A dramatic appeal for political & human solidarity from occupied Kashmir:

https://www.facebook.com/Lakeer.Official/videos/vb.296776155847/1882079085254769/?type=2&theater

This is Terry Dosh, then called Fr. Leonard, a Benedictine monk & priest, who became a friend of my family in the late 1950s & stayed a friend until he left the priesthood in the early 1970s. He was the quintessential “people person” & made friends wherever he went because of his profound humanity. When I was in the convent in 1966, he came to visit me while attending a conference in Chicago & when he greeted me, we hugged. We had known each other then for several years. The mother superior was aghast. She allowed us to visit under her supervision but the next day & for a few weeks thereafter she would call me to her office, put me on my knees, & cajole at first, then threaten expulsion if I did not promise under the vow of obedience to never again express physical affection for anyone. I had already been through this with the novice mistress who commanded me not to embrace the children in my family when they came to visit. In both instances I refused saying it was “anti-human” & that I would not promise something that I considered disturbed. “I don’t want to be the kind of person you’re trying to make me,” I explained. Needless to say, this did not go over well.

The superior punished my recalcitrance in several ways. First, I was left home when the order took all of the young nuns to Rome for some kind of ceremony at the Vatican. Then I was told I wasn’t “smart enough” to go to college when all the other young nuns went off to study nursing or teaching. They assigned me to going every morning to clean the chaplain’s toilet under supervision because they knew I detested him for his arrogance & rudeness, especially toward me. (For the record, I never once cleaned his toilet. I would put the seat down & flush several times while I read his magazines on the Vietnam War.) Lastly, they took me away from the learning-disabled children we worked with because I refused outright to use physical discipline of any kind nor even raise my voice with the children. Instead they put me in the kitchen to be trained as an institutional cook. Like most working-class girls, I didn’t have big expectations for my life but a future of dealing with raw meat & powdered eggs was absolutely not in the cards. Not only was the order trying to make me emotionally dead & twisted, but they were trying to kill my spirit & deny me participation in my own historic times. After almost three years, I asked to leave, repeating “I don’t want to be the kind of person you’re trying to make me.” They put me on a train to St. Paul without a dime in my pocket.

The last time I saw Terry Dosh, still Fr. Leonard, was in Minneapolis in 1967 or 68 while I was a student at the University of Minnesota. By then, I was involved in the antiwar & civil rights movements & Palestinian solidarity. (The women’s movement didn’t yet exist.) Now here’s the funny thing: I never mentioned those political things to him because I assumed he was politically conservative. In fact, when I moved to NYC to become part of the feminist movement & active in the abortion rights campaign, I learned that his brother Fr. Mark Dosh (also a friend of my family) was a leading figure in the movement against abortion rights. The confusion probably began with his friendship with my extremely conservative parents. Politics never really came up because it was religion that bound them. He may have judged it wiser to avoid politics. In the early 1970s when I was living in NYC, my mom told me he had left the priesthood & married an ex-nun. My mom was contemptuous of this just as she was about my decision to leave the convent.

Occasionally over the years, I would look him up on the internet & learned he was a central figure in Catholic Church reform groups, in the movement to allow priests to marry & for allowing women into the priesthood. For some reason, perhaps not wanting to defend my own political choices, I never tried to make contact with him again, even after I moved back to St. Paul. Recently, I decided to look him up again, realizing he was in his 80s now, & learned he died in 2016. It was from his obituaries that I learned just how progressive he was politically. After my departure for NYC, he had gone on to get a PhD in Latin American studies from the University of Minnesota & after leaving the priesthood lectured widely on US intervention in Central America. Who knew? He had two sons, one a musician & another a professor of Latin American studies. According to the tributes, he was a loving father & husband & always remained the quintessential “people person.” I regret not fully knowing him until after he died but I would have liked him to know what an impact his kindness & respect for me had on my life. May he Rest In Peace.

(Photo is Terry Dosh as a young priest)

These fearless little Kashmiri kids will give you a zillion reasons to support the struggle against occupation.

https://www.facebook.com/nayeeslone12/videos/vb.309635589600034/2132569270141187/?type=2&theater

Best selfie ever.

Kashmiri infant pepper sprayed in family home by Indian occupying forces.

8 month old toddler pepper sprayed, her father Mudasir mercilessly beaten when he intervened as police ransack their home yesterday without any provocation and target the family of slain Rayees sofi of Fateh Kadal ! Such incidents of pre planned harassment and repression of civilians show there is a deliberate ploy to incite youth further and push them to retaliate violently.” (KNS)

https://thekashmirwalla.com/2019/02/police-sprayed-pepper-on-toddler-beat-up-father/

This is little Annie in the canine penitentiary trying to dig her way out. I took her home after her 10-day detention on Friday afternoon. Her hair was falling out in clumps & her eyes were filled with terror. The good thing–no, the great thing–about dogs, especially rescue dogs, is their forgiving, grateful nature. She won’t leave my side & frankly, I don’t want her to.

On February 21st to 24th, Pope Francis will be holding a summit at the Vatican on pedophilia among priests. It’s about time since allegations first became public in the 1980s. Because the Nazi pope who proceeded him was so compromised on this issue, Pope Francis was likely elected to deal with the public relations problem since he is a master of the grandstanding gesture. He announced a “zero tolerance” policy toward rape of children but in fact nothing has changed within the church except that now dioceses publish lists of accused priests. Meanwhile allegations of widespread sexual criminality are exploding in every country. There are two excellent documentary series on Netflix that deal with this issue. One is titled “The Keepers” about the 1969 murder of Cathy Cesnik, a Catholic nun in the Baltimore archdiocese. She was a beloved teacher in a Catholic school where a local priest was molesting young girls in unimaginable ways. Two of her students set out to investigate the unsolved cold case crime. What they unearthed is a landmine exposing the brutal lengths the hierarchy goes to protect priest rapists, the passivity of the laity in not demanding the Vatican deal with these crimes, & the indifference or collusion of civil authorities with the Church hierarchy in covering up the crimes.

