Of Brave Catholic Clerics And Pond Life Scum

"Over the years, Mel Gibson has insulted Jews, African-Americans and Mexicans. Don't worry, if he hasn't insulted your ethnicity yet, he'll get around to it."
- David Letterman

By Charley Brady

Bejeepers, I never thought that I would be quoting Letterman, but he has a point. However, I prefer to think of Mad Mel as an equal opportunity nutter. If I'm honest he reminds me of myself a bit.

Well, if you take out hitting women and calling female police officers "sugar tits" and all the rest of his insanity, that is. Oh, yeah, and the shed loads of loot that he has and which I don't have and his 'devotion' to a weird sect of ultra-Catholics.

That alone is enough to turn you off religion forever.

So if you take all of that out of the equation then we could practically be brothers. And of course the alleged fact that he doesn't like n******s and homos and wet backs.

As a matter of fact I'm beginning to wonder what we have in common at all.

Let's see: I like live and let live. I don't have a problem with gays nor blacks or Mexicans (my favourite country in the world, by the way) and I don't like swine who hit women.

Still, it's at this moment still alleged, so I talked to my brother Donald in Scotland who has had a bee in his bonnet about Gibson (i.e. can't stand him,) and has had an almost pathological hatred for the man since he finished filming "Braveheart" and managed to insult the Scots.

That wasn't a great idea, since it was great film and he's a great director.

Scots have memories even longer than (God help us) the Irish. So Donald will never forgive him.

Mel can't just leave it alone though. So to all the blacks that he has insulted, to all the Jews, to the gays, please don't take offence as he doesn't seem to be all that crazy about Scots either.

Like I said, you can't really in good faith call this guy a racist. Jeez, he doesn't even like himself.

So: yeah, I guess we do have something in common after all.

Thank God I'm an atheist.

Yes, I know: that one is old enough to have barnacles on the keel.

I had written a piece yesterday on our mad Muslim friends, but what's the point of being disgusted by every sort of religion as regular readers know that I am?

Not when you have the mad Catholics stepping in with their own unique brand from Stage Right?

So I decided to shelve the Muslims for another day and get back closer to home. Why do I bother giving out about the Catholic Church when the likes of Herr Pope Bennie can shoot himself once again in the foot and just do the damned job for me?

I know that this guy is supposed to be infallible but if you good Catholics have a look into the history of your self-serving monarchy - yeah, that's right, it's a monarchy, albeit one that is usually run by some ancient character like Bennie - then you will notice that the Infallibility Clause [my words] only came into being in the last couple of hundred years. And even then it's only when he speaks from the Chair that the statements should be considered infallible.

To my knowledge and I'm damned sure that I will have the Usual Suspects telling me that I'm wrong, but this has only happened a couple of times, hasn't it?

So in other words he's just another bloke in a dress - who knows, Bennie might have suspenders on under there while he's telling you his angle on things because he's read a lot of gospels that were written sixty to one hundred years after the so-called facts while conveniently sidestepping what most us live with. Real facts, real situations.

If he reads his Old Testament in conjunction with the New Testament then even a man like Bennie - and let us be honest here, he is just a man - could not possibly reconcile the dreadful and vengeful Jehovah with the guy who is supposed to be It's Only Begotten Son.

One commands the rape of virgins and the sacrifice of your own child and the other tries to preach a better and kinder way of living.

I have to tell you, it sounds as if in this case the poisoned apple did in fact fall a very long way from the Tree of Knowledge.

Knowledge, eh? We can't be having that can we? The peasants might actually start thinking for themselves and that would never do.

I have to go out on a limb here and say that I believe that the Christ existed; but he also was just a man; given, mind you - as I must say - that he was an extraordinary man who took on the might of the most powerful Empire that ever existed at that point.

I find it hilarious that a tiny smidgen of a country like Ireland that erroneously calls itself a Republic should bow the knee to that worst of anachronisms, a city state like Vatican City.

I suppose I don't even have to argue this any more after last week when Pope Bennie made it abundantly clear that the rape of a child by a 'priest' should stand in the same category as a priest who ordinates a woman.

Let's be honest, going back to the dreaded Saint Paul and the utterly ghastly Saint Augustine they were all women haters. All of them.

Not the Christ, though: he seems to have actually enjoyed the company of women, despite the fact that he chose to hang out with a bunch of fishermen. Then again, I don't buy that simplistic nonsense either. They were all married and I doubt very much that they gave everything up to follow some scruffy hippy who was wandering around preaching a desert religion to desert people.

I don't believe that at all. This was one hell of a tough nut that had decided that the hold of organised religion at the time was going hand in hand in with imperialism under Roman rule and he was extremely p***ed off with seeing the equivalent of today's ass kissers sucking up to them.

