THRESHOLD OF PAIN

On the afternoon that Crossing The Threshold Of Hope by His Holiness John Paul II first went on sale in this country, I spent an hour hanging around Waterstones on Dawson Street.

It wasn’t that I was especially interested to see what kind of people were going to buy the book. Random House publishers paid a reported $10 million for the worldwide rights to the publication. It is to appear in a total of 20 editions in 36 countries. With projected world sales provisionally set at 20 million copies, I realised that it is going to appeal to a rather wide cross section of the planet’s populace so that the odds were that I’d probably clock a higher geek count if I hung around the Gardening section for sixty minutes.

No, the individuals I was keen to see were those who were rushing out to buy the book. The ones who wanted to be the first in their street, their factory, their high security cell block to own a copy. Men and women who couldn’t wait to get started on staining the volume’s elegant papal gold and white cover with their sweaty fingerprints. Surely, I told myself, if such folks exist then, verily, they are formidable bull goose loonies of our age.

Crossing The Threshold Of Hope is a book for people who move their lips when they pray. Not so much ghost written as Holy Ghost written, it is a trenchant and reactionary restatement of the traditional Catholic values (faith, hope, charity, paedophilia etc.) As you’d expect, it is banal, pompous, demented and fanatical. As you might equally expect, it has been lauded as a magnificent read by such eminent literary critics as Bishop Cahal Daly, Lord Longford and Mary Kenny. And, of course, it is currently number one in the Irish nonfiction bestseller lists.

For the record, the eight Waterstones customers whom I observed purchasing Crossing The Threshold Of Hope between 2pm and 3pm on that Thursday afternoon were made up of two priests, one nun, an elderly woman with goggle glasses and a fur coat with a herbaceous border, a black man with a beard and a crucifix around his neck, a fat bloke in a pinstripe suit, a traffic warden and, last but not least, my dear friend, Des Hanafin.

Whatever about crossing the threshold of hope, I certainly made several pilgrimages across my boredom threshold during the seven hundred years it seemed to take me to read this book. It consists of thirty-five short, though not quite short enough, essays written by His Hokeyness in reply to such eternally perplexing posers as Does God Really Exist? Why Is There So Much Evil In The World? Why Does God Tolerate Suffering? Was God At Work In The Fall Of Communism? and How The Fuck Did Clare McKeon And Cynthia Ní Mhurchú Ever Get Their Own Chat Show?

Therein, of course, lies the central problem. Asking The Pope if God really exists is a bit like enquiring of Frank Chisum whether or not he has ever heard tell of a warbler by the name of Presley. Nobody seriously expects objective common sense from a man who has devoted his entire working life to wearing unbelievably tacky jewellery and a daft white jump-suit in order to pay tribute to an over-rated little self-promoter who had an unhealthy attachment to his mother. And Frank Chisum would probably be a tad biased about Elvis as well.

In a chapter explaining how this book came to be, helpfully entitled How This Book Came To Be (great respect for the reader’s intelligence is displayed throughout the volume), we are informed that His Roly-Poliness had originally been asked to participate in a televised interview to mark the fifteenth year of his papacy in October 1993. Papa John agreed, provided that the interviewer was to be one Vittorio Messori, a trusted Italian religious ‘journalist’ sympathetic enough to Vatican dogma to studiously avoid making trouble of any kind.

Copper-fastening the stage management of the event still further, Messori was requested to submit all of his questions in advance. These were carefully vetted by the Vatican Politburo before arrangements for the recording of the interview were finalised. Nevertheless, on the eve of the big day, John Paul withdrew his participation from the broadcast, citing his “relentless schedule” as an excuse. I guess one is either fully committed to the principle of pulling out at the last minute or one isn’t.

Some months later, however, the Pope decided to consign his ‘spontaneous’ responses to paper and it is these that make up Crossing The Threshold Of Hope. Reading it, you quickly realise that there was one compelling logistical reason why a face to face interview would never have worked. It would’ve been virtually impossible for Signor Messori to articulate any of his questions in person, what with the Pope’s cock nestling so comfortably in his mouth. The tone of this fawning hack’s queries is so unctuous and sycophantic that they run like spilled syrup from the page. Just the way El Papa likes it.

At least, now we know why His Hamminess goes down on his hands and knees when he arrives at an airport. It’s not to kiss the tarmac. He’s actually making himself available for a press conference to the journalists standing behind him.

Here is hard-hitting Messori at his incisive best. “I would like to take the liberty to ask you to share with us, at least in part, the secret of your heart. Given the conviction that within you, as within every Pope, lives the mystery which is believed in faith, the following question automatically arises: How can you bear such a weight, which, in human terms is almost unbearable? No man on earth, even the highest religious leaders, has a comparable responsibility. No one is placed in such a close relationship with God. Your Holiness, how does one address Jesus?”

Way to go, Vittorio, that sure put the shites up him alright!

Obviously eager to shift units of his tome in countries where works of Catholic agitprop rarely threaten to go double platinum, the Pope strains hard to be as kind as possible about other religions, but can’t really manage it for very long. After all, as is traditional, His Oiliness’ love for his own religion cannot be displayed in full bloom without a leafy green background of hatred for others. This time, it’s the Buddhists who get it in the neck.

