Say no to the spoilt brats who protest about the Pope
HOW do you know if someone has decided to block book tickets they don’t intend to use as part of the ‘Say Nope To The Pope’ for Francis’s visit in August? Well, just give it a minute, and they’ll be quick to tell you.
As you are no doubt aware, the Pope’s trip here at the end of next month – coming so soon after an abortion referendum which resoundingly proved that the Catholic Church is no longer a force in Irish life – has been the source of some controversy.
It is all a long way, of course, from the last time that a Pope visited these shores. On that occasion, back in 1979, it is estimated that a million people trekked out to the Phoenix Park to watch John Paul II.
It is a day out which, for this then seven-year-old, was memorable mostly for the spooky early morning mist which shrouded Islandbridge like a cowl. I was one of a million then, and by not attending this August’s jamboree, I’ll be another one of millions now.
Like many of us, I was a reluctant participant in Catholic rites in school. Like many of us, I grew up with a deep resentment towards the Church. But, like many of us, as I watched the Church’s grip on this State loosened one finger at a time, that resentment simply gave way to a sort of weary indifference.
The Church may have been the enemy of free expression and dissent at one point, but it is decades since it has wielded any real power.
As our society recalibrates itself, it has ushered in a new era of more enlightened laws. It has also ushered in a new form of smug, smarmy contempt for people who don’t toe the line with the new orthodoxy.
The fatuous ‘Say Nope To The Pope’ campaign is a perfect example of the rising tide of sneaky cynicism and nastiness which has been displayed by so many of Ireland’s new wave of liberal crusaders.
It is also interesting to note that the loudest protesters tend to either be too young to remember a time when the Church genuinely did have this country by the scruff of the neck or are instead old enough to remember those darker days but kept their mouths shut when such a protest would have actually taken some cojones.
No doubt whichever heroic keyboard warrior came up with this ‘Say Nope To The Pope’ protest thinks they’re a great sort, altogether.
Certainly, the people who have been lining up to congratulate each other for their anarchic japes run the risk of dislocating their shoulders from slapping themselves on the back so much.
One intrepid soul was quick to boast that he had block-booked 800 tickets under the pretence that he was bringing four coachloads of pilgrims. How do we know this? Well, he was quick to go running to social media to tell everyone how clever he thought he was.
That’s because, like all the other bandwagoneers, there’s no point in doing something if the rest of the world doesn’t know exactly what you’ve done.
Forget the kindness of strangers, these days we look for the validation of people we’ve never met.
One of the protesters summed up the levels of sacrifice they are prepared to endure when he said: “I bought 800 tickets. There’s 12 per person but you can multiply it, so I started off with a few as I was sitting there in the sun on my phone. I was maybe there for an hour on my phone in the end.”
Surely there is some sort of award for bravery we could offer this guy?
Granted, it might not be as dramatic or, indeed, perilous as Martin Luther striding up to the castle church in Wittenburg and hammering his 95 Theses into the door.
But the sun is indeed very warm of late and anyone prepared to spend a whole hour in the open, potentially risking a mild sunburn, deserves recognition for such outstanding courage.
There are certainly grounds for protest – just as there were grounds for protest when the queen of England or Obama visited these shores.
This is a democracy, and people have the right to protest. What they don’t have the right to do, however, is to ruin an event for other people out of a sense of spite and arrogant peevishness.
If there was such a massive groundswell of opposition, why aren’t the protesters availing of the tickets and making their stand inside Phoenix Park where it would actually be noticed? After all, 480,000 tickets were made available so there is plenty of room.
Surely a few banners or placards pointing out the innumerable sins of the Church – and they are legion – dotted around a capacity crowd would have a far greater impact than simply trying to prevent the faithful going along to see a man they respect and adore?
There has always been a genuine and legitimate concern that replacing the Church as the dominant organisation in this country would simply create a vacuum to be filled by other equally intolerant doctrinaires and that, ominously, seems to be the case at the moment.
For instance, all the talk and loud posturing about ‘compassion’ for minorities during the abortion referendum may have been more than mere word salad if those who sang most loudly from the compassion hymn sheet could extend some of their much vaunted tolerance to people who share a different point of view, particularly the elderly and infirm who find solace in the Church and mean nobody else any harm.
IRONICALLY, and it sounds undeniably counterintuitive, the Church hierarchy can probably take some semblance of comfort from the furore. After all, they must be telling themselves, they still occupy a lot of people’s minds.
But if the protest achieves its stated goals and manages to make the Phoenix Park look deserted come August 25, what have they managed, exactly?
Well, they’ve managed to discommode thousands of people who would have marked that day down as one of the highlights of their lives.
How very brave.
Like many rational atheists, I won’t be attending. Not because I hate the Church, but because I don’t care.
It takes a particularly obnoxious form of condescension to pretend that denying this opportunity to others is anything other than childish spite, a form of facile moral posturing which only makes the protesters look like spoilt brats.