If Christ Returned There Would Be A Lot Of Out-Of-Work Clerics

"They told us of a second coming
So we all looked to the sky;
But it's not a saviour that we wanted:
Just someone else to crucify."
- New Model Army

By Charley Brady

How appropriate. If Jesus actually were to return to this earth he would be appalled at what his legacy has turned out to be.

And if he were to confront the deeply corrupt and sinister city-state of the Vatican then those stalwart people would assuredly find a different way to crucify him all over again. Just in order to cover their own asses, you understand.

He wouldn't fit in, that's for sure. The Jewish mystic that ran amok in the temple of the moneymen would have no time at all for the frock- wearing hypocrites who actually dare to speak in his name while at the same time accumulating shed loads of loot that most of us can only dream about.

It's odd. Despite my disbelief in any sort of life after this I do believe that around two thousand years ago Jesus the man walked this earth.

And what a man he must have been.

I wonder how many so- called Christians have contemplated how much guts it must have taken to confront the might of organised religion at that time.

So instead of decent values such as he seems to have espoused we're stuck with the aftermath of the Ryan Report.

May 27th

As I write this the 18 shoddy Orders who were behind the organised rape, abuse and mental torture of thousands of children are still trying to brazen it out and saying that they will not pay one cent extra over the cobbled together deal that our heroic government did with them in 2002.

With the exception of the Christian Brothers, who needed to be shamed into it, they're not interested in giving anything back to compensate for the lives that they have ruined or for the suicides that these good Christian folks were directly responsible for.

This isn't "The Little House on the Prairie". This isn't "The Waltons". This is the work of genuinely ruthless, calculating men and women who were willing to sell their souls for money and if thousands of kids were buggered and left shattered as adults, well, it's all in the Lord's name, isn't it?

Or, as I hear more and more: "It's just the times that were in it."

What in the name of whatever God you believe in is that supposed to mean?

Unfortunately, the Lord our God must have been taking another day of rest when the "suffer little children to come unto me" were being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night to satisfy the lust of demons who would, next morning, be placing a wafer on their tongue and gruffly telling them to "love one another".

There are so many things that are not being addressed here: for one, how is it that such a concerted group of sadistic monsters were all attracted to one particular church?

And if you give me that argument (that I am sick of hearing) that it was because Ireland was a sexually repressed society - which it was - then I'm going to get a pair of pliers and begin to pull my own teeth out without the use of anaesthetic.

There are many lonely men and women in any society who, just through geography or a myriad of other factors have never really had a relationship. What they do is get on with it. They deal with the hand that fate dealt them.

Love doesn't happen for everyone. What it doesn't do to you is turn you into the kind of depraved creature who rejoices in taking a fellow human - and for heaven's sake, a child at that - by force.

That argument is never going to wash with me.

So at the moment we're up against a stalemate. The Orders are simply refusing to step up and admit that they should be handing over everything - EVERY asset they have - and then get down and beg forgiveness for every rape, every beating and every life that they have destroyed.

And if it had happened to me then that still wouldn't be enough.

Nor do I believe that, as has been said, we must try to understand the perpetrators of this abuse. I don't want to understand them. I have no need to understand them.

What the hell would I learn from them anyway, apart from giving them some sort of warped credence for their barbarism?

I'm more than willing to learn from guys who drink too much, who like to argue in a civilized manner and who live a life that is far from perfect, because those kind of people I can relate to; but genuine monsters walking the earth who took turns at raping children?

What on earth would any amount of psychobabble tell me about them except that the key should be thrown away in the very unlikely event that any of them ever do time?

Why can we never say what these people are in this country?

They are psychopaths and sociopaths. There's no need to study the bastards: there is nothing to study, unless you wilfully wish to go into the very depths of the human psyche. And I wouldn't call these aberrations human in any event.

On the political debate program "Questions and Answers" two nights ago we were sitting listening to the usual mealy-mouthed nonsense about where we go from here when suddenly one courageous man changed the landscape of the whole program. It was one of the most riveting and honest pieces of television that I've ever seen, as much as anything because it came straight out of the blue and straight from the wounded heart of a 75-year-old man who was past pulling any punches.

