IRELAND
The Irish Times
November 13, 2017
By Patsy McGarry
Former Glenstal abbot says pandemic of child abuse and incest is a ‘religious problem’
Moralising will not help us understand the wave of sexual harassment and child abuse cases that have emerged nationally and internationally, says Mark Patrick Hederman, former abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Glenstal, Co Limerick.
Instead, he believes we must look at the human passions that connect people such as Harvey Weinstein and Tom Humphries.
“We’ve had three philosophers of the 20th century that decided there are only three basic energies that move us all. One is power, the other is sex, and the other is money.”
While this does not capture the full picture, “it’s a good beginning… The world goes round because of sex, said Freud; or money for Marx, and power for Nietzsche,” he says.
“The church had found that out in the Middle Ages and they said: ‘We’ll put three stops on those three things – poverty, chastity, and obedience.’ So they put vows over them. It was like putting a manhole over the sewer. It doesn’t work like that.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.