THE VATICAN, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE SOCIETY OF JESUS: TIME FOR SOME TRUTH

Whenever there’s serious evil going on in the world where the Catholic Church has a religious grip on the population you’ll always hear one sound more than any other… a deafening silence! Locally, country to country, say Argentina for example, where a vicious military dictatorship murdered tens of thousands of innocent people in the 70s and 80s, a deafening silence! And from the Vatican, the Catholic Church’s world centre, absolutely nothing during that time. They let it all pass without a word. On a much wider scale there are many examples of such a strange silence in recent history – the worst being the Holocaust – and countless more if you go back in time, say 600 years, to the conquest of Central and South America by Spain and Portugal backed up by the Vatican’s army of Catholic Evangelicals, the Society of Jesus.   

With regard to Latin America, all you’ve got to do is take a look at the endless loot of gold, silver and precious stones piled up in the cathedrals of Spain, Portugal and Italy to get the material side of the picture, and if you want to see more visit the Vatican Museum. The religion of love and forgiveness started collecting well over a thousand years back. However the real treasure’s far greater than that! As the Church of St Peter began moving through human history and territories all over the globe it was busy converting the natives. Like some grand army of ghouls it’s been picking up people. Engaged in the collection of souls.

Let’s look more closely. First Europe. Before Christianity was officially established by Constantine in 4^th century Rome the Empire was dominated by rival forms of paganism, one of which was Epicureanism, part of the ancient intellectual heritage of Greece that taught comradeship and the fellowship of human beings. It was also responsible for developing the science of atomic motion! There was also the Stoicism of Emperors such as Marcus Aurelius. With the coming of the new faith and the rise of the Church these beliefs disappeared under a wave of intolerance and persecution. Over the next thousand years Christianity spread throughout Europe, suppressed outright slavery and promulgated the subjection of the rural peasantry to a military land owning class. In a word feudalism. During this period and the following three centuries the main religious grouping suppressed were the Jews. They were initially looted and butchered during the Crusades and later strictly confined to specific areas in cities, the first being the Ghetto of Venice, then expelled from country to country, one being England where they were murdered and robbed wholesale under Edward I. After this came the horrendous Catholic Inquisitions in 15^th century Spain and Portugal. All officially set up and certified by the Popes of the Vatican.

The forcible conversion, torture, murder and expulsion of Spain’s large Jewish population was its first official Holocaust. The official imprisonment of Jews who fled elsewhere in Europe its second. The Jews, however, were only a first experiment. A necessary persecution of those upon whom the Church of Rome attached a collective guilt. A blanket condemnation of murderers and killers of Christ. Interestingly enough this condemnation still persists in the minds of countless numbers of Catholics and other Christians today. I heard it myself at a school where I taught not long ago!

In tandem with the persecution of the Jews by the Vatican during the Medieval Period was its persecution of women. Hundreds of thousands throughout Europe were tortured or burned at the stake for no other reason than the fact that they were intelligent, independent minded perhaps, or refused to go along with priestly or religious demands. The only women safe anywhere were the wives of the rich while countless numbers of the poor were forced or cajoled into Convents to have their heads shaved, become Brides of the Church and provide cheap pastoral labour. A parallel scandal of this kind was recently exposed in Ireland where countless numbers of vulnerable young women, with the complicity of the Irish State, were detained and forced to work for nothing in Church laundries from the 1920s. The priests, bishops and Cardinals must have known of this practice yet from the Church only a deafening silence! Strange when the Vatican holds   a single women, the mother of Jesus, to be its pre-eminent saint yet prefers keeping most of the rest poor, ignorant and pious. Dressed in black and forever lighting a candle.

The horrors of 15^th century Spain and Portugal referred to above were only a dress rehearsal for something far bigger, namely the plundering military expeditions of conquest against the indigenous Indian Empires of Central and South America begun by Pizarro and Cortez. Looting and murder went hand in hand with forcible mass conversion of whole peoples who worshipped other gods. The Aztecs of Mexico and Incas of Peru were first mercilessly brutalized then converted to the faith of love of ‘god’s son’ by an army of the military righteous, the priests of Jesus himself, the Society of Jesus.

