John Waters will not be happy

Irish Times columnist and Catholic militant John Waters will not be happy with the latest news from the Vatican.

Waters, who’s a great admirer of the current pope but also a self-confessed luddite, will be disappointed to learn that the pope not only operates a twitter account himself but is encouraging Catholics to use social networks to win converts.

For Waters, the internet and all associated technology is nothing but the work of the devil.

Is this man serious?

Letter in today’s Irish Times

Sir,

Bishop Pat Buckley (January 22nd) writes, “Twenty-six years ago they came for me and no one did anything. Today they have come for Fr Tony Flannery.

Tomorrow they will come for you.” I beg to disagree with the bishop.

I have been a faithful Roman Catholic all my life – a “Roman” Catholic, not an “Irish” Catholic.

I believe the Holy Father has been given to God’s people as a gift, a gift that enables us always to know the truth of a matter.

Such certitude has always given me great peace and a feeling of security.

Most of all, I have never had to have an original thought of my own. No.

They will not come for me.

Yours, etc,
Declan Kelly
Dublin

Militant Catholic Senator Mullen accuses Taoiseach

The obnoxious Catholic militant Senator Ronan Mullen was so shocked by a comment made by the Taoiseach on the abortion controversy that he felt compelled to issue a formal statement on the matter (Newstalk interview here).

Here’s Enda Kenny’s ‘shocking’ comment.

I’m receiving correspondence and messages from all over the country. I’m now being branded as worse than Herod.

According to Mullen this is a clear attempt to demonise the pro-life movement

What it really is, of course, is another attempt by Mullen to get himself media attention to rant on about his extreme religious views.

Catholic Church has the right to challenge government

Smoke and sparks flew from my keyboard as I typed the following sentence.

I’m in agreement with Catholic militant David Quinn when he claims that the Catholic hierarchy has a right to challenge the Government on the issue of abortion.

Pat Rabbitte and others seem to believe that the Catholic Church does not have the right to campaign against government actions and plans surrounding the whole issue of abortion.

This, of course, is ridiculous.

The Catholic Church has the same rights as any individual or group to express disagreement and campaign against any government policy or action.

It should be allowed to retain those rights despite the fact that it operates a ruthless, medieval type regime of suppression against those within its own ranks who dare question its policies or actions.

Catholic militant Senator Mullen 'attacked' by culture of clapping

Want to make your skin crawl? Take a look at religious fanatic Senator Mullen on Frontline.

Like all the Catholic fanatics Mullen sees a conspiracy in every comment and action by all who disagree with his views.

After Mullen made a point about abortion in England Pat Kenny was applauded when he reminded the fanatic that thousands of Irish women go to England every year for abortions.

Mullen proceeded to attack the audience for daring to support Kenny’s comment.

Mullen: The clapping here tonight, I’m beginning to feel how Sean Gallagher felt actually.

Kenny: That’s a low blow, a low blow.

Mullen: No, this culture of clapping to beat down the side you disagree with is not going to do anything to reassure Irish men and women about the quality of health care.

Religious belief is psychological/evolutionary

Letter in this week’s Irish Catholic

Dear Editor,

In her praise of a finding by researchers that religion is good for people’s health Mary Kenny is unwittingly supporting the argument made by many atheists that religious belief is simply a psychological phenomenon (Irish Catholic, August 30).

Atheists would have no problem with the finding that spiritual beliefs are ‘a coping device to help individuals deal emotionally with stress’.

The atheistic view is strengthened by the fact that the researchers came to the same conclusion after surveying people from a variety of different religions.

This strongly suggests that it is not belief in any particular god or religion that is responsible for improved mental health but rather the psychological capacity bestowed on humans by evolution to appeal to an imagined greater power, particularly in time of need.

This evolutionary capacity to find solace in gods is, of course, not confined to the many current religions of today.

Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, for example, would have enjoyed the very same mental health benefits as a result of their unwavering belief in Isis and Zeus respectively.

This research cannot be accepted without also accepting that spirituality does not originate from any particular god or religion but is simple an evolutionary capacity common to all, believers and non-believers alike, to feel an enhanced sense of well being and a oneness with the universe.

Yours etc.,

Anthony Sheridan
Cobh

Katie Taylor's gold medal god

God trains her hands for battle, makes her feet nimble as a deer and shields her from the punches of her opponents.

Katie Taylor believes that her god was largely responsible for her winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

Ms. Taylor is a member of the Pentecostal church. The Pentecostals or Born Again Christians believe that their god communicates with them by speaking in tongues.

