"It never occurred to me that I could be tortured."
Dr Sheila Cassidy.
Forty years ago this week a school group spent a few days on retreat at a monastery at Ampleforth in Yorkshire to prepare in spirit for the exams they would be taking and the career choices they would be making.
On arrival at the guest house they were told that there was another visitor who was in silence, who should not be addressed or disturbed. Whenever she was seen boiling a kettle or passing through, the girls duly averted their eyes and moved away.
The woman was pale and her hair was hidden under a headscarf that fastened at the back, under her hair, leaving her face visible. It seemed in the soft light that there was some scarring across her face, but no-one looked, it was just an impression.
On the final night, the retreat programme was changed. The group were told they would be able to meet her. She had heard why they were there, and was prepared to break her silence to share her story.
The room was still and the only light was candles when Dr Sheila Cassidy began to speak quietly and calmly. She described as a girl wondering if she might become a nun, then deciding to be a doctor, and meeting a doctor friend from Chile. How she lost her faith in the church and moved on.
She spoke of working to support people in need in Chile, feeling she had found her right place until then the death of her friend, whose funeral brought her back to a very different kind of church, living and working at the grass roots. A church she understood.
Then the Allende government was overthrown. The work of the secret police under Pinochet began in earnest, but she had a sense of self as an outsider, a sense of safety as a foreigner.
She told how she was called by a priest to treat someone who had been shot. Someone on the run. She described the doctors' promise, the hypocratic oath, to help without prejudice and do no harm. How could she be a doctor and refuse to treat a person? She arrived late, when he had been treated already, and she went home. But later the knock came on her door and the shots that rang out as people were killed in the doorway. Her arrest. Her belief that they had made a mistake, that they would not take a British citizen. And the fact that they did.
She did not describe the torture then. It was too fresh, too recent, and the girls seemed so young. But she named it. Torture. Did she even mention being told to strip naked, and the use of electric shocks? Or was it implied? She spoke of being in solitary confinement and hearing other women's screams through the walls. She said more about the sufferings of others, the grace and intelligence and courage of others. The strength they found in poetry. And more about her task of finding her way, and her constant and evolving prayer.
Later she wrote about her experience, and gave talks throughout her life about the reality of torture, the urgency of recognizing what it is, where it is, and how it tries to remove the humanity of its victim, and of the perpetrator.
Forty years ago this week I listened to her. Things which had happened in secret so far away, attacking the most intimate parts of the body and mind, and soul, were a part of the reality of this woman sitting here.
On a train this week a young man sat beside me. He spoke Spanish, and was on his way to the exact same out of the way place, Ampleforth Abbey.
In the week that Donald Trump has come out in favour of torture against all moral law and against international law, and in conflict with the evidence of its efficacy, I meet a man on a train who brings these memories back.
In January 1977, Sheila Cassidy spoke out against torture. Titus Brandsma witnessed prophetically against it in 1942, among so many others across the world. I thought it was obvious. It is abhorrent, wherever it occurs. And absolutely immoral. Wherever it occurs. It is one of the most significant scenes leading up to the crucifixion of Christ, the most physically and psychologically degrading part of Christ's life, that having accepted his humanity he was all but stripped of it. Christ, the son of God, directly and physically and personally, in terror and desperation, witnessed personally and prophetically against the duhumanising behaviour of torture. The very symbol of the cross bears witness.
One cannot wear the cross with a sense of worthiness, only with aspiration. None of us are that good. But it symbolizes victory over our inhumanity. We should know it.
When I heard her speak, Sheila Cassidy was looking back, and seeing a pattern. Now, exactly forty years later, I recount this story, at a really degrading juncture in political history, and looking back and looking now, I see a pattern.
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*http://catholiccourier.com/faith-family/features/doctor-recounts-surviving-imprisonment-torture-in-chile/#sthash.we5MUs73.dpuf
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