Look at the Gospels: there isn't one single description as to how his actual appearance was. Not in any of them. The blue- eyed Aryan sandal wearing representative of today's Green Party simply can't be vouched for - well, unless you're going to accept our new religion of Hollywood mythology and if you are then stop reading right about... NOW.

He was a guy who had just had enough and decided to take the whole shower on. If he was alive today he would have been storming the Dáil last week when he saw the rows of wheelchairs outside it as Irish citizens had to almost beg - beg, mind you - that they do not be put through even more hell by having any more allowances cut or hospitals closed simply because we are paying through the nose for NAMA, the equivalent for the money lenders in the Temple.

The Christ would have gone through them like s*** through rice paper, something that we the fighting Irish seem to be unable to do.

As I've often said, we talk a great fight in the pub.

Big deal. Big swinging mickey. Why aren't we doing something that counts for something instead of playing pool, drinking or whining about the latest tax that's been imposed on us by unscrupulous thieves that are now desperately trying to cover their own over fed arses?

Anyway, back to God's representative on earth; and no I'm not talking about Bono or Geldof.

I'm back to Bennie.

He says that under Canon Law the very thought of ordaining a woman priest is subject to the same - the exact same - penalty as is raping a child.

New rules: priests can be defrocked or excommunicated for Paedophile offences, sexually abusing mentally handicapped adults [note the adults bit by the way] and attempting [attempting if you don't mind] the ordination of women.

If there is a single female at mass tomorrow then I can only assume that they go along with this utter bilge from a decrepit old drag artist who has been so far removed from ordinary human thought that he is in no way able to interconnect with the real world anymore.

Good on ya Bennie! You know that they will indeed be there, singing their little egotistical hearts out louder than anyone else so that they can show off the new dress and the fancy new hat that they're a-wearing, pushing each other aside to get the best seat right at the front pew so that the priest will see how pious they are.

It's just a shameful pity that there are not more priests like Father Ryan of Saint Matthew's Church in Ballyfermot, Dublin. I may not have much time for the church but I have a hell of a lot of respect for brave men like this elderly cleric.

Indeed, nothing but respect for him.

He had the unenviable task of saying mass at the funerals of two brothers who had been shot during one of our unending drug wars. Instead of going the usual mealy mouthed way that most priests have done under similar circumstances he decided to make a point by asking his congregation to look at the "wretched, torn, bullet-ridden bodies" in front of them and think again about the consequences of living the lives that they had led.

So far, that seemed to me to be the kind of thing that a community priest should naturally do for his own community; but this is Ireland of the New Lawless and so of course he was threatened in front of his own alter for having the temerity to do such a thing.

Needless to say the good Christian folk in the pews sat there clutching their little prayer books and did nothing when watching an elderly man being threatened by a female gouger.

Who can blame them? The police, much as they would like to, have almost no power over people who time and again have threatened and even killed witnesses to their appalling violence.

I do not blame them. They have families and we know in this country what happens to your family when you come forward to give evidence against scum. I

f I had kid I wouldn't do it. Would you?

Yet Father Seamus Ryan didn't flinch. He stood there and took it like the man that he is.

For all that I give out about the church I just want to offer up my utter respect (much as that sorry commodity is worth) to a genuine Irish hero. If there were more like him then the churches might start to fill again.

Here though we don't give our respect to heroes like Father Ryan. We may pretend otherwise but what we give our respect to are politicians who have been seen - nudge, nudge, wink, wink - to be getting away with cheating the establishment out of shed loads of expenses. What we admire are bankers that will never see the inside of a jail cell. We like the idea of the 'rogue' - Jeez, how I hate that word. We don't seem to see that the 'Establishment' that these gougers are shafting are none other than ourselves.

We should be hanging our heads in shame. I heard only the other day when raising the topic of Father Ryan: "Would you not think that he should have kept his mouth shut and just got on with the service?"

So: a sneaking regard for the murdering drug merchants, the peddlers in human misery who ARE getting away with it. The Death Junkies who will go on and on until they too get the inevitable bullet through the back of their skulls.

When it happens - and it usually happens at a very young age for these creeps - myself and people like me will have no sympathy; none at all.

If they all wiped their loathsome selves out in the morning I would be rejoicing, not shedding even one damned tear.

Tom, my late father, would be horrified by me. He was a three times a week in church man and he was not one of these yokes who was street angel, house demon. He was a genuinely good person who gave myself and my brothers the kind of upbringing that some are only able to dream of.

I miss him every day but can't help but think that I would have been a very bitter disappointment to him. He had a sense of quiet peace about him that I never inherited for some reason.

For myself, I'll go on longing for the time that certainly won't occur in MY lifetime when every drug dealing piece of pond life on this island has wiped themselves off the face of the land.

I make no apologies for that.

Whatever God you worship, whatever beliefs you have, may they go with you until next week when I hope to see you all again.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net