I often rant and rave at the stupidity of allowing two million (and counting) Muslims into this crowded set of small islands. I honestly call them the true ‘Fifth Column’ because that is what they are. They do not assimilate, nor do they integrate; they stand alone, insular and defiant; because they know that their ‘effing allah will succeed. All they have to do is breed, and they shall, eventually, overcome.
But it is, unfortunately, not the first time that a Religion has taken power in either a whole country, or region of a country. Not overtly, that would have been instantly detected, and crushed; but slowly, insidiously, and totally, using one means of power alone, and that is the fear of eternal damnation if its needs and demands are not met. I commenced writing about Islam, but the religion of whom I write now is an older one, namely Roman Catholicism. Readers might think that I engage in hyperbole; but fear not: I can prove every word, every sentence which I write.
The Country is of course, the island of Ireland. Split into the Republic and the British Province of Northern Ireland, the insidiously deadly purpose of the Church, which was to govern and rule, was implicit in every Law, every provincial Council, every Parish bulletin issued or debated within the Republic. The Bishops’ word was akin to Law, the rule was achieved with an iron fist encased within a silken glove, and the Parish Priest was taken and accepted as the Speaker of the True Gospel, and what they said, what they demanded, was given and achieved unstintingly. Their power was slightly diluted within Northern Ireland, because the Protestant Anglicans, together with the Orange Order, ruled the roost in Belfast; but there were hundreds of small Catholic churches in the province: and where there was a Catholic Priest, there was a man whose word was Law, whose demand was that there be children, and more children, from every marriage; for the idea of contraception and worse; abortion: was anathema to Rome, and of course Dublin. Add to that the unspoken tribute paid to the IRA, whose very existence was both accepted and acknowledged in the Dublin Hierarchy, and you have what was a reality, the rule of the Word backed up by the rule of the Gun.
I do not write of the Governments imposed by Great Britain, which ended when Partition was declared and the island was split in two; nor do I write of the Government of the Republic of Ireland, which has governed since Independence was declared. I write of the ‘Invisible Government’, which, to all intents and purposes, was the real ‘Government’. I write of the Bishops, of the Parish Priest, whose very word was akin to Law; and of the enormous bureaucracy and wealth of the Catholic Church, which told people what they should read, or write, or even to think and to behave, in and out of wedlock; all according to the traditions and rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Of a ‘Government’ which routinely connived at the issue of passports and travel documents so that small children, the illegitimate sons and daughters of usually illiterate and certainly ill-educated young women who had committed the grave ‘sin’ of having sex outside of marriage, and therefore had borne the very ‘Spawn of Satan’ could be routinely packaged, and sent off to America as they had literally been sold by the convents and homes where they had been born, in false and fake adoptions to ‘good Catholic Families’ in the United States.
I watched the documentary by Martin Sixsmith entitled ‘Ireland’s Lost Babies’, which attempted to discover the routes by which literally thousands of babies and tiny children were routinely trafficked, mainly but not exclusively, to widespread dioceses in the United States, and ‘adopted’ for a large ‘donation’ to that same Church, by Catholic families. I place the word ‘adopted’ in inverted commas, because, in most cases, the convents and homes were neither authorised to act as adoption agencies, nor did they question or otherwise check out the suitability of the prospective family units; the only two questions asked was whether the family were ‘practicing Catholic’, and the second question was whether the donation would be cash or cheque? Meanwhile, the mothers, now forever deprived of their children after ‘signing away’ their rights to hold that child ever again, were forced to work as slave labour in the Magdalene laundries which made another wonderful profit for that same, beneficent, Catholic Church.
I also watched the fantastic film ‘Philomena’, which was the source for the Sixsmith documentary. Yes, it was a fictionalised account of one of these ‘fallen women’ who, after fifty years of grief and trauma, found the courage to speak of the illegitimate son she had given life to, and to attempt, with Martin Sixsmith’s help, to trace her son in America. She, played by the remarkable Judi Dench, had attempted many times to gain knowledge from the convent where she had lived and slaved. The story went from Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan, being a cynical unbeliever of Philomena’s story, to both actually tracing the adoptive parents and finding that that small boy had become a successful lawyer who advised Presidents. They also discovered that Philomena’s son was dead, as he had succumbed to the ravages of AIDs, because he was a homosexual. But the saddest piece of the film was to follow, because the journalist and the grieving mother discovered that her son’s lover had actually taken her son’s remains back to Ireland, and he was buried at the back of the convent where he was born. There were some remarkably funny moments in that film, but the one piece which shall stay with me for a great many days was when Philomena confronts the aged nun who had not only sent her child away, but also had routinely denied the very fact that the convent knew anything about her son at all. Philomena asks why she had been denied her son, and the old nun shrieked that ‘her child was the result of the grave sin of ‘carnal incontinence’, and what was done; was done!” That, although just a few seconds of a feature fiction film, says it all as far as this commentator is concerned. The Church had ordained that the girls had sinned, they would be punished, and the children, property of the Church, were disposed of as was seen fit. The film may have been made to tell a story, and hopefully make a profit, but it also carried a message, that the Church hasn’t even begun to apologise to those it had routinely abused, betrayed and lied to, and that message grows louder by the day!
New to me, mainly because I am unable to travel to cinemas because I am needed at home, was the viewing of the award-winning movie Spotlight (on Amazon Prime) which gave a merciless dissection of the iron grip which the ‘eminent’ Cardinal Law held, by means both legal and extra-legal; over the treatment of the victims of sexual abuse carried out by priests within the Boston diocese, and the manner in which those same priests were protected, nourished and passed around the Diocese like knights and rooks on a life-sized chessboard; but in a game of chess where the only losers were the boy and girl victims of these cassocked predators, penetrated and/or sodomized by those same ‘Men of God’; and the winner was always the bloody Catholic Church, along with the Boston diocese. The Diocese KNEW of the abuse, KNEW of the lies, the fabrications and the deceit, and did ‘eff all about it, because the ‘Good Name of the Diocese’ might be besmirched.
The final frames of the movie say it all.
- There were 249 priests and brothers publicly accused of sexual abuse in Boston diocese.
- Well over 1000 survivors in Boston alone.
- In December 2002, Cardinal Law resigned; but was reassigned to the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the most prominent churches in Rome.
- Major abuse scandals have surfaced from Brazil to New Zealand, From England to Canada, from Australia to Ireland.
If this is what one has to expect from a Religion which professes love, peace and charity; may God, if there is a God, help us if they ever put their minds to revelling in their dispassionate License to deprave and terrorise!
Fire, Pillage & Plague 