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Well now, here’s a thing

A Catholic priest has caused uproar in Ireland after declaring that the deputy prime minister, Leo Varadkar, and other gay politicians will go to hell.

Fr Seán Sheehy, 65, condemned homosexuality, trans rights and abortion rights from the pulpit and in media interviews this week, drawing widespread censure, including from his own bishop.

Some called the comments a throwback to a vanished Ireland, others linked them to Sheehy’s exposure to US culture wars during 42 years serving in US dioceses.

Could actually be just that he’s a Catholic priest who has actually read the stuff about what Catholic priests are expected to believe.

You know, we are indeed all God’s little children and here’re the family rules he’s laid down about how we should live our lives. Obey them and be with him in the next life – don’t and don’t. Hell being the absence of being in God’s presence in that eternity.

Now, we out here don’t have to believe all of that as the majority of humanity doesn’t believe the Catholic Church’s take on these things. Largest centrally organised religion in the world it may be but it’s not dominant nor a majority. But complaining that a Catholic priest actually believes Catholic teaching is a bit much, no?

33 thoughts on “Well now, here’s a thing”

  1. Quick, lock him up! Next thing he’ll be saying that Herod’s murder of the innocents was a bad thing and not a progressive postpartum abortion program that we would do well to emulate.

  2. Oddly enough it’s his fellow priests and his bishop who are leading the calls for his cancellation. This is going to be another area that Ireland will blindly follow blighty into error. Look at CoE membership since they became woke.

  3. Technically the priest is wrong..

    You don’t go to hell for being gay.
    You go to hell for being unrepentingly gay.

    Nowt wrong and Safe Seat Assured when you regularly bemoan your wickedness and pay your 13’s…

  4. Bloke in the Fourth Reich

    But you can bugger choirboys every week as long as you say some our fathers and hail Marys afterwards.

  5. Bloke in the Fourth Reich

    They didn’t have gays in the old days. My mum told me. She knew there was no gaying going on because every third sermon was on the hellfire awaiting teh gayers. That is proof enough to her that none of it was going on.

    Attempts to suggest it is quite the opposite, it is proof that there was plenty of gaying going on and the Vicar didn’t like it and wanted it to stop, have been unsuccessful.

  6. He should be a progressive Christian, like our Archbishop, and believe in Islam, then advocate stoning them to death.
    Much more enlightened and well, just cool, man.

  7. Isn’t Norniland there because a certain group of Irish people didn’t want their kids raped or sodomized by adherents to the new State Religion after “independence”?

    I’m not a Catholic (is the Pope one?) but I suspect that under the veneer of religion, this priest probably has a point.

  8. @Grikath
    He was asked specifically if people in a gay relationship or marriage such as Varadkar were going to hell. He answered in the affirmative.

    Of course the chattering classes chose to misrepresent it.

  9. Recently I learnt that the Roman Catholic church became so hysterical about abortion only due to a zealot Pope in the 19th century. Before him it was more “nuanced” as people like to say nowadays. When did it become hysterical about poofery?

    Don’t give me any bollocks about its being in the bible: Pope’s pay attention to the bible according to whim.
    And don’t tell me about what the earliest Christians believed – nobody knows much factual about that.
    And don’t bang on about “church fathers”: they are mere mortal windbags.

    If you can point to a place in the Gospel according to M, M, L or J where Jesus tells men not to shag each other then I’ll pay heed. Jesus still may or may not have said it but the gospels are the only plausible source for what it’s claimed he said.

    Anyway, the bloody man claims to be “not religious” so shouldn’t Father O’Hooligan condemn him to hell for being a heathen?

  10. I especially liked the bit when Based Irish Priest surprised his congregation by opening the door to the sacristy and ushering in a 29-stone adult male African lion called “Rory” to give them the Good News in a fun and ecologically aware new way.

  11. Dm – Recently I learnt that the Roman Catholic church became so hysterical about abortion only due to a zealot Pope in the 19th century

    Yarp, this is the problem with ‘learning’ stuff on the internet. The notion that the 18th century Church was down with babydeath is a pretty bold lie tbf, it’s always tempting to believe the whoppers.

  12. @ Grikath
    There are gays who choose to remain celibate because sodomy is a sin (specifically condemned in the Torah), as is promiscuity which is sadly rife among the gay community. So the correct answer is that gay sexual activity not subsequently repented is a reason for going to hell.
    @ dearieme
    Abortion is not, AFAIK, mentioned in the Bible: miscarriages were viewed as a tragic misfortune.

  13. Bloke in the Fourth Reich

    All Christian anti-abortion fundies need to acquaint themselves with Exodus 21:22 and compare it to the penalty for manslaughter (rather, womanslaughter) in the following verse.

  14. I had heard that a Jewish mama considers a foetus to be viable once it becomes a doctor…..

    (Told to me by a Jewish friend, so there!)

  15. Bish
    CofE going woke can be set exactly about then, when Bishops started complaining about carpet bombing German cities. “Oh Germans are people too !” Sort of bollocks.

    DM

    Don’t get taken in by the old chestnut about JC not mentioning teh gayers in the Gospels. Much of Catholic ( RC and CofE ) is derived from St Paul and he explicitly states in an epistle

    “Bum not thy brethren nor the animals in the field, lest God doth smite thee down and a lion devoureth thee.”

  16. dearieme,

    “Recently I learnt that the Roman Catholic church became so hysterical about abortion only due to a zealot Pope in the 19th century. Before him it was more “nuanced” as people like to say nowadays. When did it become hysterical about poofery?

