Controversy rages about whether the papers should have published the story about Michael Cleary being a da. What fun. Some say The Phoenix was way out of line printing the yarn when his corpse wasn’t cold in the grave. Others engage in earnest disputation as to whether the story is actually true.

As we go to press it’s suggested that maybe DNA tests will resolve the issue once and for all. We shall see. But why bother? There’s another point of view – that the papers were right to go with the yarn whether it’s true or not.

Consider all the things which have no more basis in fact than the tale of the tooth fairy but which are proclaimed on-air and in print day in day out by the outfit Michael Cleary represented – without any controversy whatever on Mr. Gaybo’s wireless programme or in V. Browne’s deranged and semi-literate broadsheet.

What about Adam and Eve, Noah and the 40 soft days, the biog. of Abraham, the Xmas story, the “Ascension,” the “ensoulment” of foetuses, etc., etc., and so on and so forth? And why are there no dinosaurs in the bible?

You make this sort of point to any sky-pilot still extant and you will very likely be told that none of it matters because even if these stories aren’t actually true they symbolise or illustrate much greater and more profound Truths than can be located in mere physical, practical fact.

Fair enough, so. But equally and by the same token, then, irrespective of whether Cleary was actually screwing around, the story that he was, and that he fathered a child (or even children) in the process, symbolises and illustrates an important profound Truth about the RC church in our time. Which is that the celibacy rule has acted as a cover for widespread sexual activity by priests and other religious, much of this activity taking the form of the sexual abuse of children placed in the care of the Church.

Given the numbers of priests and religious involved, it is beyond argument that the church authorities, themselves members of the clergy, have known about it for yonks and have schemed to keep it from the laity. The sleazy secret has been carefully sealed inside the institutional church which meantime presented a gleaming pure facade to the world as it denounced, anathematised and damned any who transgressed its narrow, rigid structures on the permissible expression of human sexuality.

Whether or not we can take it as literal truth, the image of Cleary mounting the pulpit to rant against sex outside marriage and then mounting an unmarried member of the congregation symbolises a Truth about the Catholic Church which it is important we should all be aware of.

I do not propose to refer again to the stories which have surfaced in Ireland in recent times showing that bishops, priests, brothers and nuns have been sexually active or involved in the physical and/or sexual abuse of children for many years. Let’s take this as read and look farther afield.

The Universe reports that the archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico, faces bankruptcy and the seizure of all its assets because of lawsuits related to sex abuse by priests. Archbishop Michael Sheehan has told local media that the diocese faces demands of almost £33 million.

Just along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, the USA’s first Hispanic Catholic Archbishop has resigned after revelations that priests in the diocese have for years been sexually abusing small boys while the archbishop himself has had affairs with at least five women.

That excellent little magazine The Freethinker reports that in the last eight years the Church has already stumped up more than $400 million dollars in compensation and legal fees arising out of allegations of sex abuse by clergy.

May 9th has been set as the date for the trial on sex abuse charges of Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago and his friend Father Ellis Harsham. Both men deny the charges.

Up in Canada, more than 100 priests and brothers have been charged with sexual assault and the sexual abuse of children, while 4,000 people alleging physical and sexual abuse by nuns are claiming £640 million in damages.

A year after it was set up in response to widespread anger and horror among local lay-people, an “internal” Church inquiry into the case of the Birmingham priest Fr. Samuel Penny has still not published any findings. Penny’s sex-abuse victims included five children from one family: the parents were devout and energetic lay workers in the diocese and had trusted Penny implicitly. It emerged after they had gone public with their allegations that Penny had been sexually abusing children for 20 years and that the diocesan authorities had known this for at least six years and had done nothing about it.

The Independent on Sunday reports that Penny was by no means the only priest in the diocese involved in the sexual abuse of children, while the Guardian tells of priests elsewhere in Britain being transferred to “retreats” after allegations of sexual misconduct.

The cases of thousands of children sexually abused by priests and brothers in Australia meanwhile wend their way through the legal process. In Western Australia more than 300 former inmates of Church institutions called one phone-in radio programme last year alleging sexual abuse by priests, brothers and nuns. They named a total of 29 clergy as paedophiles.

