I am a Catholic - or, better to say - I was a Catholic.
My parents, in their wisdom which was the wisdom of the day decided to educate me in Catholic schools and sent me to Holy Cross primary and Marist Brothers Miramar intermediate. This was back in the 1960s when parents either through naivety or deliberate blindness ignored activities of nuns, brothers and priests and subjugated themselves to the preaching of what I see now as a very dodgy religion.
My parents wanted me to go to St Patrick's College in Wellington but I resisted and, along with a couple of friends who had experienced some 'indignities' at the hands (literally) of one of the teaching brothers, got our parents to enrol us at Wellington High School. Wellington High School was an OK school that suffered from the reputation of being a technical college. Even in the 1960s there were class barriers and snobbery even though the economic divide hadn't fully taken effect. The result was that, although I enjoyed my time at WHS I didn't get challenged academically and left after passing School Certificate. I took on an apprenticeship in the printing industry and was doing well until the industry radically changed through digitisation, the rise of the internet and collapse of the printed media industry.
Anyway, that's water under the bridge except for a renewed interest in the aforementioned activities of those Catholic nuns, brothers and priests. Recently there have been exposes of the church and the activities of church members in the Wellington region. Some very good investigation has been undertaken that has resulted in long-overdue prosecutions. Here's on study that is worth a read:
Steve Kilgallon has written elsewhere on other exposes and I will bring these and reports from other writers as I find them.
