SMELL THE GLOVE

Any day now a hombre called Padre Alessio Parente will arrive on these shores to whip up support for the canonisation of an Italian madman who called himself "Padre Pio."

Pio, who died twenty-five years ago last month, is at the centre of a Right-wing cult within the Catholic Church. Devotees of the cult tend also to be associated with the "Our Lady of Medjugorje" hoax organised by Croatian fascists. The semi-clandestine Opus Dei organisation is heavily involved in both operations.

Tens of thousands of Irish people are involved in these scams, whether out of conviction or because they have been hoodwinked. The Medjugorje fraudsters are particularly active in organisations which advertise themselves as bringing humanitarian relief to Bosnia but which are in fact support-groups for Roman Catholic death-squads in western Bosnia-Herzegovina, particularly in the vicinity of Mostar.

The Pio cult runs Padre Pio centres in a number of towns. Some of these act as agents for specialist travel firms which coin a profit organising pilgrimages to the southern Italian village of San Giovanni Rotondo, where Pio operated as a priest for the last 40 years of his life.

San Giovanni was a quiet mountain village of some 3,000 people before the Pio project got under way. By the time Pio died in 1968 it had been transformed into a bustling town of 30,000, with lavish hotels, guest houses and scores of restaurants - and, scattered over the adjacent hills, the villas of newly-enriched entrepreneurs.

My own closest encounter with the Pio cult came when somebody I had never met arrived at the front door one night a couple of years back and held out a tattered thick-woollen glove of sorts, suggesting that I should rub this rag over the body of a child in the house who was seriously ill. "It's Padre Pio's Mitt," I was informed in a reverential whisper.

Pio was a "stigmatist." That is, he claimed that "the wounds of Christ" were on his body: holes through his hands and feet where the nails pinned Christ to the cross and a bigger hole in his side where a roman soldier pierced him with a spear to finish him off. (This was, clearly, an act of euthanasia, which prompts me to wonder how come the Catholic Church is so dead-set against it now: if it was good enough for Jesus - who they believe was fucking God - why isn't it good enough for human beings who might be presently in agony and screaming to be put out of an intolerable and undignified misery?)

Pio always wore mittens on his hands and thick socks on his feet to soak up the miraculous blood which oozed continuously from the wounds. (Nothing which I have read on Pio's life explains what happened to the blood from the presumably more spectacular side-wound.)

Actually, all this is a load of baloney anyway, since the Romans didn't nail people they were crucifying to the cross in the first place. A person nailed up like the standard figure of Christ would have fallen down in no time at all, the weight of the body tearing through the flesh, bones and tendons of the hands and feet. Nailed up there like that from Friday lunchtime to Sunday morning? Not a chance.

Howandever: this mitt is supposedly heavily impregnated with the blood from Pio's Christ-wounds and was being offered as a miraculous curative. I was subsequently to discover that it had been circulating in the Derry area for years, being passed from sick person to sick person. I also learned - upon taking a quizzative interest in the matter - that there are other Padre Pio's Mitts in Ireland. There's a Limerick and a Dublin Padre Pio's Mitt, one in the Connemara Gaeltacht, and quite likely others that I don't know of.

These must be among the most dangerously disease-soaked pieces of fabric in the land, slithery with germs, bacteria, bodily fluids and snot. A more inappropriate item to rub on the body of a child already weakened by illness would be hard to imagine. But when I explained this to the zealot on the doorstep the reaction was one of horrified disbelief: it was "bad luck" to reject the Mitt. Touchy fuckers, these dead stigmatists, it seems.

I have no way of knowing how many people have died needlessly from diseases caught from Padre Pio's Mitts, but it must be substantial.

The stigmata apart, there were other miraculous things about Pio, according to the cultists, the most dramatic of which was his power of bi-location - the ability to be in two places at the same time.

I have noted in this space before that all of these holy bi-locationists seem to have specialised in being simultaneously in two places which were out of sight of one another. You'd see them here and then discover afterwards that they've been seen somewhere else at exactly the same moment. But you never saw them at this side of the room and at the other side of the room at the same time. Nobody has ever been able to say, "Wow! Look! that guy over there and over there is in two places at the same time!"

Pio was never observed starting to give out communion from both ends of the altar rail and meeting himself in the middle. He never played himself at tennis. He never impersonated the Everly Brothers.

Then there was Pio's miraculously perfumed body odour. When he sweated he smelled of "violets and sweet tobacco."

He could also foretell the future.

Two things need saying about all this. One, that every time we are tempted to jeer at the likes of David Icke, every time we wonder among ourselves how anybody could be so daft as to sign up with the Koresh chap whose followers were slaughtered at Waco on the orders of the kill-crazy US Attorney General, Janet Leno, every time we chortle at the antics of poor fools who seriously believe that Elvis is alive and well and playing rhythm guitar with Brian Coll and the Buccaroos, every time we think on such things we should remember that one of these delusions is remotely as ridiculous as the preposterous claims made on behalf of the "Padre Pio."

