Corporate Malfeasance

As an adult I felt the need of a faith,
and a faith community to be part of,
whilst I struggled with a secular world
where I found community to be lacking.

Sometimes openly worried agnostics
would privately ask for my reflections 
on the Roman Catholic Church.

To save time and stop early confusions
my reply to every asker got set as
'The Catholic Church is the oldest
multinational corporation in the world.'.

It got me out of a lot of discussions
about doctrine where both my asker
and I would have raised more heat
than light discussing Catholic doctrines
that neither of us knew enough about
to be able to enlighten to each other. 

What my answer avoided
was how national laws work
against international corporations,
and against each other,
but given that civil law
was secular, and less led by taboo,
discussion about it should
have been a more open dialogue.

In theory corporate law
was open to discussion
as any other subject
that any civil society
that claims the word 'free'
to describe itself could be.

But none of us could shed enough light
on the opaque self preserving character
of corporate power, beyond recognising
that from the reported numbers of secretaries
who were shamed and lost their jobs,
for being impregnated by their bosses,
power was proud of how it created imbalance. 

Where the churches said little about sex
beyond how 'adultery was female in form
and mentioned quite often in The Bible.'.
They made it difficult to probe further.

We could never count the number of subjects
that The churches shut down with what they said,
but the part that patriarchies played in adultery,
where the women got the blame was obvious.

But a well informed liberal consensus,
in film and print, would, and did, campaign
to end that silence, here is a recent answer.