Since 2009, pastor Andreas Calbazar has been temporarily housing newly separated fathers in a home in the Swiss village of Erlenbach. Cabalzar began this project when he was approached by four local men, all of whom needed a temporary place to stay after splitting up with their wives. Today, Cabalzar runs a shelter with room for three newly single men, as well as two bedrooms for visiting children.
Most men stay no longer than a few weeks, and during that time, Cabalzar works with the men to help them maintain a consistent relationship with their kids while they transition into new, more permanent homes. He also says that the small group atmosphere functions like a support group, and gives the residents an opportunity to reflect on their recent split.
Notes Cabalzar of his program: “there is a commitment to the children and a reliable relationship must be kept. The children need to have a positive picture of their parents.”
Cabalzar is certainly on to something. The departure of one parent from the family home, especially when abrupt, can be very disruptive to that parent’s relationship with a child. This is especially true when the departing parent’s transitional home is not particularly appropriate for visiting with the children – such as when the parent has nowhere else to go but a friend’s couch, a small motel room, or the home of a family member who lives a considerable distance from the children.
Temporary housing like that offered by Cabalzar, then, could be a good option for parents who want to maintain consistent contact with their children while they work on establishing a new, more permanent residence. And, the holistic approach Cabalzar takes to his mission (he works with the men’s lawyers, marriage counselors and other involved professionals) could help many families navigate the initial stages of a divorce more smoothly. While the services offered by Cabalzar’s organization are only available in Switzerland, his ideas are certainly worthy of wider application.
In a recent New York Times article, writer Bruce Feiler explores a supposedly emerging domestic trend – couples who live together, but sleep in separate quarters. Feiler points to a recent study which found that 1 in 4 American couples spend their nights in separates bed or bedrooms, with many separate sleeping couples citing their need for a full night’s rest as the primary reason for the decision to forgo the traditional marital bed. It seems that issues like snoring, differing wake up times, busy day time schedules and constantly ringing or vibrating cell phones are driving couples to move from one bed to two.
Feiler sees this trend as a problem, and declares war on so-called “Bed Divorce.” He notes that sharing a bed also benefits the co-sleepers, such as by instilling feelings of security, and provides several tips for harmonious bed sharing.
I wonder if this trend is really such a bad thing. The study cited by Feiler suggests that couples who choose separate sleeping arrangements due so because they get a better night’s sleep when they sleep alone. Anyone who has suffered a streak of insomnia can tell you how difficult it can be to be a pleasant and productive person when sleep deprived. Can it be that these separate sleeping couples choose to sleep alone for the good of the relationship? If a couple functions better when both partners are well-rested, what harm is there in eschewing tradition?
What do you think: is a shared bed essential to a solid relationship?
It’s summer, the season of weddings. Ah, weddings, those meticulously organized displays of love and commitment with all of their conventional trappings: the white satin dress! The champagne toasts! The flowers! The cover bands belting out “We Are Family”! The buffet lines!
Many weddings today are the result of months – if not years – of stressful planning, and lots of cold, hard cash. And, for many couples, the much fussed over wedding will be counted among the happiest days of their lives.
Unless of course, you end up in one of those couples that eventually gets divorced. Party officially over.
In King County, the formal finalization of a divorce is a decidedly unceremonious ceremony. In most cases, just one of the soon-to-be-legally-split spouses shows up before an ex parte court commissioner, hands him/her the necessary paperwork, and answers a very brief set of hum-drum questions about the amount of time that has passed since the divorce was first filed, as well as the marital assets and debts, the children of the marriage (if any), and other issues that must be dealt before any divorce can be declared final. After the testimony is given the commissioner hands back the signed final orders, and you are done – officially a single man or woman. The whole process usually takes less than 10 minutes, and it’s far from festive.
