WHAT happens when the Taoiseach addresses the Dail like a
particularly enraged caller to a phone-in radio programme?
Do harmony,
lucidity, thought, care and reason result?
Or does public life begin to resemble a mob in a market place?
And if the
speaker on the platform is sounding inflammatory, what exactly is happening
at the back of the crowd, where young men appear to be gathering rocks?
The last person to use such unforgiving and disdainful language about the
Vatican was Ian Paisley -- the old Paisley, mind, not the dottily babbling
and cheery old grand-uncle that has emerged in recent years.
Go back 40
years and you will find in the pages of 'The Protestant Telegraph' precisely
the kind of vituperative talk that graced Enda Kenny's speech to the Dail on
Wednesday.
This now, from the leader of Fine Gael, the party which was once
a political extension of the Catholic Church and which faithfully did its
bidding: hence the Taoiseach's party and governmental predecessor, Liam
Cosgrave, actually voting against his own government's bill to allow the
sale of contraceptives.
The Taoiseach's allegations and tone were thus unprecedented: "Because
for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an
attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic
republic ... as little as three years ago, not three decades ago."
(What? As recently as three years ago? No, actually. A Government spokesman
later explained this did not refer to any specific event, but described the
cumulative effect of the Vatican's actions. Quite so: what need of accuracy
when the mob is abroad?)
The Cloyne Report, he continued, "excavates the dysfunction,
disconnection, elitism ... the narcissism... that dominate the culture of
the Vatican to this day."
(Rubbish again: Cloyne was into Cloyne and not into the Vatican, and moreover,
it studiously avoided the vituperative Kenny terminology, of "rape",
"torture" and so on).
However, the Taoiseach did not use such strong language about the failings of
this State: "The unseemly bickering between the Minister for Children
and the HSE over the statutory powers to deal with extra-familial abuse, the
failure to produce legislation to enable the exchange of soft information as
promised ... "
So, on the one hand "narcissism, elitism, dysfunction, disconnection",
by the Vatican: on the other, "unseemly bickering", by the State.
And all this, after the revelations about the Roscommon incest case or the
brutality of the mother towards her children exposed in last week's court
case in Galway: yet the savagery of both cases vastly exceeded anything done
by any priest in recent times. Needless to say, both families were in HSE "care".
The measured words of the Vatican press officer Fr Federico Lombardi are
barely audible beside the Taoiseach's shrill outpourings: "Therefore,
the severity of certain criticisms of the Vatican are (sic) curious, as if
the Holy See was guilty of not having given merit under canon law to norms
which a State did not consider necessary to give value under civil law."
In other words, the Government of Ireland is denouncing the Vatican for not
introducing
those very changes to its canon law which it had itself failed
to introduce to its civil code.
To remind you: in February, 1998, the then
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced that mandatory reporting of child sex abuse
would be introduced within the lifetime of that government.
Yet here we are,
thirteen and-a-half years later, and this has still not happened.
WHY?
Is it because the very concept of mandatory reporting of abuse escapes
easy legal definition?
For when does "mandatory reporting" simply
become passing on tittle-tattle?
Moreover, the Catholic Church cannot
operate outside its own canon laws: it is bound by them, as the State is
bound by the civil laws.
So why this expectation that the Catholic Church
can select whatever laws it likes, like a child at a pick and mix sweet
counter?
The Irish Catholic Church and Irish nationalism have been conjoined twins for
over two centuries, and it's often difficult to say who did what.
Did Irish
Catholicism achieve the political power that it did simply because the Irish
people wanted it that way?
Or did the Catholic Church bully Irish
politicians into doing its will?
But where did the clergy for this
power-obsessed Irish Church come from? Mars?
Complex matters indeed, and
ones that are more extensively elucidated in Mary Kenny's brilliant 'Goodbye
to Catholic Ireland'.
As an opponent of the political power of the Catholic Church all my adult
life, I will just say this.
The nuns of Ireland ran our hospitals with
greater efficiency than the HSE, and at far less cost.
The Celtic Tiger was
made possible by a conservative educational system that was largely the
creation of the Catholic Church.
Tens of thousands of Irish people became
priests, brothers and nuns, in the fond and fervent expectation that they
would be serving God and the needs of others, not themselves or their own
appetites.
As the cataclysm of hate, hysteria and humbug washes the Catholic
Church out of our lives, it is worth remembering those basic truths.