It’s also such a very short clip that I am pretty sure the rest of the ritual does not support the premise of the Guardian’s version or else they would have presented more of it or even the whole thing. Why is the press afraid to show the whole procedure to see if the child was roughly handled all along- if the child was, a longer video would have confirmed it and strengthened the story. Instead it’s very tightly clipped which makes me think it was clickbait edited for shock value. Are leftwing nuts afraid to let their readers hear the Word of God, or afraid that maybe everything was going great until this particular moment and might lessen the shock value? And why no names/dates/etc for confirmation?
There is a reason this is playing now - there’s a leftwing Catholic official I think in Ireland who has proposed making religious instruction of children “before the age of reason” a violation of children’s “human rights.” And things have gone hinky enough over there that the guy is not seen as radical.
As bad as the video is, while it certainly looks like the priest planted on upside the kid’s head, the kid could have bit the priest’s finger or thumb as he was cradling the face and the priest could have been trying to free his thumb, which might look like a slap with a shaky-handed 98 year old.
It could even have been staged, since there seems to be no ID and the background’s not distinctive enough to ID the church.
Or the rest of the video could show the priest’s state of mind, maybe he has Alzheimer’s and got confused when the kid was throwing a fit and did slap him, in which case he probably screwed up the ceremony too... and showing him mumbling and screwing up the ceremony would make people more sympathetic to both priest and child- the former for having succumbed to a horrible disease and the latter for having to experience the disease at the hands of the ill - and then public discourse would be about the suffering and collateral damage caused by Alzheimer’s which does not fit the paper’s agenda.
I know my Dad always loved animals, but because he’s fighting Alzheimer’s, he keeps stepping on my parrot’s tail when they’re both wandering around the house, and now the parrot gets a understandably nervous around him. Dad also doesn’t see well at all, and sometimes sticks his hands in the bird’s chest and face when walking by his stand - an act which would normally make the bird clamp down on a person’s finger in self defense. Fortunately the parrot seems to know it’s not intentional and he just squawks and tries to give Dad room by leaning way back on the perch or scrambling out of the way.
I think I’d rather see an interview of the parents and church officials than react to a video with no context.
Is that still allowed here?