On the evidence, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid probably was homosexual. So what? If he remained celibate, in accordance with his vows, his sexuality was his own private business. We are what we were born. However, many people now wonder if his homosexual orientation influenced young seminarians in his care towards homosexuality. So what? We are all capable of changing our sexual orientation to one degree or another, and if the seminarians observed their vows of celibacy, so bloody what? Let us look at it another way. If the Archbishop was a raving heterosexual, and influenced young seminarians in that direction, so what? There's nothing wrong with heterosexuality either.
A problem would arise if a homosexual was anti-heterosexual, or if a heterosexual was anti-homosexual. In that instance, we would have an inarguable case for saying such people should not be appointed to positions of power. Nobody has the right to degrade or denigrate another person's sexuality, and in the case of an Irish Catholic archbishop, who controls sex education in schools and has a bias against one orientation or the other, the situation would be an affront to human rights. Nobody has the right to churn out children with prejudiced views.
Of course, I am being rational here, and the furore over McQuaid is based on irrationality and sheer prejudice - against homosexuals. The people who are getting their knickers in a twist over the Archbishop are showing a subconscious loathing of homosexuality itself. That is their big problem. They want a straight priesthood. At this stage of the game, they wouldn't even mind a straight, sexually active priesthood - let the clerics have as many women as they want, but for Chrissake don't let them have men in their beds. That is what they really mean.
The argument has been obscured by the suggestion that McQuaid might have tried to get it on with young boys - that he was a paedophile. If so, people are right to be concerned. However, most such people have failed to distinguish between paedophilia and homosexuality. To them, it is all the one and the same. A homosexual is a paedophile is a homosexual is a paedophile. They maintain that view even though the factual evidence shows that paedophiles are usually heterosexual. If the facts were to be faced honestly about priests who engage in dodgy sexual practise, it's the heterosexual priests we should be worrying about, not the homosexual priests. Think of Father Brendan Smyth.
Then again, though most of his victims were little girls, he had a penchant for little boys too. Ah Jaysus, what we should be thinking about is how the priesthood attracts so many paedophiles, be they heterosexual or homosexual. Obviously, the collar gives them a perfect alibi for access to children. And beyond that again, we should be thinking about how the rules of the Catholic priesthood cannot but produce men whose sexuality has been distorted and who enter the seminary in a perfectly healthy sexual state come out the other end as raving sexual lunatics.
How could it be otherwise, when their clerical teachers, as we know from testimony about McQuaid, spent hours giving out to each boy about wanking, celibacy, and the horrible things that men and women get up to. McQuaid seems to have been obsessed about the sex act, and was a dab hand at demonstrating how it was done - he formed a circle with the index finger and thumb of one hand and pushed the index finger of the other through the hole. No matter whether he was demonstrating the heterosexual or the homosexual act - the thought of that grown man acting like a schoolboy in the shed talking dirty about sex makes the hair stand on end. What have he and his ilk done to generations of Irish people? What are his successors doing now?
Off with their heads and their hands - off the minds of our children and ourselves, I say, until the sexual nature of the priesthood is restored to full health. Which probably means, until the priesthood and the laity have equal power. It is nothing less than barbaric anyway, that the ruling caste in the Catholic Church is exclusively male. Sure what could you expect but sexual perversion when an all-male priesthood declares that women are not good enough to walk with God? n