Deny hospice patients the tabernacle? Go to hell, PC brigade

Sunday Tribune, 25 January


It's easy to snigger at the Catholic church. Take Pope Benedict's new announcement about the Virgin Mary. Anyone who claims they have been visited by Her must remain silent until the church has done a full, lengthy investigation. If they don't, then they're lying.
At face value this seems a bit unreasonable. I mean, what if Mary's message is: "Quick! Tell everybody: the world will end in less than 24 hours" or "Don't tell the Pope this, but…"?
All right, I'm being flippant, but even when the church is just going about its business, weeding out charlatans, it still presents an irresistible target.
It is also easy to be frequently enraged by the Catholic church. Especially if 'contraception', 'gay' or 'Aids' are words you feel strongly about. Or 'abuse', 'cover-up' or 'Bishop of Cloyne'.
Whatever way you look at it, an organisation as non-PC as the church has a big bullseye painted on it. However, although it's hard to defend, that's no excuse for not defending it when necessary. Even if that defence is coming from a non-church-going, 'collapsed' Catholic like myself.
Last week, Catholic chaplains at Letterkenny hospice were told to remove a tabernacle from its prayer room as its presence was contrary to HSE policy. This was despite the priests getting the consent of the Church of Ireland and Presbyterian chaplains.
On Wednesday's Joe Duffy show, one of the priests concerned pointed out that 80% of patients there are Catholic. Eighty-six per cent of us, by the way, told Census 2006 that we were Catholic too.
So who had taken offence? Nobody. Political correctness won and the tabernacle was removed, denying comfort to patients too ill to leave the building to commune with their God. The HSE says it will accommodate the tabernacle elsewhere, subject to consultations. Just not in the prayer room.
This type of political correctness seeks to please everyone, and ends up pleasing no-one. Its logic dictates that, as the prayer room is multi-denominational, it should contain symbols of every faith, not just Catholic. This might require an extension: Hindu symbols – like statues of Ganesh the elephant god – tend to take up a bit of space. Should Scientology be allowed to leave photos of L Ron Hubbard there? What about the Moonies?
As this is impractical, the PC solution is to ban all symbols and ignore everyone's rights.
Ireland strives to be a pluralist democracy where all religions are accepted. To achieve this we must safeguard the rights of the majority as well as the minority. We
can't be hamstrung by the obsessive PC fear that we might/possibly/may offend some unspecified group.
An example of this fear occurred last month when the Broadcasting Commission banned an RTÉ radio ad by Catholic publishers Veritas, because mentioning Christmas on-air could cause offence by promoting Christianity. The previous Christmas, Veritas had to remove the word "crib" from a radio ad for the same reason. Who, reasonably, is going to be offended by the word "crib"?
If a minority is going to complain about a religious festival celebrated by the vast majority, it can hardly claim to be tolerant itself and so nullifies its own argument.
The commission's concerns were perplexing when you consider that RTé broadcasts the Angelus twice a day. The station says it has no evidence that other faiths find this oppressive. So where was the evidence for the cribs? And where was the evidence of oppression the HSE used to ban the tabernacle? There was none.
Ireland's hospices do extraordinary work. It's hard to quantify the amount of physical and emotional pain they ease. However, the PC behaviour displayed in Letterkenny was insane. Whatever about 'policy', ordering the removal of a tabernacle from a prayer room used predominantly by ill Catholics is beyond disgraceful. If the room was used mainly by Muslims and they were told to remove a copy of the Qu'ran it would be equally indefensible.
Where does this PC nonsense end? Should we cover up all our churches, mosques and synagogues because they might be offensive?
Karl Marx called religion the "opiate of the masses". Let the masses have their opiate. Let people console themselves however they see fit.
And let the PC brigade go to hell.

January 25, 2009