Paul Malpas

Some of the latest rubbish coming out of the Catholic Church in Ireland this week was first of all from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a man I have some time for and a man I exhorted to resign over a year ago at the antics of his fellow bishops.  He was telling all the “stay at home” Catholics to stay at home and resign from the Church.  Mass attendance had fallen to 17% of the Catholic population and he was getting mightily fed up of these once or twice a year Catholics claiming expensive and worthwhile places at Catholic schools but not allowing and not showing their children the Catholic way of life.

What it seems he wants is a hardcore of regular church going Catholics with Catholic children ministered by a diminishing group of priests.  With his reduced revenue from this 17% he can then try to cope for a few more years.  By getting back to basics, he is hoping by then that all the abusing priests are dead and the few can cope.  This negative mantra is where the Church as got itself to today and what a shame because the Church does so many good things.  Bring on the women and ordain away and come out fighting you depressed bunch of eejits.

The other item this week that could be classed as amazing if it was not so awful was what came out of the publication of the redacted Chapter 9 of the Cloyne Report which was published last weekend.  This chapter dealing with Fr Ronat (not his real name) and his antics in the diocese over a thirty year period was the longest in the report and was left out when it was published last July because it could prejudice future court proceedings.  Well there was none and it looks like the numerous complaints against this man are going to brushed aside.  Which makes potential survivors loath to come forward if they want justice in Ireland.  The Cloyne Report divorced the Irish government from the Vatican because of the criticisms of the Diocese’s handling of the affair which was atrocious, yet only one of the 19 priests reported was ever brought to court.  It does not make sense, especially when most of them had been eventually removed from ministry.

The blame was rightfully and correctly laid at the feet of the diocese and its priests yet nothing happened.  Why did Enda get himself in such a tizz with that marvellous speech in the Dail and why did the Vatican recall their Papal Nuncio? Was it just posturing for posturings sake.  But Fr Ronat had been abusing children for over 30 years, the first complaint I think was in 1979 and he was eventually removed from his duties in 2005.  Why is it that ordinary folk like myself can only think that brown envelopes have returned to the Irish landscape.  Indeed we are daft to allow these things to happen in the way that they do.

The reasons put forward by the Diocese and by the Archbishop of Cork, Dermot Clifford, who was put in charge of Cloyne when Bishop Magee did a runner in 2008 or euphemistically stepped down, said that the priests who had been reported had been enticed or beset by their victims and that the priests who knew about this abuse did not let it go any farther has they considered these acts to be sins and not crimes.  Are we daft enough to take this rubbish.  Can priests who spend 15 years of their senior education working out the ins and outs of  their religion  seriously think that way.  I can only suggest they are alzeimic.

When you put those arguments along with the recent one in England where it was suggested that Bishops were not vicariously liable for their flock of priests, it shows you the extent of idiocy the Church can go to, instead of paying out a few quid to deserving victims.  Thank God we came on a strong judge who gave a massively strong rebuttal of the Diocese of Portsmouth’s argument regarding vicarious liability.

For some reason as I was thinking of all this claptrap I was reminded of the couple of lines in JP Dunleavey’s book “The Ginger Man”, the quite remarkable book illustrating 1950s Dublin.  When the hero of the story, Sebastian Dangerfield, when offering his manhood up to his virginal, middle aged, Catholic lodger, Miss “Lilly” Frost in bed, who had his back turned to him, said “Lilly, why did you want me to do it this way.”  “Oh Mr Dangerfield, it’s so much less of a sin”.

Immediately this impared logic brings Bill Clinton, the erstwhile President of the United States of America and the Catholic Church in Ireland to mind.

This is going to be a short one today.  I am mindful of all my old school friends around the globe who are now hanging on to every word I write and because I do not know how far they have been religiously persuaded over these last 50 years and as I do not want to upset our recent acquaitance, I will have to pick my way carefully over today’s disclosures and happenings.

