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.