the soprano

Evening coffee with The Soprano in Newbridge Silverware's Cafe Des Beaux Parvenus.
Newbridge Silverware is a good location for coffees in these recessionary times because the car parking is free and the Russian waitresses are Russialacious.
Well you know what I mean.
As for The Soprano.
She is not a Soprano in the sense made popular by the television series The Sopranos.
That is to say, she is not a member of the mafia.
She's a Soprano in the old fashioned sense.
She sings.
Right this moment she's singing a particularly boring kind of song.
"Oh James," she says, "I was at a presentation this weekend. And they were talking about the oppressions the Catholic Church had committed in Ireland. Can you believe the things that were done?"
I favoured her with a dangerous look.
"What things?" I murmured.
"Oh you know," said the Soprano. "If a girl got pregnant out of wedlock she had to go to the work house."
"And you think that was because of the Catholic church do you?" I said softly. "And not because of the pious hypocrisies of petty small town Irish tribalists, the atheistic little Irelanders whose sons and daughters are now running RTE, Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times?"
"It was the Catholic church James," she cried. "The Catholic church caused these things to happen. That's the way it was."
I reflected briefly.
I had no wish to start one of my epic perorations including extensive quotations from James' First Letter To The Morons.
On the other hand these days I'm less inclined to let scruff and scum and Nazis bad mouth my church under any circumstances.
If the bstaads want to oppress me they can bloody well make it official.
By the way, I don't mean that the Soprano is a scruff or a scum or a Nazi.
But she was singing from their hymn book.
I sighed.
"Listen Serena," I said quietly. "When these people start making generalised accusations about the church, you need to remember you're only getting one part of the story."
"But what they say is true James," she put in. "It all happened. It's a matter of fact. It's a part of our history."
I shook my head.
"It didn't all happen," I said.
"What part of it didn't happen?" she challenged.
I shrugged.
In spite of my better judgement I knew I was indeed beginning an extensive reading from the First Letter of Saint James to the Morons.
"You said that in Catholic societies girls who got pregnant out of wedlock were sent with their children to the work house," I reminded her. "That wasn't always true. Yes it was sometimes true. And it was true for various reasons. But what I've been telling you is that today people are charging the Catholic Church with crimes and you're not hearing the other side to the story. You're hearing the side of the story told by people who wish to destroy the church. And they wish to destroy the church because they see it as a challenge to their own power. RTE, Independent Newspapers and The Irish Times could care less about unmarried mothers and innocent children. They've done their level best to promote the abortion of innocent children for a start. And the divorce culture they've championed has delivered us any number of abandoned mothers. The media groups and the half wits who take their lead from them are using issues drawn from the past to propagate and extend their own control of our society in the present. And they lie. Every step of the way they lie. They tell you Catholic cultures dumped women in work houses. I say to you, not always. You say, always. And I say to you Don John of Austria wasn't dumped in a workhouse. The bastard son of the House of Austria who saved Europe from Muslim invasion the last time the Jihadis got their courage up enough to make a play for our freedoms. The King of England wouldn't fight them. The King of France didn't want to know. The German Kings were too busy fighting each other. It was the bastard son of the House of Austria who saved Europe by kicking Muslim arses at the battle of Lepanto. He was alive. He was honoured. He was not in a work house. Precisely because Austria was Catholic. And without him all you liberal shit heads would be bowing five times a day towards Mecca, walking five steps behind your husband on the main street, forbidden to drive cars, and forced to wear sacks as your most daring fashion statement. You people haven't got a clue what oppression is. But remember Don John of Austria. You owe him a lot. Five hundred years ago he won you the Catholic freedoms you enjoy today. And then there's Erasmus. The finest mind of reformation and renaissance Europe. His father was a priest and his mother a prostitute. He wasn't sent to any work house. He wasn't abandoned to starve. He was reared in a convent by nuns who loved him. That's Catholicism. And his thinking has illuminated western scholarship for the past five hundred years. The nuns raised him. Catholic nuns. They were his mothers. They taught him to think and to believe and to be impervious to the opinions of small towners who are so obsessed with bastardy. Yes. Erasmus was the bastard son of a priest and prostitute. There's no shame in it. His soul has brought honour to Europe and given other children born in tough circumstances the sure knowledge that their lives may yet by the grace of God redeem the rest of us cosmic mediocrities. And his contribution to the scholastic method has enabled and propagated five centuries of free thinking and philosophy. It was the bastard Erasmus who set our universities on the trail of free exploration in the light of the wisdom of the ages. And without the Catholic church there's no Erasmus. Without the Catholic church he's either aborted or thrown on the street as a beggar child. Instead because of Catholic values his life has become a beacon to anyone with half a mind to see the wonder and the lesson that has been wrought in him. And then there's Tony O'Reilly. Ireland's richest man. He's a bastard too. In more ways than one. The son of a high