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Week after week, it’s a different cock in a frock rolled out to say something nasty about the gays, so it was with rolled eyes and resignation that I read the headline Gays ‘will never go to heaven’: cardinal. But then I stopped in my tracks. Let’s not tar this chap with the muppet brush too hastily…
Last week we learned all about the concept of ‘mental reservation‘ in the Catholic Church; a neat little trick that allows people such as the otherworldly Cardinal Desmond Connell to have a blemish-free conscience when allowing people to believe that which is not strictly true (kinda like when you were a kid and you believed that it was ok to tell porkies if you crossed your fingers behind your back).
This got me thinking. Surely Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan (me neither) couldn’t really believe that the GLBTs couldn’t get into Heaven? Surely a man of his education wouldn’t baldly state something like homosexuality is as a result of an ‘education issue’ or an identity disorder stemming from adolescence? I checked the calendar; it is indeed almost 2010 – so how can we explain his rather fruity statement?
Mental reservation of course! Let’s look more closely at his statement. The bits he certainly reserved mentally are in square brackets (more manly than those faggy roundy ones {and don’t get me started on the frankly outrageously camp squiggly brackets…}).
VATICAN CITY — Homosexuals and transsexuals “will never enter the kingdom of heaven [without a red carpet]“, a leading Roman Catholic cardinal said on Wednesday.
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan said that while the Church regarded [outmoded notions of the wrongness of] homosexuality as an “insult to God”, this did not justify discrimination against gay and transsexual people.
“Transsexuals and homosexuals will never enter the kingdom of heaven [without a red carpet, paparazzi and some kind of Cirque du Soliel thing happening] and it is not me who says this, but Saint Paul [the Bible's very own prolific spambot] ,” the cardinal said, in comments reported by the Ansa news agency.
“People are not born [fabulously] homosexual, they become [beautiful, divatastically] homosexual, for different reasons: education [about grooming] issues or because they did not develop [unhealthy relationships with the handsy parish priest who obviously had some issues with] their own identity during adolescence. It may not be their fault, but acting against [their fierce beeatch] nature and the dignity of the human body is an insult to God [or 'Tyra' as we sometimes call Her],” he said.
There, I hope that clears it up. I think with this mental reservation concept, the Church will be able to get away with, well, just about anything now! Hurrah!
The Primate of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Sean Brady, has problems with the erosion of the idea of family in Ireland should civil partnership be introduced.
Thanks for your opinion, petal, and I do recognise the pressure on you to come up with new material for your money-generating audience each week, but this is, as the name suggests, a civil matter with some considerable consensus behind it.
Shouldn’t you be busy trying to reconstruct all those families destroyed by your organisation’s systemic practices over the last 100 years?
Just sayin’ is all…
They’re beginning to call this child abuse saga the Irish Holocaust. After watching this man, you’ll begin to see why.
—Start of transcript
Mr. Chairman, I’m surprised at the minister there now.
First of all Mr Minister (directed at Minister Noel Dempsey) you made a bags of it in the beginning by changing the judges. You made a complete bags of it at that time, because I went to the La Foy commission and ye had seven barristers there, questioning me and telling that I was telling lies, when I told them that I got raped of a Saturday, got a merciful beating after it, and then stuffed…
… he came along the following morning and put holy communion in my mouth.
You don’t know what happened there. You haven’t the foggiest, you’re talking through your hat there. And you’re talking to a Fianna Fáil man, a former councilor and former mayor you’re talking to, that worked tooth and nail or you, for the party that you’re talking about now. Ye didn’t do it right, ye got it wrong.
Admit it.
And apologize for doing that. Because you don’t know what I feel inside me. You don’t know the hurt I am.
You said it was non-adversarial.
My God.
Seven barristers.
Throwing questions at us.
Non-stop.
I tri.. attempted to commit suicide, there’s the woman who saved me from committing suicide, on me way down from Dublin, after spending five days at the commission. Five days I spent at the commission. They brought a man over from Rome, ninety odd years of age, to tell me I was telling lies.
That I wasn’t beaten for an hour, non-stop by two of them.
By two of them.
Non-stop from head to toe without a shred of cloth on my body.
My God minister.
And could I speak to you (comment directed to Leo Varadkar, Fianna Gael), and ask your leader, would you stop making a political football of this.
You hurt this when you do that.
You tear the shreds from inside our body.
For God’s sake, try and give us some peace.
Try to give us some peace and not to continue hurting us.
That woman will tell you how many times I jump out of the bed at night with the sweat pumping out of me. Because I see these fellas at the end of the bed with their fingers doing that (gestures) to me. And pulling me in to the room, to rape me, to bugger me and bate the shite out of me. That’s the way it is.