Unless of course, you are one of the 25 or so couples who’ve booked a “divorce ceremony” with a Japanese entrepreneur named Hiroki Terai. For the low price of 55,000 yen (or about $600.00 US – much cheaper than the typical modern American wedding), Mr. Terai will plan and host your divorce ceremony at his “divorce mansion” in Tokyo. Your family and friends can look on as you and your not-beloved-anymore make vows to start new and separate lives, before smashing your wedding rings with a hammer. Then you may all wine and dine – at separate tables, of course – in celebration of your now-severed nuptials.
Awkward much? Well, Mr. Terai says that he sees the divorce ceremony as “a positive way to end a marriage and move on by making a vow to restart their lives in front of loved ones.” And it appears that at least 25 ex-couples agree. Still, we think it unlikely that you’ll find your social calendar brimming with divorce ceremonies any time soon.
A news story out of Chicago tells the tale of a Laura Derbigney, a Hispanic Catholic woman who claims to have recently been ordered by a court to obey Orthodox Jewish dietary restrictions and keep the Sabbath. The reason? Laura’s husband has a son with an ex-wife – an ex-wife who follows the strict dietary and other rules of the Hasidic branch of the Jewish religion.
The boy’s mother, apparently upset that the child was fed a non-kosher hot dog while in the father’s care, asked a Chicago court to order Laura’s husband to obey Orthodox Jewish dietary and other rules while the son is in his care. The court agreed with the boy’s mother, and ordered the father to feed the boy only kosher foods, and to observe the Jewish requirement of resting on the Sabbath (which for Orthodox Jews means refraining from such activities as cooking, operating electronic devices, and driving).
Laura, who is most probably not an actual party to the litigation between her husband and the boy’s mother, and thus not actually ordered by the court to do (or not do) anything, complains that the court’s order functionally restricts her lifestyle – while the boy is visiting his father – to that of an Orthodox Jew. She specifically points out that the court’s order bars her from preparing many Hispanic dishes while the boy is in her home. She’s hired an attorney to attempt to overturn the court’s order.
The story has few other details about this case, but of note is the fact that Laura’s husband is himself a Catholic who does not personally observe Jewish traditions either.
So why is the court forcing this family to act like Hasidic Jews when caring for this child? We can imagine a few possible scenarios. First, despite the fact that the father now calls himself a Catholic, he was indeed once married to a Hasidic Jewish woman. It may well be that during his marriage the father also considered himself to be Jewish and that the family obeyed Jewish laws prior to the divorce.
Thus the mother’s argument may be grounded in the fact that the child has always been raised in the Orthodox Jewish tradition and that the father, despite now considering himself Catholic, should continue to raise the child in a household which follows Jewish rules. Indeed, the parents may even have agreed to do so when they were divorced.
It’s also possible, of course, that the father has always considered himself Catholic, and that the family practiced both religions prior to the divorce. Or it’s possible that during the marriage the father consented to raising the boy as a Jew, despite the fact that he himself followed the rules of the Catholic church.
The more important question, however, is this: can a court even order a parent to follow any one religion’s practices without violating an individual’s right to freedom of religion?
We think the answer is no. While we’re not constitutional lawyers, as family law practitioners we often encounter the issue of religious decision making between separated parents. It is quite common for our clients to be concerned about whether or not the other parent will continue to raise the child in a certain religious tradition after separation or divorce. We often advise clients that any order or agreement that commands one parent to observe certain religious practices would not be enforceable in court.
This is not to say that two divorcing spouses cannot agree to continue to raise their child in the family’s chosen religious tradition – certainly divorced parents can make the same decisions regarding the religious education of their children that married parents can. It is not all that unusual for two parents who cannot get along as spouses to continue to share religious values and priorities when it comes to their children. It is also not uncommon for divorced spouses to agree that each parent may include the child in their own religious activities, even when each parent practices a different religion. In fact, we’ve seen many Washington parenting plans that specifically state that each parent may include the child in their own religious practices so as to avoid the conflict we see in Laura Derbigney’s story.
