The Wisdom Of The Clergy

She should have been home.

That was the wisdom offered by a parish priest in Melbourne recently as he spoke to a group of primary school children. Why did he mention the name of a woman who had been raped and murdered in 2012? Was he providing some lesson in Catholic morality that would give the wee little ones a firm foundation for their teenaged years when the hormones started to raging? Teaching them what the Catholic Church believed was proper behavior for the female congregation?

Murder victim Jill Meagher

He held up a picture of Ms. Meagher, a woman who had been walking home from a pub at 1:30 am after a night out when she was attacked.

People do that sort of thing, go out to nightclubs or pubs or concert halls to have fun. Men and women both are known to stay out late. But if you are a woman in Melbourne, you are doing what you have no business doing, according to the wisdom of an Australian clergyman.

She should have been home in bed, the priest told the children, and not out at all hours. It was her own fault, then, if you follow the clergyman's logic, that she was killed by a serial rapist. A woman should be living a faith-filled life, you see, kids, and all you girls take note. Never leave your homes. The Muslims have the best idea, don't they? Don't allow women to walk about without a male escort, or they are fair game for the thugs and killers. So there's the lesson for you boys. Women are not entitled to respect, unless they are cloistered behind the four walls of the family home, in bed by 10.

The Archdiocese of Melbourne has apologized for the comments, calling them inappropriate.

And offensive as well.

But what they failed to explain as they extracted an apology from the priest who upset the parishioners is why they continue to employee a priest whose mindset is so dangerously archaic . They never said the priest was a feckin' eejit for blaming a victim, yet that is what the laity thought of the man.

When a murder victim is called out for not living a more "faith-filled" life, there is a bigger problem than that of a single priest. That he would even think to instruct children on proper morality by using an innocent, brutalized woman as an example of what not do reflects a mentality that harkens back to the Dark Ages.

The same concept of morality led to the creation of a gulag designed to contain female sexuality in Ireland, a system that remained in effect until the mid 1990's. That mindset has not been erased with time or corrected with teaching.  It starts in the classroom, with the children learning the basic tenets of their faith. And so it is perpetuated ad infinitum, until the priests are taken out of the classroom and kept cloistered behind the four walls of the parochial house where they can't cause so much trouble for the public at large.

She should have been home in bed at that time of night, the priest told the impressionable children in a parish in Melbourne. What an incredibly stupid thing to say. What a pathetic way to think about women.