Kill Your Darlings

A Rant About Abuse in the Catholic Church

I have a kind of peculiar habit of reading the news while doing yoga.

While in warrior II this weekend, I came across an article that bothered me. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. You can read the article here.

The article at first seemed positive: Pope Francis put together a pontifical commission for the “Protection of Minors” in the Catholic Church… AKA, how to keep children from getting sexually abused by priests. The aim of the commission is to “look at programmes to educate pastoral workers in signs of abuse, identify means of psychological testing and other ways of screening candidates for the priesthood, and make recommendations regarding Church officials’ cooperation with civil authorities on reporting suspected abuse.”

While it seems like a step in the right direction, the overwhelming feeling that I had was this: if you’re having to mandate so heavily because of such egregious failures, here’s a news flash: your system is broken.

For decades, we have known that children were being abused by Catholic priests. And the answer is…(YEARS LATER)…to put together a group of smart people to talk about the problem? It just doesn’t seem to fit.

The even more infuriating article that I read about this situation was one in which the Catholic Church refused to agree with the UN that what was happening between the priests and children was TORTURE and, to make matters even worse, they are pawning off the problem onto the priests’ countries of residence. If you don’t believe me, you can read more here:

I will say it again: this system is broken. And it’s going to take A LOT more than a pontifical commission to fix it.

There’s a phrase in the literary world that I feel somehow applies here: kill your darlings.

Essentially, this means if it’s not good, let it go, regardless of how “dear” it is to you. This needs to happen in the Catholic Church — a massive upheaval where they return to scriptural principles rather than man-made ones. But that’s a conversation for another day.

The more personal point that I want to make here is this: unless we are willing to look ourselves in the mirror and see our faults and failings, we cannot make any significant change. As a writer, I have to be willing to “kill” my darlings in my novels, but I need to be willing to do this even more so on a personal level. If we’re going to make a difference in this world, I believe we have to be willing to be honest about what needs to change in our lives, our families, our communities and then do whatever we need to do to cut out the bad (AKA, kill your darlings) and then bring in the good.

I know this is a departure from what I normally write about, but (as I’m sure you can tell) this was on my heart.

What’s one area in your life where you need to “kill your darlings”? Feel free to share in the comments :)