oh man! I didn't know that was so recent as well. Good gravy.

It's all fucked up.

The fact that there's still no national investigation or coordination in Spain might be the most amazing part.

I may have to watch the Intelligence Squared debate about the Catholic Church again for catharsis.

oh man! I didn't know that was so recent as well

Recent enough that the young Sinead O'Connor spent some time in a Catholic reformatory.

Timelies.

Mom's in the hospital again. Same problem as a couple of weeks back. Hopefully the GI specialist will be more help this time, but she's also got to start drinking more liquids. I'd say on average she has less than a quart of liquid all day. She especially needs to take care of fluids if she's having issues.

Any health/recovery-ma would be appreciated. She's 89, and I think these problems she's been having are the biggest quality-of-life issue for her, so it would be nice if they ID some kind of cause that can be dealt with (lactose, gluten, etc.).

I read a book a few months ago about a similar baby-trafficking scheme in Ireland. It was fiction (a mystery, Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black), but it's chilling to realize how much truth there might have been in it.

~ma for your mother, Frank. Is she living on her own, and if so, is there someone who lives close to her who can check in on her regularly?

Though I have to say, sexually abusing children, stealing babies and enslaving wayward girls is quite a trifecta of evil.

Tim's dad is still aggressively trying to get us to re-join the Catholic church, and I am getting thisclose to losing my shit at him and pointing out the litany of utter evil the church has committed and condoned in this century alone.

I don't have a problem with him continuing to be a Catholic; his faith is personal, and I respect that. But he won't respect our decision to not follow in his footsteps.

I don't know exactly what his parish is preaching, but they sound like a very uber-conservative parish, espousing things like -- his (Tim's Dad) salvation is contingent on getting his children to come back to the church. That's a direct quote.

Tim has 2 brothers -- 1 goes to the same parish as their dad, and the other converted to Lutheranism because his wife is a Lutheran, and they wanted to raise their children in that faith. And I can tell you that although Tim's dad will grudgingly acknowledge that Lutherans are Christians, he *actually* believes that they're apostates who will be going to hell, all because he hasn't tried hard enough to get them to come back to the church. His 20-year-old granddaughter (a brilliant, geeky Buffista spirit baby if ever there were one) is thinking about going to seminary after college, and it breaks his heart. Because it's the "wrong" faith. (Of course, if they were Catholic, she wouldn't be allowed to go to seminary because she was born without a penis and therefore inferior to men and don't get me fucking started on that bullshit.)

Anyway. This is obviously a huge festering problem in Tim's family, and it's not going away. Tim and I must make his dad flip out privately, because we don't go to *any* church.

I mostly feel sorry for his dad, because it must be horrible to believe that it's *your* responsibility to "save" your kids. Well, actually, I know exactly how horrible it feels, because that's exactly what the Freak-Ass Church was like. I just never knew the Catholic Church could be this freaky evangelical. Because growing up Catholic in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you we were never ever encouraged to evangelize. It was more like, "Oh, your neighbors aren't Catholic? Well, too bad for them."

Anyway. Sorry. At this point in my life, any mention of the Catholic church makes me get my rant on.

(I can't even think about what will transpire if Tim and I get married. Because it won't be in the Catholic church, and probably not in any church. But that's not really an issue right now and may never be. But still, I can't help thinking about it.)

Frank, I x-posted with you. I hope your mom's doctors can work out what's going on. Have they run, or will they run, any blood tests to see if she has gluten or lactose issues?

If she's willing to change her diet, she doesn't even need to have tests -- she just needs to cut out gluten and/or lactose for a week or 2, and if one (or both) is the culprit, it's pretty obvious.

But it's got to be really hard to change how you eat when you're 89. It's not fun at any age, but really, 89 is lifetime of eating one way, and it would be really jarring to suddenly make a massive change.

Fingers crossed for her, definitely.

Vortex:

It will be a huge change, but worth it, I think.

Whoah. No kidding. It sounds scary and awesome.

The thing that gets me is that this went all the way into the '80s! the 1980s! You'd think this kind of thing would be in the 1880s or during WWII, but no.

Yeah. I hear "Catholic Church" and "kidnapping," and I think Edgardo Montara.

Congrats, Vortex! Sounds like a GOOD change for you!