I hope you found it pleasing, curious, titillating perhaps, but trust me, when you try to sleep tonight you will hate me with a passion I cannot fully describe in the pages of a book. As you lie there, eyes wide open, your head pressed into the pillow, your second full hour, wide awake, mouthing the words
‘I am a C …
Well, I’m not a C … But that bastard Brigstocke is.’
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask – given how resistant I am to religion, why on earth do I think I want to invite God into my life? The truth is I don’t know exactly. It’s just a feeling that if there’s something up there, or out there, or in here that could reasonably improve the quality of my life and of those around me, then I’d be willing to try it. I have a nasty feeling this willingness to explore a state of ‘other’ could bring me to God or just as easily see me develop a massive heroin habit.
4
Nothing bad happened …
I SHOULD PROBABLY SAY AT THIS STAGE THAT NOTHING BAD happened to me. I don’t have a personal axe to grind with religion. There is no shameful and unsettling secret hiding away in my past that means that deep down I’d like to destroy every church in the land and lay waste to the clergy. I didn’t once pick up a Bible and burn my hands on it. I wasn’t spooked by the image of Christ looking wistful on the cross, though I do find the obsession with his death both odd and unpleasant. I wasn’t grabbed in the souk by a beard-faced Muslim cleric who bellowed at me aggressively in Farsi, and neither was I sent to one of those schools where a man in a brown dressing gown coaxed me into the vestry and whispered in a sinister Irish lilt, ‘You will put this in your mouth or no amount of praying will ever make you feel OK about yourself again.’
I’m not a Catholic. I wasn’t buggered by a priest or anything similar. I’m not out for personal revenge. I’ve never been tempted to have hypnotherapy to delve into the space that exists before my memories began (they start from about the age of 17 – that’s normal, right?), but I’m pretty certain that no religious representative has ever done any direct harm to me, unless you include being boring, dishonest or obtuse. There was a religious education master at my junior school who had really awful coffee breath, dreadful at the time but at least we’d have remembered and been able to identify him if he’d ever tried to kiss us. I am not out to destroy anyone’s individual faith. Quite the opposite. I’d like to swipe some of it, distil it to suit my personal tastes and drink it down with gusto. I do have serious reservations about the tacit consent that membership of any identified religious organization provides for the church as a whole but that doesn’t mean that I’m coming after the believers to prove them wrong. For the most part I’m pleased for them. They’ve found something to believe in. Why can’t I do that?
While I have no personal experience of being fiddled with, whacked, bullied or tweaked by men and women of the cloth, I am appalled by the capacity of religious organizations to use the rituals and secrecy of their structures to commit terrible crimes against their own flock. Sometimes the horrors committed by the holy are grand and take place on an international scale, but very often they are personal and can isolate their victims for the rest of their lives. The Catholic Church is by no means alone in its inability to heave its decrepit flailing body out of the quagmire of revolting sexual abuses that are revealed every few months, but Catholicism has had a shocking number of complaints from those brave enough to fight for truth, and it now looks as if child abuse is as integral to Catholicism as a private education is to frontbench politics. They’re not all at it, but enough of them are for me to seriously wonder what standard of GCSE passes Catholic schools are promising for parents to take that sort of risk with their little darlings. What’s a little underage fellatio for an A star? There are three-year courses at the top universities for people with the right qualifications, and places for life in counselling and self-hating shame for children who’ve been touched up by a frustrated pervert who chats to the Lord in the morning and whispers sweet nothings to ten-year-olds at night.
