Joe probably thought he was on safe ground when he said "modern pro-lifers are unlikely to be in favor of burying dead babies in a septic tank." But he is forgetting that these kids were wicked little bastards: fit for neither baptism nor Christian burial; drenched in that oh, so compassionate concept, Original Sin.

Joe's world of sweet old ladies making nice tea, and jesuits capturing young minds purely to instil a lifelong love of learning(!), betrays an innocence that would be touching if the realities he overlooks were not so monstrous.

In Joe's world it is the brainwashed, not the brainwashers, who are to blame. The exploited are to blame rather than an arrogant church that learnt in mediaeval times that where education and knowledge are in short supply, ludicrous superstitions can be spread like a virus.

Joe's desire to bury the past would exculpate the Nazis and it would exculpate a number of churches, not least his own. It took the Nazis less than a decade to take hold of impressionable minds en masse. The Catholic church worked at it over many centuries, embedding its power deep in many cultures, enjoying its greatest success where access to education was most limited. Yet so easy to resist, in Joe's halcyon world.

In rural Irish communities even in the 1950s, it would have been as hard to defy the Catholic church as it would have been for German youth to defy Hitler. I always refrained from criticising the last pope for enlisting in the Hitler Youth in his salad days. To hold out against it would have needed an order of bravery I would probably not have had myself. Yet Joe is ready to blame entire communities for falling under the sway of an arrogant hierarchy, kitted to the hilt in their disgusting finery, which even (in the person of Dublin archbishop McQuade) drafted itself into the heart of the Irish Constitution. When a cabinet minister proposed mother-and-child legislation that would have taken the sinful little critturs away from the church's clutches, the church brought down the government.

That church is at last starting to lose the battle in Ireland, but Africa still offers fertile ground, with the Catholic bishops relentless in their quest to infest minds against the benefits of condoms. It would be better if Joe and all like-minded sweet innocents just shut up until they learn a little more about the miseries and destroyed lives for which their loving church is responsible.