ragon
THE
P RTAL
September 2018
Page 5
Clamavi in toto
corde meo
Snapdragon on the current crisis in the Church
S itting in
the boathouse keeping an eye on dogs, grandchildren and lunch as the
rain came pelting down this week, my mind wandered freely across the loch taking in as
much of the view, church history and spiders, as was consistent with keeping snouts out of
baskets. Robert the Bruce is said to have drawn inspiration from the persistence of a spider
and decided on the strength of a bit of web spinning to have one more go at regaining a
kingdom. Spiders, I can report, have nothing on Labradors when it comes to the sheer hard
work necessary to get into lunch for 12, packed into snout proofed boxes. In between all of
this, prompted by the letter the Holy Father sent to me on Monday, I fell to thinking about
the mess the church is in at the moment. One doesn’t often get a letter from a pope, even if everyone else
seems to have got it as well, so a bit of cogitation seemed in order.
I gather that this is the worst crisis in the history of
the church but it doesn’t seem to me to be quite as bad
as the fuss caused by Arius or by Martin Luther for that
matter. This one isn’t a question of faith or doctrine
but of morals and discipline. As far as one can see, lots
and lots of homosexual clergymen have abused one
another and tried out their filthy perversions on the
young. Once caught, they have used church money to
pay off their victims and moved themselves around in
hot pursuit of new blood.
This is sin and appears to have going on since the late
1950s. Those set in authority are either at it themselves
or, having known the perverts for years, cannot bring
themselves to do much about it. This too is sin. Re-
reading the Holy Father’s letter I suppose this is what
he is driving at, but why I have to fast in an act of
repentance for what he characterises as clericalism,
is beyond me. The sinning of clergymen is not
clericalism, it is wicked behaviour; nor is the pathetic
habit of thinking that everything that father says and
does is right, clericalism. That is infantilism which is
not quite the same thing.
In the back of my mind, as I shared what had been a
perfectly good packet of Chedders with 2 dogs and an
extremely damp ghillie, I had a vague recollection that
councils have been called to deal with the question
of how bishops are to be dealt with when they err. I
also had an even vaguer recollection that the prophets
faced this sort of behaviour in the past and that the
consequences of not dealing with it was a wholesale
clear out of Israel and the destruction of the Temple.
Fortunately, the dogs were driven off by the arrival of
the wet and hungry and I could put Ezekiel’s unpleasant
discoveries out of my mind.
Perhaps I ought to write back to Pope Francis and
point all of this out: perhaps we all ought to write back,
which is what one generally does when one gets a letter
from anyone important, and let him know how much
we all value his efforts to keep things generally ship
shape and Bristol fashion.
While we are about it perhaps we could tell him what
we also all know to be true, which is that deacons,
priests and bishops, amongst whom we number
cardinals and popes, are required to avoid sexual
intercourse with those to whom they are not married
(which in most cases is everyone in the world). Just
because the sin of fornication has become immensely
popular in the world and homosexuality a matter of
civic right, does not mean that we should all be at it
with or without someone else’s children. I expect as
Pope, he knows all this but just in case, why not write
and tell him? Imagine the effect of a billion letters each
suggesting that every single one of those about whom
he had written to us had to go, regardless of th e short
term effect on the numbers in ordained ministry.
The letter idea got short shrift at dinner that night:
the general consensus was that most people were
too mean to invest in a stamp and were they to do
so the Italian post office simply couldn’t cope. A
visiting American amused us greatly by insisting that
Cardinal Tobin, who spends much of the year in the
Archdiocese of Newark, has announced that he had no
idea that a homosexual subculture operated within the
clergy of his own diocese and that another Cardinal
has apologised for failing to get his secretary to draw
to his attention the revolting activities of Cardinal,
now Archbishop, McCarrick.
... continued at the foot of the next page Ø