When Cardinal Pell declared some years ago, that the health hazards of homosexuality were worse than that of smoking, he sure showed his cards. The fact that as a priest his anti gay stance drove young aspiring men to suicide did not seem to trouble him the least.
Pell will get his trial and no matter the outcome, the catholic church is receiving a king-hit right now. It cannot risk losing support from their own staunchly conservative anti-gay, anti same sex marriage of ‘true’ believers, nor from those that were hoping that this new Pope would finally steer the church into a more progressive direction. It is a real dilemma and a nightmare. One can just imagine the battles being fought between the younger progressive cardinals and the concreted conservatives. I would not be surprised it coming to fisticuffs with mitres flying about, littering the Vatican’s corridors.
I reckon the Pope would have been tossing and turning last night. A restless sleep. He needs all the advice that his most trusted cardinals can muster. The whole Vatican must now be seething with anxiety, lawyers getting copies of briefs, ready for the Melbourne procedures. It is clear that Pell’s TV appearance last night was already pointing out at great lengths that ‘character assassination’ and ‘media gossip’ will be used as one of his best modes of defence. It might be argued that his trial cannot possibly be fair when so many allegations of sexual abuse have already been ‘relentlessly’ aired and tried by the media. Against that is the belief that ‘no-one’ is above the law, not even the Pope.
My own parents gave it all a miss many years ago. Mum reckoned she would have used the pill if available in earlier years. She was a great supporter of her own children later on choosing the number of children they wished to have. It begs the question, if the pill would have been available in my parents time, some of us might now not be here to tell the tale! The bombshell when I announced my plan to travel to Finland to get married was received with total mayhem and utter despair. “You used to be such a nice young man, Gerard,” was what my still fervently believing catholic inspired mum told me. Dad was more understanding or just less orthodox. Either way, the idea of marrying a girl they never met, was much less of an issue than the fact she wasn’t ‘catholic.’ It was one of the most irritating questions we were asked by mother, when dating a girl; Is she Catholic?
I would like to think that my trip to Finland might well have been the catalyst in their slide-down into becoming ex-Catholics or non-believers. It was slow in coming but gathered speed as the years went by. It had a liberating effect on my parents. The final knock-out blow to their Catholicism was delivered years later, when they watched a TV segment whereby their former ‘nice-boy Gerard’ was interviewed about his recent vasectomy. There could not have been a more enthusiastic supporter for the cut to the vas deferens, than my mother.
The surgeon was Barbara Simcock. I read years later that she performed thousands of vasectomies. What she doesn’t know about testicles is just not worth writing about. The seventies was just the beginning. Vasectomies become so popular the term vasectomania was used. It still is the preferred method for male contraception. Just type in ‘vasectomy’ and one gets the most mouth watering invitation from dozens of clinics offering a host of very tempting procedures. One even offers a three-day trip on a luxury liner.
The mind boggles.
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