Ian's Rant

Ian was very public about his issues with the Catholic Chruch.  I met him almost 20 years ago in Botswana where he ran a safari company.  As a young boy, he’d been abused by several parish priests in the small town in South Africa where he grew up.  He finally told his mother and she protected him by sending him away to live with relatives in the city.  He felt he was being punished and did not speak of the abuse again for many years.  Now the dam was broken and he could speak of little else.  For days as we drove across the Okavango Delta, Ian railed against the church that had failed to protect him.  “They stole my faith. They stole my family.” he would say again and again, then he would curse them.  By this time, the Boston Globe story had just come out.  The true extent of the global Catholic church sexual abuse and cover-up scandal continues to grow even today.

Ian’s face was ruddy and swollen and at only 30 years old, he already took medications for hypertension.  He drank heavily in the evenings - it’s hard to hide that in a bush camp.  In medicine, you learn to assess probabilities, I didn’t give Ian good odds for a long life.