PRIESTS AT BOTTOM OF “THE TROUBLES”

The Greatest and Most Influential Lies are told in the name of God and for God

please read Dear God, the Price of Religion in Ireland, Eamonn McCann, Bookmarks Publications Ltd, London, 1999

please read Preventing the Future: why was Ireland poor for so long? Tom Garvin, Gill & Macmillan, 2004

- note, documents how Archbishop McQuaid held the country back economically with the assistance of the Roman clergy

"Religion is an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world and the soul of soulless circumstance. It is the opium of the people" - Karl Marx

The Catholic priesthood gave active and tacit support of arch bigot Eamonn De Valera who formed a vicious Catholic constitution and gave Archbishop McQuaid unbridled power and turned home rule into Rome rule and who gave sincere condolences when Hitler committed suicide http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/de-valera-hitler-the-visit-of-condolence-may-1945/  The Church no doubt loved Hitler though it could not say so for he did its dirty work for it and tried to liquidate the Jews who were always hated by Christianity

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland until the nineteenth century, didn’t have as much control over Catholics as it would have liked. The people were so poor that there were not as many proper churches as there could have been. Their faith was uniformed and riddled with superstition. Mainly through the endeavours of Cardinal Cullen, who was Archbishop of Dublin from 1852 to 1878, the Irish Church became totally subject to the control of the papacy. Unionists and Protestants feared Rome Rule and soon went to war against Catholics. Their fears were confirmed when in 1951 the Catholic Church led by Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, stopped the Mother and Child Scheme as it was an infringement of Catholic teaching. The Church stated that it was not up to the state to look after children or to educate women in regard to health and gynaecological services. The ultimate cause of the bloodshed in Ireland and during the troubles in Northern Ireland was the Roman Catholic clergy. And the clergy was soft on the IRA murderers. Amazingly, despite that, people often think that Catholicism was about attempts to keep some control over us so that we would not become feral!

Some see religion as dangerous and they become disingenuous obfuscating hypocrites and preach how good religion is for they think that whitewashing is a real way to peace. That is why priests and imams etc get away with what they do.

Religion is an accessory for people to fight over and that is not right. Priests and clergy and all who have taught religion are responsible for every drop of blood that is spilled in Northern Ireland. Take the IRA. They would not be killing, maiming and torturing if they were not raised in the Catholic Church. They may pull the triggers but the people who motivated them to kill are worse. They have given them a device, in the form of religion, for the IRA to make a pathetic excuse for killing. It does not matter that the clergy oppose the killings for they are helping to cause them. Religion was always in the business of condemning war but in such a way that its ban would not be taken seriously. It is a tactic to look good while boosting evil. Good works are not really good when they are deployed to attract you to an evil cause. And the Church does good as a bait.

Priest, Father Reid, is hailed as an Irish Peace Process saint since his death (2013). Yet he made out that evil scheming Gerry Adams was sent by God to provide for peace. Clearly Reid's peace making was about self-glorification and not principle like Adam's. Reid was part of the Irish machinery that glorifies or trivialises evil and the consorting with evil. Therefore relative peace came about in spite of him not because of him. Reid is an example of the dissonance that is sown in people by religion and that leads to so much suffering.

What about the fact that the Irish priesthood successfully ordered young Irish men to fight in World War I purely for religious reasons? The Irish clergy wanted to strengthen Catholic power in Belgium. In Ireland 1914, the priesthood convinced their Irish lapdogs that Catholicism in Belgium was being persecuted by Germany. This was easy to do for the Church controlled what information the nation got and nearly everybody was compelled to go to Mass on Sunday. The priests issued a call to arms and thousands of young men responded and thousands of mothers urged them to fight for the faith in Belgium. The Church in Ireland thought that if it sent lots of priests as chaplains, that these chaplains would encourage and nurture the soldiers' sense of Irishness and their patriotic and sectarian fervour. Catholicism at that time was only pro-democracy if it meant that good Catholics were using democracy to enshrine Catholic principles in the law. The Church was not interested in protecting democracy as such as it has always condemned modern democracy as caving in to a world that is hostile to the doctrine and morals of the Church. The Church led young men who didn't really have an informed choice to war and said it was the will of God! Whether the soldiers came home alive or perished forever on the battlefields, the mothers of Ireland hailed this as the will of God. In other words, the war was right just because the priests said so. That made it the will of God. It is God's will for people to fight and die - even immature young men who have been taken advantage of by the system and the Church.

The priests along with Archbishop McQuaid were virtually rulers of Ireland. They lived in wealth and splendour. Their mansions rose amidst the shacks of the poor. They had cars and holidays and sometimes even boats.

The Rome Rule and the bigotry instilled in the Irish Catholic population by the Catholic faith led to the bloodbath in Northern Ireland.

The priesthood and the ministry of the Christians thrive on being seen as a caring profession. They like to make out that they care for the flock. It is tragic that it is not hard to see through all this when so few do as we shall soon see. Their example is meant to draw us to the ways of God. This really means they want us to be tricked into putting our reservations about their moral teaching aside so that we will become what they want us to be. They are not trying to reform us but to have us boost their egos by accepting their standards as if they are superior and know more than us. The sensible person bases all on self-esteem and does not try to convert others. They test what they see for themselves and they grow in goodness and happiness but how can a Catholic test that adultery or unbelief in God is always wrong? They are just being brainwashed. The Roman Catholic Church claims that the tradition of the Church and the Bible are the word of God and God does not lie or err meaning these sources are infallible. We will see that these sources are anything but infallible – we know as well that people like to boast that they are infallible when they make claims like that because you would need to be infallible to recognise the Bible or tradition as infallible! Claims like that are definitely as far from humble meaning that the more the Church sees a saint in you the more arrogant and deceitful you become!

Priestly misdeeds include

controlling the education system to ensure that only Catholics were teaching Catholics and to ensure that schools focused on getting the children to believe even at the expense of other subjects.

making sure Protestant and Catholic children would be educated separately by setting up schools for Catholics only. A Catholic ethos and Protestant ethos are identical in all essentials and in many peripheral matters. The real reason for the separation was to create a "We are the right form of Christianity and they are in dangerous error and won't seek the truth properly the wretches" mentality and it is over religious education. They can concentrate on that better and implement it easier if a school is say Roman Catholic only. And if a Protestant attends such a school, he or she may endure tacit bullying that will progress to something even worse.

applying social pressure and the force of Church law to compel Protestants who marry Catholics to have the children raised as Catholics "Irish Directory on Mixed Marriages - "These obligations are not imposed by the Church's regulations, nor can the Church remove them; they come from God".

encouraging the IRA to murder by offering it cheap forgiveness and by doing nothing to encourage their arrest though the dogs in the street knew who they were.

going with the IRA to give the sacraments to people it was about to execute and then arguing, "I didn't go to tell the police and maybe save this man because if I did the IRA would stop getting priests to save those souls by giving them the final preparation for death".
 
The Church even today makes Ireland a cold house for Protestants and people of other religions and for atheists. That coldness incubates anger and resentment and division.

Finally to quote Fintan O Toole: "Nothing corrodes civic democracy in Ireland quite so badly as the myth of charity. It has a long reach because it has deep roots. It comes in part from the history of colonisation. But its most insidious form is the belief that the Irish would have had nothing were it not for the Catholic Church. The truth is that the church fought ferociously to prevent the development of any form of public education or healthcare that it did not control. It destroyed and then took over the non-denominational national school system in the 19th century. It blocked the extension to Ireland of the sickness and maternity benefits introduced in the UK by Lloyd George’s pioneering National Insurance Act of 1911. It stopped the mother-and-child healthcare scheme in 1951."