Father Death
The newsreader on RTE Radio 1 this morning said that five heavily-armed men abducted a person last night in Ballymurphy, a Nationalist area of Belfast. In a separate incident, shots were fired into a home in a Protestant area in what's thought to be an ongoing Loyalist internecine feud. So, although political normalcy in Northern Ireland is still a vision this Christmas, the situation is far better that it was 30 years ago.
Back in 1972, the region experienced the worst year of the Troubles when 470 people were killed and the Provisional IRA emerged as a powerful force with growing popular appeal. Of all the evil deeds it masterminded that year, none was more horrible than that which took place on the bright summer morning of 31 July in the village of Claudy, County Derry, when three no-warning car-bombs exploded and killed nine people, five Catholics and four Protestants. Three of the dead were children.
Evidence has now emerged that the man who led the IRA unit responsible for the carnage was a Catholic priest, Father James Chesney. And if that wasn't bad enough, it has been revealed that his involvement in the atrocity was made know immediately to both the Catholic Church and the British government, who then colluded at the highest levels to have him quietly transferred across the border to the Republic of Ireland. He died there in 1980 aged 48.
This sacrificing of truth and the denial of justice is eerily reminiscent of what's been happening of late in the Catholic Church's sex scandals. Saving the institution is of paramount importance so the troublesome priest is transferred and the suffering of the victims is compounded by the cover up.
The Catholic Church's stock in Ireland is now so devalued that this latest blow won't do make matters much worse but it is, nevertheless, a tragedy as it will further obscure the heroic role many Catholic clerics played during the past 30 years in preventing the North from sliding into full-scale civil war. And it also diminishes the work of those priests who continue to uphold their faith. While so many of us will be sitting stuffed in front of the television this Christmas, priests be visiting the sick and the lonely and giving the Last Rites to the dying. Day after day, these same priests will sit in damp, draughty churches listening to the pathetic sins of those who need absolution.
The explosions at Claudy are still reverberating 30 years later; the shock waves caused by the implosion of the Catholic Church in Ireland will last even longer.
