Prancing, Preening Popery.

I started this blogging vehicle on 24 November 2009 and since then I have written 59 blogs almost on a daily basis with the exception of an alcohol refuelling stop over the Christmas.  Blog writing is a little like walking across the Sahara Desert.  You set off nice and fresh with plenty of water but after two months and no oasis the water is rationed and after another while almost non-existant and the end of the journey is nearer than the start, so you have to keep going with not at all the same style and vigour as you did at the begining.  I am running out of water or should I say ideas and my daily offerings are becoming more banal but I have to press on until this searched for oasis or inspiration appears and I can refresh and march on determinedly.

So while I stumble and fall and drag myself forward I will return to that old chestnut which I must have squeezed completely dry over the last few weeks.  The Irish bishops and their complete lack of grip on reality.  But wait I think I can see water.  Is it a mirage or is it really an oasis?  They were there on the News on Monday night prancing and posturing in front of the papal procession in their long white dresses waspishly tied at the waist with their scarlet fascias and rakishly set off with a white ferraiolo slung across their shoulders, for all the world like girls at a country dance ladies excuse me, waiting expectantly while the Pope walked amongst them preening and clucking like a little red rooster hoping for one of these white beauties to entice him.  What do they think they were doing, what message did they think they were giving out to the world.  They were there to discuss child abuse by priests and not to take part in a mannequin parade.  As a good friend of mine, Michael Cryan, said yesterday morning “Nero fiddling while Rome burns comes to mind”.  These fancy dressed clerics with their medieval affectations pawing their Teflon leader while the Church is ripping itself apart (there is teutonic rumblings of even worse abuse in the cockerel’s own farmyard)  If politicians tried to do the same and not act in a responsible manner they would be voted out of office before they returned home.

Do they not understand there is work to be done and serious work at that.  We do not want pomp, ceremony and vacuousness.  We want accountability, admittance of guilt, empathy with the abused and firm, firm plans on how to go forward.  To be leaders and shepards you have to be part of your flock, you have to belong.  These boy scouts in Rome could have come from Mars for all I can see, so remote are they from public thinking.  I just hope the seriousness of the situation somehow sinks into these jesters because the abused have now got the bone between their teeth and they will not let go and the Church will suffer unthought of harm in the years to come as the majority of practising Catholics get hauled from their comfort zones and made to confront these bishops, these men of riddles and forked tongues who do not deserve a comfortable old age.

So once one strata of power is removed let us turn our attention to the priests.  In order that we get every one of these abusers, some could still be hidden, all of them should be punished by making sure they all marry a woman of their choice and that should be sufficient punishment for most, any that survive the ordeal should be canonized.

We are nearer the water, we can smell it, but alas, it is a mirage, a sham, an illusion. What the Pope and his acolytes are giving us is not what we wanted , expected or deserved.  The verdict of this two day garden party is that child abuse is a sin and these bishops have to go back home and hope and pray it never happens again.  Anyway the Pope claimed that a weakening of the Catholic faith in Ireland has been ” a significant contributing factor in the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors”.  So it is not their fault at all, it is our fault and our childrens fault.  It is we who unzipped those clerical trousers, it was our children who deftly pulled the clerical member from its cosy nest and put it carefully where the sun don’t shine.  We are to blame, what a relief it is to know the truth.

Well whether it is a sin or it is not is feck all to do with anything, because without doubt it is a crime and these abusers and the men who tried to hide this crime from the authorities and systematically covered up these heinous transgressions need punishing and I just hope the Gardai and the Government plough their own furrow and bring these people to justice.

As for Drennan and his ilk it seems to me that they have been exonerated by this Roman beanfeast and our only hope, Archbishop Martin, has been told to back off.  His position it seems is now untenable and for me he should walk away and let the scum float on the surface like they have probably always done.  Never in all my life have I heard such drivel in what is coming out of Rome.  Never in all my life have I seen evil being allowed to take sway over good to such a degree.

What about the poor abused.  What about us who have lived our whole life in the Church.  I am 64 on Friday and I think that I have wasted all those 64 years accepting what these wastrels have told me, it fills me with despair and anger.