Malachi O'Doherty

The whin flower blooms even in the frost, proving that kissing is never out of season.

A Frosty Irish Christmas

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It is hard to knock a Pope in Ireland without being seen to be taking sides in an old sectarian quarrel – or are we passed that?

When the MP Iris Robinson said that she found homosexuality an abomination she was gloriously pilloried by those of us who defend gays as equals and friends. Now the Pope has said that ‘human ecology’ requires the abolition of homosexual activity. Nasty old Nazi. Imagine saying a thing like that!

Pope Benedict has provided his critics with all the evidence they need that he is a throwback, except that you don’t get to throw a pope back to where you got him from; you are stuck with him until he dies.
He tells us from his wisdom that homosexual activity is something man has to be saved from, much as the earth has to be saved from the destruction of the rain forests.  What offends here is not just the recitation of the old teaching that same sex union is sinful, but the sense of proportion implied.
You would think that, had the pope been looking for an example of sinful sexual behaviour that might be an affront to nature, from which our salvation is urgent, he might have noticed that his own priests have been molesting children in huge numbers and that his own office has been covering it up. Or is that below the belt?
Strangest of all about what he says is his assertion that he is defending human nature. The Catholic church theology of nature is shown now to be a fraud. Benedict understands human nature from his reading of the Book of Genesis, not from his reading of nature itself, which would show that some people are sexually attracted to and bond with people of the same sex as themselves.
Benedict does not want you to live by your nature but to fight against it, the way he fights it himself. Surely priestly celibacy is as much a divergence from nature, as he teaches it, as gay sex is.
But, some will argue, he has to say these things from time to time; you can’t expect him to change Catholic teaching on homosexual activity, or on a whole host of sexual considerations, like contraception or sex before marriage.
Well, the church does change its view of things. It no longer repeats the old law that the word of a Christian is always to be accepted before the word of a Jew, for instance. The hygiene laws of the book of Leviticus, which would seem to require you to ask a woman if she is having her period before you sit beside her on a bus, have also fallen into disuse.
Of course the papacy, we are often told, does not defer to public opinion, and this coming badly timed in the wake of Iris Robinson’s remarks, is beneath notice in the Vatican. So a few western liberals will be appalled, the world is wider than the West  and many others will be impressed.
Pope Benedict, of course, may indeed be thinking more politically than morally, given how popular his words will be in some quarters. With the episcopal churches in Africa splitting the Anglican communion on gay ordination, Benedict might be effectively hoisting a sign to let them all know they would be perfectly at home in his church, which shares their horror and their sense of what Nature requires.
But there will be a cost for this among western Catholics, many, perhaps most, of whom are liberal in their theology and generous in their understanding of sexuality.They know the calamity for the church that past obsessions about sex have turned out to be, particularly the  teaching on contraception, also grounded on the bizarre Papal understanding of the laws of nature, and integrally bound up with its abhorrence of homosexuality. As theologians explained at the time, if you couldn’t argue that sex was for procreation rather than pleasure, then you would have no argument against all the other things that couples do, or that people do on their own, that give them pleasure but don’t produce offspring.
These teachings, in Ireland anyway, are almost universally ignored and the loss of moral authority in the church, which followed from them, has been massive.
Pope Benedict has done a service to anti Catholic secular liberals every where; he has made himself an easy target.
But  a Pope is never an easy target for liberals in Ireland. yet there has been speculation that he is coming here soon.

When he does, he must be met with a sea of pink derision. We should nopt be inhibited bythe legacy of sectarianism from giving him the full Iris treatment.

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But on the subject of beards, I am struck by the thoughts of another blogger,

“Why? Why do we expect men to be clean-shaven?

It isn’t just because we like to kiss / be kissed by clean-shaven men*, because since when did the sexual or romantic preferences of women get to dominate cultural norms? Since when did our ideals even get taken into account, let alone become an oppressive social requirement? Since never, is when.

[* Anyway, kissing someone with a proper beard can be just as nice a feeling – albeit a different one – as kissing the smoothest face there is. And at least with a decent beard you won’t be caught unawares by stubble. Ouch. Maybe we like to kiss smooth men because we can close our eyes and imagine, subconsciously at least, that we are kissing women. Hehehe, evil laughter. Another possibility is that we like smooth men because they remind us of when we were girls kissing boys, and we like to pretend that we are still just a girl, just kissing a boy. That would make sense – the men win too if we believe we are girls kissing boys, that none of it is very grown up or meaningful; if we deep down understand kissing as a time when we are girls and they are boys, then we won”t act as full-grown women or make grown-up demands on the other person… Hm, stuff.]

So anyway – if the pressure to shave isn’t for snogging purposes, why is it?”

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The cool atheists – as distinct from those of us for whom this is a phoney argument – are in a flap over the prospect that some people will think Leonard Cohen’s Allelujiah is a religious song.

This follows the news that X Factor winner Alexandra Burke will record it for Christmas, singing it like a spiritual.

Cohen has a way of mixing sexual and religious imagery that would scare the faithful but bewilder the determinedly unspiritual too.  The ‘real’ message of Allelujiah is despair at the prospect of love which is nothing more than a ‘broken Allelujiah’. I’m not sure who’s supposed to be cheered by it, if anybody. And KD Lang’s rendition is the one I love most.

It seems that he has heard this discussion himself before and doesn’t like his words being appropriated for causes.

This version of Allelujiah posted on Youtube and sung by Malvasio, replaces some of the verses with this message:

There’s a blaze of light in every word,
It doesn’t matter what you’ve heard,
The Holy or the broken Allelujiah.

And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
with nothing on my tongue but
Allelujiah

Or does anyone know if these are Malvasio’s words?

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We are getting mixed messages about pork; we are being told not to eat it but also that what  has been eaten so far has done no one any harm. Apparently it is a confidence issue, not a health issue.

One commentator on RTE said yesterday that eating pork now would present as great a risk of cancer as smoking one cigarette.

And besides, only one tenth of the pork in the country is contaminated.

OK: there is a one in ten chance that a cigarette has been pureed into your dinner. Do you still want to eat it?

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Wave is a support group for the bereaved of the Troubles and they are holding a carol service in Belfast on December 9, before a Christmas tree with 3,700 lights, to represent the dead. They invited me to their rehearsal last week.

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