Bishops of Baal

By AM Sunday, July 31, 2011

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Every day the starving poor
Crowded around Bishop Hatto's door;
For he had a plentiful last-year's store,
And all the neighbourhood could tell
His granaries were furnished well.

At last Bishop Hatto appointed a day
To quiet the poor without delay:
He bade them to his great barn repair,
And they should have food for winter there.

Rejoiced such tidings good to hear,
The poor folk flocked from far and near;
The great barn was full as it could hold
Of women and children, and young and old.

Then, when he saw it could hold no more,
Bishop Hatto, he made fast the door;
And while for mercy on Christ they call,
He set fire to the barn and burned them all.
-    Robert Southey


This old poem which I recited at primary school has stayed in my memory from childhood. I don’t know if the recognition of the human capacity for evil burned it into my consciousness. It certainly made me aware from a young age that when it came to the most malevolent of human behaviour bishops would be to the fore with the worst of them.

What stance should Irish society take towards the Catholic Church? The same as a dog would to a lamp post.  Respect is won, deference forced. There is no reason for society to hold this institution in higher esteem than it would any other private members club. There are many private clubs with an infinitely better record than the scandal soaked Church.

Over the decades names like McQuaid, McNamara, Ryan and Connell, have all registered as godfathers in this salacious enterprise that is the Catholic Church in Ireland. We are now aware of the rampant criminality that took place on their watch. Today under the leadership of Cardinal Sean Brady, in terms of child protection, the Church can hardly claim to be fit for purpose. Children will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of priestly power and arrogance. In an inverted moral universe the reputation and social standing of bishops are considered more important than the protection of society’s young.

The exasperation of many priests towards the arrogant bishops is clear from the words of Tony Flannery. An official with the Association of Catholic Priests, he states:

We of the Association of Catholic Priests are almost a year in existence, and have over 500 members, but our efforts at having any worthwhile discussion or dialogue with the Irish bishops has been frustrated. They meet us, but ignore the points we bring up; we write to them and get a reply four months later that is patronising in the extreme. All of this is happening at a time when the church is going through the worst crisis at least since the Reformation.

The status of the bishop brigands long depended on their ability to continue fostering a mistaken societal belief that they presided over an institution of integrity rather than one that enabled an institutionalised rape network to function. Like many men of god who demand respect they really crave submission. Now with the remorseless exposure in the media and the public revulsion culminating in the Dail declaration of intent by Enda Kenny to extirpate Church sexual criminality, the bishops have fallen from their lofty perch and in the words of Colm Kenny ‘cut sad and unconvincing figures now as they trot out yet more pathetic regrets instead of root and branch reform of the power structures of their church.’

So contemptible of the world we live in, but enamoured to the power within it, they are incorrigible when it comes to not merely stating but acting out the obvious; which is simply that the protection of children is infinitely more important than Vatican directed protocol. In their warped moral landscape they think rape is less sinful than scandal. They will always move quickly to protect the Church from scandal but not to protect children from clerical abuse.

The bishops of Baal are not without their defenders eager to take the legs from under anyone approaching the Vatican goal line: demented Catholics will blame the Jews, gays, communists, Peter Tatchell, Michel Foucault, anyone other than those most culpable.  That dementia is spreading to the extent that a thinking Catholic element is now hilariously blaming the ‘atheist ayatollahs’ in the Irish Labour Party.

Tom Doyle, the US Dominican priest and professor of Canon Law, in castigating the behaviour of Irish clerics, undermines this stratagem which aims to bamboozle society into thinking that Mother Church is fine, just a few of her delinquent offspring running about; and after all, boys will be boys.  Doyle refers specifically to ‘the victims of the Catholic Church, the largest, most powerful and most deeply entrenched pillar of Irish society.’

At the centre of the sleaze sit the bishops. Niall Muldoon, director of Children At Risk in Ireland, sums them up:

We have seen that Bishop Brendan Comiskey covered up child sexual abuse in his diocese through the 1990s; that Archbishop Desmond Connell covered up in his dioceses in the 1980s and the 1990s; that Bishop John Magee covered up in Cloyne through the 1990s and 2000s, right up until his retirement in 2009.

Muldoon proceeds to ask ‘how can any parent feel safe again in allowing their child to interact within such an organisation?

The short answer is they can’t. A better answer is Bishops out.