There were also priests, who wanted a refuge. Priests were often careerists with a "calling," wanting to do a good job and rise to a better post. ![]() Anonymous in the confession, they were somewhat interchangeable to their flocks, who did not know the length of assignments. Priests were assigned to parishes as needed. There was also the Church culture of the time. Any local priests who counselled the mother would have had no vocabulary of "domestic abuse." And in the social ethic of the 1950s-60s, in Florida, no one interfered with a father's rights to keep his family on a leash, though many thought it too tight. Of course neighbors witnessed events-screaming, sons being hurt. The mother was treated by the family doctor for "abuse related' bruising. High school classmates remembered his frequent welts and bruises. There's even an infamous photo of toddler Charlie at the beach, supported by two guns planted in the sand. At nine, Charlie became an altar boy, a respite from the highly structured and violent household filled with guns. Beatings were a common fact of his and his mother's life. As a devout Catholic, that also meant regular attendance at Mass and reverence for those that served God.Ĭharlie was expected to adhere to his father's tyrannical (and often arbitrary) rules-or else. ![]() In this "all American" family the father had a plumbing business, the mother did the accounts and catered to his many edicts, while trying to raise their children to become decent people. In this deeply researched nonfiction, she traces Whitman's path from his childhood with a violent authoritarian father, brutalized mother, and two younger siblings, also struggling to survive. Twisted, mentally ill, yet, as author Jo Scott-Coe shows in MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest, mass murderers don't develop in a vacuum. His was the first televised mass shooting and "domestic terror" spectacle in American history. On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, after slaying his wife and mother, climbed the clock tower at UT Austin and shot about 50 people, including the fetus of a pregnant woman. With the disturbing acceleration of mass murder shootings, it's easy to forget the first big one.
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