To be honest, I've paid almost no attention to the Ferns Report. Part of me just hated the whole story and I guess I felt like I had already absorbed enough of the details to get the gist of it. Yet, there's this nagging feeling that I should really learn more about what went wrong in the Church.
Today at Mass the priest started his homily saying that now he "has some idea how the German people must have felt at the end of the second world war". He said he felt he was "guilty by association" for abominable acts against society's most defenseless people. While most people who make NAZI analogies are pointing the finger at others this man was pointing the finger at himself and his church, to which he has dedicated his life. His distress was obvious.
Now I feel I should make a better effort to learn what the report says. I have a stack of newspapers to read and I also found a copy of the report online (not easy) and I downloaded it. It's over 200 pages, which is a lot of reading, but I'd like to imagine I'll eventually read it.