    Don’t give me any bollocks about its being in the bible: Pope’s pay attention to the bible according to whim.
    And don’t tell me about what the earliest Christians believed – nobody knows much factual about that.
    And don’t bang on about “church fathers”: they are mere mortal windbags.”

    Religion is just bollocks. It’s something that constantly follows what society wants, which shows that it isn’t the Word of God, because you’d expect that to be rather static.

    It’s probably the case that they started caring about abortions as surgery grew and women could have them, rather than just abandoning babies in the woods.

  17. BiFR – Exodus was actually a pretty progressive list of rules for settling personal injury claims and ensuring fairness in employer/slave disputes.

    Progressive for the time.

    BoM4 – there are no new evils under the sun (or so I thought until I saw ‘Lizzo’). Church fathers were writing about abortion and bum fun over 1,000 years ago (spoiler alert: they weren’t in favour).

    If religion didn’t exist, we’d certainly invent it. It serves a lot more social purposes than just bingo and weddings, and I reckon humans need some kind of vision of the divine, the perfect, the ideal, the Good. Even Ragnarok is a new beginning, the promise of life’s victory over death, pagan virtues over monstrous evil.

    We should prefer the Big Gods who live in the sky, because the alternative is cruel, earthly Little Gods in the mould of a Moctezuma, a Mao, or a Jeremy Hunt.

  18. “Laws that prohibit absolutely the practice of abortion are a relatively recent development. In the early Roman Catholic church, abortion was permitted for male fetuses in the first 40 days of pregnancy and for female fetuses in the first 80-90 days. Not until 1588 did Pope Sixtus V declare all abortion murder, with excommunication as the punishment. Only 3 years later a new pope found the absolute sanction unworkable and again allowed early abortions. 300 years would pass before the Catholic church under Pius IX again declared all abortion murder. This standard, declared in 1869, remains the official position of the church.”

    source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12340403/

    Question: how the hell did they propose to tell the sex of the foetus?

    Comment: what a piece of work Pius IX was. WKPD: In his 1849 encyclical Ubi primum, he emphasized Mary’s role in salvation. In 1854, he promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, articulating a long-held Catholic belief that Mary, the Mother of God, was conceived without original sin. His 1864 Syllabus of Errors was a strong condemnation against liberalism, modernism, moral relativism, secularization, separation of church and state, and other Enlightenment ideas. Pius definitively reaffirmed Catholic teaching in favor of the establishment of the Catholic faith as the state religion where possible. … He centralized power in the church in the Holy See and Roman Curia, while also clearly defining the Pope’s doctrinal authority. His chief legacy is the dogma of papal infallibility.”

    So he attributed divine powers to mortals, to wit Mary and himself (and his successors). Not really Christian, is it, his form of Roman Catholicism? As I understand it Christians believe that only Jesus combined a mortal and a divine nature. They’re a bit polytheist, you might say, the Roman arrangements.

  19. We should prefer the Big Gods who live in the sky, because the alternative is cruel, earthly Little Gods in the mould of a Moctezuma, a Mao, or a Jeremy Hunt.

    Alternative? Fantasies about the former have never coincided with a lack of the latter.

  20. Quite PJF
    As I’ve said about S. American Catholicism & politics. Believing in God predisposes people to believe in anything.

  21. People who do not believe in God have a tendency not to believe in nothing but to believe instead in anything that attracts their ill-informed vanity like climate emergencies, Anthony Fauci or, most dangerous of all, themself.

  22. Often heard that said, TMB. Usually by god-bothers. Can’t say I’ve ever seen the slightest evidence for it. For my generation at least, who started out by & large expected to believe in a god, scepticism was a concious choice. And not necessarily a beneficial one. It’s far easier to believe in something than nothing. That you are responsible for your own destiny & there are no cop outs. No god riding to your rescue in times of adversity. That’s a hard choice.
    Belief. What does it actually mean? There are things we know from experience. And there are the things we have personally proved don’t exist. Between the two are the grey areas. Things we are told by people whose reputation we have reason to trust. Things we are expected to accept from those we regard as outright liars. Where does belief lie along that scale?
    I’ve said before on here, whenever someone tells me something my first reaction is to ask myself; why is he telling me this? So are you telling me out of the ultimate privacy of your own mind, you believe in god? Why? What’s in it for you?

  23. The difference, BIS, is that religion cannot be subject to scientific refutation. You cannot prove a negative.
    If I told you that the earth is an oblate sphere you might immediately say that that is impossible because of gravity.
    And yet it is, and you do not personally have any way of testing that truth.
    (Not that I’ve a dog in this religious fight. I accept that this is just something most people believe in.)

  24. I’m reminded of Dame Edna’s son’s ‘room-mate,’ who used to be an alter boy and at one time toyed with the clergy.

  25. It’s far easier to believe in something than nothing.

    That’s the point I was making, BiS, and there are many more dangerous things to believe in than God whether he has an upper-case G or no.

  26. @philip
    If I told you that the earth is an oblate sphere you might immediately say that that is impossible because of gravity.
    And yet it is, and you do not personally have any way of testing that truth.

    Get a friend to hold a light up reasonably close.
    Set a cross hairs on it on a fixed horizontal surface, or a tripod.
    Get your friend to move a long way away.
    Now look down your cross hairs.
    If the earth is flat, the cross hairs will still be on the light. If the earth is round, the light will drop below the cross hairs.

    Or watch a boat go over the horizon. It seems to lower into the water until only the top is left. If earth flat, you’d see the whole boat all the time.

    Two simple experiments to prove that the earth is in fact round, next time someone asks you to prove it.

  27. CD

    The Earth is banana shaped. Sir Bedevere proved that.

    It’s time this “roundist” propaganda was stopped.

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