Marching out of step

Of course the entire world can't be out of step and the lone objector in step. Or can it be so?

What happens when an organisation or institution or religious community refuses to accept what someone says? Does it mean that the views of the individual are necessarily wrong? Could it be that the organisation refuses to listen? Is it a matter of perception?

One thing can be said and that is that the organisation has on its side two important ingredients, power and control. And that seem a universal law.

Very often the organisation will attempt to dismiss the views and opinions of the individual objector. And indeed, many times that manages to quash the spirits of the person.

Most times the organisation or corporation has all the tools of control and manipulation on its side.

Their leaders can come across as rational and pleasant people. They can even make sense, maybe even look 'holy', refined and kind.

Most of us are conditioned. It is the few who will not be afraid to persist in questioning and objecting.

Take the situation in Burma today. Most of us in the West will naturally and inevitably take the side of the individual protester against the State. Our sympathy and empathy is for the individual and against the State.

Or in Iran, we in the West will empathise with the individual protester and see the organs of State as the oppressor. How does the Supreme Leader and his entourage feel and think about what is happening?

Now look at the Ryan Report in Ireland. Today most people empathise and sympathise with the victims of abuse and cast scorn on the religious congregations for what they did.

Turn the clock back 20, 30, 40 years, the then victims were considered the villains of the peace and the religious congregations were treated with great respect.

In the now of any situation it is the small person, the marginalised, the person who finds it difficult to be understood or speak in the language of the club. who is dismissed. And one way the organisation handles the person is to label him or her as 'angry'.

It is that ingredient which makes the Ryan report such appalling reading. It is that aspect that must make us have sympathy with the demonstrators on the streets in Iran.

Any organisation but especially a religious congregation which does not listen to the marginalised, no matter how unpalatable the story may be, surely has lost its charism.

As a small boy in Dublin's Synge Street I was always confused by the brothers talking about the importance of 'emptying' ourselves just as Christ did. They spoke about how the followers of Christ were 'outsiders and marginalised. The next minute they were talking about the great and the good who were past pupils of the school and were now the captains of industry.