THAT'S MEN:IMAGINE BEING sentenced to life imprisonment for a thought – not for uttering it or promoting it but just for having it and enjoying it?
The idea may seem to belong to some (hopefully) impossible future but it’s exactly the sort of belief that was handed to young Catholic boys and girls up to the 1970s. The particular version they were given involved impure thoughts and hell.
If you had an impure thought (that’s a thought about sex, not about cheating your neighbour) and if you “took pleasure” in it, then you had better hope you could get to confession before you were knocked down by a bus, because if you didn’t, and you were, you would spend all of eternity in hell.
I mention this because, as church sex scandals rumble on, it’s increasingly difficult to appreciate just how totally, absolutely and utterly unthinkable it was to Catholics that clergy would engage in sexual misbehaviour or abuse.
Similarly it was utterly unthinkable that a cleric who engaged in such behaviour would be protected, moved around or facilitated in any way.
Our entire class once had to write an essay on purity because two guys were caught reading the News of the World in the toilets of our Christian Brothers school. That’s how concerned the church was about sexual misbehaviour of the sort that got reported in that paper.
When we were sent on a retreat, a cleric burst into our rooms each night to check, according to him, that we were not using transistor radios, considered to be dangerous instruments because you could carry them around with you outside the control of your parents.
You could be listening to Radio Luxembourg, a station which played pop music, was uninformed by Catholic morality and therefore could lead young people astray.
Such a station would never be allowed to set up business in Ireland, but what harm might be done to those who listened to the wavering signal under the sheets?
The real indication of how shockingly unexpected the whole sex and abuse saga was is this: it simply did not occur to any of us that this cleric might have been hoping to find something more juicy than a radio in the boys’ shared rooms.
So innocent were we that when a fellow who was on a rugby tour to France brought home a condom and his sister brought it to school to show her classmates this amazing artifact, consternation followed. When the nuns found out what was going on, the whole thing was treated like the discovery of a nuclear bomb.
The entire class was made to stand in the yard while a sort of emergency response team of nuns went through their desks.
The parish priest was called in to read certain diaries that were found (from what I recall of him, this was probably the last place on the planet he wanted to be but saying “no” to nuns has never been easy). Girls were expelled.
I am sure the diaries were fairly innocent by our standards of today but the incident again underlines how absolutely anathema the whole idea of sex was to the church, or seemed to be.
Films were banned, books were banned, dancing suspended at Lent, RTÉ regularly condemned – all because the Catholic Church was dead set against the idea of sex except inside marriage and then only for the procreation of children (that’s right, you had to be trying to get pregnant or else no sex, and that included hanky panky).
Of course it was all beginning to fall apart thanks to television, showbands, industrialisation, feminism and the church’s opposition to artificial contraception.
But it still never occurred to us that clerics might engage in sexual activity or that those austere church authorities might cover up for those who did.
When a girlfriend told me about clerical students trying to “get off” with her, I scoffed. What a ridiculous idea.
I’m not scoffing now.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free by email.