The second documentary series is titled “Examination of Conscience,” about pederasty within the Spanish Catholic Church. This series really gets to the heart of the Vatican’s strategy in dealing with this worldwide crisis within the Church. “The Keepers” dealt with this but more tangentially by showing how the archdiocese lobbied vigorously against extending the statutes of limitation for prosecuting priests even though it takes most child victims over 20 years to process what happened to them & then begin to heal–if they ever do. Many suffer addiction, other self-destructive behaviors, suicide, & are never able to process it. “Examination of Conscience” goes straight to the Vatican with its accusations & with substantial documentation of their allegations.

The most important thing revealed is the way the Church hierarchy uses theology & guilt-baiting to turn priest rapists into the victims. First they start with talking about sin rather than crime & about forgiveness rather than prosecutorial justice. They coax & manipulate accusers into keeping all allegations secret & confessional, they offer hush money & if those tactics don’t work they resort to intimidation, litigation, & denouncing the victims as gold-diggers going after “deep pockets” solely for financial gain.
The Spanish documentary explores the social shunning faced by the accusers. The laity in the dioceses, often even family members, will often side with the accused priests, going so far as to protest for them against the accusers & again civil authorities are reluctant to take on the Church. That’s one thing that makes these two documentaries so remarkable. They show the strength of character & determination of victims in standing up to all this despite the threats & social isolation that they know will result. What’s remarkable is that child sexual assault victims already operate from a place of deep isolation since they were made to feel, during the perpetration of the crimes against them, that they provoked the assaults.

“Examination of Conscience” is particularly important for investigating if there have been improvements under Pope Francis’ “zero tolerance” policy. They offer damning evidence that nothing has changed except the public image of how the Church is dealing with the rape of children. We can hope against hope that the summit later this month will finally establish a process of turning over these priests to civil authorities & ceasing to lobby against rape victim rights. But that is highly unlikely without much greater protest from the laity within the Church & much greater prosecutorial aggression by civil authorities. Clearly the Vatican, as the largest employer of child rapists in the world, cannot be trusted to police the criminals it harbors.

This is the trailer for “Examination of Conscience”: https://www.netflix.com/title/80991879?

We should take a moment to honor the life of South Korean human rights activist & feminist, Kim Bok-dong who died on January 28th at the age of 92. She was 14 years-old when the Japanese military forced her, along with hundreds of thousands of other women, to work as sex slaves in brothels administered by the army in countries which it occupied. Japanese authorities euphemistically called them “comfort women.” Kim worked in more than one country, including China & Singapore, & was unable to return to South Korea until 1947. At one point, she swore to stay alive to one day tell the story of these unspeakable crimes against so many women. She was so brutally treated & traumatized that it took her until 1992 to process & be able to speak out. “How could I have told them about my experiences?” she asked. “I had things done to me that were unfathomable.”

Strengthened by the women’s rights movement in South Korea, Kim Hak-sun (1924-1997) was the first “comfort woman” to speak out in 1991 after forty years of silence. Eventually many more women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, & the Netherlands (Dutch women & girls were coerced & captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony) publicly told their stories of being forced into sex slavery by the Japanese army. Sometimes they were sold into slavery by their parents; more often they were promised factory jobs or kidnapped outright. In 1992, Kim Bok-dong was one of the many women strengthened by the courage of Kim Hak-sun to come forward. She also became a human rights activist, a central figure in exposing Japanese sex slavery & in campaigning for a public apology & compensation for the thousands of now elderly women still suffering physical & psychological harm. For the past several years until her death, she was one of the few “comfort women” still living but their struggle continues through students, human rights, & women’s rights activists.

She was uncompromising in her campaign for justice & derisive toward the 2015 agreement between the Japanese & South Korean governments. She had every reason to be since the Japanese government has a detestable history of denial. It was only in 1992 that it admitted to involvement in ‘recruiting’ young girls, & in building, administering, surveilling the brothel facilities. In 1993, the Japanese government issued the Kona Statement acknowledging not just direct involvement in administering but coercion in recruiting & holding the women, including through kidnapping & violence against the women. In November 2018, the South Korean government dissolved the “comfort women” foundation established by the 2015 agreement & funded by the Japanese government to compensate the few victims still alive. Reportedly few of the very few surviving women actually took any compensation because of the contempt dished out with it.

Current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is publicly disdainful about charges of any coercion despite the testimonies of countless women. That’s because he’s leading & playing into the rightward shift in Japanese politics. Ultranationalists have been campaigning against any such admission & have succeeded in removing discussion of Japanese sex slavery during WWII from the school curriculum. They also want all these agreements abrogated & denounced.

Against such an edifice of power, Kim Bok-dong was undaunted. She stands as one of the giants of modern feminism & human rights & should be honored by all women & their supporters around the world. May her strong, beautiful spirit inspire us to carry on her work. May she Rest In Peace after turning a bereft life into a monument to the struggle for justice for women.

(Photo of Kim Bok-dong from Getty Images)