But, where divorced parents run into trouble is when they ask the court to make orders that endorse one parent’s religion over the other’s. Religious beliefs (or, just as importantly for some people, the lack thereof) are obviously of profound importance to many individuals and families.
We don’t underestimate how difficult it is for some parents to send their child off to a household with a different religious lifestyle, especially when that household’s religious beliefs are radically different than the other parent’s household. In an ideal situation, parents will be able to reach some compromise or consensus about the role of religion in their child’s life. But as this story shows, achieving harmony between two very different households is often difficult – not only for parents, but for the courts as well.
The aspiring actress told an operator: “I can’t breathe. I’ve been stabbed. Please help me. I’m dying. He’s stabbed me to death.”
There’s something about the murder mystery that holds a unique place in our popular lore, from Hitchcock to Agatha Christie to CSI. Such mysteries are fun and intellectually diverting in a removed, antiseptic way.
In this popular genre, the victim’s words from the grave are a persistent, haunting plot element. There’s a peculiar resonance to such soliloquy, straddling the final line between life and death, just waiting to be listened to, and parsed endlessly.
On that last fateful phone call, the police operator asked the dying actress who did it. The actress, Amy Leigh Barnes, replied clearly:
“My boyfriend . . . I’m going . . . I can’t see.”
Mystery solved.
In the real world, aspiring actress and glamor model Amy Leigh Barnes was murdered by her boyfriend Ricardo Morrison. The sentencing Judge told Morrison:
“You controlled and abused Amy over a period of months. It was a sustained campaign of prolonged physical, emotional and psychological abuse.”
Barnes, who was from Manchester, England, had just turned 19.
Morrison, who had four prior assault convictions and a record of violence towards women, got 24 years to life in prison for murder from the English Court.
His mother, Melda Wilks, a police officer herself, was acquitted for letting Morrision wash his bloody clothes at her house after the murder.
In the real world, domestic violence is more brutal, less tidy, and far less clever than in murder mysteries.
I write this post while watching Bones, a procedural crime/odd couple buddy TV show about a (female) prosaic forensic anthropologist and a (male) cocky FBI agent. It’s a show known for grisly murders, quirky characters – and a dark sense of humor.
But it only works because it’s not real.
I’m not suggesting that there’s anything inherently wrong with enjoying light murder mysteries. Life is full of such uneasy dichotomies, after all. I only suggest that it sometimes makes sense to step back and drop the fiction that dead bodies represent little more than plot points along the way to that last, fiendish twist.
In real life, there were plenty of clues to Amy Barnes’ death. The odd thing is that these clues were revealed well before her murder. As the London Times reports:
The jury heard that she was often seen in bars and clubs frequented by professional footballers [soccer players], some of whom she dated. Morrison resented her friendships with other men …
“For the past seven months, Ricardo’s been hitting me, locking me in rooms with him so I can’t go out, putting knives to my throat, telling me he’s going to kill me, putting pillows over my face,” she wrote [in a text message to a friend].
On the morning of her death, she texted another footballer, saying that Morrison had punched her and slammed her arm in a door.
I wonder what their response would have been had she confided that her car was being broken into, or that someone had stolen her ATM card. How long would it have taken her friends to advise her to call the police, or to even do it themselves on her behalf?
[L]ess than a month before he knifed Amy to death, Morrison attacked five women, butting and punching them in the face at a London nightclub.
In real life, such warning signs are so common that we, both individually and collectively, often do little to “interfere.” Serial batterers like Morrison come out of the jails and go back to their familiar bars and clubs and parties. Thus even when our police and courts do their job, and emphasize not only punishment but offender treatment (see our latest article on the Rihanna/Chris Brown situation), there is often scant social pressure to contain and ostracize such tyrannical behavior.
