Cartoon by Brian Mór
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And now, on top of these many crises comes a scandal crying out to heaven – the revelation of the clerical abuse of thousands of children and adolescents, first in the United States, then in Ireland and now in Germany and other countries … There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005). During the reign of Pope John Paul II, that congregation had already taken charge of all such cases under oath of strictest silence. Ratzinger himself, on May 18th, 2001, sent a solemn document to all the bishops dealing with severe crimes ( “epistula de delictis gravioribus” ), in which cases of abuse were sealed under the “secretum pontificium”, the violation of which could entail grave ecclesiastical penalties - Hans Kung
It might be difficult to believe but there have to be some good apples in the barrel that has Catholic Church stencilled on its side. Not everyone affiliated to this International Centre for Child Rape is an abuser or an accomplice before or after the fact in terms of cover up. It might well take Indiana Jones to find them but they are there. Why is another matter. Maybe they believe that such is their penance; born into original sin they must walk the earth scorned as the associates of paedophiles because as tiny children they were not worthy in the eyes of the god they proclaim to love so much. Worth it in the end because silent deference to an obedience-demanding god shall see them rewarded with eternal salvation.
It never seems to occur to them that a god who hates children so much that he has them branded as sinners the moment they emerge from the womb, is unlikely to reward them with anything but more of the same. The writer Martin Amis thought that paedophilia was anything but a love for children. He saw it as a hatred of children. So maybe the rapist priests are at one with their god after all. For what is original sin but a hatred of children?
The whole sordid business goes right to the very top. In Ireland, for example, Cardinal Brady has been found to have a history of cover up. In 1975 he participated in imposing a vow of silence on abused children. That he seems an alright sort of guy today is beside the point. Sometimes cultural embedment when it is reinforced by cultic ritual distorts the thinking processes. Brady most likely bitterly regrets his involvement in silencing the abused now that there has been a substantial descaling of his eyes. But if he couldn’t see to begin with what authority can he preach to the rest of us about a god who failed miserably to guide him or equip him with a moral conscience?
Internationally the head of the Catholic cartel, Joe Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict, or to cynics like me simply the priestfuehrer, too has hands which are by no means clean. Yes, the man with the hotline to Heaven has been up to his neck in a little bit of covering the tracks and distorting he facts. His latest rubbish beggars belief. Rather than place culpability firmly where it belongs, in the hands of the clerical rapists and the institution that covered up the crime, society is offered this: the root cause can be traced to the 1970s when ‘paedophilia was theorised as something that was in keeping with man and even the child … The effects of such theories are evident today.’
Not surprisingly this provoked howls of anguished outrage from survivors groups that spanned the Atlantic. Margaret Kennedy, from the British Minister and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors group, complained:
He is trying to say that the modern world is corrupt and sexually rampant. It is blaming society for what is actually their responsibility. No one in any age has ever thought that adults having sex with children is right.
Even more scathing was Barbara Blaine, head of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests which is based in the US:
It is fundamentally disturbing to watch a brilliant man so conveniently misdiagnose a horrific scandal … Catholics should be embarrassed to hear their Pope talk again and again about abuse while doing little or nothing to stop it and to mischaracterise this heinous crisis … The Pope insists on talking about a vague ‘broader context’ he can’t control, while ignoring the clear ‘broader context’ he can influence - the long-standing and unhealthy culture of a rigid, secretive, all-male Church hierarchy fixated on self-preservation at all costs. This is the ‘context’ that matters.
Next he will be blaming the altar boys. They made the priests rigid.
Cartoon by Brian Mór
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A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water - Carl Reiner
It might be nice to look at but that is about the height of it. Where I live there was ice still to melt from the last heavy snow a few weeks back when a fresh batch arrived to reinforce it. Now it is everywhere. Even the kids are fed up with it. A novelty at the start they soon grow to realise just how limiting it is. Getting off school is ok but when they are condemned to the house boredom soon sets in.
I like the sense of cooperation and patience that our seriously inclement weather has brought. People moved to assist and steady each other. Road rage seemed to have been reduced as motorists recognised their mutual difficulties. Most of those who fell seemed to have been women. On a few occasions I had to stop to get women on their feet or pick up their belongings after a fall. Courtesy of my wife I had a pair of snow grippers on my shoes which meant I could move pretty freely. Everybody should stock a pair. Their value is to be marvelled at. And they are not a gimmick but actually do what it says on the tin.
Snow, despite its challenges can bring fun. But tonight we saw how it can be the harbinger of grief and loss. A fifteen year old girl dies after her improvised sleigh hit a tree on a Cork golf course. A mother and her child both lose their lives when their car skidded on ice a few miles up the road from us. What emptiness in those households on Christmas morning. The fatal season rather than the festive for the families and their loved ones lost.
The only creatures that seem to enjoy it no matter how long it lasts are dogs. Each morning at the weekends myself and a friend walk the dogs. They love rummaging through the snow laden fields where they can charge around free from the rigours of the choke chains around their necks. A dog’s life doesn’t seem so bad after all. The ease with which they adapt to the extreme cold amazes me. We are well wrapped up while they go pretty much as the day they were born.
During the blanket protest with no windows in the cells and the snow falling outside, which was sometimes driven into the cells by the howling wind, the thought crossed my mind that freezing to death was no longer a remote possibility. A screw commented that he expected to open a cell door some morning and find a prisoner dead from exposure. Most of his colleagues, being the fine Christian gentlemen that they were, probably prayed for it, their bibles firmly in hand. Yet the bible was a source of joy to me. I could stand on it while speaking out the window and keep my feet off the sub zero concrete floor.
