The Vatican team is in Ireland

The Vatican commission to investigate the Irish church is at present doing its work.

Back in the 1970s this blogger studied in Rome. New out from Ireland, the Vatican and its personnel left me stunned and simply amazed.

At the beginning of the second academic year a lecturer, a young priest, arrived into the lecture hall. There was only one thing to do - roar laugh. Not because of his apparent orientation. But it was the massive roman collar, the perfect black suit, the frilly stock. the shiny shoes, the white cuffs, cuff links, simply incredible.

In modern jargon, it was the beginning of a great learning curve for some of us.

Everything about his dress and behaviour left one in no doubt that he had to be a gay man. Nothing at all wrong about that. But then to hear how he enunciated the most conservative and orthodox thinking on all sexual moral issues of the church left us simply flabbergasted. Many of us would go home and simply laugh our hearts out at the nonsense of this man. He was a source of great fun for many of us young men.

At the time it seemed uproariously funny but there was also something worrying and dismaying about it all. And his pomposity was, to say the least, annoying.

Today that man is a cardinal archbishop.


If the Vatican is to be anyway serious about setting up a commission to investigate the church in Ireland, surely it is important they appoint people to the commission who are outside that ‘Vatican thing’. Are there married women and men on the commission?

Of course there is nothing at all wrong about being gay. But the mix of being gay, secret about it, expressing conservative views, acting out a life-style that seems on the face of it to be bizarre, is indeed most worrying. And it would appear many closet gay clerics are also misogynst. A phenomenon replicated throughout the hierarchical church.