The organisers of this Latin American Holocaust shipped home the loot and left the conquered peoples to the determined no-nonsense pastoral care of their new spirit guides, the Vatican’s new roving priesthood. They did their work well. Over the next five hundred years they captured the souls and gained the trust of hundreds of millions from the United States border all the way down to Chile and established themselves as the official religion of love. Easy-peasy. Well not quite! Initially the native Indians resisted from one thousand miles to the next but were always put down over the centuries by their new Spanish and Portuguese masters who institutionalized the teaching of Catholic doctrine in schools. The treasures gone, this was now a battle for hearts as a prerequisite to enslavement on the endless sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations. And all the way down the centuries, the only sound from the Popes of the Vatican, the so-called inheritors of the teachings of Jesus, was silence!

Early in the 19^th century armies of bandits led by crusading generals became the norm throughout Latin America. One of these is typified by General de Rosas of Argentina who, with the silence of the Vatican playing an overture in the background, wiped out the entire population of the country’s native Indians and became military dictator. The relationship between the Vatican and the dictators of 19^th century Central and South America is a whole subject for study but the trend is always the same; institutional religious indoctrination hand in hand with an endlessly brutal suppression of labour, the official representatives of the Catholic Church, of the Vatican itself always silent. Of course, there was always ‘compassion’ for the suffering though it never went any further than silent prayer or the blissful ministration of the holy biscuit to the poor. Silence was always maintained and through tradition and a desperate universal ignorance the poor kept coming to worship.

The spell was first challenged in Latin America with the great Mexican peasant revolution of the early 20^th century during which, for a period of three decades, the grip of the church on the minds of the people was broken and Catholicism officially suppressed. The reaction of the Vatican was initially sorrow rapidly followed by outright condemnation and excommunication. In Europe however its fortunes took a turn for  the better! The takeover of Italy in 1922 by Mussolini’s fascists was met with more than a welcome. In Spain during the 1930’s a Spanish anti-Catholic Republican Government met with open Vatican hostility and condemnation. During the Civil War that followed the Vatican lent its support to the fascist General Franco who emerging victorious, continued his long term campaign of atrocities against Republican supporters and sympathizers with a brutal suppression of large numbers of the population. He was supported throughout by the vast majority of Spain’s bishops and priests acting under orders from Rome and in turn rewarded the Church by formally embedding Catholicism as the state institution of formal education par excellence. Fascism and the Catholic Church operated hand in glove until the dictator’s death four decades later. Not a murmur from the Vatican about the endless atrocities that led up to the Second World War.

As for Hitler’s rise to power in the early thirties, the suppression of democracy and bloody persecution of all opposition, the emergence of an absolute dictatorship based on race, the setting up of concentration camps and the passing of the Nuremberg Race Laws, there was barely a murmur of disapproval from Pius XII. The same went for the murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents and the mentally disabled that followed. The Pope and the Vatican never stood up and spoke out. It’s been claimed that they were powerless to do anything and might themselves have come under attack but such excuses are simply disgusting. They preferred instead to remain silent. Their possible influence among Germany’s large population of Catholics unheard. What is not in dispute is that in the years following the end of the War, Vatican officials provided an escape conduit from Europe for many Nazi War Criminals to South America while during the conflict itself, Catholic bishops in Slovakia and elsewhere formally assisted in setting up concentration camps for the murder of Jews.

During a period of three decades then in Europe, the Vatican was an institution of collaboration and silence. Painful silence, possibly prayer!

Today in Europe, with the demise of Soviet Stalinism in the east, the Catholic Church is again all powerful in Poland and the Baltic States with an iron grip on the hearts of its people. Of course there’s always the seemingly endless affection Italians have for their ‘Bishop of Rome’ even if the title’s only something the Vatican gives itself! However such affection is certainly now the case in Mexico but also Brazil and through much of Central and Latin America. At the same time the Catholic Church has steadily increased its following everywhere in Africa except the Muslim north. In short, despite continuing revelations of the inappropriate behaviour of its clergy high and low, its treatment of women, its financial scandals and ever increasing enrichment, its influence continues to grow everywhere among the poorest centres of population and lowest concentrations of literacy in all the above areas.         

The last few weeks has seen the Catholic Church firmly back in the news. The ghastly revelations of sexual impropriety and shocking history of institutional exploitation of women in Ireland hasn’t dimmed the faith of its followers or their love for their spiritual leader the Pope a single iota. Candles will continue to be lit and prayers fervently said by women in black the world over and fridge magnets, snow shakers and other holy souvenirs bought by tourists. The Catholic Church souvenir industry run by the Vatican is vast! The established faith of the poor Jewish preacher who rode into town on a donkey has been set up for 1700 years and its machinery’s running like clockwork. It’s in the business of preaching a faith and harvesting souls but who knows what the man really believed? He was an orthodox Jew, that’s for sure. Believed in celebrating the Sabbath and Exodus from Egypt and may well have been married with kids. He was a broadminded man and certainly liked women.

