally ill and found a young girl there with a mentally ill mother. She was only fifteen. But just a few words of praise and she was my friend for life. She had a sister Jenny when I met. Both girls also grew up without a father and their lives proved a disaster in many ways. The common theme was that they could not make lasting relationships with men. They did however conceive children outside wedlock and the daughters are repeating the pattern of inability to form lasting relationships and becoming single parents. I could go on with many more examples but I will just add that all the girls were baptised and are nominally Catholic. My next question is not why is this happening but why is the Church totally ignoring the suffering of these young people? Yes, we are great at giving to the poor through charities, we might even be what we like to think we are 'communities of faith' and we might talk of Catholic Social Teaching and the rights of people but we never never even look at this problem just beyond the front door. We prefer to ignore it and perhaps it will go away. Although baptised and nominally Catholic none of these girls come to Church because what really has the Church done for them. They know more than the so called experts that a child needs a Father and a Mother because they have suffered and I mean suffered all their lives from the absence of one. They have grown up with little believe and confidence in themselves because when young someone who should have been there had totally ignored them and considered them worthless. I remember a girl running into the Church during Adoration and telling me how she had found out the phone number of her birth father and phoned him. He had simply shouted abuse at there and told her he wanted her to stop pestering him. In every school the numbers of one-parent children is now beginning to outnumber the child with two. But it is OK says society they get along pretty well. Not the ones I know. Yes they may find a job and they may support themselves but what of those who turn to drugs, who become prostitutes, who become criminals. Authorities are almost scared to look into their backgrounds.
But we have no answers some priests will cry. But if there idea of Community is to agree with the divorced that marriage is just an ideal then what support is that. Perhaps we should all read Mark 10 again and think why Jesus was so angry, for angry he was.
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