stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

258 STRIPPING THE GURUS
In any case, the altar boys groped, seduced and sodomized by
various Catholic priests certainly did not have everything they
might be asked to do for the Church explained to them up front.
Nor behind.
Proper medical care for those who have given their lives to the
cause? Not if you’re Thérèse of Lisieux (1873 – 1897), whose powerenjoying,
vindictive prioress delayed sending for crisis medical
help. She further restricted one doctor’s visits from his suggestion
that he come every day to three times in total, and forbade injections
of morphia as Thérèse lay dying of tuberculosis (Furlong,
1987).
More recently, in the 1930s, a girl placed in an industrial
school in Ireland run by the so-called Sisters of Mercy told her
story:
I had a lot of abscesses.... I couldn’t walk at one stage. I kept
passing out, particularly at Mass in the mornings. When I
was about nine, I was very sick—I had a big lump under my
arm, and they had to put poultices on it. They wouldn’t call a
doctor, because they’d have had to pay for that (in Raftery
and O’Sullivan, 2001).
Likewise for the life of nuns in Massachusetts, as one lay
member recorded:
I’d see priests driving around in Cadillacs. I remember reading
a story about how nuns didn’t have full health insurance
and was just infuriated by the injustice in that (in Boston
Globe, 2003).
The free exchange of information, beyond the boundaries of
the organization, for petitioners to receive honest answers to even
embarrassing questions? Not divinely likely:
Cardinals take an oath to the pope to safeguard the church
from scandal—to prevent bad information from becoming
public (Berry and Renner, 2004; italics added).
Honest mistakes, incompetence, negligence and intentional
wrongdoing are all abhorrent to the higher leadership [of the
Roman Catholic Church]. All are denied, covered up and rationalized
with equal zeal. The clerical world truly believes
that it has been established by God and that its members are