I am old enough to recall the big freeze of 1963. Memories of the snow in the back yard being higher than my small frame are vivid in my mind. The channel my father and other men dug through the street to allow some form of movement probably saved the lives of some of the older residents in the Lower Ormeau Road’s Bagot Street. It was about then I first heard my father’s joke about the difference between a snowman and a snow woman – snowballs.
My mother nursed our then youngest sister through it and when the thaw set in thanked her god for his mercy in protecting a new born, only to lose her to pneumonia at the onset of spring. She lies buried under a simple marker placed on her grave by my mother saying ‘my Pauline.’
God isn’t good, god isn’t bad. God just isn’t. It took her many years to realise that but by the time she did I think she was all the happier for it. No longer tormented as to why a good god might deprive her of her child, she could reconcile herself to nature. Better that she did. Imagine going to face a monster like that the other side of the grave.
It is supposed to be 10 below outside. Time to turn the heating back on before the temperature differential levels out. It is the only way to ward of the invasive chill. Snowed in, snowed under, snowed off.
Painting A Cold Floor by Raymond Watson, from the series The Shot Lock
Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Cartoon by Brian Mór
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Cartoon by Brian Mór
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It was our first trip to Sweden. As we soared in over Norway, gazing out the window of our Scandinavian Airways carrier we marvelled at the sheer preponderance of fjords and rivers that crisscrossed the terrain. Bleak and desolate it nevertheless beckoned with its offer of unremitting solitude.
From the air Stockholm looked massive, almost like flying into London I remarked to my wife. But the difference in population is immense, London having about four or five times the populace of the Swedish capital.
Like New York, Stockholm is built on a series of islands or archipelagos as the Swedes prefer to call them. 12 in all I think, linked by interconnecting bridges. In prison I frequently received postcards or photos of the country’s beautiful lakes but had little idea just how central water is to the topography. For a short time during the blanket protest, before a vindictive screw stole it, a postcard from Sweden was the one dash of colour in our cell. So it was with some reflection that I found myself sending postcards to people held in Maghaberry and Portlaoise from a city where so many were mailed to me.
We had been forewarned in advance that Stockholm was an expensive city and it turned out to be just that. A pitcher of Margaritas to go along with our evening meal cost about €50. Everywhere, prices made rip off Ireland look cheap and value for money by comparison. A cold city, it had no Iceland mentality; nothing there to equal buy one get one free.
Stockholm is a very clean and tidy city and seemingly well organised. Trams, taxis, planes and buses all seem to be on time. Restaurants are invariably packed. Capital of what is said to be the most secular country in Europe, there were few churches that I saw. A religious bookshop beckoned but I didn’t enter. I already had my fiction for the journey, the third of the Stieg Larsson trilogy.
We called it our honeymoon, the first time we had actually got away together without kids tagging along and fighting every step of the way. Our last trip together sans what our friend Angela calls ‘the midgets’ was to Madrid. Even then one managed to stowaway in her mother’s womb. As much as we love them, we found that a touch of absence makes the heart grow fonder!
We spent a lot of time walking including a two hour Stieg Larsson tour. On foot is the best way to acquaint with a city. The late David Ervine preferred to holiday in cities rather than resorts. He wanted to see how people lived rather than how they holidayed. There is much to be said for that. The ersatz composition of resorts limits knowledge of a country visited. Once in from the cold streets of Stockholm, we would collapse in the warmth of a spacious and well maintained hotel room, grateful for the small mercy of not having to separate the fighting midgets.
We were hardly in the city 24 hours before we ran into a scam merchant. He was a taxi driver and seemed not to have been Swedish. Most Swedes we spoke to had reasonable English but this chancer hadn’t a word of it and relied on excitable gesticulations to make his point which was basically that I had broken something disembarking from his taxi. He most likely kept the broken piece in the cab and cellotaped it back on to catch the next tourist he thought was gullible enough to fall for his ruse. My wife sought to calm him with a larger than normal tip whereas I felt a hefty tip on the end of his nose more in order.
Con men like this weasel are regulars in many foreign cities. I experienced it in Amsterdam one evening when a taxi driver who claimed to hail from Morocco took myself and a former republican prison on an elongated route to our flat. When he asked for his ridiculously inflated fare my friend tossed the standard 15 guilders in his direction, telling him in no uncertain terms that we were onto his scam. He threatened us with the cops to which we invited him to take us to the station. A new departure in our lives but the cops were Dutch, not British. That ended the exchange.
Obviously I do not know the cultural or ethnic backgrounds of the people who traversed Stockholm’s streets but it seemed very much a white European city. It was certainly not Malmo to the South of the country where there is much social tension between many Swedes and the immigrant population and where more than a dozen foreign nationals have been shot there this year alone. Few people of different skin colour were on view in Stockholm, unlike Dublin, London or Amsterdam. The only two beggars I came across were not white and it struck me that immigrants, if that is what they were, might experience a difficult time in the country. If the food and drink prices were an index to go by, then it would take a considerable amount of hours on the streets, cup in hand, to make enough for a bed for the night. Ending up on the street is not a safe option. The Swedish climate is not one that would guarantee a response to a wake up call after a night spent roughing it.
Back home, and the kids are fighting.
Cartoon by Brian Mór
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