Confronting delicate issues is never comfortable of course, especially in a group or on a team. I remember in college reading about a freshman, Mark Seeberger, who died of alcohol poisoning in a fraternity hazing ritual. I happened to play rugby (for the University of Texas) with one of the fraternity guys who was drinking with the freshman the night of his death. I asked my teammate about it, two days later, at practice. My teammate, who played right next to me on the line (Inside-Center to my Fly-Half) nonchalantly demurred “the lawyers told us not to talk about it.” His comments indicated a general attitude that the dead kid simply couldn’t hold his liquor – a kid who had been handcuffed in the back of a van and “asked” to drink 16-18 ounces of rum.
I never said anything else to my teammate about this – despite my horror at my teammate’s casual response and my general strong feelings about Texas fraternities. No one, of course, was ever prosecuted for this death (The operative fact against prosecution seemed to be that the kid’s hands were handcuffed in front of him, not behind him, so that he actually put the bottle to his own mouth).
In part, I said nothing because there was nothing more to be done. Also, when playing rugby your very physical safety often depends on how quickly your teammates get to you while you are in a ruck or a maul – so I did specifically ponder whether saying anything at all to this jerk might make him just a little less eager to help me out in such situations.
But I wonder, looking back, if I would have said or done anything had it been an ongoing, volatile situation rather than the aftermath of a tragedy. Would I have had the courage to confront someone, or even to take more direct action on the hope that it might make a difference? I simply don’t know.
My question in this case is not why the police were absent, but whether his friends, and hers, were as vigilant as they could have been when faced up close with a dangerous and unstable situation. This tragic crime was, after all, reasonably foreseeable.
One reason for the possible inaction of Barnes’ and Morrisons’ wider group of friends and acquaintances may be that in most societies it is a greater taboo to be a victim of domestic violence than to be a habitual perpetrator of it (see our article about rape in South Africa).
The natural corollary to this flawed social contract is to allow this particular type of criminal behavior to proceed mostly unchecked until it’s too late. Why do we continue to stand by and let this happen?
Sometimes you might write an e-mail to get your thoughts down right.
Jefferson apparently sent the fateful email 6 days before the wedding, which was to take place at the New York Mandarin Oriental. According to the New York Daily News:
Nichols, 29, immediately called her family and friends to alert them of the ill-timed news, [but] the basketball pro waited much longer.
“He called about two hours before the wedding. It was nuts,” said one Jefferson pal.
Although Jefferson never showed up to the hotel, he made sure to give his best friend his Black Amex credit card, with which the guests made good use of during the night.
A jilted Nichols, who was “not entirely caught off-guard,” checked into the hotel and was upgraded to a suite on the 45th floor overlooking Central Park on what would have been her wedding night, according to a source at the hotel.
Now that last part”s just sad.
Jefferson disputed reports that the wedding cost $2,000,000, saying it was in fact less than $500,000. And in fairness, Jefferson says that after canceling the wedding he also paid Nichols a “six-figure” settlement. Jefferson explains that Nichols is his “best friend” and that:
I’m not trying to buy her off. She has a lump sum to help her move on.
Though Jefferson has gotten plenty of grief from folks who don’t seem to appreciate this act of generosity, he does have a big fan in Howard Stern. In an interview with Jefferson, Stern declared:
People should say you are a hero. And I’m not making a joke. This is what we should admire in our society, that he is taking marriage seriously and he’s saying, ‘Listen I’ve got real doubts here.’ . . . This is what men should do. This is what women should do. Be honest with the other person.
Honesty perhaps. Good timing not so much.
In some ways, I actually agree with Stern. Not that Jefferson’s a hero, but that people should talk about their doubts more before getting married, be more honest with each other about these doubts.
It’s never easy, of course. But if your relationship can’t handle this kind of blunt discussion, you probably shouldn’t be getting married anyway.
He had the body of a porn star. He would disappear mysteriously for days a time. Jason Brake even had the name of a porn star.