There are people in influential positions - at least one former Supreme Court judge, a number of members of the Oireachtas - who believe in this stuff with the calm fervour of the genuine fanatic.

The second thing which needs saying is that the Pio people have a political agenda which we would do well to take seriously.

It isn't an accident that the Pio cult is energetically promoted by the "pro-life" crowd, or that the more ominous of his pronouncements are advanced in the Youth Defence comic, the Irish Democrat, as rules of right living. "Love and fear must always be together . . .", readers were recently advised in large print. "Love without fear becomes presumption. Where there is no obedience there is no virtue . . ."

The wounds were assuredly a fraud. But obviously the sick mind was real enough.

The campaign for Pio's canonisation is political, too. Naturally, it enjoys the full support of the extremist bigot, John Paul II, who regularly highlights Pio's calls for young people to join the "Blue Army" of "Our Lady of Fatima" and to combat communism, contraceptives, freedom and fun.

These people are not harmless. When you meet them, nail them.

DERRY AIRS

The release (at last) of the Teenage Kicks compilation (Castle Records) confirms what we all knew already but nobody ever got around to saying straight because it seems such an extravagant thing to attach to such an uninflated, matter-of-fact bunch of fellows: that the Undertones were the best rock and roll band there's ever been from Ireland.

You could playfully make a case for Thin Lizzy, Taste, the Radiators, U2 . . . but we're talking serious rock and roll here.

The Undertones were also - it's not quite the same thing - the band from anywhere least burdened with bullshit.

Most rock bands at some career-point or other take to telling anyone who'll listen that they're not into fame and fortune at all, that it's the music which matters. The Undertones, or most of them, weren't like that at all. As they'll tell you themselves, they enjoyed the bit of fame they had, and if they'd made a fortune they'd have enjoyed that even more.

But success was wasted on them. At the point in their careers when Strummer, Pursey, Dammers and the like were carefully contriving their street-credibility, the Undertones were enjoying themselves hanging out on the street. Rock and roll stardom? It was brilliant, says Mickey Bradley, like having a job in Du Pont but never having to go in.

In Derry they met a lot of small-minded, small-town begrudgery. Bloody cheek of them, walking about like they were rock stars . . . "People used to really despise us," John O'Neill told the Derry Journal recently, "and give us terrible abuse - particularly Feargal. The three most hated groups in Derry then were the RUC, the (British) Army and the Undertones. The music critics loved us, but they weren't about on Foyle Street on a Saturday night."

If they'd headed off to London and actually behaved like rock stars there might have been a lot less resentment.

Feargal was the band member most heartily hated in Derry, partly because he was the singer and therefore the natural focus for whatever feeling the band engendered, but mainly because he dared to be different, and, alone in the band, was openly ambitious. Right from the beginning Feargal was the sort of fellow who felt OK about preening himself in public.

But he was by no means the total prat of (un)popular local legend. I remember calling up to his house in Grafton Terrace to interview him for the Sunday World and his mother, the late Sybil, coming into the parlour to ask if he had offered photographer Val Sheehan and myself a cup of tea, which he hadn't.

"Well, get out to that kitchen then and make it," she commanded. "Have you no manners?" And then she sent him across the street to buy buns, the meantime apologising to Val and myself. "He'd affront you anywhere, his head's away with it."

He brought the tea and buns in on a tray and afterwards begged us as we left, "Don't be writing what my mammy said, hi . . ." I had a lot of time for him, and still have.

Most of all he had a voice of the most exquisite beauty, like an innocent Orbison, thrilling, pure, perfectly-pitched. He didn't write any of the Undertones' songs, but he made the best of them his own. I can imagine the most memorable of U2 songs being sung by somebody other than Bono. I can't imagine 'Julie Ocean', 'Wednesday Wee' or 'Jimmy Jimmy' sung by anybody other than Feargal. I wish he hadn't made such a hames of his solo career, and I hope it isn't over.

Incidentally, if there's ever a poll for the best-ever single from an Irish rock and roll band, 'Julie Ocean' has my vote. The week it was released, in 1983 I think, I bet Cathal O'Shea £25 in Blades in Terenure that it would reach number one in the UK and I still regret paying him the money because even though it didn't reach the top ten, or possibly even the top twenty, I still reckon I was right.

And Mickey Bradley played the bass like Joey Ramone. You know, slung down low near his ankles.

Those among you who don't know the Undertones won't know what marvels you have missed until you allow Teenage Kicks to shimmer its beauty across you.