Father Joe

 

McCarrick. 

I once lived with a Catholic priest, who took his title “father” seriously. He considered himself equivalent to the father in a family. And he once wrote a piece for publication arguing that being a father was a kind of martyrdom, that a father dies every day for his children. His editor tried to convince him not to make this claim; it sounded bizarre. And I agreed with the editor.

Now that I have had a good deal of experience as a father, it seems yet more bizarre. It is the opposite of the truth. We parents live through the eyes of our children. They give us a second, perhaps a third, perhaps a fourth, life. Perhaps more: the chain of descent is a primitive form of immortality.

But Father Joe was adamant. He even mocked his editor for not agreeing. He saw it as an obvious insight. He was a martyr for his congregation, and felt good about himself for it. Accordingly, each parent was also a martyr, being killed by their own children.

I realize now that Father Joe was a narcissist. Many members of the clergy are: it is a role that proclaims “I am better than others.” The Bible calls them Pharisees. 

This would explain the supposed tragedy of parenthood. A narcissist would indeed consider the existence of the child (or parishioner) an affront to themselves, in that it requires them to consider the interests of someone other than themselves, and sometimes deny their own desires for another. Indeed, to demand this is, in the mind of the narcissist, an assault, even murder. Consider the “transsexuals” insisting that if you do not use their chosen pronouns, or let them use their preferred washrooms, you are guilty of genocide. This is the way the narcissist sees the world. This makes them dangerous and capable of violence.

This can then justify the narcissist in any kind of abuse of their children. Or, among clergy, any kind of abuse of young parishioners. They had better be useful to the narcissist in some important way, to justify their existence. 

There is a trope in Greek myth of a parent consulting an oracle on the birth of a child; and being told the child will grow up to replace them. As a result, they persecute and try to kill the child.

Of course, this is always simply true. In the normal course of nature, the child will outlive the parent. So what is the point of this oracle?

I think this is a literary convention to make objective the inner thoughts of the narcissistic parent: children are evil. They require attention, and they are likely to survive him or her. This is an affront to the narcissistic ego. 

Freud’s imaginary Oedipus complex probably springs from the same roots. There is much child hatred in the real world. Look at the numbers for abortion, for pedophilia, and for child sex mutilation.