The late and very much missed Father Felix Beattie used to wonder what priests did in the afternoons. Now just half way through 2018 and still no attempt to take up the Pope’s suggestion that bishops discuss extending ordination , let us consider what bishops do. Archbishop Cushley of course will be brushing up on his actuary homework to prove we actually will have x priests in the year x ; another is very worried about Trident and nuclear disarmament , despite the latter’s success in preventing World War 3. But these things pass the time. But ignore the Scottish bishops- we think they ask nothing more- and look at bishops in general , why they don’t want us to receive the Eucharist, and see if we can detect some kind of rationale. Now don’t laugh !
Let’s take celibacy first. They must know why it started- I’ll get on to clerical education next week . In the early Middle Ages, some legitimately married priests were leaving church property to their children. The answer was to confine the provision of the Eucharist to unmarried men without any reference of any kind to Christ’s Eucharistic command at the Last Supper. Presumably our bishops still accept this, which does make it rather difficult to accept anything they say seriously.
This is not a humorous blog , but the next point about celibacy does come up occasionally . No, seriously. It is cultic purity, the idea that women are impure. Before the invention of a practical cold shower , this must have been handy enough as opposed to thinking about it. We apologise for any spelling mistakes at this point : we are trying to imagine the faces of a Scottish congregation on being told this , especially if they read the local press.
People speak of the Mafia , the Freemasons and possibly even the BBC in terms of institutional solidarity. Institutional solidarity with a conscious or subconscious sense of grievance at deprivation of something as human and natural as family life is even more satisfying to experience , and more difficult to combat . Other than just shaking one’s head and walking away , which most people in the Church have simply done. It is a direct refutation of the concept of the Good Shepherd . But if you can ignore Holy Thursday, well, the sky’s the limit.
Possibly literally so.
Some schools have a school song : a line from ours warned about ‘Vana mentis gloria’.If you have your own uniform, uncontrolled authority , even your own language in a way, plus the occasional person still referring to ‘Your lordship’, not to mention Canon Law-framed in 1917, incidentally- to back you up , well why listen to anyone else ? Even to the Gospels on Holy Thursday ? The expression ‘All power corrupts ; absolute power corrupts absolutely ‘was aimed directly at the Church.
The American scholar Marshall McLuhan was partially correct in his very early warnings about the power of the media. A prescient American writer asked ‘What if he’s right?’ as he mostly was.
Do any bishops in 2018 ever ask ‘What if we’re wrong ?’ This is an area never covered by definition in the many writings of St Pope John Paul II, to which they tend as a group to be addicted in every sense of the word.
When will they ever agree that they are , and find their way to extend valid ordination to parishioners ? Can’t they see that their authority is not affected but in fact increased by this, not to mention the transformation to the Church that this would permit ? Perhaps even allowing as a result the Flock to receive the Eucharist?
We celebrate this week the Feast of St Peter and St Paul . We hope that this week they would add a celebration of the life of St Peter’s mother in law, with all its implications.

Some aspects of the Irish abortion referendum were particularly interesting. One was the fares of Irish students in the UK being paid by some university groups to go back home and vote. Not so much of the ‘Saxon foe ‘ stuff nowadays! And who was paying and why? Actually why in particular, when you think about it.
An Irish daily newspaper- in an article quite opposed to abortion- makes the following point : ‘The vast majority-97% -of all abortions are in cases of crisis pregnancy, a deeply distressing circumstance in the main endured by women who are young , unwed or single’(we don’t see the distinction either). Where have these women been? It has been pointed out before that anybody sitting at the back of a bus full of schoolchildren and requiring an education in the mechanics of sex can easily receive a spectacularly wide one. In Victorian times or Edwardian times this could be obtained in brown paper covers from seedy shops near railway stations, but damn it, do young women not watch TV, where the narrative thread of any drama ever since the Bond films must have an interruption in the narrative thread for a coitus? Do they not watch perfume adverts? Or in 2018, even chewing gum adverts? Where have they been ?
The journalist Mary Kenny wrote the perceptive ‘Goodbye, Catholic Ireland’ which defined Holy Ireland rather effectively, juxtaposing Ireland’s astonishing missionary activity along with queries to Catholic magazines as to whether saying the rosary wearing gloves was still effective. This website’s favourite episode has been repeated too often . (You know the one- the toilet one ). A little Irish town I used to visit had a parish priest and two curates. Each had his own house, and the parish priest was known to some as ‘Old Belly o’Pups’, not a remark to be heard among the parishioners of the Cure D’Ars, one imagines. The wild boys of the parish playing cards at the back of the chapel during Mass have appeared in Irish fiction for nearly a hundred years. Further back, before the Famine, priests struggled unavailingly against faction fights and the fairy culture with its consequent high rate of infanticides, much worse than abortion , after all, since it involved picking up and murdering real live babies. The song ’Shall My Soul pass through Old Ireland, Lord ? ‘is in theological terms indicative of a stupefyingly low IQ. There is the pathological and all consuming Irish fear of what other people- from village idiots to the gombeen man, or anybody- might think of them, and its impact on high Mass attendance. There is obviously a great deal of stony ground beneath the green fields, and always has been.
But we must be fair, even to the Yes advocates. The Irish film star of the Thirties, Brian Aherne, a brilliant anecdotalist, was once interrupted in full flow at a meeting with friends in a Hollywood pub in the autumn of his career by someone activating the juke box. He remarked, passionately,’ Here I am, a poor old man, at the mercy of ever halfwit with ten cents to put into an illuminated coal scuttle’. A large percentage of those under fifty, thanks to social media , is also apparently at the mercy of every halfwit able to loft an opinion, however immature or weird into the Cloud. And worse still, to act on it.
To recap, the referendum was to remove the right to life of the unborn from the Irish constitution. The deflective construction of the Stealth bomber is highly effective, but beside that of the Irish episcopacy it is comparable to wet newspaper . Bishop Brendan Leahy of Limerick was first out of the traps, with a reference to the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis. An Irish bishop looking forward to a visit from Pope Francis ! Oh for a look at the agenda of a meeting between Pope Francis and the Irish episcopacy.
One of those Irish expressions , and there are several, which appear to have been constructed entirely and not at all surprisingly without reference to the concept of Christian charity, pungently remarks ‘ Hell slap it into them!’ It is not without distaste but with a nod to the fitness of things that we suggest this as a welcome to the meeting of the Irish episcopacy and Pope Francis.