If you can’t manage to be celibate then – here’s a thought – don’t be a monk! Do something else that doesn’t involve building up a head and scrotum full of unsatisfied lust waiting to go off like an unexploded bit of sexual ordnance. If you can’t resist your inclination towards little boys, then don’t go into teaching at an all-boys boarding school. If you’re a nun who finds never having been touched by a man with lust in his eyes and a penis as hard as Chinese maths makes you want to beat women who have enjoyed that experience with sticks, then maybe your marriage to Christ isn’t working out so well. If you place some wrong-headed value on celibacy and then pretend to be better than everyone else because you’re not getting your rocks off, you are wrong. If you find it’s harder than you’d thought to leave your bits and pieces alone and then choose a child as your sexual outlet because they’re the least likely to expose you for the ugly pious fake you are, then get honest with yourself, apologize to God and get out of the position where your failure to live up to the impossibly difficult abstinence you’ve set yourself represents a real and present danger to other people. If that’s where you find yourself then it’s time to stop pretending you’re better than the rest of us and try to normalize your relationship with sex. Get laid with a consenting adult. Have a series of earth-shattering orgasms alone or with friends who make you think Belinda Carlisle really was right and ‘Heaven is a place on earth’. Make sweet and passionate love to your own fist if you wish. You never know, you might like it; just knock it off with the kiddy-fiddling. Let the kids get to sex in their own time; they don’t need to have it introduced to them by a trembly self-hating adult, nor do they need to be told that to want to do it will make them dirty for ever.
Choosing to get your loving on with God isn’t going to get you off when the throbbing bone of Satan is threatening to rip the front out of your cassock. Prayer and fasting might beat back the forces of carnal desire for a few people, but the risks involved in attempting that are treacherously high. Priest, monk, nun, mother superior, bishop, choirmaster, verger, pope or whatever job you take in the service of the Lord won’t stop you being a human. You’re flawed and randy just like the rest of us. If you believe that we are all created by God, then ask yourself why He put our hands at exactly the same height as our fizzy bits. It’s not a coincidence, it’s not a test, it’s so we can, when it’s necessary, please ourselves and then get on with what’s left of the day. For the love of God or humanity or yourself, I don’t care which, break the seal, take the pressure off and have a bit of personal sticky time before you do yourself or someone else an injury. Wank, you wanker, just wank.
If you’re a Catholic authority figure who hasn’t yet abused a child, the organization you belong to is protecting many who have. Even for the ordinary Catholic believer, there is no escaping the fact that as a respecter of the papacy you are supporting an institution which chooses, deliberately, to expose children to sex criminals and then chooses, deliberately, to keep those sex criminals away from the forces of the law. The Catholic Church has shown itself to be corrupt, irresponsible and dangerous. As each day passes we understand with greater clarity how the Roman Catholic Church is an institution that uses the shame its victims feel as the means to keep them quiet. That is a disgrace of the worst kind. Broken lives of silent guilt, inflicted by the ‘Universal Church’ on the most vulnerable in its care. It amounts to no less than the theft of childhood by those who claim to protect it, hidden beneath the righteousness of the faithful. You wouldn’t save your money at the Bank of Rape, so why pray at a church whose record on child abuse means I’d rather employ Gary Glitter as a nanny than send my kids to a Catholic school?
Muslims do it too, and the structures of devout Islamic practice make it easier for the perpetrators and more dangerous for the victims to speak out. C of E clergy do it. Atheists do it, agnostics do it, even educated Jews do it; anyone is technically capable of committing acts against humanity and disgracing themse
lves. It’s not religion that makes perverts but it does give them a place to hide and to practise their sickness within the protection of their church. When you add to that the ludicrous scribblings of holy writers from a couple of thousand years ago, whose views on sex were so retarded they make Ian Paisley look like a progressive deviant, it’s no wonder that the pressure cooker blows its lid off so often.
The present Pope has a bad record when it comes to sex offenders in his Church. He is a fascinating man. These days he’s known as Your Eminence, or His Royal Almighty Popeness, but before the white smoke billowed out of the chimney showing that the cardinals had found a man who didn’t look like he would change too much of anything, he was plain old Mr Ratzinger – it sounds like a foul, rodent-based children’s snack. ‘Enjoy a Rat-Zinger, kids! Now with delicious chewy rosary beads, phenomenal wealth and chunks of hard-to-swallow, sinister past.’
