According to Varnus, this can't even be a question, it's a basic premise, because God has to forgive everything. He even gave this title to his biography published in 1996. Written by Angéla Füssy.
And it is a crime even if it is not punishable according to the strict framework of the law and everything else is a private matter. There is a lot to confess, because God will forgive you anyway... if this is his craft.
But nothing is so simple and self-evident. It's more shades of gray than black or white. You can swim only according to the thin letters of the law, thanks to the time that thickly covers the prison, the darkest secrets. Or because if the guardians of the law have enough guts and call it abuse of influence, which it is, eventually there will always be a lawyer who twists the obvious with common sense. And then only the dry knocking numbers remain, strictly above 14, so that they can be easily fit into the framework of the law... In the end, we only have to try to push them to the wall, strictly with the opportunity and rigor provided by the law, who still dares to say: this is not good.
However, this does not change anything. Dirt remains dirt. Innocent, broken lives are now speaking silently.
The decades-old wall of silence has been broken, from which there will be no way back for the Xavérs, Lakatos, Somogyvárs, Márton Fekete and their peers. Society will pass judgment on dirty crimes that were covered up by fear and shame for decades, even if the court does not know in every case.
Because there is no law, neither falsely claiming exploitation and abuse as consent, nor flagging a statute of limitations, which would allow a sane person to accept that a 30-40-50-year-old man uses an inexperienced, vulnerable 15-16-17-year-old child as a sexual toy.
I ask all those who are now lamenting that we are coming to label these people as guilty without judgment: just imagine for a single moment that all the horrors that we have described so far happened to your 14, 15, 16, 17 year old children it happened. Be it a girl or a boy. It doesn't matter.
Did you imagine it?
Even now, they say that telling the truth about all this is sexual assault, vile defamation, because it is not even a crime, there is no final judgment and the age of consent is 14?
Yes, I know, your own child is different. This can't happen to him anyway.
Those parents who only let their child go to the gym to spend his time meaningfully, then were happy when the trainer paid special attention to him, or those who were proud of their child when they saw him under the wings of a famous organist, who would how much you can take it.
And there are those who don't have loving parents, for whom no one was worried if they didn't make it "home" by 10 p.m., or if a suspicious car came to pick them up. In their case, there is no one who blames himself for half a lifetime for not taking better care of his eyesight. Because they are not the apple of anyone's eyes, that is why they may accept the unacceptable more easily at that moment, since they hope for some kind of emotion in return.
For weeks, a rebellion that has never surfaced with such elemental force has been rumbling for weeks. Rebellion against the sexual exploitation of all children, regardless of gender, age, or family background, because the crime is the same in all cases. It is no less if it is committed against a zacis kid torn from a branch, than if it is against the professor's only feared child. It has no color, only a smell. The nose-wringing stench of silence, looking away, explaining and winking, denial and excuses, on the altar of which countless lives were broken into pieces.
The other day I heard a 50-year-old man crying like a baby. She could never tell anyone about being raped at the age of 12.
Another man wrote that he met his former classmate on the bus. The boy called himself a college student that year because he was ashamed that he didn't go home after classes. He fell into the clutches of a predator when he was still in elementary school. Then he lived in workers' hostels, subletting, and eventually became unemployed, and by then he could not even afford the rent of a palm-sized room. He also contracted a deadly disease. Everything that happened to him, he now told the former classmate, whose soul he had heard in the reports of the past weeks, when he saw him. This man asked us to finish what we started, for the sake of torn apart lives.
And there is the third one, who was already moved by the fact that someone was curious about him, about his story, which he couldn't tell anyone for 40 years. He also grew up in an orphanage. Perhaps you can already guess what kind of trauma could have broken out in him after all this time.
Photo: Varnus Xaver/ Facebook
Two days ago, I listened to a now 18-year-old girl, speechless with shock, as she told me in unvarnished detail, between deep breaths and intermittent silences, how she was raped at the age of 13 by the child supervisor of an apartment home, and then on one occasion, not only by her, but by two friends, three of them at the same time, in a weekend house, where he stole her away for the evening.
And there's that boy. Barely 21. He carries the pains of a mature man. Through orphanages, correctional institutions, corrupted, sold, prostituted, who stood up to all this and started an avalanche with a few brave sentences. He doesn't even know that it all started from him, he feeds on his courage. He was always alone, he used to say. Even when it happened to him. Now there are crowds behind him, yet he lies there on a bed of grace, waiting for tomorrow, maybe not even this, but only the street. He also needs help to get something for dinner, which is a huge thing because he could laugh and earn 50 thousand in half an hour if he gave himself to a Lakatos guy again. Maybe now he will start on a different path, he would start, but despite the real crisis, this child protection is such that there is no organization, neither state nor civil, that would give a real crutch to a lost child who has been chewed up and spat out.
The pain that has been buried until now flows non-stop. And if you tear open the dry scars, you can't leave the person who after all this time has finally started to trust something with a gaping open wound. Helplessness hurts, it hurts that there is not enough time and too much that has already passed, and that all I can do is give voice to the silence. Meanwhile, I could scream in anger.
Will God forgive me anyway?
I think, or at least I hope, that He judges those who never repent of sin and lifts up all the lives that are down here in the mud.
And then there will not only be law with strict frameworks, but also justice.
Featured image: Varnus Xavér on May 6, 2013. Photo: Zsolt Czeglédi / MTI