The Catholic Church doesn’t do that kind of thing. It’s only got his mother in mind. Hundreds of years later the Church of St Peter turned him into the son of God and so made him celibate. It had to be done to make up the myth. Their myth. Their institution to suit. Forget his biology. He wasn’t interested in girls, same as  holy church fathers! Even so readers he was born a man first. As for the Vatican, hundreds of thousands of their bishops and priests the world over have to make themselves live unnaturally. Like having an erection is a sin against God! If you can’t control it my son you’ll be kicked out of College. Really! Why go through all that hell to be unnatural? Does it really deserve our respect? Are they really doing it for us? Who are really the sinners?

One final point. The influence of faith or adherence to it is by no means lasting or uniform. In Ireland, after eight hundred years of St Patrick, with most of its population during that time illiterate yet firmly devoted, things are beginning to change following recent scandals and revelations. The age old trust of the faithful in their priest has begun to crack and a cracked mirror can’t be repaired. There’s now a distortion and a distorted reflection makes people think. They might not like what they see and want to push the image aside but they can’t. They’re not sure what they see anymore. The old certainty’s gone and they can’t get it out of their minds. Something’s changed. Maybe for the first time they’re beginning to think and the crack’s getting wider. They see something else and they don’t like it. Next thing they’ll start asking questions. It’s already happening in Ireland and among the youth in Portugal and Spain. The unemployed youth of Europe are waking up and they won’t join the priesthood no more!

Postscript: Immediately prior to the publication of this Post a Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, has according to BBC News denied that the new Pope, Francis 1^st, ‘failed to speak out against human rights abuses during military rule in his native Argentina’… “There has never been a credible, concrete accusation against him,” he said, ‘adding he had never been charged’. According the BBC Report the Vatican spokesman ‘blamed the accusations on’… “anti-clerical left wing elements that are used to attack the Church.”

If correct the statements made by the spokesman are extraordinary. Firstly the use of the word ‘charge’ is unclear. Presumably he means civil criticism or condemnation rather than any form of legal procedure though any denial of the former is on shaky ground. Much more important is blaming accusations on anti-clerical left wing elements. This is an old and well used blanket slur used by the Vatican to condemn all forms of criticism i.e. blame it on anti-clerical socialists, and was much in evidence during the time of the Spanish Civil War in support of the fascists.

It is certainly possible to be anti-clerical without being left wing or a socialist. It is likewise possible to be a socialist without being anti-clerical. Many devout Catholics are! The fact that the Vatican conflates the two is indicative of a deeply reactionary posture, well established over time to defend itself against endless criticism that it has only too often sided with established authority, taking the side of the rich and powerful against that of the poor.

VIVA CHAVEZ!

Some of you reading this post may wonder who it is I’m writing about and why. After all, when so many people in Britain spend so much time on a daily basis struggling to make ends meet they can’t be blamed for not being too fussed about what’s going on in the rest of the world outside the standard management of news by the BBC or the Murdoch media empire. In any case people these days tend to accept what they’re given and few politicians care about them anyway, especially the poor. The political process has become a mechanized institutional system of lying. Most politicians indeed are plain liars. People don’t care about you anymore because you never really cared about them!  You only pretend that you do.

Emiliano Zapata, the Indian peasant who led the great Mexican Revolution early in the twentieth century once told his followers, “Don’t trust your leaders. Trust only yourselves.” He was a great human being who rose from illiteracy to become a national figure who was loved by the poor. A few days ago Hugo Chavez the President of Venezuela lost his battle with cancer and died aged 58. Elected four times into office he was an uncompromising believer in equality and justice and spent most of his political life fighting tirelessly on behalf of the poor of his country. He took away the power and privileges of the rich, nationalized the oil industry which formed the basis of their wealth and redistributed it to the hungry and needy. Many millions of peasants and those of the endless city shacks benefitted from the free medicines, clean water, decent new accommodation and the fair priced food he made sure they got.

