Glad to have lived long enough to see the return of Christianity

A few weeks back as I was having my usual Thursday morning flick through the Farmers Journal, (what a production: the only problem with it, being the fact that it would take a full day to read it all!), there was a picture of Kildare farmer proudly displaying his gay pride flag of all colours.

Like every other occupation, there always have been gay farmers, but going back 30 or 40 years – maybe even a lot less – such a subject would have been an absolute taboo. No mention of it; no coverage of it; and very definitely no ‘coming out’ for fear of bringing pain and shame to the family and the village.

It reminded me of a trip down from Croke Park a few years back when four of us in the car in the middle of a Galway footballing defeat post mortem were stopped in our tracks by a documentary that just ‘happened to come on’ Radio One entitled ‘In Shame, Love, In Shame’, and after hearing it, we all pondered on how Ireland could have been such an unloving, uncaring and unchristian country in the wake of the great ideals of 1916.

The documentary has been written about, and lauded too, many times, but in summary it tells the story of a young, single (the key word) Kerry woman, Peggy McCarthy, who back in 1946 became pregnant and later died while giving birth after being turned away from two hospitals because she was unmarried.

At her funeral, the local Parish Priest, Canon Patrick Brennan, locked the church gates to refuse admission for her remains, only for the locals to break them down and bring the body of the unfortunate woman into the church. Even at that, the priest refused to say Mass for her, but at least the people of the village had stood up for what they believed in: they had shown a bit of Christianity.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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