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You are > Home > A sleeping Biffo and Catholic women priests
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Wednesday, July 21, 2010
A sleeping Biffo and Catholic women priests
John Cooney
TAOISEACH Brian Cowen’s political creditworthiness has taken a further heavy blow with the revelations in documents published by the Dáil’s public accounts committee about his doziness as Minister for Finance in early 2008 as the currency crisis was preparing to assume gale force proportions.
It is hard to disagree with Michael Noonan’s verdict that ‘Biffo’ was “asleep on the job” when, in January 2008, David Doyle, the secretary general at the Department of Finance, warned that Ireland’s banks faced a solvency problem. Not all was well with the Celtic Tiger economy.
Pointing out that this warning was made nine months before the Government gave the banks their carte blanche guarantee in September 2008, Noonan punctured the current Cowen’s alibi that the Government was bounced into giving the blanket guarantee because of the rattlesnake suddenness of the financial crisis.
The documents published last Friday after the Dáil went into its long summer recess show that the Department of Finance first recommended changes in company law to put banks into examinership. In February the department then advised against giving the banks a global guarantee, a month before the St Patrick’s Day share price collapse in Anglo Irish Bank.
“Brian Cowen was asleep on the job at that particular point, he wasn’t making hard decisions,” the Fine Gael finance spokesman growled on RTE radio on Sunday, while pointing out that Merrill Lynch, which was opposed to a blanket guarantee in its confidential assessment to the Government that Anglo Irish Bank be turned into a “bad bank” for impaired loans.
Not for the first time, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has been trotted out to defend the Taoiseach from Noonan’s strictures by claiming that evidence shows that the Government and its officials were actively engaged in contingency planning ahead of the storm but that from mid-September 2008 onwards, the international financial crisis deteriorated so rapidly that the Government introduced the guarantee, a move subsequently endorsed by Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan.
But what is really shocking is that grim disclosure that when Brian and Biffo ignored their advisers and charged ahead on September 29, 2008, with the €440 billion bailout they were under the illusion that the banks had assets of €500 billion. This was not so.
The banks, especially Anglo-Irish, were playing ducks and drakes with them. Nor did B&B opt for a contingency plan to nationalise Anglo-Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide.
So maddening are the details of the disarray in Government that the public should be up in arms demanding an immediate general election. Instead we have the annual political summer siesta amid further bleak news yesterday (Monday) that Moody’s credit agency has downgraded Ireland’s Government bond ratings to Aa2. Why? – yes, of course, on account of the country’s banking liabilities, on top of weak growth prospects and a substantial increase in national debt.
The good news is that Ireland has “turned the corner”. On paper perhaps, but I see few signs of a return to confidence – have you?
The nation’s elder statesman, Garret the Good, speaks for us all when he told the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Glenties on Sunday evening that this clear evidence of gross political incompetence in economic governance highlights the need for a radical reform of the political system.
However, he observed that Irish people have shown considerable tolerance of actual financial corruption and have a habit of enthusiastically re-electing politicians in spite of their national disgrace. This he deems to be a moral defect in Irish society.
The former Taoiseach diagnosed ‘Up Mayo’-style localism represented by a lust to have a ministerial Mercedes endowing the constituency as being against the common good of the Irish people as a whole.
“There is in Ireland a primordial attachment to a county or even to a small part thereof that seems to be given precedence over loyalty to the State,” he thundered.
Garret said seeing this “State car” complex in Kazakhstan and Zambia convinced him that localism in this country is “a native Irish form of African tribalism”. I’ve heard of “French Mayo” but “African Mayo” is unknown territory!
Nor did Mother Church escape Garret’s censure when he complained that tax evasion, had never received the attention it should from churchmen who offer weekly moral guidance to people.
After his Olympian performance in Glenties, Pope Benedict would be advised to invite Garret to the Vatican as a lay theologian and public relations adviser after the German Pontiff ’s updating of canon law which has incurred the wrath of women and liberal Catholics worldwide.
The furore was ignited when the media reported last Thursday that the Vatican has ranked support for the ordination of women priests as being as gravely sinful as the rape of children by clerics.
However, Bishop John McAreavy next day described as “unfounded” some media misinterpretation that the Vatican ruling drew an equivalence between the ordination of women and child sexual abuse.
“The former offence relates to the sacraments, the latter to immorality,” said the Newry-based Bishop of Dromore. But Bishop McAreavy’s stout defence on behalf of the Vatican failed to convince me. It clearly classified female priesthood as “one of the church’s most grave crimes, along with heresy, schism and paedophilia”.
This listing of the ordination of women as one of most serious crimes against Roman Catholic canon law or “delicta graviora” – is yet another instance of the medieval mindset of Pope Benedict and the Roman Curia towards women.
Nor did it appease women groups across the globe. An Irish woman prominent in the fast-growing Roman Catholic women priests movement in America and Europe accused the Vatican of “misogyny”.
The numbers of Catholic women priests have grown from seven to over 100 in the last eight years since the first ordination in 2002 on the Danube in Austria. The Vatican response to women’s ordinations has been that they are automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church. But now the Vatican has gone a step further by condemning everyone who supports the movement for women priests within the Catholic Church.
“This decree by an all-male hierarchy reflects Vatican misogyny and hostility to women priests who are ministering effectively in inclusive, vibrant grassroots communities,” said Co Laois-born Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan.
Bishop Meehan told me that in defiance of the Vatican’s uncompromising opposition women priests are being supported widely by the hundreds of Catholics attending every public ordination.
“Roman Catholic women priests are the Vatican’s worst nightmare because we are gaining support among God’s people and leading the church into a new era of justice and equality for women in the church,” said Bishop Meehan.
“Shame on the Vatican for linking the ordination of women priests with grave crimes like paedophilia,” she continued.
“This is a scandal that would make Jesus weep.”
Bishop Meehan will travel to Ireland next month to promote the movement for women priests in this country which once boasted that St Bridget of Kildare was an abbess with Episcopal status.
Along with Bob Kaiser, who covered the Second Vatican Council for Time magazine, and Californian attorney Patrick Wall, who specialises in clerical abuse litigation, Bishop Bridget will address the Humbert Summer School on August 20 at the Harlequin Hotel in Castlebar on the theme of “Catholic Church Reform”.
So it’s official – come to Humbert and be excommunicated!
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