Surely such a man should have been universally loved and admired. Not at all! America’s politicians along with all the greedy and exploitative rich across South America hated him for it. The fact that he expropriated the wealth of the few and gave the poor and hungry of Venezuela hope and pride made him an enemy of the Republican Party in a country where at least a third of the people live in dire poverty and want to keep it that way. Understand this, nobody in America cares about the poor of America because America is a society where nobody much cares about anyone else. Not necessarily because they don’t want to but because they don’t know how to!

Historically America was created as part of a struggle against a colonial power by men and women who sought to choose their own individual political destiny. Consequently the society that emerged was formed on a basis of individualism and personal initiative. Any ideas of equality and comradeship, of people caring about each other was entirely anathema to the mindset and values of those who fought for colonial freedom. A mindset dominated by the idea of individual liberty rather than collective freedom. When American politicians today talk of liberty and freedom, two key words in their lexicon, they do not mean them to have any connection to the idea of equality between people. Their idea of liberty and freedom is the liberty and freedom for people to be individualists. For example that each man and woman can own a gun if they choose without interference from any outside collective body such as the State!

According to its Constitution, the personal rights of each individual in America are paramount. The effect  of this is to institutionalize selfishness and preclude the possibility of anyone caring about anyone else. In Europe, with our different history, we might until recently have found it difficult to understand a society where nobody cared about or helped anyone else which is why trades unions only formed in America under such violent conditions. Recently however in Britain we see the emergence of a society dominated by rampant individualism i.e. the conduct of bankers unashamedly awarding themselves outrageous bonuses and salaries while their banks make stupendous losses at the expense of the taxpayer or the executives of American multinational corporations engaging in tax avoidance practices, likewise at the expense of the British people. This emergence into British life of unrequited rampant individualism is of course a product of the Thatcher era. A time of cooing supercilious lying par excellence!

Of course, it then is only natural that the actions of Hugo Chavez to help the poor of his country by promoting equality through redistributing wealth should bring the condemnation of British and American politicians. Natural because in America no individual is responsible for the welfare of any other. There can be no generalised welfare. No welfare state. No care or concern about the welfare of anyone else. Only your own! Anything else is collectivism. Communism! Inequality therefore becomes something God given which explains the extreme religiosity of its population!

In Venezuela the majority of the poor are of indigenous Indian descent. The same applies throughout most of the continent of South America. The native Indian population is right at the bottom of the pile. Hugo Chavez was one of them. Much is made of his charisma, his singing and clowning. In Britain we like our political leaders to look like Neville Chamberlain with stiff white wing collars, grey moustaches and bowler hats. Men wearing red berets and military fatigues just isn’t British. It’s Latin American! British political leaders aren’t supposed to sing or play a guitar. They’re expected to hold up little pieces of paper and grin!

The Venezuelan leader was a four times elected political populist. Described as ‘controversial’ at home by his enemies from the business class because he used his power to promoted equality and justice, the view is perhaps more applicable to his political friendships with certain other world leaders among whom were Robert Mugabe, Ahmed Ahmadinejad of Iran, Fidel Castro, Evo Morales of Bolivia, the Presidents of Argentina and Uruguay and of course George Galloway! Now what on earth one might ask unites these people as a friend of a friend of the poor? Chavez stated his belief in socialism many times over but many of the above are anything but. One’s an Islamist and anti-socialist with strong anti-Semitic tendencies, another a tribal populist with anti-socialist views while the socialism of Morales and Castro is more akin to Latin American syndicalism than European Marxism. And while Galloway himself is certainly no revolutionary Marxist at least he’s indignant!

Here then is Chavez in company with some very strange bedfellows. There’s nothing at all ideological that connects any of these people, like Ahmadinejad the Islamist with Kirchner of Argentina. On the surface there’s only a generalised antipathy towards the United States and in some cases Israel. America was indeed the dominant power in Central and South America throughout the twentieth century and ran the whole continent like a collection of colonies on behalf of mining, agricultural and financial corporations through corrupt and violent local appointees, usually military dictators, and the people who suffered most during this time were its native Indian populations and the endless number of mixed race poor. Cuba on the other hand was once a fiefdom of the American Mafia. In short, it’s only an anti-American, anti-colonialist populism that brings them together but that kind of simmering resentment was never really much of a glue! That’s to be found elsewhere. In the economics of oil rather than the fervor of ideology.  

