Don’t hurt me again by defending the indefensible

THAT was an excellent letter from Micheal O’Driscoll (‘Church of one billion is a victim of mob mentality’, May 29), but I do take issue with some points.

Firstly, we can be thankful there are one billion very good Catholics in the world, but invoking large numbers can never justify the criminality of a few.

Bombardment by astronomical numbers belittles the dignity of every human person. It is like swatting an inconvenient fly with an atomic bomb, People whose first language is English make up 5% of the world’s population. That indicates there are roughly 50 million English-speaking Catholics. Four million Irish Catholics constituted at least 8% of the population at risk.

Again, one could reverse the argument by descending from the infinite to the infinitesimal. If a person were beaten even on only one day during all of their 14 school years (or only once in nearly 3,000 school days), that would still not render the crime trivial.

Secondly, English-speaking Catholics were not the only perpetrators of crimes against humanity throughout the last two millennia. In 12th century France, the Albigensian heresy was suppressed by penal sanction. Don’t forget that the Spanish Inquisition happened in Spain. In 1572, the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day took place during the French wars of religion. It took two sides to fight the Thirty Years War.

In 1685, Louis XIV of France removed protection from the Huguenots by revoking the Edict of Nantes.

Adolf Hitler was a baptised Austrian Catholic who shamed Germany unspeakably. Even when I was going to school, the church was still expounding the oxymoron of a “just war”

In 2006, according to the census, nearly 875,000 people over the age of 55 were still alive in Ireland. Most of us were beaten in some degree, subjected to horrific humiliation or witnessed violent punishment beatings by some trained teachers in schools throughout Ireland.

They ignored the words of St Bernard in the 11th century: “By persuasion, not by violence, are people to be won to the faith.” Corporal punishment of little children in schools was used unsparingly with sniggering relish up to 1982. Physical punishment by a teacher did not become a criminal offence until 1997. I know what I saw. I know what I suffered. I know what I still suffer to this day. It took eight years for the tribunal on industrial schools to compile a report of five volumes from 1,090 witnesses.

It would take nearly six millennia to compile a report of more than 3,600 volumes from 800,000 people who were hurt and are still hurting. We would respect staunch defenders of the faith if they stopped letting the vast majority of decent clergy down by persisting in defending the indefensible. We need reconciliation.

I am still a Catholic. I resent any dismissive insinuation that I am a mobster baying for revenge. On the contrary, I feel terribly alone and isolated. Many children were remarkably resilient, but I was not one of them. Will the church now turn its face from me?

I do have hope. I acknowledge the fair-mindedness of Let Our Voices Emerge. They admitted recently that they had not realised the enormity of the injustice.

All I want is the truth to be acknowledged by an apology from the nation, such as Bertie Ahern put on the Dáil record, to the survivors of the industrial schools. I ask for nothing more. Then, maybe, I could let the hurt go and my ranting tears might cease.

Michael Mernagh

Raheens

Carrigaline

Co Cork