THE P
Snapdragon
RTAL
July 2018 Page 5
Of bile and comfort let us sing
Snapdragon muses on recent events
Musing as one does in the heady evenings of an English summer with bat and bird in full flight and the scent of flower pushing over the top of an overloaded glass of Pimms I fell to thinking , as one so often does as the evenings begin to draw in , about the joys of what until recently many of us would have thought of as unusual behaviour .
The late , and generally unlamented , Dr Harold Shipman could see little point in prolonging the lives of those whom he thought of as dull , uninspiring and unfashionable and being a man of settled opinion and habit killed many of them . The much reviled Jimmy Saville went in for sex with the young and or vulnerable on an industrial scale while pretending to do good works , while the antics of assorted Irish and English orders in running laundries , schools , orphanages and parishes showed a self centred cruelty that many of us thought was a little off and reflected rather badly on the religious communities involved .
Ealing , and Ampleforth have not come out of this reflecting the love of their maker or the rule of their founder . The Irish have had endless fun dragging half truths out of dishonest businessmen and politicians in enquiry after enquiry while the British have not covered themselves with much glory in enquiring about either Iraq or Ulster . In Australia the scale of repulsive behaviour unpicked by the Royal Commission is simply breath-taking and one wonders , before too much righteousness fills the breasts of our American readers , why the police in America prefer their targets to be black and dead . The British enquiry into institutionalised child abuse is rumbling on and the Church of England will come out of it badly .
Cardinal McCarrick , until 2006 Archbishop of Washington : Bishop Barros , until this month bishop of Osorno in Chile : Cardinal Pell , on sabbatical from the Vatican Bank : and Archbishop Wilson , until this month an active archbishop of Adelaide are all in the news for the wrong reasons . Cardinals Pell and McCarrick are accused of serious sexual misconduct , and are to stand trial , the latter having a number of confidential settlements to his discredit for sexual misconduct while bishop of two dioceses . Bishop Barros is the man who knew of the vile abuse perpetrated by his mentor , and who was appointed bishop of Barros by the Holy Father despite the pleas
of the entire bench of bishops that was not fit to be a diocesan bishop because of this . Archbishop Wilson is the man who deliberately did not tell the authorities about the child molesting activities of his former parish priest when the latter was being prosecuted , in clear dereliction of his duties , and who then lied about it to the court trying him .
To gasps of horror throughout the Catholic world two Australian jurisdictions and the Anglican Diocese of Canterbury ( the one in England not New Zealand ) have responded to the complete untrustworthiness of monks , priests and bishops by requiring any cleric hearing confessions to report any suspicions of child molesting to the police . The sanctity of the confessional broken after 2,000 years . Now dear reader , just flick back over the previous couple of paragraphs , and wonder how on earth this could have come to pass .
The two Cardinals are accused of homosexual abuse : the two bishops of knowing of homosexual abuse and of declining to do anything about it . How strange that in a society in which one is encouraged to be as experimental as possible in matters sexual the church is coming crashing down in a sea of sodomy . Clearly that is not all that is happening here : the protection of the reputation of the church , the desire to help friends , and the ability of the presently powerful to advance one ’ s career are all in play .
What comfort is there in all of this I hear you ask ? Might a very old dragon suggest that we have finally arrived at the scene of the greatest of car crashes . Doing whatever you want whenever you want to do it is the enduring call of the devil . The church is being ripped apart by the vile behaviour of those set in authority , the faithful melt away and the church is being conformed to the image of the world the flesh and the devil . At long last we can finally see that right is right and wrong is wrong and that those of us who want to be Christians are up for right . How cross the devil must be . Pimms anyone ?