My experience of working as a Chaplain in a mental hospital back in the late 1970s left many lasting impressions on me, writes Father Patrick O'Shea.
The strongest was a question that emerged from a combination of my own experience, seeing the movie One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest again in the context of that experience and reading an article based on a controversial study into Mental Hospitals in the United States entitled Being Sane in Insane Places.
In a world where even a simple everyday act, like keeping a diary, can be interpreted as a symptom of mental illness and any religious belief is regarded by some in authority as a sign of insanity, the boundaries between sane and insane become blurred.
In a world where the abnormal passes as normal and the normal as abnormal who can say who is sane and who is not?
This question has come again for me with the arrest of a Catholic priest and his two companions for breaking into and damaging the covering on one of the satellite dishes at Waihopai in New Zealand.
As I was sifting my own mixed reactions I was struck by the terms used by some key people to describe the event. The Prime Minister Helen Clarke saw it as a "senseless act of vandalism" and Air Marshall Bruce Ferguson, the Director of The Government Communication Security Bureau as a "warped and nonsensical act."
I found myself asking if a world that spends huge amounts of money to spy on people, but can't seem to find enough money to fund education and health in a way that makes them available to those who need them most, is not acting in a warped way?
FULL STORY Sane in an Insane World (St Columbans Mission Society)