Kevin Myers Scourges Wanker Archbishops and Emotive Ecclesiastical Hermaphrodites

Ireland's Kevin Myers is Jonathan Swift with a better grip on the language.

Wednesday April 07 2010

Instead of sacraments, sin and sacrifice, clergymen now talk of

'hurt, deep offence and wounded feelings'


THE Great Religious War Between the dioceses of Dublin and Canterbury was not so much a storm in a tea cup as a bee fart in a thimble. I have still not found the actual words that could have reduced Archbishop Diarmuid Martin to such a paralysis of grief and weeping. As far as I can see, Rowan Williams of Canterbury had merely remarked that the Irish Church had lost credibility. What? You mean it hasn't?

Then, all the Irish Prod bishops gathered around the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, like lesser girls round the alpha girl in a playground spat. "Poor Diarmuid," they simpered, "poor Diarmuid and what a bitch that Rowan Williams is, what a complete and utter Canterbury!"

"I tell you what, Diarmuid," stoutly declared the Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath, Achonry, Tuam, Killala, Ardfert, Cloyne and Just About Everywhere Else Outside Dublin, "I'll go and pull her pigtails!" So then she went and pulled Canterbury's pigtails and Rowan Williams began to cry and said she didn't mean to hurt anyone and she was sorry to have caused offence and yes, she deeply, deeply regretted the deep, deep hurt she had caused.

Jesus Christ Almighty! Is it to this that the Christian churches are now reduced?

Well, they do say that bad currency drives out good -- so can this be true for religions also? The Church of England long ago announced that a belief in God was purely optional -- a devotion to WG Grace or Gandhi or even George Galloway would henceforth suffice. So C of E clergy also became more and more absorbed with feelings, rather than with religion.

And now, it seems that their vacuous, unprincipled emoting has -- through the Ryanair of the ecumenical movement -- been colonising the Irish churches.

Thus, the mumbo-jumbo of personal pain has become the liturgy of the modern religion. Instead of sacraments and grace and sin and sacrifice, clergymen are now talking of "hurt" and "deep offence" and "wounded feelings".

Of course, since so many Irish people love nothing more than winning the national-victimhood competition, this solipsistic malignancy has spread like scabies through a convent of lesbian nuns.

Moreover, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the Welsh Waffler Rowan Williams, is truly a man of many cultures: part-Methodist, part-vegetarian, part-pacifist, part-feminist, but full-time emoter.

He is like a mad street-preacher, the tufts of hair sprouting out of his every orifice quivering with contrition as he endlessly lists how he has caused, deep, deep hurt here, and deep deep hurt there.

But hold on. An Archbishop of Canterbury -- with a psalm on his lips -- could once upon a time be relied on to put a blessing on a Gatling gun being sent to slay the naked Wootsy-Tootsies, who were armed with a few sticks, as a chastising prelude to their induction into the glories of empire.

Then, having stripped and flogged some choirboys, he would retire to his palace, to Mrs Archbishop and to a groaning board, around which 50 liveried servants hovered.

In essence, though not quite in so many words, whenever the primate of England heard something he didn't like from Ireland, he would declare: "Hey! You, you bog-trotting peasant. I am the Archbishop of Canterbury. Now, just F*CK OFF!" (This was also known as the Fecumenical Movement).

Meanwhile, Mrs Archbishop ran the ladies' branch of the Primrose League, dedicated to the proposition that there was nothing wrong with this world that another 50 British dreadnoughts couldn't put right.

The current Mrs Archbishop probably runs a teetotal, vegan ashram-mission hall, with tambourines and self-awareness sessions.

Meanwhile, the disbelieving bones of poor John Charles McQuaid must be rattling in their tomb. He was heir to a millennium-and-a-half of Irish Catholic endurance. Dublin Archbishops true to Rome used to spend their entire episcopacies hiding up chimneys in the Liberties, occasionally saying Mass under the grate, but only when the fire was lit.

If caught by the town major, they would be made to eat their own feet in public, raw and still attached. The bishops were then fed alive to Protestant bull-mastiffs, loyal dogs that knew the 39 Articles and could howl all of Deuteronomy (the King James Version only).

The Irish Catholic primates of yesteryear were fluent in Irish, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Norman-French and Early English and were martyred in them all.

Their recent successor, John Charles, didn't consider a day worth living unless he had begun it by hunting down and excommunicating a liberal or banning Catholics from attending the Fingal philately exhibition because of the shamelessly Protestant postage stamps that were freely on display there, visible to all visitors, regardless of age or sex.

Yet now, John Charles's successor tearfully whimpers that he has been hurt by a few words from a prating Welsh pastor with more nasal hair than sense.

Meanwhile, the heirs to the Church of Ireland Archbishop Gregg of Dublin, who openly loathed Catholicism as an heretical and foreign intrusion from Rome, are behaving like Morris dancers.

Yes, Patrick, this is what has become of the Great and Holy and Apostolic and Patrician and Manly Churches that you once founded. The Prods are all girls, Paddy, and the Papes are whimpering, self-pitying softies.

Don't you just long for the good old Penal Days?

kmyers@independent.ie

- Kevin Myers

Irish Independent