Fr Sheehy’s catechism is no longer Irish doctrine

FR Seán Sheehy’s diatribe against gay and transgender people, condoms and promiscuity has been music to the ears of anti-Catholics across the country. ‘Why are people shocked at a priest preaching Church orthodoxy?’ they ask in mock surprise, as if fire and brimstone is the mainstay of Catholic homilies.

Now I can’t speak for the last 2,000 years but in the 50 years I have on and off attended Sunday Mass, sometimes admittedly more off than on, I have never been inflicted with such hateful intolerant rhetoric.

Nor have most people, because if it was commonplace for Catholic priests to demonise gay people in public as they are routinely in Islam (something that is usually overlooked in secular circles) then Sheehy’s Mass would not be such a sensation and Bishop Ray Browne would not have apologised for it so hastily.

The only time I heard anything approaching his thundering invective was at Ian Paisley’s church in Belfast but it was ‘Roman’ Catholics, not gays that the late pastor had between his crosshairs. God Bless these crawthumping men of the cloth, saving us poor sinners from the furnace of hell.

PAISLEY, like Fr Sheehy, was fond of using the Good Book to give his ideas about sin the stamp of authority. But like anything that was written in a time when women were stoned for looking sideways at a man and thieves had their arms chopped off, a lot of the Bible is open to interpretation and its imprimatur is not always the gold standard.

In any case, Fr Sheehy’s dismissing the Tuam Babies and the Magdalene laundries as exaggerations tells us all we need to know of his not-too-humble knack of seeing only what he wants to see and hearing what he wants to hear.

The Church moves at a snail’s pace when it comes to reform but move it eventually does. Not so long ago, birth control was verboten. Church teaching cited the Old Testament’s railing against ‘spilling semen on the ground‘ but since 1985 when the government approved the sale of contraceptives, the debate has moved on.

Catholicism only approved cremation in 1963. If it’s not to shrivel into a cult, the Church has to be relevant to modern life, so there is always tension between the ever-changing world and the timeless Church. That’s why Pope Francis asks ‘who are we to judge?’ about homosexuality. It’s as if he’s halfway to publicly accepting homosexuality as natural, rather than a disorder.

Doubts about transgenderism are not limited to Catholics, they cut across society, but as more youngsters suffer from gender identity problems, society will have to grapple with the condition, regardless of whether it’s real or imagined and the Church will have to go there too, in time.

The Church’s inevitable embrace of most social change does not make Jesus’s message easy to practise. Far from it. Tenets of Christianity such as ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ and ‘the first shall be last and the last shall be first’ raise questions about money, ambition and being a decent person in a harsh world that most of us don’t want to hear.

The scandal of clerical sex abuse is also an important factor in turning people away. The shame of the cover-up coupled with priestly celibacy has caused a fall-off in ordinations and the shortage of priests that handed Fr Sheehy his soapbox in Listowel, filling in for the regular priest who was on a parish pilgrimage.

The retired priest who spent most of his career in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, may be congratulating himself today for fearlessly giving the flock a good dressing down. Ironically, he has only reminded us of how despite its failures, the Irish Church has moved on from the severity, sexual repression and judgmentalism of Fr Sheehy’s youth.