Let me just second that and also share a small story that has just happened... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Sunday, May 08, 2011, 11:12 (747 days ago) @ TonySee

Thanks Tony and especially Stephen and let me share with you something I have just shared with Stephen on the phone.

I was lying in bed about an hour ago just about to get up and the phone rang. It was a male voice on the other end of the phone and I could immediately tell the man was crying and all chocked up. He had difficulty in getting his words out. The story he ended up telling me is one of the most moving I've ever experienced and I'm now almost chocked up trying to write this. The man is close to 80 having been born in 1934 in Germany. He was sexually abused as a young altar boy at the age of 13 and like many others suppressed it. Eventually though he had to leave his homeland because of the memories of the experience and that's how he came to live in Australia. In recent years he finally got around to doing something about this abuse that occurred so long ago and he wrote to the cardinal in Germany back where the abuse occurred. I'm not sure of the final outcome — I think he has got some satisfaction but it sounds to me it might be "too little, too late" — and I'm not talking money there. (He sounds quite well off and can look after himself so I suspect this isn't about money at all.) This is about being violated at a deep level of faith and trying to come to terms with it all at the spiritual level over an entire lifetime. He did say to me that it is all still very raw because it is only about three weeks ago that he received a final letter from the Church in Germany seeking to close the whole matter off and mark the matter as "resolved".

To try and cut a long story short I ended up having a very long conversation with him — mainly listening to his story — and sharing little bits and pieces of mine and some of the stories some of you have shared on Catholica. He sounds to me like a very beautiful man. For most of his life he's been "a faithful Cathollic" — and highly active in his local and diocesan communities ... as an architect even designing churches ... and at lower levels on local parish committees and as an acolyte etc — I'm sure you get the picture.

He's been reading Catholica for a long time but has never contributed anything to our discussions. This morning however he clicked on a post and told me how he watched a video. It was the one made by Stephen based on The Seeker's Song, "A World of Our Own". He became so chocked up with tears watching it that when he recovered he felt impelled to have to talk to someone and share his life experience with someone because of it. As editor of Catholica I was the fortunate one to be on the end of his phone call. It is a phone call I will treasure for the rest of my life and throughout it I was only hoping I could share it with each of you in the entire Catholica community — and indeed the entire world. I am still a bit of a spluttering mess as I type this. In the end I asked him to email me and I would meanwhile speak to Stephen on the phone and get his permission for the man to ring him and share with Stephen the story he had told me. I suggested to him — and to Stephen when I spoke to him — that this man needed to share his life story with Stephen far more than he needed to share it with me. For about the last twelve months, after a lifetime of faithful participation in the life of the Church he has finally "given it away" — essentially I gather after some dealings with one of the local senior bishops in Australia (I won't divulge any names other than to say it's none of the usual suspects) — and he's been looking at the Buddhist faith. Still feeling "Catholic" mind you and he said to me "the funny thing is I've found in the Buddhists that they 'get the Jesus story' far more than we do as Catholics" [that is not literal but a close recollection from my memory of what he said].

I haven't even got the man's name and I asked him to email me with his details because I didn't have a pen handy up near my bed. I'm still waiting for his email. His wife returned home in the middle of our conversation and he briefly interrupted the conversation to explain to her who he was talking to and what the conversation was all about. I'd bet he's in the middle of a long post-mortem with her after our conversation — and showing her Stephen's video. Thank you, thank you, Mr Whoever-You-Are. That was a very special moment of blessing in my life and I hope it might soon be in the life of Stephen. Stephen himself told me he's been a bit gobsmacked already at the number of views the post received so evidently the video has had an impact on a lot of other people as well.

Here is the link to Stephen's original post and the video:
www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?id=74623

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]