'At the Summit.... There is Nothing'

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/02/15/joseph-marmion-the-jesuit-abuser-i-knew-could-block-out-the-sun-literally-and-metaphorically/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIdhp5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTZH0vsYTpzZrGatoyUUo8gNnqnrsobVjMy-eMBFvF4WQdjRUcJ-Hq91kA_aem__E0kjMtwADqcnG-DeEdqCg

To get a better handle for how very advantaged groups can sustain silence for so long?

One is the multiple elective affinities, politicians, advocates, academics who sit silent, when the very institutions, where they work, go about rehabilitating religious wares, providing refuge and sanctuary for their new international archives, even award winning mentions in architectural designs.

To illustrate the loyalty points, this type of cultural will, only gets exercised about some things, and more often ignores other things.

Tom says "some jesuits and some past pupils are too eager to congratulate the order on its handling of sexual abuse.

There has been a suggestion that the Society of Jesus is "a cut above" other orders and that the support and redress for victims underlines this superiority. One doesn't need to be a cynic to reflect that the competition is not great."

I would add in some people can only be proximate to adulation and any sign of critique, they run for the hills, or simply go berserk, even attack.

Furthermore, the Jesuits were endowed with the task of educating the finest wines, 'the cut above the rest,' meaning the self system as a person is significantly related to social status.

All the more reason, why our institutions provides them with refuge and sanctuary.

Institutions, despite the horror, cut a good political deal to be a 'cut above the rest.'

Tom himself is able to write well, as one would expect of a Belvedere Boy.

However, 'The Society of Jesus' and all the other Orders, dealt with more than their 'cut above the rest' status groups and 'genetic' endowment rights of inheritance.

“If there is one fact that history has irrefutably demonstrated, it is that the morality of each people is directly related to the social structure of the people practicing it.”

—Emile Durkheim, 1925

Here is how one of the abusers named, who was at the epicentre of care for children with disabilities and was bellowing out of RTE until 2018/9, despite numerous prior complaints against him going back to the 1990s

"Abuse is not normalThe first requirement is to recognise that there is something wrong. Some families live in a climate of mutual abuse which is as natural to them as water for a fish."

Fr Paul Andrews Author of Changing Children 2001

These are the authors who cited St John of the Cross 'the summit of all spiritual life is that there is nothing.'

Tom cites a victim "you know, I sometimes wonder if they are just eating for us all to die."

Finally, would the elective affinities who provide legitimacy for these groups make the same risk calculus for pushing stuff into the long grass?

The answers re the cold shackle and swagger are surely more than bull horn loud.

These groups are far from just purveyors of sonnets, their inured and desensitised ways did not even disqualify from chief celebrants at State funerals.

Ireland in 1814 and Ireland in 2024/5.

Ireland's politicians can even use graveside orations to score political points, in terrains where the state's barren sacrifice had oversight and was responsible for unceremonious burial of children and banishment of others children outside of the country.

FG/FF Pied Beautification, the dogmatically grounded but artful prose of the political philosophy, who sought out the theistic to impose its wishes in the lie(s) of the land.