You're talking about some very broken people. . . . Life is very difficult for them. They can't hold down jobs, can't hold down relationships. . . . Life is difficult. Therapy costs a lot of money. These people don't make much money; hardly any of them are actually fit to work. They need the Vatican to cough up some of its billions [to] pay for these people to be able to live their lives.
Should Irish bishops resign, as a few have offered?
Resignation gets them off the hook. They should be criminally prosecuted. . . . If you or I covered up crimes like that, we'd be slap-bang in jail in five minutes, and rightly so. There's a double standard. . . .
What should the Irish people do?
It's the good-hearted, sweet Catholic people who go to Mass still despite all of this -- they are the people who have the power in their hands to get the Vatican on its knees and confess. . . . How these people can do that is by refusing to go to Mass, boycott them until they actually come to their knees and confess. . . .
The way we are at the moment, we're in a very dysfunctional relationship with an organization that's actually abusing us. And we can't see what's being done to us. We have the mentality of a battered wife who thinks it's her fault. If we had a friend in a similar relationship, we would beg him or her to walk away.
Yet you still consider yourself a Catholic?
I'm a Catholic, and I love God. . . . That's why I object to what these people are doing to the religion that I was born into. . . .
I'm passionately in love and always have been with what I call the Holy Spirit, which I believe the Catholic Church have held hostage and still do hold hostage. I think God needs to be rescued from them. They are not representing Christian values and Christian attitudes. If they were truly Christian, they would've confessed ages ago, and we wouldn't be having to batter the door down and try to get blood from a stone.
henry.chu@latimes.com
