Again and again priests are mocked as abusers
It’s often better when a defence of Catholic religious comes from a non-Catholic: it seems to others more objective, and less partisan. Thus, Victoria White’s powerful article in the Irish Examiner last week – on May 15 – seemed all the more impressive because she is a Church of Ireland person.
Victoria began by noting that “kicking old Catholic priests in the dentures is the easiest way for a journalist to get Facebook ‘likes’ these days”. Indeed. But, she says, she “cannot stand injustice done to any group… as is being done to Catholic religious. Few other groups in our society are the targets of such consistent slander.”
Yes, the damage done by the 11 priests or former priests in the Dublin diocese convicted of child abuse in the courts has been enormous (allegations against 98 were made). There must never be any denial of that. Yet “the hard truth is that no other institution has dealt as comprehensively with child abuse in its ranks as the Catholic Church”. The abuse of minors is an issue throughout society – as the charges against swimming coaches, let alone the Jimmy Savile scandals, has demonstrated.
Mocked
But again and again, it is Catholic religious who are derided and mocked as wholesale abusers of children.
This was brought out with great artistic delicacy in the movie Calvary, starring Brendan Gleeson. It is a superb film, as the reviewers have said, and should be seen by anyone interested in the role of the priest in Irish society. The priest in Calvary is indeed mocked, derided and verbally abused by many individuals in his community – an exquisite location under Sligo’s Ben Bulben.
He is threatened with death by a victim of an historic abuse case, and faces that with fortitude. Men reprimand their small daughters for talking to the priest, and the local tattooed rent-boy makes obscene suggestions.
A faithless wife gives him the come-on and the brattish rich-boy urinates in his presence. Even his church is burned down
Keeping the Faith
Yet, in an almost Christ-like way, Father James goes about his business, of keeping the Faith in and out of season. That, the movie implies, is his role: to be persecuted and stigmatised, for the sins of others, but to
do what the Gospel enjoins – forgive.
Calvary illuminates what Victoria White has written. She ends by saying she has tried to research the economic returns which religious have made to this State: astonishingly, there is no academic research done on this subject.
Here’s an interesting side fact, however: according to Robert Calderisi, former director of the World Bank, “the Catholic Church has probably lifted more people out of poverty in more countries than any other organisation in human history”.
Marie Stopes’ alarming ideas
Harry Stopes-Roe, only child of the birth control pioneer Marie Stopes, died earlier this month aged 90, and his obituaries brought out, once again, some of the alarming ideas that his mother entertained.
It was common knowledge that she was a eugenicist ñ she believed in stopping the poor, disabled or any ‘imperfect’ people from having children.
She considered myopia (short sight) a serious genetic flaw and wouldn’t attend her son’s wedding because his bride, daughter of a famous scientist, wore glasses: she called Harry’s union with a specs-wearing woman as “a eugenic crime”, which would “contaminate” her family line.
Stopes was also anti-Semitic and sent Hitler a volume of her poetry. She was vile to her husband, apparently a kind man, and banished him to the attic, complaining that he didn’t “satisfy” her. She made her son wear skirts until the age of 11 because she thought trousers restricted men’s fertility (interesting for a birth-controller).
Cruellest actions
But surely the cruellest actions of her life was the way in which she chose, and then rejected, a series of orphans, whom she had selected as a companion to her son. She advertised for a little boy to adopt, selected one after another, kept them for a short time and then rejected them, usually on eugenic grounds. She announced that one five-year-old would benefit from “a few whippings”, and she recommended “thrashings” for children who wet their pants.
One wonders what became of those five rejected orphans.
Still, there is a certain irony in how things have turned out: Stopes’ ‘eugenic’ groups – people with higher IQs and flawless health ñ now have lower fertility; while the ‘dysgenic’ – those with less education and poorer backgrounds, are boundlessly fruitful.
Rise of the Right
The ‘Front National’ in France is likely to do well during this week’s European Elections. Their policies are sometimes distasteful, and probably boosted by the disclosure that two new mosques a week are under construction in France, amounting, so far, to 2,390. “Our identity is menaced…by Islamic inundation,” proclaim headlines in the French press.