Ireland: A Case Study in the Psychosis of the Catholic Church

Despite its efforts to show case the good deeds it does - Pope Francis' PR push over the last year is a part of this - the Roman Catholic Church has left a wake of broken and ruined lives over the centuries as the bitter old men in dresses in Rome and in bishoprics across the world obsess over all things sexual.  Indeed the Vatican continues its jihad against gays despite Pope Francis' disingenuous seemly conciliatory statements on gays.  In few places was the Church's obsession with sex and its stranglehold on society stronger than in Ireland.  A piece in the Irish Times looks at the Church's history of cruelty and harm in Ireland.  Here are excerpts:

The Irish psychosis whose latest expression is thousands of dead babies in unmarked graves is a compound of four elements: superiority, shame, cruelty and exclusion.

A Catholic priest writing in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in 1922 under the pen-name Sagart, actually objected to the establishment of mother-and-baby homes, not on the grounds that they were horribly oppressive in principle, but that they might let unmarried mothers lose their proper sense of inferiority. 

The institutional church, meanwhile, was a giant factory for the mass production of shame and secrecy. It was the Irish secret service. In an article in The Irish Times in 1964, Michael Viney referred to “the secret-service mother-and-baby homes” run by religious orders in Ireland. 

The metaphor was not strained. Viney quoted the mother superior of a home he visited as telling him that the young women never set foot outside of the grounds: “They’d rather put up with a toothache than risk a visit to the dentist in the town, where they might just meet someone who would recognise them.” 

The church’s genius was that it both generated the shame and controlled the secrets that resulted from it.

The third element was cruelty – conscious and deliberate cruelty, aimed at the creation of fear. Catholic Ireland locked up in mental hospitals, industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother-and- baby homes an astonishing 1 per cent of its entire population. The cruelty of these places was not accidental.

Viney reported that the homes had well-run systems for sending letters from inmates to London – they were then posted back to the young woman’s family with British stamps, as if from an accommodation address in England. 

Cruelty and fear survive: the law of the land still says that a teacher in a Catholic school can be sacked without redress for getting pregnant outside marriage. Contempt for poor children is thriving – one third of our children currently live in deprivation. If you think we don’t treat vulnerable children as “deterrents” any more, have a look at the system for asylum seekers. And of course, we’ve reverted to the use of mass emigration as the solution to our social problems. The past has yet to pass.

 It is long past time that the Church and its hierarchy be held accountable for all of the horrors inflicted on innocents over the years.  Thankfully, the support for the Church in Ireland is in a long overdue free fall.