Michael O'Brien had obviously simply had enough. "You don't know what happened!" he yelled at Minister Noel Dempsey. "You haven't got the foggiest! You are talking through your hat, and you are talking to a Fianna Fail man, that worked tooth and nail for the party that you are talking about. You didn't do it right. You don't know the hurt that I feel inside."

Michael O'Brien is a former Lord Mayor of Clonmel but he is also a man in whom the wounds have never really healed. How could they?

Until the age of eight he lived in a little village between Clonmel and Cahir but when his mother died... well, I'll let his words speak for themselves:

"There were 13 of us. I was the sixth-eldest, and when my mother died eight of us were taken into care; the youngest was just a month-old. There was no other reason we were brought in except that we were now motherless...

"You were a ward of the court and the judge didn't care what hellhole he sent you to.

"He was two-and-a-half years there before they told us he was our brother. That's the way the State worked. They didn't care; nobody cared."

As Michael so articulately and so angrily put it on "Questions and Answers" (except that there were only questions, no answers) he was raped on the second night that he was there. Words really don't paint a picture of his description and how he is still haunted and wakes up screaming in front of his wife after all these years.

And this is a tough man. No wonder that many more fragile souls ended their lives as hopeless alcoholics or drug addicts.

"He raped me seven or eight times altogether over the years I was there. I wasn't the only fella. He brought lots of other boys into that little room".

Even to write about this is hell, so I have no idea - none at all - as to what these poor children went through. To read the report and see how much these children loved Christmas Day because the priests and the brothers were too drunk to abuse them is just to make me feel that I wish I could have my father back for a couple of minutes, if only to tell him how much I appreciate the great childhood that he and my mother gave me.

Instead I'm reading about children so thirsty that they were drinking from the toilet-bowls. And if they were caught doing that they were beaten unmercifully.

I took a pop at Journalist Kevin Myers last week for his way of looking at this, so let me re-address that because when he gets it right he sure does get it right.

In today's column he writes: "This is not a Christian country and never has been, either in the way it has treated the less fortunate, or most of all, in the way it has revered the founding icons of its identity."

I couldn't agree more.

Meanwhile, Bertie Ahern continues to be the most self- serving re-writer of history we've ever produced.

While being the main guy who let a couple of nuns talk Fianna Fail into the appalling deal whereby the Orders get to pay a miniscule amount of what they should, in any sane country, be paying he just can't help but lecture us once again.

Not ALL of the children in these "communities" were abused, according to statesman Bertie (man of the people) Ahern: "Let's be clear about that!" he thundered.

Well, if those children, Bertie, man of the people as you are, had to witness their companions being beaten and dragged off to the rape-rooms then I would humbly suggest to you that they were abused in their own way and will have images in their heads that they will never be free of.

Apart from anything else distasteful with Ahern and his increasingly ludicrous statements, doesn't it sound just a little like the argument that maybe six million Jews didn't die under Adolf; that maybe it was just - oh, for the sake of argument, maybe just one million.

Ahern, one dead Jewish person or one raped Catholic child under the care of what is supposed to be a caring society - that is one too many by far.

30th May

Well, I waited as long as I could before sending this in to my long-suffering editor.

The Orders are still holding out and even if they offered a fiver between the whole miserly bunch of them it would be too late now. They have proved that they care less for souls than for money and that's the bottom line, isn't it?

This was a decades-long conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the politicians - and yes, to a certain extent between the medical authorities, the gardai and the Judiciary.

Let's call it what it was, which is an unusual thing on this island of saints and scholars.

They're not going to help the taxpayer out on this one. But didn't we set up, in the fallout from the assassination of Veronica Guiren something called the Criminal Assets Bureau? Since ultimately these Orders have benefited very well from criminal activity that no- one seems to be accountable for, isn't it time to start seizing their land and property from them?

And if we can't do that then can I urge every single one of you God-fearing parishioners to never again give one of your hard-earned cents into those baskets that they give you every damned Sunday. They have done nothing to deserve your money.

I'm sick of walking on eggshells just because I know decent priests, nuns and brothers who have lived exemplary lives; now it's time for THEM to say in no uncertain terms that they want to see rapists and child beaters who have taken their lives' work from them to start paying for their crimes - both with money and by being put behind bars until the end of their miserable existences.

This one isn't going to go away. Not because of journalists but because this time the people are very, very angry indeed.