FINAL BREAK WITH SATAN PRIEST

I was aware that the Catholic Archbishop had a appointed the Satan priest to take care of AIDS sufferers.

But I also knew that this was a bad choice as the priest was an arrogant man with contempt for church authority and a determination to do his own thing. I am sure he would have told the Archbishop to go to hell.

What chance did I have as a lay Catholic? The priest regarded me as rubbish meat. That is why he did not have a parish but was stuck in a priory at Bomana.

He had contempt for the Positive Living message that would have involved him in study and support for family.

One of the major problems of priests was loneliness. No one came to see if this priest lived or died. Linda and I became his friends and would visit him. Linda knitted him a woollen hat in Franciscan brown. I stayed with Linda to bring some softness to the Satan priest.

I was aware that I knew more than he did on AIDS awareness. So I tried to lift his level of knowledge but he refused to accept any advice from me. I gave up after a number of months.

Then Linda slowly started to drop in body and mind in her 8^th year of infection. This was the onset of dementia without ARV. The priest did not believe she was violent. 

He had an eye for good looking women and Linda was most beautiful. He had the eye for beauty of the average womaniser.

She horrified me and my children with her violence and fears of being killed by spirits and evil men.

One day, a branch broke off in the tree near the house. She was determined that this was a sign from evil spirits. Linda insisted that I go to the Catholic shop and buy crucifixes to bury in the garden.

She was convinced that an old woman had turned herself into a black bird and was waiting to kill her from a tree near the house.

She woke up dreaming that her room was full of men and women come to take her body and soul.

She would bash my daughters if they let me hug and kiss them. Linda never touched her own children in love.

I used to throw her 9 year old son around just to let him feel that a man cared for him.

After my son died of AIDS, Linda needed some outlet so she used to have me take her daughter and friend with her to a disco. I would pick them up at 3.00am.

One Saturday, she was ironing her dress when I told her we had no money. She cried and went wild.

Pulling the ironing cord from the wall, she dropped to her knees and wrapped the cord around my legs. Then she burned me several times on the legs with the point of the iron.

I grabbed the iron and stopped her but not before the iron had burned her on the neck and shoulders. We were both injured. That was the only time she had been violent to me in 3 years. She mainly bashed my daughters when I was at work. She was becoming demented and violent.

I decided to calm her down by going for a drive. My hidden motive was to take her to Father Jude at Bomana to show him the effects of her violence.

We met and I told him what had happened. He took Linda and sat under a tree while I waited for about half an hour.

He then came over to me and told me to take her home to wait for the police to come. He said that the burns on her body were vicious domestic violence. I would be charged and arrested. 

He was not interested in seeing the burns on my lower legs. I was convicted on 50% of the evidence. This was his dream come true. The fact that my burns were on my lower legs and hers were on her neck, showed she was kneeling and I was standing. She was wielding the hot iron.

Now he could kill the Positive Living family message all of which was based on Scripture - faith, hope, peace. love, family, friends, truth, compassion, trust, patience, fellowship and forgiveness. Had the priest never read his Bible? St Paul wrote on those qualities. The priest had obviously never read the commandment on "bearing false witness".

For the first time in my life, I swore at a priest and told him he was a stupid and vicious old bastard. I asked why I would have brought her to him to be a witness if I had burned her.

I said that I was showing him the effects of mental instability and dementia in final AIDS that he claimed never to have seen.

This was his perfect chance for Satan priest to destroy the Positive Living message. He would be confirming the fake message by the AusAID paedophiles that I was a violent man.

I took Linda home and she was happy. The dementia had lifted and she seemed to remember nothing.

The Satan priest did not go to the police. He knew that he would have made a false report. Instead, he advised Cox, the lesbian advisor in the AIDS campaign.

Within a few weeks, the story of my burning Linda was around the town. The Catholic hierarchy was wise to keep the Satan priest out of parish work. He could never be trusted with confidentiality in the confessional. He would blab all he had heard around the town.

From that time, I stopped all contact with him. He continued to work to destroy Positive Living from us. He failed.

If God is for us, who can be against us? Certainly not a Satan priest.

The saddest memory of Linda and Jonathan came with my singing him to sleep at night. He would sleep in my bed with lullabies sung gently in his ear.

I would sing Brahm’s Lullaby and a song by Roger Whittaker “For you are beautiful and I have loved you dearly more dearly than the spoken words can tell”. He would sleep in minutes.

In the months after he died in late 2002, Linda was under the house listening to the radio. She started crying and sobbing. 

Rushing down, I found her holding the radio to her chest. She was listening to the song by Roger Whittaker. That was the real Linda. Shame on you priest.