They also believe that Hell is a real place where all non-believers and members of all other religions are doomed to spend an eternity.

Catholic militant David Quinn believes that his god was responsible for Ms. Taylor’s victory but, confusingly, he seems to be aware that he is destined to spend eternity in hell.

In fact, ‘born-again Christian’ Christians take their name from the New Testament and especially the passage where Jesus tells his followers “I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again’.

Is Mr. Quinn thinking of changing gods?

Journalists Maeve Sheehan, Eilis O’Hanlon and Claire O’Sullivan also believe that Ms. Taylor’s god hands out Olympic medals to the chosen ones.

Eilis O’Hanlon in particular went a bit berserk as a result of the religious hysteria following the gold medal ‘miracle’.

She condemned Irish citizens for their laziness, greed, lack of discipline, lack of self-respect and for living off the fat of the land.

She condemned the Irish Times for failing to mention Ms. Taylor’s god in its reports.

She condemned the ‘twisted logic’ of those in favour of family units other than the traditional Christian male/female model.

She condemned liberal minded secularists.

Since reading Ms. O’Hanlon’s fire and brimstone sermon I’ve made several offerings to the Great Zeus in thanks that Ireland only won one gold medal.

Any more and half the population would have been burned at the stake.

Catholic militant Mary Kenny exploits passing of Maeve Binchy

Irish Independent columnist and Catholic militant Mary Kenny just couldn’t resist exploiting the death of Maeve Binchy to push her Catholic agenda.

Unlike most Irish writers, according to Kenny, Binchy was not anti-clerical and anti-Catholic and didn’t include the cruel Christian Brother or the paedophile priest as ‘stock baddies’ in her books.

The underlying message here, of course, is that cruel Christian Brothers and paedophile priests are nothing more than the invention of fiction writers.

Kenny also suggests that Binchy was an upstanding Christian because she didn’t write explicit sex scenes.

The greatest insult of all from this so called friend was the claim that Binchy, a life long non-believer, was really a Catholic saint.

In this weeks Irish Catholic Kenny further insults Binchy by claiming

That she always held the deposit of faith and values transmitted to her by her parents.

Soul reaping Catholics like Kenny seem incapable of accepting that many victims of Catholic child (abuse) indoctrination eventually manage to escape from the clutches of its superstitions.

Mary Kenny: An unrepentant Catholic militant

Journalist and Catholic militant Mary Kenny recently wrote an article (Irish Catholic, 10th May) in which she called for more clarity in the media when the crime of child abuse is being reported.

I think the word child abuse is a catch-all phrase and quite often in reports it doesn’t make clear what the offence actually was.

In her opinion there should be three categories of child abuse.

Category one: Molestation, which, according to Ms. Kenny, is known as ‘fiddling’.

Category two: Masturbation, which, according to Ms. Kenny, is known as ‘a hand job’.

Category three: Rape, which is penetration of the anus or vagina.

Her article, rightly, generated a great deal of anger particularly from child abuse victims.

When interviewed by Pay Kenny (11th May) on the issue Ms. Kenny began by saying:

Well, I’m not a specialist in this area at all and I’m not a lawyer. I write simply as a journalist and I try to follow George Orwell’s great rule that the first duty of a writer is to express clarity.

This, of course, is untrue. Ms. Kenny does not write ‘simply as a journalist’.

She writes and defends her extreme religious views because she is a militant Catholic who believes that her god and her church is the one true god/church.

I have no doubt that she understands, at least to some degree, the pain of those abused by her church.

I have no doubt that, generally speaking, she is a good person but I also have no doubt that she suffers from one very serious flaw.

Her reasoning faculty, like that of all religious militants, has been damaged by religious indoctrination.

Such damage allows religious militants to defend their particular religion no matter how many or how horrendous the crimes carried out in its name and under its protection.

Broadly speaking; those who are of a religious disposition can be broken down into three categories.

Those who are happy to continue practicing whatever beliefs they happened to be indoctrinated into as children.

Such believers usually deal with criminal behaviour within their church by separating the actions of their religious leaders from the goodness of their particular god.

Those who simply cannot accept the crimes done in the name of their god.

Such people either join another church or abandon religious belief altogether.

And then there are the militants.

These people go to enormous lengths to sound reasonable in the face of the horrendous crimes committed by their church.

Their church is, first and foremost, the most important aspect of their lives. They will allow nothing, absolutely nothing, to override their total dedication to their particular god.

Such people have an innate ability to defend the indefensible.

I include below part of the Pat Kenny interview of Mary Kenny and some responses from Marie Collins, a victim of Mary Kenny’s church.