Soon after he was made Pope, Ratzinger made a visit to Poland – something he’d very much wanted to do as a younger man. I’m not sure why he didn’t make it; perhaps the Hitler Youth ran out of brown shirts, either that or he didn’t pass the ‘you must be this tall to ride this invasion’ test. In fairness to the man, I don’t imagine that avoiding membership of the Hitler Youth was that easy to achieve when he was a young man in Germany. I only avoided becoming a scout because I was fat, lazy and dysfunctional. I’m also crap with knots and had an unhealthy obsession with my own woggle. In terms of forming an opinion of the Pope (I’ve never met him, but I looked him up on Wikipedia and I’m not sure I like him at all), I find the fact that he was hoodwinked into joining the junior wing of the Nazi Party not nearly as worrying as his rising to the most powerful position in the Catholic Church.
In September 2010 he came to the UK, which of course was very exciting for a great many Catholics. The Pope has the ear of God. I’m not sure where he keeps it but he has it somewhere. For a great many believers, a papal visit represents a tremendous spiritual event and serves to strengthen their feeling of connection to their faith. I expect Tony and Cherie Blair were positively vibrating with excitement at the very thought of it, the money in their pockets jangling as they worked each other into a frenzy of zealotry. Alastair Campbell might not ‘do God’ but the Blairs would ‘do Him’ in a heartbeat, then charge Him for the privilege of their company no doubt. I also enjoyed the Pope’s visit, though not perhaps as much. It was very exciting for the secular community to have a man that powerful come to see us and like all visits from international criminals it seemed likely to kick off a row. There was a plan to arrest him, which sadly came to nothing. Certainly there seems to be a pretty good case against the Pope with regard to decisions he made when he was a cardinal and I would think that finding a severed ear on his person would be likely to damage his defence somewhat too. It’d be a Hell of a hearing if God were called as a witness for the defence. What would He swear to?
‘I swear to Almighty Me to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
Then humanity could spend the next 2,000 years interpreting and twisting whatever God had said on the witness stand to suit whichever view of the world we already held anyway. ‘He mentioned a Tuesday in Berlin in 1936 and that means gays are still evil and women can’t be priests.’ If the Pope had been arrested in the UK, and then prosecuted and sentenced, I would think there’d be a good chance that Britain would have been at war with the Vatican. I don’t like war as a general rule, even in films I tend to side with the conscientious objectors, but in this instance I reckon we could have ’em. It does seem possible that the Vatican are in possession of the Ark of the Covenant, which, as we know, when opened would melt our faces off, so we should prepare for that, but in principle I think we could take the Vatican pretty easily, then hand it back to Italy where it belongs. Give it two weeks and Silvio Berlusconi would have turned the whole place into a twenty-first-century Bunga Bunga party to make both Sodom and Gomorrah blush. Obviously if the Vatican organized all their millions of followers worldwide to rise up against us, then Britain would be stuffed. But they’ve succeeded in keeping so many of them in dire poverty for so long that I doubt that more than a handful would manage the bus fare to the fight.
Perhaps not surprisingly the plan to arrest the Pope when he came to the UK was co-ordinated by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Trouble-makers, those two with their pesky thinking and all that. With the help of barrister Geoffrey Robertson and solicitor Mark Stephens, they prepared a case that looked to me like it might well have legs. I’m no lawyer and of course I respect Corpus Christi (whoever he is), but this Pope guy is guilty as hell and should go down.
In 1985, when Ratzinger was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases, his signature appeared on a letter that argued the ‘good of the universal church’ should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sexual offences against two boys. As I understand it, this concerns a priest who raped children. Two under-aged boys were exposed to the horror of a sexual assault by a man in a position of trust. A man of the cloth. A priest. To reiterate, because it seems important: the man, the one in the position of trust, the priest, the man of the cloth, raped two children. He took from them a thing he could never give back. He used his position, as a member of the church they as children had been forced to attend, to enact a vile deed he hoped would never be discovered. This is what he did. His superior, Cardinal Ratzinger, the man whose job it was to deal with these exact issues, felt that, when confronted with the rape of two children, it was important to consider the ‘good of the universal church’. He could have defrocked the man and taken away the position he had abused in order to rape the children, but he sided with the priest’s view that the fewer people who knew what had happened, the better. So he kept him safe in the bosom of Catholicism in order to maintain the ‘good of the universal church’. Presumably the priest said something along the lines of, ‘Hey, get this bosom off me, I don’t like bosoms, I like fucking kids.’ I don’t know; I wasn’t there. I’m guessing.