powered government apparatchik who couldn't keep his mickey in his trousers. His mistress delivered the child and raised him. People of that class nowadays often contrareceive or abort their unborn children. O'Reilly lives only because of Catholic church values. His mother was not sent to any work house. And the irony is this. O'Reilly had more of a duty than a loose cannon like me to defend the church and uphold its values through the abortion age. He chose wrong. But he lives. Glory to God, O'Reilly the bastard lives. He lives and adventures, succeeds or fails, damns himself or repents, because of the Catholic values that prevailed in Ireland the day he was born. The same Catholic values his newspapers have done so much to destroy. Yes O'Reilly lives. Because in those days the Irish people turned their noses up at murder whether abortion or infanticide. It didn't matter how hungry we were. The child was always welcome. O'Reilly is a bastard. A brilliant bastard in his way. If he had chosen right I would have been his ally to the gates of hell and back. But he chose wrong. Yet still he lives. A traitor to the cause of life. But only God may judge him. And his life, all the accomplishments of wealth, prestige, privilege and position, which I account as nothing but which the liberals who despise Catholicism seem to think is the just the bees knees, all O'Reilly's accomplishments, I tell you, exist because of the Catholicity in Irish culture seventy years ago. That's Catholic values. That's the defence you will not hear when RTE, Independent Newspapers and The Irish Times and your liberal atheist friends attempt to vitiate the church with innuendo and lies. You know what they're doing, don't you? You know why they're doing it? They're trying to make you sit in judgement on the past so that you will not see the present. They want you to pat yourself on the back with a blanket condemnation of the Christian past so that you will never ever be at risk of seeing the satanic vileness of the atheistic present. It's taken them just twenty five years Serena. In those few short decades our media groups and their political hangers on, have delivered us the violent society, the abortion society, condom culture and the dictatorship of Judge Liberal. Twenty five years to undo 1500 years of Christianity. Twenty five years to give us daily murders in a country that had no murder rate at all. Twenty five years to deliver power to Dublin and Limerick city crime gangs. Hoodlums in the street sticking knives into people in the full knowledge that they will never answer for it. Drugs being dealt into every school in Ireland. Michael Neary violating women on the operating table at Drogheda Memorial Hospital. Nurse Mulholland murdering people in Naas Hospital. Countless murders in old folks homes all over Ireland. How many people died at Leas Cross nursing home? How many? And no one charged with murder. How many children have died in Health Board custody over the past few years. The Health Board admits to some deaths. Why aren't these murders explained? Why isn't anyone charged? Who in the Health Boards began shipping children raped by Health Board staff to England for abortions? Who did this? It's our generation, our non Catholic generation, our generation of Irish Times reading RTE watching, Independent Newspapers bum wiping morons, who are responsible for all this barbarism. No other generation would have allowed drug dealing in the schools. No other generation would have looked the other way as seven children committed suicide in County Kildare in the last nine months. No other generation would have tolerated the blatent sexualisation of children through television, radio, music videos, cinema and newspapers. No other generation would have enriched themselves by bunging their parents into old folks homes. No other generation of teachers, nurses, police officers, and bus drivers, would have extorted ridiculous pay rises from our weak kleptocratic Fianna Fail government, money which could only be raised through borrowing thereby running up a national debt that would terrify an oil rich third world dictator, a debt which will ensure the bankruptcy and impoverishment of our children. No other generation would have allowed 250,ooo Arab and Pakistani Muslims to smuggle themselves into the country in the back of lorries and then declare themselves citizens at precisely the same time as Arabs and Muslims were waging terror war in every other country on earth. No other generation would have betrayed the faith of our fathers as we have. No other generation would have allowed scoundrels to stand in judgement on our ancient church. No other generation would have done any of this. Our generation has done it. The great judgemental pious liberal atheists did it. In just twenty five years. Twenty five years to undo 1500 years of Christianity. That is what the liberals are trying to conceal with their perpetual attacks on the generations that came before. That is why they seek to destroy the Catholic church. No other generation would have surrendered to their vilenesses. The cowardice, corruption, barbarism and abasement are all ours. And look who we surrendered to. Look at the calibre of them. A lying coward like Ian O'Doherty is permitted to call the Catholic Church a paedophile ring in Independent Newspapers. A worse lying coward called Ger Colleran, editor of The Daily Star, is permitted to sneer on national television that children were screaming for help in every Catholic church presbytery in Ireland. I say Colleran's mendacious hypocrisy is worse than O'Doherty's, because Colleran actually works for porn baron Richard Desmond. Richard Desmond and Tony O'Reilly have gone half shares in The Daily Star. So that's the class of clype that is Ger Colleran. And these are the moral arbiters who would sit in judgement of the Catholic Church. I tell you they are judges of nothing. Their undead souls will go down forever."