{"id":631,"date":"2009-05-25T09:49:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-25T09:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2009\/05\/we-knew-and-did-not-know.html"},"modified":"2009-05-25T09:49:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-25T09:49:00","slug":"we-knew-and-did-not-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2009\/05\/we-knew-and-did-not-know.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;We knew, and did not know&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align: justify\">&#8220;Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings \u2014 human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland \u2014 have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.<\/p>\n<p>Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled \u2014 the word is not too strong \u2014 by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.<\/p>\n<p>We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.&#8221;<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: right\">&#8212; Irish novelist <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/23\/opinion\/23banville.html?em\">John Banville<\/a>, writing on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catholicreview.org\/subpages\/storyworldnew-new.aspx?action=6262\">the horror of abuse<\/a> by religious in Ireland.  <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings \u2014 human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland \u2014 have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-r-us","category-ripped-from-the-headlines"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&quot;We knew, and did not know&quot; - The Deacon&#039;s Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2009\/05\/we-knew-and-did-not-know.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;We knew, and did not know&quot; - The Deacon&#039;s Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&#8220;Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. 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