Madam, – I am a hospital Catholic priest. Last Sunday in our chapel we celebrated the jubilees of four of the Sisters. Between them they have given over 200 years of faithful service to the sick and society. Very often, men and women from the missionary congregations come for procedures. They are usually quite old; in speaking to them one realises the wonderful contribution they have made to society and to the church.
In the present climate it is only right that the terrible failings of church people be condemned, but surely it is only right that all this be balanced by the tremendous good that has been done by the vast majority of Brothers and Sisters. We have become a “knocking society”, we seem to have no balance, we are afraid to speak of the good that has been done and is being done. Thank God it is God who will be my judge; the Lord is kind and full of compassion, slow to anger and full of love.
Many of our journalists and radio commentators and some of our politicians need to look at themselves and get a balance in their reporting and interviewing. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Pat Buckley’s point (June 4th) that Christ preached a Kingdom and what we got was a Church has been common knowledge among women for centuries. Fear and loathing of the female, a hidden pillar of Church Doctrine has always been one of its most effective modus operandi.The report acknowledges that abused children were routinely referred to as “bastard scum” or “spawn of the Devil” their benighted mothers pilloried as whores who would burn in Hell for all Eternity.
I would argue that to a greater or lesser extent all of us have suffered as a result of the deeply dysfunctional attitude to sexuality at the heart of Irish Catholicism which appears to have been entirely in thrall to the Vatican on the subject. Huge psychic damage has been done. To have deliberately damned the well-spring of love and devotion the sexes are designed to bestow upon each other and to do it in the name of God was the real blasphemy and tragically we now have overwhelming evidence to prove it. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Shakespeare, England’s greatest poet, spoke in Hamlet of the importance of “Holding the mirror up to nature”.
In light of recent revelations, did Thomas Moore, our own national poet, have something of a premonition when, writing of some clerics in the poem Intolerance 200 years ago, he penned the following lines: “So smooth, so godly, yet so devilish too;/ Who, arm’d at once with pray’r- books and with whips,/ Blood on their hands, and Scripture on their lips;/ Tyrants by creed, and torturers by text, /Make this life hell in horror of the next.” – Yours, etc,