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!

espousing things like -- his (Tim's Dad) salvation is contingent on getting his children to come back to the church

Seriously? That's ... not very Catholic, to me. No church I've ever attended had that kind of attitude. But then if it did, I wouldn't have been going there.

I wonder if we are getting an intersection of the old-line Catholicism and the new evangelical mega-churches. Certainly the conservatism of the Church hierarchy aligns better with the evangelicals than it does with the old blue-collar unionized/progressive base it used to rely on.

Nobody's talking about liberation theology anymore, that's for sure.

cold tea:

Vortex, congratulations! I hope you find it challenging and rewarding.

Vortex, that is wonderful news! I am abstractly fond of Harford Insurance because they took good care of my MiL after Katrina (when not all insurance companies were so inclined), so I'm hopeful it will be a good place to work.

Congrats, Vortex! That's very exciting!