The Buggerhood

By AM Monday, May 25, 2009

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Hell is paved with priests' skulls - Saint John Chrysostom

Consider the following extract from an Irish Times editorial.

The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is the map of an Irish hell. It defines the contours of a dark hinterland of the State, a parallel country whose existence we have long known but never fully acknowledged. It is a land of pain and shame, of savage cruelty and callous indifference … The instinct to turn away from it, repelled by its profoundly unsettling ugliness, is almost irresistible. We owe it, though, to those who have suffered there to acknowledge from now on that it is an inescapable part of Irish reality. We have to deal with the now-established fact that, alongside the warmth and intimacy, the kindness and generosity of Irish life, there was, for most of the history of the State, a deliberately maintained structure of vile and vicious abuse.

Hard to take in?

The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, otherwise known as the Ryan Report, is only hard to take in for those who had no inkling that worse existed than the report actually revealed. For those familiar with the rape of children by Catholic clerics there is nothing surprising about the report, anger-inducing as it undoubtedly is.

As the Irish Times charges, ‘abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system.’ The congregations were like a legion of the lecherous let loose by a rapine and rapacious Catholic Church and set upon the impoverished young of the nation; an army of child rapists endowed by the government with the power of unaccountability which they used at every turn to abuse the young. Clerical child rape has become as Irish as the potato. It is a national disgrace which we are condemned to carry like a hump on our backs. Abroad we will not be known for our hunger strikes or aid to the world’s poor, but for our rape of children. Thank you, bishop.

There should be no equivocation; the Catholic Church in Ireland was at the heart of this phallic phalange. It was an accomplice before and after the fact. It aided and abetted, covered up, withheld information, perverted the course of justice. Has there ever been a body of men in the history of this country more purpose built than the Catholic Church for mass rape? It is fitting that a memorial be established to the abuse victims. But it should be a meaningful one, not a token. The dissolution of the Catholic Church in Ireland would be appropriate. It would defeat the purpose if dissolution were to be imposed from above. It should come from within the church itself as a genuine, rather than forced, statement of disapproval. Those who care about children should simply leave this vile institution. They can find their god or Jesus elsewhere. Faith is self sustaining, relying little on substance to continue its existence. Why would it need the substance of a church to survive? The supposed loving Christian god would not be seen within a mile of the Irish Catholic Church. If Jesus was to approach a Catholic church it would be for the same purpose that he approached the temple in the biblical tale – to clear the clerics out of it.

How society still allows the Catholic Church, an anti-child institution, to have any control over schools beggars belief. A much better option for society than permitting Church involvement in the education of our children would be to insist that all clerics in a 500 yard vicinity of a school or a playground should first wear a bell which they must ring to alert youngsters of their presence. I happen to agree with neither bell ringing nor Church involvement in schools but if I was forced to choose between the two I would prefer the bell ringing as better practice.

Christian Brother industrial schools were slave rape colonies. The brothers could have the best of both worlds; sexual gratification and financial remuneration. Moreover, just about anybody it seems could walk in off the street, demand their boy and be supplied with one by the clerics. Every paedophile in Ireland must have felt they were going to the sex equivalent of Iceland where the offer was ‘bugger one, get one free.’

The law is indeed an ass. It seems amazing that organisations like the IRA or UVF have an illegal status when the Christian Brothers is a legal body that people are permitted to join. Amazingly, there is no legal sanction whatsoever against membership of a rape gang.

Furthermore, it seems criminal lunacy for the government to be introducing new gang busting measures but no church busting measures. Surely, if ever eavesdropping was justified it would find a receptive audience if the agencies of the state were to bug the conversations of clerics. They could also declare membership of the Christian Brothers a criminal offence. There are indeed serious reservations from a civil liberties point of view about such measures. But the government’s decision to prioritise some criminal enterprises and not others is a sign of where its values lie. And it is clear from The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse that children ranked well down the value scale.

Blasphemy? Jail me.