Mary Kenny: Well, I’m not a specialist in this area at all and I’m not a lawyer.

I write simply as a journalist and I try to follow George Orwell’s great rule that the first duty of a writer is to express clarity.

I think the word child abuse is a catch-all phrase and quite often in reports it doesn’t make clear what the offence actually was.

Simply as a writer I would say there should be three categories of explaining what this offence is.

The first category would be molestation, which I think, in the vernacular, is called fiddling.

The second is masturbation, which is usually called a hand job in the vernacular.

And the third is rape, which is penetration of the anus and the vagina.

Sometimes when I read a report or read an interview and they talk about child rape I’m not sure whether they actually mean actual penetration or whether they mean it in a metaphorical sense.

Now all attacks on children are odious but I still think we should be told in clear language and follow that Orwell rule, what do they mean?

Many interviews with victims of child abuse, as it’s called, conceal more than they reveal, they don’t tell you what actually what went on.

I do think that context is very important. It’s very important exactly what age the victim was at the time.

Pat Kenny: Why is that important?

Mary Kenny: Because some people are very vulnerable at fourteen and some people are very street wise at ten.

Pat Kenny plays a clip from the recent BBC documentary concerning then Fr. Brady’s part in interrogating Brendan Boland, a child abuse victim.

BBC journalist: What did they ask you?

Boland: Did you ever do anything like this before with another boy or grown man and I said no.

They said, if not, why not? They kept asking me, did my body change, did I get an erection, did seed come from my body?

BBC journalist: What kind of questions are these to ask a fourteen-year-old boy?

Boland: One of the priests came over; I’m not sure, with a bible and made me put my hand on the bible and say:

I Brendan Boland do solemnly swear that I have told the truth, the whole truth and I will speak to no one about this meeting unless to authorized priests.

Then I signed it and the other signature on the document was Fr. John B. Brady. Now Sean Brady, Cardinal of all Ireland.

Pat Kenny: You see there a fourteen-year-old boy who found it difficult and inappropriate to discuss the nature of these offences with priests.

Mary Kenny: Of course and it was absolutely wrong of Fr. Brady getting the boy to swear to secrecy.

Marie Collins: (abused by a priest as a child)

I was totally sickened when I read the article.

After so many years of knowledge and awareness of child abuse, I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

What Mary is not covering here is that the whole suggestion in this article is directed at Brendan Smyth’s victims and the whole suggestion running through it as a sub text is that somehow these boys, because they’re not coming out with the gory details, that they could have been colluding in their own abuse.

She says at one stage ‘I accept that if John was a victim of an odious crime’ but I want to know more about the circumstances, much more.

I would ask, why? What does she want to know about the circumstances? An adult male sexually interfered with a minor, that’s a criminal offence.

If Mary Kenny wants to know the categories of child abuse they are laid down in every child protection document that you ever read.

She is obviously ignorant of the fact that a child can be abused without being touched and I’d like give a personal example:

I was abused and category three, as Mary would define it, was part of my abuse and that was a penetration.

But I was also photographed intimately and that photography did more harm to my childhood and did more harm to the rest of my life than the actual category three abuse.

Mary Kenny is totally ignorant and her ignorance in this case is just so…I just hope victims don’t read this because there is already guilt connected with abuse and to suggest that ‘oh only this happened to you but not that so therefore it’s not as serious’.

Somebody’s life can be destroyed by being fiddled with as she says. It is just ridiculous to come in the context of Brendan Smyth the demand to know the actual details.

What Mary Kenny is saying is we want to ask the sort of questions those three priests asked that young boy, Brendan Boland, in 1975.

Does she have no idea how hard it is for a victim to talk to anybody about what has been done to them?

And she wants them to put it in print and if they don’t she’s suggesting they’re being evasive or that there’s not enough honesty.

The whole thrust of this argument in this article is sickening.

Mary Kenny: I respect everything Marie Collins says.

Marie Collins: Read the documents if you want clarity.

Copy to:
Mary Kenny

A bizarre country

Fr. Brian Darcy spoke with Marian Finucane today on his censuring by the Vatican.

Fr. Darcy is a member of a ruthless, dictorial, child abusing religious organisation that sees human rights and free speech as a serious danger to its power.

Following the interview Marian spoke with Irish Times religious correstpondent Patsy McGarry.

This interview came to an abrupt end when Marian, a broadcaster on a national station that, in theory, represents all citizens realised the time.

Sorry Patsy, we’ll have to leave it there, it’s coming up to twelve o’clock and time for the Angelus.