Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

Pope Benno’s pastoral letter is an amazing piece of spin. It presses all the right buttons, containing an apology, but its content is tendentious. He blames Ireland’s growing secularism for the child abuse scandal. In fact, what he is really saying is that, but for Ireland’s secularism, and its movement away from the shadow of obscurantism, the scandal would never have been made public. Benno looks back with nostalgia to a time when the Church ruled the roost in Ireland and when no one could say a word against a priest for fear of permanent ostracism. In this lovely world the inferior civil government was dominated by mass-going bureaucrats, who worked for organisations headed by members of quasi Masonic Catholic lay organisations. And you could walk the streets unafraid of being robbed and leave the latch off your door. A cynic might say that this was because no one had that much to steal, and anyway, the Church through means such as the nefarious funeral offerings had stolen a lot of the people’s wealth anyway. (it ought to be pointed out that this abuse was condemned  by many priests themselves.) Of course the media, both locally and nationally, was dominated by Catholic values The national radio station broadcast The Angelus every day at noon and 6 pm (as it still does) while local papers published in full the Lenten pastorals of their local bishops loudly thundering against such secular ills as Communism, Protestantism and heavy petting in dark laneways.

 |As a lapsed Catholic, I am reluctant to give the Catholic Church advice. I would urge it to try and free itself from the fetters of its un-human theology. Pope Benno has spent his life and his considerable intellect wedded to this theology, to the extent that he thinks he knows God. Part of his worldview is that the priesthood, no matter what its sins, is superior to the laity. Party of the church’s problems in Ireland have arisen from people forgetting that the clergy are, at the end of the day, only men.