The Catholic bishops are up in arms about gay marriage. Wouldn’t you think they’d be more circumspect about elbowing their way to the front of a fight about sexual relationships?
 
No need to report the sexual savaging of children, they maintained until the week before last. Even now they are iffy about the extent to which reporting is required. But equal rights for two men or two women in a loving relationship? Would turn God’s stomach, that would.
The Co. Antrim-born boss of the RC Church in Scotland, Cardinal Kevin O’Brien, is leading the charge in Britain. Gay marriage would be “madness”, a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right” leading on to “further aberrations”.
When it was explained that churches would not be required to recognise gay marriage, O’Brien shot back: “Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that ‘no-one will be forced to keep a slave’. Would such worthless assurances calm our fury?”
Eh?
O’Brien came up our street a while back, over to preside at celebrations of the centenary of the Long Tower Church. Free Derry Wall was overprinted the night before his arrival with the proclamation: “No forgiveness without firm purpose of amendment.”
O’Brien will have gotten the reference – but seems to have missed the message. Pondering the broken-backed logic of the bishops’ position, I recalled the pithy prescription of the Code of Canon Law 1016: Salva competentia vicilis potestatis circa civiles eiusdem matrimonii effectus.
In his definitive “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma”, Ludwig Ott elaborates: “The State is entitled to regulate the purely civil legal consequences of the contract of marriage (right of name and state, marital rights to property, right of inheritance) and to settle disputes about these matters... To the extent that the State legislation and administration of justice invades the jurisdiction of the Church, the Church cannot recognise their validity. Thus the Church rejects as invalid for Christians obligatory civil marriage. She regards such civil marriages not as real marriages but merely as legal formalities.”
Indeed. But if gay marriages are not real, what’s the bishops’ beef? What institution dear to the Church is being subverted, grotesquely or otherwise? Why should two men (or women) going through a meaningless formality be of interest to the Church in the first place?
Riddle me that, Cardinal O’Brien, Bishop Quinn, Right Rev. Waters.
Incidentally, I have heard it said by an alleged theologian, who was not contradicted by a Bishop taking part in the same discussion, that a Catholic marriage becomes valid when, after vows, the man and the woman are pronounced husband and wife. This is a common mistake.
A marriage becomes valid in the eyes of the Church when it is consummated. And consummated according to the formula: erectio, introductio, penetratio, ejaculatio.
Moving directly from erectio to penetratio without so much as an introductio would fall far short of validation. Likewise, obviously, for going straight from erectio to ejaculatio, which I am told can happen.
It strikes me that there may be a not insignificant number of women in Ireland who are actually unmarried unbeknownst to themselves and who may be relieved to learn that, even in the eyes of the Church, they are free to pack their bags, fetch out the running-away money and skedaddle.

Apart from willing Barcelona to win, there isn’t much reason for excitement about the European Champions League now coming towards a climax.
It’s not a real champions’ league. Once the tournament was a natural outgrowth from the network of national leagues across Europe, the champions of each country head-to-head in knock-out competition, with an open draw and no such thing as seeding, every round bestowing a night of death-or-glory dramas all across the continent. Proper football.
The last time that happened was in 1991, when Red Star Belgrade conquered the continent a matter of months before Yugoslavia fell into hell and split into shards. Then, there were 59 matches. The following season the knockout stages were reshaped into groups, leading to a few meaningless matches but guaranteeing the biggest clubs, unless they’d been dumped out before Xmas, at least six games – in what’s meant to be a cup competition.
By 1999, as many as four teams were being admitted from each of the major leagues, further expanding the elite’s chance of amassing yet more wealth. Only once since has the final been fought between teams which had qualified as national champions. The horrific financial disparity between football’s haves and have-nots that has since ensued is no coincidence.
As Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner observe in Jumpers For Goalposts: How Football Sold its Soul: “The Champions League dukes it out with America’s World Series in baseball to see which is the sporting world’s biggest and most delusional misnomer.” Proper football writing. (Elliot and Thompson, £11.99.)
Thus, the connection between the Champions League and the underpinning structures of the game becomes ever more flimsy and strained. Increasingly, the League takes place in a separate life-space, from which the lower orders have effectively been excluded, a glamour tournament in special surroundings for celebrity clubs protected from any proximity to the roped-off riff-raff, and nothing resembling romance.
Football, of course, is merely reflecting change in society: the widening gap between the classes, the manic competitive drive to accumulate, disdain for the notion of fairness, care for the interests of others seen as stupidity, thickening corruption everywhere.
What’s happening to football cannot be reversed without the world being turned on its head. Or rather, its feet.