ROME
Crux
February 20, 2019
By Elise Harris
In the 1994 movie classic “The Shawshank Redemption,” Tim Robbins plays a wrongly convicted inmate who eventually escapes by tunneling out of the thick stone structure using only a tiny rock hammer he uses to chip the prison wall away over a long stretch of time.
His primary confidante behind bars is played by Morgan Freeman, who, after the escape, comments on his friend’s passion for geology: “Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes, really … pressure and time.”
At a Rome news conference Tuesday, a panel of women activists touted what might be called a “Shawshank solution” to the woes plaguing the Catholic Church, including the clerical sexual abuse crisis and sexual assaults against women religious – recommending the application of pressure, combined with the determination to stay the course.
It was a piece in a women’s supplement published by the Vatican newspaper earlier in February that prompted Pope Francis to acknowledge sexual abuse of nuns by clergy.
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