I started to listen to Brady’s mass this morning which was sent out over the web, but after the first hymn sung by some strangulated soprano, I switched it off.  I knew from her tone and delivery that this service was going to be same old, same old.  I waited a couple of hours until the media had got the papal pap into print and without a doubt the whole world was waiting for it from Co Roscommon in Ireland, to Northfield, Minnesota, to Alexander Road in Manchester.  Without doubt the Vatican’s publicity machine is a powerful tool.  The problem is it is stuck in the same mire as the Church and can only churn out what we do not want.  They have not been arsed to try to get into the minds of the ordinary decent people of Ireland.  They are the ones most affected by the scandal and all the pope can offer them is trite nonsense.  He does not accept any of the blame when we all know he is up to his holy oxters in it.

The people of Ireland do not want to do penance, they do not want to hear that they have become too secularised, they do not want a visit from a man who has organised this cover up and the one in Germany that is threatening to be an even bigger burden on Rome. What they do want is a fundamental change in the mind-set of the epicopacy.  Peter R. Cullen writing a letter to the editor of the Irish Independent today sums it all up succinctly.  For an eighty year old to have such revolutionary thoughts is admirable.  Google it and read it.  I hope he lives long enough to see it happen.

We need to see the old order out and a new more democratic and accountable Church in its place.  Perhaps Archbishop Martin is the one that could draw us out of the mire providing he is let and even if he is not let, he should withdraw himself from this evil that is being orchestrated in Rome.

We are certainly being led a merry dance and it is now time to up the tempo.

So I am sorry to all my new found school friends for being such a rebel against the religion they have held dear since the late Tommy Duggan massaged their arses all those years ago but I also was fed this pap for most of my life and it was only when retirement beckoned did I revert to anarchy.

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.

I think it remarkable how Dr. Willie or Won’t He Walsh, Bishop of Killaloe has gone public about his innermost thoughts and reflections and praised the 50% of the Church’s congregation who have been wilfully ignored for the last 1500 years.

Willie who is within a hair’s breadth of retirement has admitted that on one or two occasions during his 50 year priesthood he had been tempted to relinquish his vows in favour of a relationship with one or two of this 50%.  He also stresses the indelicacy of the Church in not allowing women the same share of responsibility as men and how womens’  natural humanistic approach to problems would have stopped the rot that is now threatening the Church and probably their presence would not have allowed this canker to develop  in the first place.

If this attitude by the church had been shown in any other walk of life, the Pope and the curia would have been up before the Industrial Relations Courts for sexual discrimination.  Willie Walsh was a brave man to come out and say all this but you can say anything you like on your last day at work.  You can call your bosses all the names you want on retirement but he would have been a lot braver if he had come out with these gems of sense and sagacity ten or more years ago, when the Church really needed to give women the push forward.

I really do think that this promotion of women is the only thing that can save the Church in its travails over the next 10 or 20 years.  Where is the argument of these old befuddled men, what is it that makes them think that women have not got the same gravity has men?  What women certainly do not have and what religious  men seem to have is a surfeit, an absolute abundance of testosterone allied with an unwavering selfrighteousness.  Take the case this week of the priest Maeliosa O’Hauallachain, who having allegedly persuaded this young girl to masturbate him in the confessional box then told her to say ten Hail Marys as penance.  He certainly could not have been the full shilling but with a name like that how else was he going to get gratification.

So the sooner our German Pope gets his head round what seems to me to be such a simple problem and sees all the absolute treasures that the Church has, which are going to waste , the sooner his problem will be solved.  However every time I think of this simple answer I am reminded of the historian Dermot Ferriter, on the Pat Kenny Monday night debacle on RTE 1 in December, who came out with the stark reminder that you can talk of change and hope for change but do not expect change from the Vatican.  It is not in their business plan.

On another point let me congratulate Kevin Myers for the brave point he highlighted in his Indo piece yesterday about Gerry Adams and his woeful behaviour in protecting his brother in the wake of the allegations of rape and sexual abuse of his daughter.  How long will it take for these so-called politicians and bishops to understand that it is society generally not just the family and the institution that need protecting from these horrible deeds.

It is easy to kick a rapist priest but you do not shin a Shinner.  As he points out Suzanne Breen, a very gutsy lady, who writes in The Sunday Tribune and Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Sunday Independant are the only voices shouting out and wondering why the silence.  The rest of the media marvels including the television toppers at RTE  should take their blinkers off and start shouting, but of course as Myers said “bashing beaten bishops is far less risky”.  If poor old Mr Robinson has to go down for his wife’s sins.  Why should Gerry not go, for his brother’s sins and his own act of omission?