But Haylie Hocking believed him when he said he was a personal trainer. She believed him when he said that his mysterious weekend trips were just to visit gyms with his trainer clients. And she happily accepted the expensive jewelry he gave her.
She even said yes to his marriage proposal.
The Daily Telegraph reports that 27-year old Hocking of Bristol, England had planned a church wedding and a lavish country house reception.
Then a friend of Haylie’s, while planning her bachelorette party, saw Jason Brake in an online porn site movie. Haylie canceled the wedding, declaring “I don’t know if I will ever be able to trust a man again.”
Jason’s response was, well, what you might expect from a duplicitous porn star:
“The sex side is purely for the camera, but Haylie did not understand I was only acting. I am sorry and did not want to hurt her. I still love Haylie and would have stopped doing porn if she had asked me to.”
Yeah, dude, you’re a real romantic. She didn’t ask you to stop your line of work because you never told her about it.
(Retired football star, husband, and father of four Steve McNair was murdered on July 4th, 2009, by his 20-year old girlfriend who then shot herself.)
It was always easy to root for Steve McNair.
A Mississippi boy who played college ball for a historically black college many football fans had never heard of – Alcorn State. A calm-headed leader who smoothly handled the extraordinary pressure of being drafted third overall in the 1995 draft by football-mad Houston.
McNair was the consummate professional who solidified his team, the Titans, as they moved from Texas to Tennessee. He then made the pro-bowl three times, and became the co-MVP of entire league, and led the Titans to within one yard – one yard! – of taking the Super Bowl into its first overtime.
It was no small thing to be a pro black quarterback in a southern city in the late 90′s, in a league where many coaches and owners wondered – not that privately – if a black man could succeed at quarterback in the NFL. As Tom Curran writes:
He was the first black quarterback to really be accorded the respect that his physical ability, leadership skills and mental toughness demanded ….
[Doug] Williams was hailed as a trailblazer when he won a Super Bowl with the Redskins. Yet McNair cleared a more difficult obstacle. He was the first black quarterback that a team built itself around and tethered its fortunes to from Day 1. It probably isn’t a coincidence that, once it became clear McNair was the real deal, quarterbacks like Donovan McNabb, Akili Smith, Michael Vick and Vince Young were suddenly top five selections.
I am a huge Seattle Seahawks fan, but I always rooted for Steve McNair no matter what. You just had to.
And now it seems he may have been, in his personal life, just a garden variety ass, who wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, until he found something else to want.
I heard some friend or teammate or something on the radio talking about how McNair was a class act who didn’t deserve this. And while I don’t believe that anyone deserves to be murdered, for any reason, I was struck by the glossy outrage of this eulogy. I have enormous sympathy for McNair’s four young sons, and for a wife who apparently had no idea of his affair until hearing of the grisly murder-suicide.
But the evolving facts paint a less than pretty picture of a cad who also happens to be a hero of mine:
They had apparently been “dating” for months, travelled to Key West and Los Angeles, and even took vacation photos together.
Kazemi introduced McNair to her family, and told them that he would imminently be divorcing to start a new life with her. But Robert Gaddy, a long-time close friend of McNair, said he knew nothing of any such plan. And Mechelle McNair says she never knew about Kazemi at all.
The morning of July 4th, Kazemi shot McNair 4 times, while he slept, once in each temple, and twice in the chest. Nashville police believe that Kazemi then positioned herself so that she would die in his lap. Instead, perhaps fittingly, after shooting herself in the temple, she fell to his feet.
My prayers go out to McNair’s wife and children, and Kazemi’s own family, who have already endured great tragedy. I feel saddened, but more mixed about the man who seems to have acted off the field like the stereotypical jerk who expects to get away with it because he just always has. A man who was apparently comfortable with a pristine public image that masked a pattern of boorish behavior.
