Well, that's too bad. I met a super-nice atheist Polish girl at swing-dancing who has just de-friended me from Facebook either because of my pro-life stand or because I told her some things she didn't want to know about the Catholic clerical abuse scandals, e.g. the John Jay report discovered most abusive priests weren't pedophiles but gay ephebophiles. Really, I should not have brought homosexuality into it. Inter-religious dialogue fail on my part.
These are the reasons I feel bad about it:
1. From football fans to Guardian readers, there is a lot of knee-jerk anti-Catholicism in Edinburgh. The chances she is going to willingly enter into a dialogue with another thoughtful, university-educated, practicing Catholic in Edinburgh are slim.
2. Twenty-something women are volatile, and it is wrong to forget that they are not as thick-skinned as most forty-something women.
3. Given her studies, her politics and her rah-rah unthinking acceptance of what she is told by feminist professors, she is in serious danger of messing up her life. Of course, if she can manage to stay on the right side of her professors and be 100% right on, she may indeed get a good academic post in the UK. (Her degree is unlikely to get her anything else.) So that is something.
4. The UK doesn't need any more pro-abortion anti-Catholics yelling that Poland is "fifty years behind". We have plenty. Still, it's always a coup when this person is herself Polish, so that means publishing opportunities. Yay.
5. Like me, she battles depression. I don't mean the blues. I mean the disease that you have to take pills for. I feel a natural kinship with the happy pill poppers.
Sigh, sigh, sigh. Okay. Cheerful post next.
But honestly how CAN we talk about the clerical sexual misconduct crisis honestly without mentioning...? Aw. Should have stressed that in countries where most of the priests are probably straight, the majority of victims of clerical sexual misconduct are probably adult women. My bad.
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