IRELAND
The Irish Times
PADRAIG O’MORAIN
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.
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