Venezuela is the world’s fourth largest oil producer with an annual revenue from it approaching 100 billion dollars. During his time in office Chavez supplied oil on exceptionally favorable terms to many of the above political leaders and together with Iran acts to manipulate supply and price controls in OPEC, the international cartel of energy producers. Therein lies his connection to the Iranian anti-Semite and enemy of Israel and explains Venezuela’s break of diplomatic ties with the Jewish State. The relationship between Chavez and Argentina is something else. In recent years he paid off the debt owed by Argentina to the rest of the world in the aftermath of its currency crash and need to borrow widely on the international markets. Argentina came close to bankruptcy. Economic collapse was narrowly averted and the country nudged back on its feet by the oil wealth of its Latin American neighbor helping it avoid having to return cap in hand to the bankers of Wall Street. Besides, such a link with Argentina would help isolate Brazil, the real economic power house of the continent and no friend of its southern neighbor. The same went for Uruguay. Oil for influence! Castro on the other hand got it for free and sent Venezuela large numbers of doctors. As for Morales, the minerals of Bolivia were a natural exchange for the liquid gold of its friend to the north.

The oil wealth of Venezuela then was the currency of economic exchange cementing good relations between Chavez and his Latin American neighbours. It gave him a powerful degree of geo-political clout which enabled him to reduce the influence of the United States in its Latin American backyard and substitute his own, something his Iranian partner in OPEC would certainly approve. Oil, as a sound economic basis for good mutual relations could be mixed with Chavez’ genuine ideological beliefs and local political aspirations. Venezuela’s oil wealth enabled him to actualize his socialism and put into practice his passion for equality and justice for its Indian people and poor. Most of the international political leaders with whom he joined never had that kind of ‘local’ interest. They were united more by antipathy towards the United States and Britain as colonial powers than by any ideology or concern for their poor. In any case Venezuela today still has a comprehensive capitalist economy and Chavez’ economic model has been described as being more of a ‘pro-poor capitalism’ than anything socialist or Marxist.

Nonetheless it brought him the friendship and admiration of various European radicals and socialists among whom was George Galloway, outspoken himself and never shy about being seen in the company of like-minded world leaders although, quite frankly, I somehow can’t see Robert Mugabe appearing on a TV reality show kissing the feet of some babe! Nor Fidel Castro come to think of it! Chavez perhaps, if the mood took him! He was leftist and populist. A man who gave the oppressed poor a voice, they gave him theirs and trusted him with it. Looked at from the general standpoint of American politicians he was an unreconstructed Marxist demagogue but then these people would hold such a view against anyone critical of the vile excesses of American Imperial policy in Latin America over many decades; imprisonment and death on a grand scale for anyone who stood up and spoke out. Yes, those who hated him only ever had a concern for the interests of the rich and the powerful.               

Hugo Chavez was certainly no revolutionary Marxist, or military liberator of the style of Simon Bolivar. But like Bolivar he did have a singularly Latin American vision. Both were great anti-colonialist campaigners. One against Spain the other an unrequited critic of American neo-Imperialism. Bolivar, who died disillusioned and a lonely spent force later became a universal political hero throughout South America. Chavez, who died a populist hero in Venezuela, awaits a fate as yet undecided in the hall of fame of those who championed the poor. So despite serious misgivings about the character of his political friends on the world stage I nonetheless say, for your struggle to give the poor of your country equality, justice and a vision of better things, along with a superb national youth orchestra, VIVA CHAVEZ!

You had the heart to care about ordinary people in a way that British politicians never could. Millions across the world mourn your passing.

RASCALS, MOLESTERS AND GROPERS

I’m taking a break from THE HORSEMEAT CHRONICLES to further comment on a subject close to my heart that deserves a new twist. Where have all the scandals gone? It’s a question I asked in an earlier post and for very good reason. In the last few years the British people have passed through so many serious scandals that they’re probably close to immune to all except the worst. It’s not only their frequency. Compared to those of previous years they’ve so effortlessly commanded our outrage and indignation that a whole new standard may have to be set.

It’s useful to consider them terms of the Richter Scale in Seismology that runs one to ten. The biggest quakes reach the high eights and destroy cities. Their power registers globally. Most of the lesser ones run four to six. But here you’re talking in terms of absolutes. Human scandals are relative. For example, if the Jimmy Savile situation had exploded in the nineteen-fifties its impact would have been far more powerful than it has been today. Say eight point nine in 1955 compared to eight today. While the seemingly small difference is actually gigantic in seismic terms, the Savile Scandal, shocking as it is now, would have registered as Earth shattering in the fifties.