McNair’s image in Nashville was that of a classy, regular family guy who played tough on the football field while giving his heart and soul to charitable activities. Well, he was definitely a rugged quarterback who took his team to the Super Bowl. And by all accounts, he did wonderful stuff with his charitable foundation. All of this stuff was covered by
television cameras at every turn. McNair helped build houses, ran youth camps, even picked up a chainsaw himself to help a town clear debris from a tornado. But somewhere along the way, McNair was also hooking up with the 20-year-old waitress and partying heartily with her in Nashville …
In my three decades of experience covering professional athletes, a famous football player seldom turns 36 and suddenly decides to start fooling around on his wife. It’s been going on a while. Plenty of people in Nashville had to know — had to know — that McNair was not everything his image portrayed him to be. But they allowed the image to thrive.
McNair, by all accounts, conducted his affair as an open secret, in restaurants and bars, with which the fawning press was breezily compliant.
Then there are are homages to McNair that, given these revelations, hit an odd note, such as teammate Derrick Mason’s utterance that McNair was “the most selfless … person I have known.” And there is the usual tabloid tripe, such as the New York Daily News proclaiming, with its typical self-restraint and dignity: Steve McNair, Sahel Kazemi Love Nest Became Blood-Soaked Crime Scene.
The shortest comment I’ve read is a tweet from actress Holly Robinson Peete (21 Jump Street). Peete also happens to be married to retired NFL quarterback Rodney Peete, with whom she has four children. Gotta hand it to her, she definitely call it like she sees it, and talks like someone who is aware of her self-worth:
In my heart of hearts, I suppose that at some level I see, and even appreciate, the karmic directness of this tragedy, the physics of action and consequence, the whole thelmaandlouisiness of it all. If the various news reports are accurate, McNair seems to have cavorted with a pretty, and pretty insecure, troubled young woman. A woman with a limited sense of self-worth, who was content, at least for a while, to be the plaything of a rich and famous man. An undereducated waitress at Dave & Buster’s restaurant, she was dating the most famous athlete in the entire state of Tennessee.
Kazemi, for her part, seemed comfortable with the attention she received for her obvious physical attractiveness. Her Facebook page – the image she publically presented – included numerous photos of her cleavage and her new Escalade, including one of her lounging on the Escalade in a bikini. A wild-eyed innocent victim she was not.
In some ways, such liasons are simply an honest market of supply and demand. Society typically rewards money in older men and beauty in younger women, not so differently than in a Jane Austen novel. And however McNair may have treated Kazemi, and whether or not he actually told her he was divorcing his wife, his attentions to her could only increase her perceived “market value” by other rich and/or famous men.
In other words, these arrangements happen for a reason, that is at some level mutually beneficial, at least for a time. Even the consequence of this case, though extreme, is not really unforseeable. People often play at games without fully understanding the stakes. Indeed, the very danger of such clandestine relationships may carry part of their attraction for all concerned.
What is clear is that both McNair and Kazemi made a series of increasingly poor decisions.McNair partially gifted her a Cadillac, apparently leaving it to her to make payments on a waitress’ salary. Kazemi started selling her furniture before there was any concrete plan for co-habitation. And oh yeah, she drove a high profile car while she was wasted (McNair of course let her; he was the passenger).
McNair probably never imagined that Kazemi was capable of violence more akin to a drug cartel assassination than to Romeo and Juliet. He may not have even had a clue as to just how desperate she had become. Kazemi, for her part, was somehow surprised that a man who would cheat on his wife so effortlessly with her would also cheat on her. Remember the old addage “If they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you.”
The funny thing is that despite all his selfish and thoughtless actions, McNair will still always be a hero, just a hero whose magical powers erode once he hits the sideline and takes off his helmet. I never cheered for Air McNair because of his charity work or his family man persona – I never even heard any of that until he died. I cheered for him because of how he played football, with brains, and strength, and guts to spare. He played football like the game was meant to be played, without drama, without complaint.
