Church and silence: Sometimes a trampled cat on Ilica attracts more attention than a Roma child

That is why this gospel is read almost painfully precisely with the news from Akovac, where a 63-year-old priest was wrongfully sentenced to three years and eight months in prison for four criminal offenses of pimping children. According to available reports, the court did not accept his defense, and his precautionary measures were extended. And now ćweć according to the well-known Croatian custom, to have a few days of mourning, a few church announcements about the protection of minors, a bit of moral fog and then a return to well-maintained oblivion.

But here it is not the caseč only about one priest. Riječ is about a system in which the reputation of the institution is too often defended faster than the child. It is even sadder that the victims are Roma children from Medstrok;imurje, children who in our social imaginary too often live on the edge, where empathy stops and prejudices begin. Where society postpones its own indifference for decades, children easily become someone’s statistic, and hardly someone’s concern. Sometimes it seems that a trampled cat on Zagreb’s Ilica attracts more attention than a Roma child from a settlement that we have long since placed outside the boundaries of our own conscience.

At the end of the same gospel, Jesus does not dwell on big words, rather; talks about a glass of cold water given to the smallest one. Perhaps the most accurate measure of Christianity can be seen right there, not in the loud defense of the reputation of the Church, but rather in in the quick protection of those whom no one wants to see. Because the love that demands silence is not love, the loyalty that protects the powerful is not loyalty, and the Church that fears the public more than the suffering of a child is not persecuted. She is only caught in the truth that she has been running away from for too long.