So in a sense, human scandal is relative to historic time. Today we shake our heads, say they’re at it again, and maybe even have a laugh in the pub about the high and mighty being caught with their pants down or their hands in the till. We’ve become used to such things almost as a daily occurrence so we’re becoming immune to the shock wave, the person doing it or the institution involved. Just another piece of filth at one of the banks for example or someone or other having a feel!

The more important the individual or institution involved the more resounding the scandal. This is because the media need a big name to drag through the dirt for public consumption. As long as the dirt has the right kind of distaste. Their prime objective is to sell newspapers and fill time on television around advertising. In the late fifties a scandal involving a top Tory politician, call girls, a Soviet military attaché and a five star pimp was massive. The Profumo Affair caused the Government to resign and was a major cultural sensation. It ran for ages. There’d never been anything like it. The resulting shift in moral values led straight to the swinging sixties. Today the same thing with all the same kind of people involved would run for a few days in the Sun then disappear under a Cardinal's cassock.

Likewise a few months ago the Savile Scandal involving the BBC, the police, and figures in the world of entertainment was seriously big. Today it’s already half-forgotten but in ten years’ time such a thing might have far less media time to travel. Right now Savile competes with Lib-Dem licentiousness, Holy Roman hanky-panky and general church naughtiness, sporting celebrity crime, mass food substitution on a grand scale and gross financial impropriety by banks. One major political figure after another, one major church official following the next down the dark road of humiliation and exposure for indiscretion. One kind of personal weakness, another piece of moral stupidity or another. People we might expect to know better being unable to control themselves. Those we regard as our betters doing unbelievable things. Knowingly, impulsively walking over the edge to destruction. 

The question is not simply why? Why do they all do what they do, but why do they think they’re immune to exposure. Jimmy Savile had the police to protect him but others didn’t so why take the risk? Play a deadly game of chance so that a stretched out hand or a single inappropriate action or word might lead to the loss of everything. Why do people already in the public eye so willingly dance with death? Seek to embrace public ridicule? Do they want at some deep fundamental level to be laughed at in pubs. If so the stage is a more suitable career than politics or the church. Why for example, risk blowing your whole career, your life’s work, your high moral reputation as a religious leader by messing about with young priests? Didn’t you think they might feel betrayed, lose their respect for you and give your secret away?

Why break the law so many times when you broke into so many private lives, you journalists, churchmen and politicians? Did you think the police or the high moral authority you had would protect you? Your position would only protect you if you were someone like Savile and spread masses of money around. It enabled him to do what he wanted most of his life and take his dirty mind to the grave. He had the power of money on his side and he knew it. Those he preyed on were poor and unimportant . It made them vulnerable because nobody would take any notice of them, especially the police, and he knew it. He understood vulnerability. Most of his admirers were working class, same as his victims. He let them smell popularity. The sense of a good thing. To those with more a discerning eye he was cheesy all over with his soppy little gestures and gimmicks. If it looks like a rat it IS a rat so why pretend that it’s not!

The roll call of filth is illustrious! Despicable police behaviour at Hillsborough and after; phone hacking; police treatment of rape victims and child identity theft; corrupt rotten journalism; Members of Parliament stealing from the taxpayer; cheating violent sportsmen; thieving criminal bankers cheating the public wholesale; corrupt and abusive police; wholesale sexual abuse within the Catholic Church; food fraud gangsters; the energy price fixing racket; the moral and physical abuse of young women by the Catholic Church and State in Ireland whose exploitation over many years ran dirty and deep; extraordinary double-dealing at the Inland Revenue; police working undercover infiltrating protest groups and having sex on the job; tax evading multinational corporations. These and many more! This is no longer a matter of a few single issues. It is generalised grossly amoral behaviour as a way of life throughout British society.

Exploitation, moral bankruptcy and endless indiscretion! Come to think of it though maybe it’s a bit more simple than that. Maybe people have just lost their sense of direction. After all when you’re smelling shit all the time you can’t remember what anything else smelt like! You’ve got no point of reference to anything better when everyone and everything around you stinks. The bad smell becomes the normality for you and your kids and if that’s what you smell then that’s your reality. And as far as appearance is concerned you’ve become just another overweight ball of lard in an endless procession of fast food junkies who prefer snacking on shit because they’re too lazy to cook a half decent meal.

