Hilarie:‘That would be an ecumenical matter’

Feb 6 2010 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Unfortunately, the reality for many Roman Catholics around the world is much less amusing. Only a few weeks ago the church in Ireland had to admit to a decades-long cover up of paedophile activity among the priesthood in Dublin. It took a Government-led three-year investigation to force the church to apologise for allowing 170 priests to escape justice for offences involving hundreds, if not thousands, of children. One suspects this situation has also occurred elsewhere.

This is not something that can easily be forgotten, so when Pope Benedict this week announced he will be visiting Britain in September – and paved the way by criticising our equality laws – I could feel my hackles rising.

Our current and proposed legislation – meaning that Catholic adoption agencies can’t discriminate against gay couples and churches would not be able to discriminate against homosexual or transgender people – threatens, says the Pope, religious freedom and runs contrary to natural law.

These sound like fine words, if they didn’t come from the head of an organisation that had to be forced to put its own house in order.

I find myself much more interested in the freedoms and rights of young, innocent children than I am in ecumenical matters such as female priests and gay people in clerical collars.

The concept of a ‘natural law’ is also an interesting one. Anyone who knows an openly gay man or women and has talked to them about their sexuality will know they are not free to choose how they feel – it permeates their very being. The human gene pool allows for infinite variation. We are not all the same and what consenting adults do together is no-one’s business but their own.

Moreover, it’s hardly ‘natural’ to expect healthy men and women to spend a lifetime practising clerical celibacy. In fact, it’s positively asking for trouble.

And while we’re on the subject of sex, let’s consider how this current Pope has had a lot to say about the use of condoms in African countries where AIDS runs rife. Despite the fact that condom use could save lives, the practice has been deemed anti-life. Some communities are now populated almost entirely by orphans and the elderly.

In South America, the church’s anti-contraception rules mean that the unwanted children of desperately poor families end up in feral gangs, hiding out in city sewers and begging for food. In the city of Buenos Aires alone there are an estimated 3,000 street children and as many as 700 sleep rough every night.

Are these not greater evils than the possibility of a carefully-vetted gay couple being given custody of a much-wanted adopted child or a woman preaching from the pulpit?

I’ll leave the last word to Father Dougal. “The whole of this Catholic thing is a bit of a puzzler, isn’t it Ted?”