"If you live in Ireland, YOU are responsible for the absolute travesty that has occurred."
Joe,
Far too late to deal with all the points you have made - but a couple of quickies.
It is totally unfair to lay the blame for this obscenity at the door of Irish people.
All of these atrocities were allowed to take place directly because of the place the Catholic church occupied in Irish society - the power it possessed reached deep into the lives and minds and souls of the Catholic population, far beyond that of the Nazis or of Stalin's regime. It was complete control of the minds of the people; it even reached beyond the grave. If you defied your priest, you could be humiliated, beaten, ostracised, lose the goodwill and necessesary suport of your neighbours, your home, your occupation, even your country, (not forgetting persecution of other members of your family - including your children). On top of all this you also stood a fair chance of eternal damnation thrown in for good measure - spiritual blackmail, which was used to terrifying effect. Can you name any despotic regime in history which has ever achieved that position over its subjects? What was it the Jesuits boasted - "Give me a child five years old and I will give you a Catholic for life".
My own position.
I was born and brought up in England up to ten years ago when we chose to move here, mainly because of our interest in music.
My father went to fight fascism in Spain in 1937; because the Catholic Church threw its total support behind Franco's Fascist regime he was excommunicated from his church and my three sisters and I never received a Catholic education.
Some of our family remained Catholic, but my father's experiences, and that of his younger siblings, who were tormented by the priests and nuns for having a 'Commie' brother who had 'sided with the Devil in Spain', prevented them from being fully sucked in to the Catholic mind-machine.
I kept in fairly regular contact with one of my aunts in Dublin right up to her death a few years ago. She was one of the bravest people I ever met. She and her husband defied the anti-Catholic mobs in Derry in the 1950s, and only fled the city with her husband and three young children, the youngest a babe in arms, when their house was burned down about their ears. A hard lady - yet she was scared shitless of the priest to the day she died - what kind of organisation instils that sort of fear in its supporters - perhaps you can explain that to me?
G'night all,
Jim Carroll