The View, 28/01/2021: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000rssw via @bbciplayer
Painful as it was for me to do, I watched Eamon Martin’s whole interview on BBC i player.
It was obvious to me that he was making a great effort to be very politically correct – the mourner’s tone, the sticcato verbalisation, the quasi tearful eyes, etc.
He went way over the top in trying to shift the blame as much as he could away from the Church to society as a whole.
But society does not just emerge without movers and shakers and without people and organisations that actually shape it.
The society that existed in the Republic of Ireland was shaped almost wholly by the Roman Catholic Church – apart from the obvious effects caused by the 800 years of British occupation – which had more effect on politics rather than life in general.
Society in the Republic of Ireland between 1921 and perhaps 1970 was a confessional Roman Catholic society.
The Purple Parliament at Maynooth dictated to the Dail and in the person of John Charles McQuaid, who was De Valera’s friend, confident and Lord Archbishop, there was the REAL ruler of Ireland.
Not only did Dev genuflect to McQuaid and kiss his bejewelled hand, but he also involved McQuaid and a number of Holy Ghost and Jesuit priests in the writing of the 1937 Constitution.
The Constitution declared that Roman Catholicism was the state religion.
And Dev & Co put the church in charge of schools, hospitals, universities, orphanages, mother and baby homes, Magdalen Laundries etc.
In opposing the minister for health, Dr Noel Browne, McQuaid insisted that the bodies, sexuality and souls of women and children were EXCLUSIVELY a matter for the RCC and none of the state’s concern or business.
McQuaid even rebuked the editor of The Irish Press for carrying women’s underwear adds that showed an obscure image of the vagina – what McQuaid called the “mons veneris”.
The RCC owned the vaginas, breasts, wombs and fallopian tubes of every Irish Catholic woman and would limit, control and dictate their use.
So the attitude of the whole of Irish society on all these matters were created and maintained by the bishops, priests and religious
Irish ethics and morals had to conform, in every detail to Roman Catholic doctrine and teaching.
And if doctors, policemen, lawyers, journalists etc wanted to keep their jobs they upheld that teaching too.
It was people like McQuaid who banned the writer and teacher John McGahern from teaching and forced him into exile in England.
Amy is trying to push the blame on to society.
That society was a creation of the RCC.
It was not society that forced women to eat their own vomit in mother abd baby homes. It was Roman Catholic nuns who did that.
It was not society that made a pregnant woman mop up after her waters broke. It was an RC nun.
It was not Adel’s (the lady we read about tge other day) father who drove her to imprisonment. It was her parish priest.
It was not the unfortunate women who sold their babies into adoption. It was the RCC that did that.
WHAT TO DO NEXT
1. We need a full public enquiry, North and South into everything that went on in RC institutions.
2. Any priest or nun still alive who was part of the RC gulags should be prosecuted and imprisoned.
3. The state should confiscate RCC bank accounts and properties to give all survivors the most generous of compensation.
4. And I imagine this will never happen, but the RCC should be a proscribed organisation like other organisations responsible for torture and death.
Historically the RCC is guilty of various forms of terrorism.
The women and children in those homes experienced real terror. And those who inflicted the terror on them are surely to be called terrorists?
I was born in 1952.
I experienced terror, physical and emotional in the RC schools I attended.
I entered seminary in 1970 and I experienced forms of emotional and intellectual terrorism in Clonliffe Seminary, Dublin.
I experienced severe bullying at the hands of clergy in Wales and Down and Connor.
But most of us, thank God, have never suffered the terrors and horrors suffered by those poor women and children.
I often ask myself why God has never repaid the RCC for all the evil it has done.
And then I remember that God has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church.
BISHOP PAT BUCKLEY 