In a week which saw plastic pious voices protesting blasphemy drowned out by the more sonorous tonation of religious brutality, the Catholic Church in Ireland has been in chest-beating mode, although it would be premature to go quite so far as to say mood.
The Church has little choice but to apologise for the appalling crimes it, for decades, inflicted on women and children the length and breadth of Ireland. Yet it is hard to believe that it has genuinely internalised the sorrow it expresses. It is much easier to feel that it has adjusted its mode to avoid falling foul of the the public mood.
There is no compelling reason to believe that the Church would not do the same again were the blackthorn stick back in its grasp. At the cusp of each new progressive dawn the Church has opted to remain cloistered up in its own den of iniquitous superstition, issuing curses rather than blessings. If it is never to repeat its barbarism it will not be as a result of it having become infused with a humanitarian spirit. Society simply will not allow it to acquire the power where the horrible vista projected by its existence looms large.
The Church long bellowed as evidence of its godliness, its function in “civilising” the inhabitants of far off lands through its missionaries. Fact check: it took the emergence of a secular society in Ireland with an express mission to civilise the Church that saw it hauled from its bully pulpit and into the courts and tribunals where it was forced to answer to those it had maltreated. The Church has been reined in and tamed, but remains a creature of its own invidious instinct.
Whatever else, if women and children are not to fall into the clutches of vile sisters and brothers, Ireland must never become holy again. The ageless acuity of Berthold Brecht serves as a potent reminder in such matters: “For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
Before dismissing this dim view of the Church as hyperbolic, consider the ostentatious hankering for the power and authority it once held and exercised that was on display a week or so before the publication of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry report. RTE had broadcast a sketch by Waterford Whispers which depicted the Old Testament God being arrested on a charge of rape.
A shocking revelation this year (as) God became the latest figure to be implicated in the ongoing sexual harassment scandal. The five-billion-year-old stood accused of forcing himself on a young middle-eastern migrant and allegedly impregnating her against her will, before being sentenced to two years in prison, with the last 24 months suspended.
The Catholic Primate of Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin, waxed outraged and described the clip as “deeply offensive and blasphemous” and called for it to be removed "immediately".
RTE did nothing wrong but, still, beat its breast in abject remorse for having complied with the outcome of the 2018 referendum which opened the way for the disestablishment of blasphemy from statute law. The sketch was doused in holy water and banished from sight.
RTE has form here. It showed the same timidity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre by refusing to display the first post-slaughter cover of the magazine.
RTE did nothing wrong but, still, beat its breast in abject remorse for having complied with the outcome of the 2018 referendum which opened the way for the disestablishment of blasphemy from statute law. The sketch was doused in holy water and banished from sight.
RTE has form here. It showed the same timidity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre by refusing to display the first post-slaughter cover of the magazine.
RTE should have stood its ground and defended the clear and codified expression of the popular will rather than acquiesce in the demands of clerics. It rowed back when it should have been full steam ahead. Blasphemy is a meaningless concept and has no status in law. Like canon law it is just something Catholic clerics make up and which the rest of us are free to ignore much like we can disregard the rules of any darts club we don't belong to.
The god that the same clerics are so upset about being mocked is, in the words of Richard Dawkins:
Anything remotely resembling him should be in the Hague not in Heaven, accused of crimes against humanity. Rape of a single woman would be among the lesser charges the fiend would face. Apologising for mocking that monster is appalling not admirable.
The god that the same clerics are so upset about being mocked is, in the words of Richard Dawkins:
arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Anything remotely resembling him should be in the Hague not in Heaven, accused of crimes against humanity. Rape of a single woman would be among the lesser charges the fiend would face. Apologising for mocking that monster is appalling not admirable.
⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.
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