IRELAND
Irish Examiner
JP O’Malley
BETWEEN 1914 and 1915, the Jewish Czech writer, Franz Kafka, wrote the mesmerising novel, The Trial.
Today, 100 years later, it illuminates the connection between bureaucracy and power.
In The Trial, a young bank official, Joseph K, is arrested for a crime that doesn’t seem to exist. He is taken to a quarry outside of his town and killed.
The word ‘Kafkaesque’ is overused by journalists, but it is appropriate in describing my experience when attempting to ‘excommunicate’ myself from the Catholic Church. Attempting to leave this immensely powerful organisation is like being locked in a crystal maze with no exit sign in sight.
Ostensibly, my official attempt to depart from Catholicism started last October. But the philosophical quest began 18 years ago. As a young boy, the Catholic Church was vital in shaping my cultural and intellectual identity.
There was a picture of the Sacred Heart in my bedroom. Every night, until I was eight years old, my brother and I would kneel and say prayers before sleep. …
This was just one year after the arrest of Father Brendan Smith, the notorious paedophile priest whom the Catholic Church initially protected, but who was eventually convicted of several, depraved sex crimes on innocent children: first in Northern Ireland, in 1994, and then again in the Republic, in 1997.
From aged 12, I had no belief, whatsoever, in the concept of a divine being.
By the time I was in my 20s, I was a militant-atheist.
And after my close reading of the ‘Ferns’, ‘Murphy’, and ‘Ryan Reports’, I was fully convinced that this was not an organisation I wanted to be associated with in any way.
It came as a huge surprise to me, then, last October, after I wrote to Reverend Fintan Gavin, the assistant chancellor of the Dublin Dioceses, asking if I could formally leave the Catholic Church, to be told that it was impossible.
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