The report about the longlasting abuses of children and young people in Pennsylvania and the efforts by the Catholic hierarchy to cover them up, raises extremely serious issues. It confirms how the Catholic Church has become a structure dominated by a caste of priests. They run it according to criteria which best guarantee their domination, as well as enable them to hide the mistakes and crimes their fellows commit.

For an outside observer, it is doubtful whether this fundamental problem can be solved by some exercise in communications, like the letter sent by Pope Francis to all the “faithful”.

If the Catholic Church is not going to clean with fire and from the ground up the ways and structures by which the ideals it supposedly proclaims get to be carried out in practice, then it will end up totally discredited. First and foremost, it needs to prioritise the elimination of the impunity enjoyed by the sacerdotal strata. That is what some Nonconformist “sects” did.

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Welding

A man came to tell me about an aspiration of his that had persisted throughout his life. I admired him for it. Over the years, he had learnt a skill at his place of work, had studied and obtained the necessary qualifications relative to it, had then gone on to teach the skill that had become his: welding. Teaching it as a trade to young people gave him much satisfaction. He reviewed with enthusiasm the successes achieved by some of the apprentices he had worked with.

He continued as an instructor eventually parttime till some time ago, he was relieved of all duties by school heads. He offered to continue providing instructioneven free of charge, but was repeatedly rejected. Even the Ombudsman failed to support him.

He wanted my advice: what could he do?

I asked about his age. He replied he was past eighty.

My advice was for him to give up. Nobody is going to back him because he had become too old.

I’m still unhappy with what I had to tell him. Is it not possible for a citizen like this to find where (with some NGO if not a government entity) he could satisfy this urge to be of help to others wishing to learn a useful trade, one that is declining in this country?

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Notice

I still cannot understand much of the story regarding the notice establishing new employment regulations that was published apparently without anybody concerned on the business side knowing about it or even being aware of it.

As far as I could see, the alarm was raised... if it was such... in an article that appeared in a daily newspaper, written by a lawyer specializing in employment regulations. He referred to what had appeared in the Government Gazette. If I understood the story, up to that point the organizations that represent the business sector were totally out of the picture. Then within twenty four hours, they all came out to condemn the notice. A polemic ensued: had they been consulted prior to publication or not?

My suspicion is that the business assocations need to improve strongly the methods by which they monitor economic management and changes in the rules that are introduced in this area. Many changes reflect decisions that have been taken at a European level. About them, it is not just the government that has got to do its homework, but the business organizations as well. Are they really doing so?