Short Eyes

john marshall
Sep 5, 2018 · 6 min read

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Whether I like it or not I am Catholic. Raised with the guidelines to the Almighty that were my father’s, his father’s, and his father’s father going back centuries. The religion my mother converted to when I was five years old. Those set of religious mores that held me in check everyday in school under the discerning eyes of Sister So and So. It powered me to the altar in the fifth grade after memorizing and reciting verbatim, the entire mass in Latin to gain entry into the world beneath the crucifix and the sacristy.
Yes the church, where the pews went on for the length of a football field, with the stained glass, stations of the cross, and a ceiling so high you could never throw a baseball far enough to touch it. Yet you knew you shouldn’t. Not because you didn’t want to, but because God was up there somewhere, and hitting the Creator with a baseball might condemn you to reciting the Hail Mary and the Lords Prayer, even in your sleep, for the rest of your life. Regardless, it all seemed so divine.
Then one day in 1997, an article in the British press reveals the cover up of sexual abuse to young African girls at the hands of Catholic priests in Eastern Africa. The story goes on to say, like so many to follow, that the abuse is as prevalent as that of young boys by Catholic priests in America. The author of the article opines that the reason it is not being reported in the States, is because the Catholic Church is working overtime to dam the damning flow of unsavory information about the priests so it does not flood the news world to Biblical proportions. That was 21 years ago. The damn has now burst, and the flood of nauseating news regarding decades, hell, centuries long sexual abuse of minors by a cadre of Catholic priests throughout the globe has grown large enough to float Noah’s Ark.
As someone raised Catholic it is shocking. Shocking that the religious beliefs, the God I was raised to believe existed, would be used in such a way that would cross the boundaries of what is acceptable in the worlds of online porn and prison. Which brings us to the title of this confession.
Short Eyes, for the uninformed, is the name given to any child molester by the incarcerated. To those who’s lives are defined by vertical bars and razor wire being the limits to their inhabitable world, an adult who sexually abuses children is the filthiest of scum. They may murder, extort, steal, con, or just flat screw up to end up on the inside, but to lay lusting hands on an adolescent is the unforgivable sin. The penance? Death to anyone who does. Short Eyes don’t last long in our prisons, a year if they’re lucky.
Think about that. Hardened criminals have a more virtuous code toward youth than many a Catholic priest. That an adolescent child would be safer from sexual abuse in a maximum security prison surrounded by criminals in modern America, than in a Catholic church with priests on the loose, lays bare the savagery to the infectious culture that has been allowed to mutate in the Petri dish of Catholicism for centuries. Maybe those we incarcerate aren’t so criminal after all.
Speaking of criminals, Omertà, the legendary code of silence practiced by mafioso longer than anyone who reads this has been alive, has been practiced by the Catholic hierarchy for the same. Deceased members of every major mafia crime family are rolling in their graves in amazement. Amazed that an organization could continually receive undocumented income, be engaged in illegal activity, never pay taxes, and never go to jail, for centuries. Even the ghost of Al Capone, bootlegger extraordinaire, and incarcerated for income tax fraud is murmuring, “I was in the wrong business!”
And business it is at the Catholic Church, or any other church when it comes to protecting that business. A business worth billions, built on the backs of the faithful for millennium. Who cares if priests are molesting young boys and girls? Who cares if priests having children out of wedlock? Who cares if priests are raping nuns? The protection of the Catholic brand, the economic soul of the church, is the only soul worth saving for those in command of the brand. As a Catholic I am appalled, and the silence of everyone of my fellow Catholics on these shores and others not seeking clear eyed reform of the Catholic church is the real Silence of the Lambs.
Should The Reformation, brought about by a devout Martin Luther disgusted by Pope Leo’s extravagances, which included having naked boys jumping out of cakes, be the only major upheaval of the Catholic church? American Catholics do not have to wait for what the church will or will not do. Just as We the People have the power through our Constitution to grant the most liberal religious freedoms in the world, so too through that document we can initiate change if we so choose.
“The power to tax is the power to destroy, “ so said U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in the majority opinion, McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819. If we wish to have realistic change in the the way the Catholic church conducts itself the the United States of America, destroying its centuries old business of abuse is a starting point. If there ever was a document that lays out in detail to just what the Catholic church is in every state, and every country, it is the Grand Jury Report from the state of Pennsylvania. Reading it illuminates how the Catholic church is not so much a religious organization, as it is a business. A business that has flourished in the market place of abuse under the moniker of God. In America, any business, all business, is subject to the scrutiny of that infamous Beelzebub with universal reach, the IRS. In Pennsylvania is it time to have the Catholic church seek redemption of its sins by giving alms to the Devil every April 15th?
Once taxation starts income and expenses have to be recorded and audited externally. What better way to clear the murky waters of a business mired in deceit and abuse than by having Satan call you in every year for an audit? One of the original ideals to our experiment with constitutional democracy is to allow the states to be laboratories in that experiment. Time the citizens of Pennsylvania to request the passage of state legislation that strips the Catholic Church of their tax exempt status within the state? What is wrong with the congregation taking control to rid the pestilence within the church? If it is challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, so be it. Let the discussion begin. The discussion of what you can and cannot do, hiding behind the facade of God, to achieve tax exempt status. It is safe to say, pedophilia, rape, and forced abortions won’t be included on the tablet for the Ten Commandments of Tax Exempt Status.
Of course there is another avenue the Catholic church can travel if it wants to merge onto the road to salvation, and bypass the will of the state on its way to the Promised Land of reform. That avenue? Marriage for the priesthood and female priests. From the time of the second sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. until 1139 A.D., those males that declared themselves Christ-ian apostles and priests were allowed to marry and have children. The cult of celibacy and virginity reached their zenith in the early 12th century with the all male priesthood facing challenge after challenge by female Christ-ians desiring to join the priesthood. What could God fearing men do to keep control? Legislate marriage out and celibacy in. The reality for Catholics is that the amount of time priests have not been allowed to marry, 879 years, is out done by the amount of time priests and apostles were allowed to marry, 1069 years. For old guard Catholics in 2018 to claim the need for ritual purity in administering the Eucharist, the reason for excluding women from the priesthood in 1139, and the original reason why priests must be celibate and could not marry, is absurd in an age where women have been Eucharist ministers in the church for decades. Allowing marriage in the priesthood and women to become priests will be the long overdue resurrection Catholicism needs in order to survive. That there are those within the hierarchy of the church who would try to prevent this to protect their individual and institutional power reinforces the concept of a business, not a religion.
Catholics worldwide want change, and change there can be. Like Christ slogging through the streets carrying his own cross, modern Catholics must labor under the weight, perhaps for decades, of a 21st century reformation if they want Catholicism to resurrect from the ashes of those torched by unholy desire into a faith grounded in the Christ-ianity of compassion, empathy, and forgiveness for all regardless of creed, race, or station in life.