Colm Toibin: Among the Flutterers

Colm Toibin writes splendidly about the sexual problems of the Catholic Church in the current London Review of Books. With a wry, wise touch he addresses the Church's sorry efforts to assert its own 'victimhood', notes its (much needed) loss of authority in Eire ("The bishops, priests and nuns are sinking, but have every intention of putting up a struggle before they drown"), and is interestingly sceptical about conservative Catholics who believe their Church was only corrupted quite recently by a kind of homosexual entry-ism.

On a personal level (at 16 Toibin too thought he had 'felt the call') he writes with the expected candour and precision: "Becoming a priest solved not only the outward problem of forbidden and unmentionable sexual urges, but, perhaps more important, offered a solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in the deepest recesses of the self." (The solution Toibin has in mind, by the way, is a quiet life of compassion, "doing good and being good", not seizing the chance to live in an all-male cloister and prey sexually on the innocent and powerless.)

There is humour too, as he mentions a writer friend who visited an Irish seminary in the 1980s, and looked on as a fair few "young candidates for the priesthood, boys from rural Ireland, attempted Wildean witticisms; he noticed them wearing specially tailored soutanes, moving around each other, excitedly, like a flock of girls..." This is Father Ted territory. Toibin also has some sport with the suspicions that seem to attend Pope Ratzinger's desire to carry on like an elderly fashion victim and keep a handsome valet at his side. But I wouldn't know anything about that... Nor do I understand what Toibin's trying to admire, like so many before him, in the enigmatic fence-sitting John Paul II.

By the end, though, Toibin has put the Church's sex problem back into succinct and troubling form: "The problem is that, after all that has been revealed, many of us who were brought up in the Church now know that we once listened to sermons about how to conduct our lives from men who were child molesters. And that senior members of the Church hierarchy protected these men, believing that the reputation of the Church was more important than the safety of children, and that Church law was superior to civil law. When they were found out, their sorrow was not fully credible."

Ratzinger: "the stench of evil"

Olenka Frenkiel's report for Newsnight last week on the general failure of Ireland's Garda Siochana - consequent to the findings of the Murphy Report into clerical abuse - to pursue and prosecute Catholic priests who raped children; and on the specific case of the paedophile ex-priest Bill Carney - who was paid off by the Church to make himself scarce, and still takes his holidays in the Canary Islands - was as upsetting as anything I've seen on television this decade. That this morass of turpitude, hypocrisy and lies is one to which Catholicism makes a distinctive contribution by dint of its own backward nature - its granting of near-divine authority on earth to human men made out of the paltriest and most rancid physical/moral material - is proven in the grim and creepy personage of the current Pope, who was propelled to office by the widespread feeling that what the Vatican really needed was 'a sound man', after years of presumably lackadaisical liberalism under the profoundly conservative Pole Karol Wojtyla. Christopher Hitchens, God bless him, says what needs saying about Ratzinger in Slate today:
"The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that."

"Good evening Mr Waldheim / And Pontiff, how are you?"

"... You have so much in common / in the things you do." Apologies to Lou Reed, but this interesting number from the New York album has been running through my head ever since that old Hitler Youth alumnus Joseph Ratzinger, who now gets to call himself Pope Benedict XVI, made his touching pre-Christmas pronouncement about the human race dying out because of homosexuality and 'gender theory', and the need to preserve 'God's creation' just as zealously as we protect (or talk about protecting) the rainforests.

Clearly, obviously, there are no homosexual people whatsoever in the Roman Catholic Church, closeted or repressed or otherwise. But other gay Christians have gamely engaged with Ratzinger on his own toxic terms, arguing (from the Bible? You tell me...) that people in this world with homosexual inclinations are also part of 'God's creation'. That all seems a bit too polite to me, but whatever: I do believe you should let people go to Hell in their own sweet way, even if they condemn themselves so out of their very own mouths.

To speak of one such, after Ratzinger's verbal excretion BBC News 24 gave airtime to one of his UK apologists, Joanna Bogle - I say 'apologist', but she appeared very proud of herself and her faith and of God's vicar in the Vatican, while also clearly feeling herself the member of a brave and persecuted minority of staunch moralists out there. So the BBC's blonde female newsreader got quite an earful from Bogle, as well as being patronised royally (and inexplicably) over her grasp on the provenance of birds and bees. Hey, let all voices be heard and debated in this world, but people who believe the stars are God's daisy chain should be very careful about patronising anybody. That such belief should also lead one into the conviction that the sole purpose (and attendant worth) of human sexuality is vested entirely in the making of babies is a shocking ignorance too; and an equally great big shame.