MY daughter was born last week. No, this will not be well, hopefully not anyway - one of those self indulgent, cringe inducing pieces by men who have just witnessed the birth of their child.
Men in the delivery room - that was the topic suggested to me for this dispatch. Thou shalt not use the word "wonder", I was advised. Wonder has been done to death.
Birth. Labour. Ten pounds, all but for an ounce. Now I know why some Jewish men pray: "Thank God for not making me a woman". Watching her in labour, hard labour. Work, toil, sweat, pant, push. "I can't". "Harder." She did.
No, wonder wasn't the word for it, not this second time around. This birth was different. Very different. I nearly cried all right, watching the capillaries on my wife's face redden and burst with the pain, the heave, the birthing.
How dare the Catholic church look down on women. How dare the church ever have insisted, as it did until well into this century, that women be "churched" after that blood and mess and colour of childbirth. How dare a celibate bishop decry the snip of a tube in the male genitalia if it should help to prevent this agony for women unable to bear it.
Thank God I left my nine year path to the Catholic priesthood. (Is this getting self indulgent?) Not that I didn't learn much there. I certainly did. But I learned so much moreby leaving.
How dare the church try to persuade any man that celibacy is a higher path. Nonsense. Utter fabrication of the truth.
To hold my daughter and this day to be kissed by my two year old son, to think that this would never have been had I continued on the path of the eunuch.
This birth was so different. Chief in my worries was my breadwinning role: it isn't easy - nor is it always achieved - making ends meet as a freelance journalist. And again the celibates, cocooned in their almost wholly unacknowledged economic security, dare to dictate to married couples about family planning.
I doubt if any man could bear the pain of childbirth. No man could love another human being enough to go through with it.
The blood, the guts, the birth, the afterbirth.
WHY wouldn't it be easy for men to kill, to beat, to be violent? No man knows the value of another human being because no man has ever had to labour for one. They'll know the value of the pound in their pocket, they've laboured for that. But they've never laboured for the birth of another human being. They don't know its cost.
We have to do so little. They have to do so very much. We look on, mopping a brow, passing a gas mask, mouthing sweet nothings: "Go for it," "Well done," "Excellent". They clasp their thighs, put down their chin and suffer the indignity of invasion and exposure.
The best thing the bishops could do to ensure the death of Catholicism in Ireland is to keep doing and saying - what they keep doing and saying.
No longer a Catholic, I hunger for a spiritual language and ritual that has for too long been hijacked by the church. I don't want my son or daughter to grow up unaware of the dimension of life which is beyond the material, the banal, the physical. Yet the last thing I want for them is to grow up duped - as I believe I was - by Catholicism.
Until priests get down and do penance, beg forgiveness, for the ways in which they have put celibacy above marriage, I will not believe. Until bishops confess their sins of long held and ever present misogyny, demanding of women what they wouldn't be able to endure themselves, until then I will not believe their twisted view of the world. Until the Pope begs forgiveness of the 110,000 married priests whom he has accused of "abandoning" the faith, when all they did was to abandon his obsessive preoccupation with sex, I, nor a multitude of others, won't bend the knee.
What's all this to do with men in the delivery room? Everything. Bring the Pope into the delivery room. Bring all the bishops. Let every priest enter and beg forgiveness of women whose sex they have so greatly wronged.
But, quite naturally, women wouldn't want them there. Who'd blame them? So now a daughter has been born to us. I do not want her to be quashed as her sisters through the centuries have been trodden upon. Dare I have her baptised? During last year's famous Late Late Show when Cardinal Daly crossed swords with Father Brian D'Arcy, one of the panelists, Patricia Coyle, said something to the effect that she believed she was colluding in her own oppression by attending Mass and thereby implicitly supporting the structure that was oppressing women.
So what of this girl child that has been born unto us, not only to my family but to the worldwide human community? Perhaps it is no accident that it is only in the last couple of decades that men have been admitted to delivery rooms and that this period coincides with the rise in feminism. Could it be that admitting men has provided a focal point for the discovery on the part of men themselves of the ways in which they have colluded and continue to collude in the oppression of women?
AS its is unlikely that women would want men other than the father of their child or medical staff to attend, it seems the last men to be admitted will be the male celibate clerics who, throughout history, have contrived more than any other group of men to oppress those human beings who alone can love enough to endure childbirth.
Ironic, is it not, that men keep solely for themselves what they call the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ - no labour in that for men, just a blessing and some words - while those who really bring forth new life have for so long done it out of men's sight and have been excluded, pending clerical so called purification, from entering so called holy places. And they wonder why the citadel is collapsing?
God must have a sense of humour. Thank God for women, the real priests of new life.