“Buddhism,” he declares, “is in large measure an atheistic system. We do not free ourselves from evil through the good which comes from God; we liberate ourselves only through detachment from the world, which is bad. The fullness of such detachment is not union with God, but what is called nirvana, a state of perfect indifference with regard to the world . . . For this reason, it is not inappropriate to caution those Christians who enthusiastically welcome certain ideas originating in the religious traditions of the Far East – for example, techniques and methods of meditation and ascetical practice.” In other words: “If any more members of my gang sign on with these chanting hippies, I will personally call ‘round and shove my papal foot up their dharma asses!”

The section devoted to the subject of women (entitled, for your convenience, Women) is two whole pages long and consists of a staggering 306 words. Inevitably, there is plenty of the usual old guff elsewhere about all the trouble that is caused by what goes on beneath the female loincloth, but that’s not quite the same thing. The chapter devoted to women as individual people and even individual Catholics is by far the shortest in the book and tucked in twenty pages from the end, it gives you some idea of just how highly His Hollowness rates this particular portion of his flock.

It is an unchallenged historical fact that John Paul has long had the weakest of grips on reality but reading this Women stuff you quickly realise that the guy is now as crazy as a shithouse rat. In this day and age, only a family-size Oxford Lunch fruitcake smothered in nuts would come out with something as zany the following:

“I think that a certain contemporary feminism finds its roots in the absence of true respect for woman. Revealed truth teaches us something different. Respect for woman, amazement at the mystery of womanhood, and finally the nuptial love of God Himself and of Christ, as expressed in the Redemption, are all elements that have never been completely absent in the faith and life of the Church. This can be seen in a rich tradition of customs and practices that, regrettably, is nowadays being eroded. In our civilisation, before all else, an object of pleasure.”

Note the clever debating style. The use of the word woman when what he really means is women or, more precisely, filthy Satanic bitch scum. And how about that second sentence for a definitive argument-clincher, eh? Revealed truth teaches us something different. It’s utterly meaningless, but it’s also the ultimate all-purpose retort. A kiss-my-rebuttal that will knock the wind out of any assertion. I now never leave home without it.

There I was in the pub the other night. “I think,” I solemnly intoned to my companion, “that a certain contemporary belief that it is now my round finds its roots in an absence of true respect for people called Liam. Revealed truth teaches us something different. It’s actually your round.” That wiped the smile off his face, I can tell you. It also replaced the smile with one of those demented smirks that almost invariably precedes the delivery of a headbutt. In fact, forget the almost.

When the Pope refers later to what he describes as “the particular genius of women,” you just know that what he’s thinking about is how clever they are at arranging flowers for the altar or making egg and onion sandwiches for the Bishop on confirmation days. There is nothing anywhere in Crossing The Threshold Of Hope to convey the suggestion that His Hopelessness has moved even the slightest fraction beyond the traditional Catholic view of females as citizens with all the social and spiritual cachet of gangrenous goats.

The real shock, of course, would be if it were otherwise. We’d have to search long and hard through the annals of history to find another example of a dissertation on women, sex and family life written by a man so demonstrably unqualified to hold forth on these subjects as Pope John Paul 11. Luckily for you, Long and Hard happens to be my middle name.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Turkish authorities introduced an edict whereby all potential heirs to their Sultan’s throne were confined to a “cage” until his death. The set-up was devised to minimise conflict and bloodshed in the country after one particular Sultan, Mehmet The Third, had had all nineteen of his brothers strangled upon his ascendance to power.

The new system required every male with a familial claim on the crown to be locked away in a “cage” (actually a series of buildings hidden beneath the imperial palace), along with their mothers, their concubines and their slaves, until the Sultan eventually croaked and the next-in-line was released to begin his reign.

Naturally, having spent several decades in such dark, dank and restricted conditions, most of those who emerged to rule over the Turkish Empire during the “cage” era of the 17th and 18th centuries were, according to historian Bernard Lewis’ Istanbul And The Civilisation Of The Ottoman Empire, “feeble in mind and body and, sometimes, dangerous degenerates.” Already, you can see strong similarities with the men who have followed in the Odour Eaters of the Fisherman, but it gets even better.

After spending fifty years in his cage, Osman The Third, described in contemporary accounts as “a neckless hunchback,” was so fed up with females that when he became Sultan, in 1754, he permanently banned all women from ever coming within one hundred miles of his palace. Growing in confidence as a legislator over time, he later prohibited any woman in his Empire from going out on the street on Sundays, Thursdays and Fridays.

It comes as no surprise then to learn that towards the twilight of his life, Osman The Third decided to publish for mass consumption his thoughts on, yep, women, sex and family life. Unfortunately, no actual copies of the work have survived. Archaeologists have, however, recently unearthed what they believe to be a dust jacket from an early edition. It features the words “A MAGNIFICENT READ”– Mary Kenny, Irish Independent.

History doesn’t tell us what the book was called but, personally, I like to think that Osman stuck by his Sunday, Thursday and Friday ruling to the bitter end and entitled it Crossing The Threshold? No Hope.