And you know what?
You know what, sometimes I listen to the leader of Fianna Fáil. I even listened to the apology. T’was mealy mouthed, but at least t’was an apology.
At least t’was an apology.
The Rosminians said in the report, they said they were easy on us. The first day I went to them. The first day to Rosminians in my home which is Ferryhouse in Clonmel, ’cause its the only home I know. He said “you’re in it for the money”.
We didn’t want money.
We didn’t want money. We wanted the pr… someone to stand up and say “yes, these fellas were buggered, these people were ra…”
Little girls. My daughter, oh sorry, my sister. A month old when she was put in to an institution. Eight of us from the one family, dragged by the ISPCC cruelty man. Put in to two cars, brought to the court in Clonmel. Left standing there without food or anything, and the fella in the long black frock and the white collar came along and he put us in to a van.
Not a van, a scut truck, I don’t know what you call it now. And landed us below with two hundred other boys. Two night later I was raped.
How can anyone…
You’re talking about constitution. These people would gladly say “yes” to a constitution to freeze the funds of the religous orders.
This state, this country of ours, would say “yes” to that constitition if you have to change it.
Don’t say you can’t change it.
You’re the governement of this state. You run this state. So for God’s sake stop mealy mouthing. ‘Cause I’m sick of it.
I’m sick of it.
You’re turning me away from voting Fianna Fáil which I have done from the first day that I could vote. Because. And you know me. You know me Mister Minister. You’ve met me on a number of ocassions. So you know what I’m like.
— End of transcript
Transcript via Will Knott
Last weekend I was a slight muppet and muddled dates. I was supposed to attend my nephew’s First Holy Communion back in Galway. I’m sorry that I disappointed my sister and all the effort that she would have gone to to celebrate the occasion, but how on earth could I stand in a church and endorse such nonsense especially when so many of their leaders are people whom one cannot take seriously.
On ITV’s News At Ten last night, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, the chap who became the latest Archbishop of Westminster, most senior Catholic in the UK, was asked about the 2,600 page report on clerical abuse in Ireland published yesterday.
His response:
“It’s very distressing and very disturbing. And my heart goes out today, first of all to those people who will find that their stories are now told in public.
“Second, I think of those in religious orders and some of the clergy in Dublin who have to face these facts from their past, which instinctively and quite naturally they’d rather not look at.
“That takes courage. And also we shouldn’t forget that this account today will also overshadow all of the good that they also did.”
I’m trying to think of something articulate and measured to say here, but the only word coming to my mind is ‘muppet’. At least Patrick Walsh, a spokesman for the Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, has more eloquence, describing the archbishop’s utterances as ‘the verbiage of unreason’.
After all these years, I’ll give the Church one thing, it still knows how to get our attention.
However, it stopped deserving our respect a long time ago.
Read more: The Executive Summary [pdf] of the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the full Report.
Also: On April 10, 2009, Nichols rejected the calls of former Prime Minister and Catholic convert Tony Blair for the Church to change its views on homosexuality, saying, “I am afraid the way the Catholic Church thinks is rather different to [Blair's thinking] and…I will take my guide from Pope Benedict actually.” Daily Mail
Here’s the full transcript of Muppet Bishop Richard Williamson’s apology.
The Holy Father and my Superior, Bishop Bernard Fellay, have requested [Translation: I have been forced to write this.] that I reconsider the remarks I made on Swedish television four months ago, because their consequences have been so heavy. [Sorry that the remarks brought heat on the Pope - not really sorry about the remarks being reprehensible].Observing these consequences I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks [Again, if the Jews and liberals hadn't thrown a hissy fit, I wouldn't be apologising], and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church [Sorry again Papa], but also to survivors and relatives [let's not put a specific number here. A plural could be two or 300,000 or 6 million (ha ha)] of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them. [I should have known better than say things that the Jews and liberals might get wind of. Fricking internet...]On Swedish television I gave only the opinion (…”I believe”…”I believe”…) of a non-historian [I'll leave this open. They can think I'm calling myself a non-historian or else that I got my Holocaust denial stuff from some other quack], an opinion formed 20 years ago on the basis of evidence then available, and rarely expressed in public since. [It's 'rarely' expressed, but it could be true though, right?]
However, the events of recent weeks [hissy fits] and the advice [ball busting] of senior members of the Society of St. Pius X have persuaded me of my responsibility for much distress caused [I've been told to take the heat off the top dogs]. To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said [Some of you have been milking it a bit, no?], before God I apologize.
As the Holy Father has said [screamed], every act of injust violence against one man hurts all mankind [he was really really fucked off when Angela Merkel phoned].
+Richard Williamson,
London, 26 February, 2009