What does it all mean? Simply that you yourself are now part of the problem. Tattooed to the eyeballs and ropping with sugar and fat, you’ve become another increment in a rolling parade of the obscene. However it’s not you who are corrupt or morally dirty. That kind of thing’s for the men of god, the politicians and the police. You’re too far down the list. Your obesity and fast rising diabetes is your own self-indulgent personal problem. You’ve allowed yourself to become your own worst enemy and prey to the moral abusers. You know them, don’t you? The ones you see making the headlines on such a regular basis. The cardinals in cassocks, the bankers in striped shirts and braces, the politicians in suits and the rat-faced journalists, whiskers ever out on the twitch for a story.

Talk of immorality and dirt? A million times bigger than the biggest oil company, countless times richer than any country on Earth, certainly half of all those on the planet put together… the chief executive of the world’s richest, most powerful business, the Pope, has just retired from running the Catholic Church. Sure the Vatican’s rich! If you’d been piling up gold, precious gems, valuable paintings and endless property for 2000 years you’d also be rich! Oh, but think of all the valuable work it’s done over that time, like having tens of thousands of young women work for them for nothing in Irish laundries while keeping them locked up… like sexually abusing and morally corrupting endless numbers of its own priests down the centuries… like persecuting their fellow human beings of other faiths with physical violence from one thousand years to the next… Like staying silent over the Holocaust. It’s foot soldiers always merciless wherever they had power over the weak.

Yes, Jesus’ representative on the planet has retired but that won’t help the Italian economy out of the shit. It could do of course but it won’t. Why should it? The Vatican’s another country, living like a maggot at the heart of a rotten apple. The founding fathers of the modern republic of Italy were determined it should be a secular state but unfortunately they failed. The maggot’s been getting fatter while Italy’s been under the control of an even more insidious worm in recent years. Don’t you think that somehow it’s strange? That wherever this Holy Roman religion dominates the minds of people anywhere on Earth it’s precisely there that people are poorest and least educated, often verging on illiteracy. From the United States and Mexico  all the way down through South America, through large parts of south-east Asia and Africa, it dominates billions of lives, receives endless wealth from those who are poorest and gives no material sustenance in return. Its houses of prayer are everywhere the most opulent and lavish with astonishing wealth in places of greatest poverty and among those who are among the most needy.

It’s a truism even in areas of Western Europe such as Spain and Italy, both mired in unemployment and poverty. On a recent visit to the cathedrals of Seville and Toledo I saw enough wealth in gold, precious gems and paintings to convince me that if it was sold the proceeds could feed the poor of Central and South America, men, women and children, till the end of the century. I’m not just talking of the riches and opulence belonging to the planet’s greatest promoters of humility and piety. Add it all up and the word ‘unbelievable’ doesn’t even touch sides. When I think of these places I remember the beggars outside. Hungry people hoping that tourists would give them a Euro. Hungry people the church police wouldn’t even let in!

So how much did you do for any of these while you were running your outfit, mister newly retired? More broadly, how much do any of these so called spiritual leaders do for anyone when all’s said and done? Yes, yes, you give them faith. Faith in ‘the Lord and his teachings’… but considering that Catholicism is a faith totally bound up with spiritual teaching it’s remarkable that throughout most of its history it’s been busy acquiring material wealth, a practice that’s gone hand in hand with its ministry of teaching, especially those naïve young priests and innocent girls in Ireland, to name only one place where it’s been busy!          

In recent weeks we’ve had a real roll call of dirt. In recent days we’ve been getting a real dose of holiness. Never mind him joining the Hitler Youth. He didn’t have to do that but he did! Never mind young priests the world over swept under the carpet during his time in office. Never mind the ruthless exploitation of defenceless young women in Ireland. Churchy commentators at the BBC have frothed at the mouth every time the man in virgin white linen has so much as taken a step! This organisation with terrorists friends should be more mindful about its own moral turpitude than play footsie with dirt. In an increasingly cynical world it’s an increasingly serious question involving the status of innocence or guilt. About who in a much wider sense is getting it over on whom.

And the winners in our dirty piss taking society? Bankers! Footballers! Tax evading corporations! And last but by no means least Liberal Democrats!

It’s just not true that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Someone just made it up and everyone likes to believe it. It makes them feel clever. Makes them feel they’re not being fooled when they are. ALL OF THE TIME!