Across the continent in New South Wales more than 250 writs alleging sexual abuse by clergy have been lodged in the Supreme Court in what promises to be the biggest class action in Australian legal history.

The Australian Catholic Church has now paid millions of dollars in insurance premia in an effort to protect itself against the mounting claims. (Irish people can take satisfaction and even pride from the fact that Cavan-born Federal Senator Joe McKiernan is leading opposition to appeals for State aid to the Church, should it eventually prove unable to meet the costs of the claims. The splendid man from Breffni points out that there are buildings, lands, art treasures and investments in all manner of capitalist enterprises worldwide which can be sold off to meet the cost of the clergy’s sexual savagery.)

We could ramble if we liked around the shenanigans and scandals presently entertaining the peoples of Latin America, the Philippines, Western Europe and so on, but the picture is clear enough already. Everywhere the word is out. The Catholic clergy is at it, in numbers which the faithful are finding it difficult to believe but which they are increasingly being forced to accept.

There’s nothing new in any of this, of course. Ever since the first, unsuccessful effort to impose celibacy on the clergy (at the Council of Nicea in 325AD), sex has given the priesthood no end of headaches, and pains elsewhere as well.

Celibacy engendered a fear of sexual pleasure which stunted and twisted the psyches of priestlings through the ages. Expressing their sexuality in furtive secrecy, the clergy tended towards abuse of the most vulnerable. After celibacy became the rule in the 12th century the sexual activity of the clergy, particularly at the highest levels, was marked by a perverse intensity. When gentle sexual pleasure is deemed utterly abominable, orgiastic excess comes easy, it would seem.

The most extravagant example was probably the first John XXIII (1410-1415), described by Peter de Rosa in Vicars Of Christ as a “former pirate, pope-poisoner, mass-murderer, mass-fornicator with a partiality for nuns, adulterer on a scale unknown outside fables, simoniac par excellence, blackmailer, pimp, master of dirty tricks.”(De Rosa, I believe, is here detailing the list of charges which led to John’s downfall at the Council of Constance in 1415, so it’s worth nothing Edward Gibbon’s suggestion that “the more serious charges were omitted”).

None of this means, of course, that all Catholic priests, nuns and brothers are or ever have been sexually active or involved in sexual abuse, nor is it to presume the guilt of those facing allegations. The novelist-priest Anthony Greely, for example, himself from Chicago, has declared his strong belief in the innocence of Cardinal Bernadin while doubting whether this will be accepted by the general public in the U.S. The Church has covered up so much which is true, he reckons, that few will believe it now when it denies an untruth.

In the nature of the thing, nobody can say for certain what percentage of Catholic clergy live lives which generally contradict their Church’s teaching on sexual morality. From the U.S., again, we read of surveys seeming to show that while thousands have left the clergy because they couldn’t hack the celibacy, around 40 percent of those who remain are not celibate either.

The statistics for Ireland may be similar, who’s to say? – which would mean that a majority – not a massive majority, but a majority nonetheless – of Irish Catholic clergy do live within the rule of celibacy which they have vowed to uphold. This should be acknowledged.

But we should also acknowledge the profound Truth about the Catholic Church which the story of Michael Cleary being a da symbolises and illustrates, whether there’s a word of truth in it or not.

VISION QUEST

My attention has somewhat belatedly been drawn to a pilgrim crisis at Lourdes. A report in the Daily Star on November 3rd last tells of a steady falling-off in the number of pilgrims visiting the town in the French Pyrannees where the “Blessed Virgin Mary” is alleged to have appeared to a Ms. Bernadette Soubrious in 1858.

It seems that trade has suffered not only from the counter-attraction of more recent BVM appearances elsewhere, but also from what some consider an overly stringent approach by the RC authorities to the authentication of cures. In the last 35 years the Vatican has accepted only nine cures at Lourdes as definitely attributable to the intervention of the BVM. This has made for formidable difficulties in marketing Lourdes as the final resort when medical science has failed.

Hotels and B&B joints are feeling the pinch, a number of cafes have closed, demand for Lourdes Water has begun to dry up, and some feel that the shrine has had its day as a major place of Marian pilgrimage.

Mind you, none of this would have attracted my attention at all had it not been for the Star’s quote from a local churchman that: “Only a miracle can save Lourdes now.”

Quite.