In America we seem to have a hard time with such complex dichotomies. We lionize our heroes of sports (and politics too) past any rational relationship to their sphere of expertise and accomplishment – then tear them down mercilessly for not living up to our Super-Sized expectations off the field.
I love sports in part because of the purity of how it defines excellence. Either a batter can hit a Felix Hernandez fastball or he can’t, either a quarterback can thread the needle between the linebacker and the safety or he can’t – there’s little point to arguing after the fact. Even with all the money and glitter and controversy, sports remains unsullied for me. This is why I could care less about Alex Rodriguez’ numerous dalliances (Madonna or otherwise), but am pretty disappointed to learn that he cheated the game by taking steroids.
McNair was a warrior, and deserves every accolade – and the Hall of Fame – for all that he did every Sunday for 13 years, between the lines of the gridiron. So it’s not so much that his tawdry rakishness is forgivable. It’s just irrelevant. As a man McNair leaves behind a mixed record between professional accomplishment and personal dishonesty. But similar things could probably be said for John F. Kennedy, Ludwig von Beethoven, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Jefferson and countless others. And as a football player, McNair was simply a god.
If ESPN classic ever gets the rights to play old NFL games, I’ll happily watch the Music City Miracle game, then watch McNair lead his Titans down the field for the tying touchdown of Super Bowl XXXIV. I’ll be cheering as he passes to Kevin Dyson, as Dyson lunges for a goal line he’ll never make, the whole game a mere 12 inches or so out of reach.
Like Titan fans everywhere, and a little bit like Sisyphus, I’ll be thinking that this time, maybe, Dyson will stretch that elusive foot and score the touchdown, and that my hero will go on to win the Super Bowl he always deserved but never quite attained.
It’s still easy to root for Steve McNair. Just keep it between the lines.
Sky’s health correspondent Thomas Moore explains: “A woman can release two eggs from her ovaries, and the eggs will remain viable for 24 hours after ovulation.
“Sperm can survive up to five days inside a woman’s body, so a woman could sleep with different men several days apart, and get pregnant not once, but twice.”
A massive new report by the Irish Commision To Inquire into Child Abuse has uncovered enough malfeasance and coverups in Catholic reform schools for a dozen Charles Dickens novels, a month of Oprah’s and a Dan Brown prequel.
But for sheer, grisly irony perhaps nothing tops Christine Buckley’s account from the inaptly named Sisters of Mercy in Goldenbridge Orphanage. Now 62, Buckley says the orphanage essentially forced its orphans into slave labor – to make prayer rosaries. Each child was forced to make 600 beads a day, or face stiff punishment, she says – pointing out that more than 50 years later she still carries a scar from having boiling water intentionally poured onto her thigh by a nun.
I don’t know if objects carry the karma that went into making them. Or if so, if we are sensitive enough to be aware of it? I may well, as I write this article, be wearing jeans and socks made in dingy sweatshops, happily oblivious to such human tolls. Such is the pace of modern life that it’s easy to be unaware of the suffering that must go into a multitude of mundane objects in our lives. And just as easy to convince ourselves that it’s okay to be unaware.
But I wonder, still, if maybe just a few of the tens of thousands of devout who prayed using these beads had a vague feeling, a hunch that they couldn’t place, that there might be something unholy in the very focusing object of their faith. That maybe the beads just didn’t feel right. And if maybe, even just one of the faithful had an inkling that the blood that suffered for his or her rosary was human, not divine.
For these poor children in decades long past, it was truly a world of shit. The Irish report bluntly summarizes:
A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.
As cathartic and vindicating as this public 2600-page document is for the survivors of such abuse, however, the public tome is missing some critical information – the names of the abusers. This is because of a 2004 lawsuit by the Catholic Order Christian Brothers, who ran many Irish schools for generations.
The Christian Brothers’ leader in Ireland, Brother Kevin Mullan, said the organization had been right to keep names secret because “perhaps we had doubts about some of the allegations.”
