The concept of a struggle between good and evil underpins the three Semitic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their mythologies teem with devils and demons, prophets, saints and mystics, all of who embody one or the other. Thus, the battle for the souls of humanity rages between God and Satan and their respective armies. And it’s been seen that way in these religions until recently. Indeed, it still is, in Israeli Judaism and in Islam.

Liberal Christians, Buddhists and humanists are less certain. They accept that good and evil can coexist, in people as well as society and that, on balance, if we end in credit rather than debit, we have not done badly by life and life has not done badly by us. Life is a League, not a Cup, so to speak, and a good life is a matter of attrition, not a single great battle.

It’s also tied up with questions of democracy and citizenship. Protestant belief places a great deal of emphasis on the need for individual responsibility and accountability. One should, in a sense, be one’s own cop, or referee. This is deeply embedded in Northern European thought, and makes sense of many political arrangements in countries like Denmark, Finland and Holland.

There is a different view in many Catholic countries where it is often believed that you can do whatever you want, so long as you say you are sorry afterwards. This culture also holds that it’s okay to do whatever, as long as you can get away with it, and that when hardy comes to hardy, you can make a confession on your dying bed and all will be forgiven.

In such environments, you will often hear calls for rigour in policing, as you do, for example, in Ireland now on the subject of road safety. There is an inherent belief that you simply cannot trust people, that they will inevitably try to get away with as much as they possibly can. And one of the great, and as yet unresolved tensions in modern Irish life is that between the old Catholic way of being and a new, less regulated, way, often characterised as secular, individualist, a la carte and Protestant.

But while these divergences exist, few disagree on the need to live a good life, nor on the need for a code of values to guide us through the maze. There is still a sense of right and wrong, however arbitrary and relative the definition, or diverse the sets of values. In the end, we still recognise evil. We can sense it. We can feel it. We can smell it. We can track its smarmy spoor through our lives.

In this regard, long-term readers of hotpress will be familiar with the slimy trail of Father Sean Fortune. Our first encounter with this repulsive beast was through his fly-by-night media and communications courses. But over the years, his other pursuit as a paedophile has been the source of his infamy.

Much has been written about him, and more will. I won’t reiterate the details of his gross and terrible trajectory through the lives of innocent and now destroyed people. But it has to be said that the mere thought of his

presence, his filthy touch, his ruthless

exploitation of children, his thuggery and bullying behaviour in the diocese of Ferns, well... it’s enough to make one ill. It really is.

So, this was an evil person. How else can you describe him? This wasn’t a matter of sex between consulting adults. It was paedophilia, it was the ruthless exploitation of power.

And he was not alone. We have heard much of the monstrous Brendan Smyth, and many many more. His employer, the organisation characterised by Brian D’Arcy as the Clerical Church, responded with compromise,

dishonesty and evasion. He and the rest of them infected the organism, and the authorities of that organism were too feeble, too compromised, too protective of the Firm to cut out the evil. They moved priests around. They worked in secret. They avoided the issue. They ran like cowards. They were economical with the truth. They put the Firm before the lives of the innocents. They betrayed the children and in so doing, they were themselves corrupted.

We have slowly been cleansing ourselves of the evils and corruptions of our past, like the Magdalen laundries, the Industrial schools, the beef industry, the planning cartels and tax

evasions by the wealthy. We are even coming to terms with the hypocritical shit that we have lived with on abortion. Now it’s time to do the same regarding the sexual abuse of innocent children by priests and brothers.

See, there’s a real risk that the resignation of the Bishop of Ferns, the hapless Comiskey, will be seen to close the book. That’s probably the way the croziers would wish it to be. But it’s not enough.

Other people need to be called to account, and in particular, the bould Cardinal Connell. The mere suspicion that a politician or a

businessperson was involved in covering up corruption or criminal activity would be

sufficient to generate a tide of rage and anger and calls for a public sworn enquiry and

retribution. This is no different.

A paedophile is a criminal and is subject to the rigours of the law. The Catholic Church has paid out vast sums of money in compensation. It is now widely alleged that its officials and orders have systematically covered up paedophile activity and have collaborated in helping criminals evade prosecution, or the consequences of their behaviour. If this is so, the Church and its authorities are themselves culpable before the law of the land. If they have lied they must be exposed and must take the consequences, all the way to the top.

It’s like this – a key Catholic Church organisation has made much of the injustice of Irish society, and has argued that you can’t have one law for the rich and another for the poor. Indeed. But equally, you can’t have one law for the clergy and another for the rest of us. Corruption is corruption and a cover-up is a cover-up. The same ethical standards apply to Cardinals as to captains of industry. Connell is in the firing line.