Christopher Hitchens, who does verbosity and bellicose like no other, put it rather well when he said of the Pope: ‘This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.’
UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke gave a statement saying, ‘Our commitment to our international obligations and to ensuring that there is no impunity for those accused of crimes of universal jurisdiction is unwavering. It is important, however, that universal jurisdiction cases should be proceeded with in this country only on the basis of solid evidence that is likely to lead to a successful prosecution – otherwise there is a risk of damaging our ability to help in conflict resolution or to pursue a coherent foreign policy.’ Don’t arrest the Pope, people will think we’re assholes, and some of the countries where the Pope is still really popular trade oil and guns with us and blah blah bullshit.
So we didn’t arrest him. He’s not a real head of state because the Vatican is not a proper state, so the issue of immunity does not apply. We didn’t arrest him because he’s the Pope and he represents millions and millions of easily provoked worshippers. The Pope has questions to answer, and their impact on the ‘good of the universal church’ is not relevant. As far as I know, the Pope’s not a paedophile, but he knows a few and he seems to care more for them than he does for their victims.
I was once a child and I’m glad no one raped me. I have children now and I hope no one rapes them. I know people who are Catholic and I hope no one rapes them. Generally speaking I am against the whole rape agenda. I find it extraordinary that there are some people who are now immensely powerful who apparently don’t share this view.
It’s been estimated that his visit here cost the UK a little over £250 million. When you add to that the cost of an Oyster card and the prices you pay in man
y of the good restaurants, we’d have been better off sponsoring the Pope to take an all-inclusive to Majorca for a fortnight and spending the rest on priest-proof under-crackers for choirboys. A lot of the £250 million was legitimately spent on keeping the Pope safe from anyone who might wish him physical ill. The rest of it, I suspect, was spent making sure the very significant number of people who protested his presence here and had legitimate questions for him to answer were kept so far away from the Pope-mobile that when he flew home in his private plane he’d have assumed that, just like everywhere else he goes, the UK is populated exclusively by teary-eyed supporters, each and every one delighted to see him.
It is also possible that some of the money was spent keeping us safe from him. I don’t know what he had planned, but let’s face it, that wobbly old German nonce-hider has form. For the amount of money we spent on his visit I think we should have been allowed to ride him up and down Pall Mall. I’m only really cross because I learned to swear in Latin just in case I got the chance to meet him. That’s a bloodimus fucking waste now.
In his capacity as leader of the wealthiest church on earth, the Pope is able to make lots of interesting visits, particularly to places where there’s grinding poverty. I’m not sure why he goes to these awful places when he could easily afford a couple of weeks in the Maldives, but he does. I presume he just enjoys being around the poor. Nothing makes you feel richer and more chipper than having a big pocket of folding cash and going somewhere really unrelentingly destitute. I’ll often withdraw a couple of thousand pounds in cash and then go watch the broken and desperate pouring in and out of Primark.
In 2008, the Pope made a visit to the African continent. Across Africa there’s a very large Catholic constituency all keen to hear what the Pope has to say. They’d better listen closely: he’s a terrible mumbler and a lot of it’s in German. He’s not as bad a mumbler as the Pope before him, but to be fair to Pope John Paul II, he was 476 years old when he died. The Pope is said to be able to talk directly to God. I hope he doesn’t mumble then. I can’t see God liking that, especially with only the one ear. Maybe God’s a mumbler too and that’s why we hear from him so seldom these days. I like to picture God and the Pope as Waldorf and Stadler, the two old gentlemen in the box on The Muppet Show, both deaf and belligerent, shouting down heckles and derision at the freak show beneath them.
God Collar Page 6