Angela Shanahan, a lesser Akker Dakker, and how a dose of the pestle and mortar might fix the Catholic church ...

(Above: a 1550 image of a druggist at work in his shop, as a way of illustrating our pestle and mortar homily for Easter Sunday).

After what seems like an eternity away from the splendid musings and insights of our very own Akker Dakker, it was disappointing to discover that he'd been down amongst the rancid turds.

And that this week's Piers Akerman column is just another bout of Chairman Rudd bashing, as he scribbles Rudd ups the ante in self-promotion.

Any half-decently broadminded columnist would have berated both the Rudd and the Howard governments for their tremendous gall in using advertising to sell themselves while purporting to save the electorate. For a start, Rudd isn't upping the ante, he's returning to the Howard status quo.

But not Akker Dakker, who had his eyepatch fashioned a long time ago to prevent any light penetrating his left eye.

It's got so that as soon as I see a government ad urging caution and moderation in all things, I immediately feel the desire to get pissed as a parrot and roam the roads in search of a fender bender. Is this what the commentariat mean when they talk of the burden of the nanny state?

But unusually for Akker Dakker his Easter column was more fibre than juicy fruity bits, and I had a yen - it being Eostre Sunday - for something more like the sultanas you can find in a decent hot cross bun.

Where else to find it than in Angela Shanahan's Sins of the fathers will be purged, as she broods about the current crop of scandals besetting the Roman church and reflects on the former archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland:

Weakland is a disgraced cleric widely known for mishandling sexual-abuse cases during his tenure and who used $US450,000 of archdiocesan funds as hush money to a former homosexual lover blackmailing him.

Weakland had responsibility for the notorious case of priest Lawrence Murphy between 1977 and 1998, when Murphy approached Ratzinger's office, eight months before Murphy's death.

He did nothing about Murphy -- accused of having molested up to 200 deaf boys from the 1950s to the 70s -- until 1996, although the allegations went back to the 70s. Weigel describes the "descent into tabloid sourcing and innuendo" as more offensive because of recent developments that underscore the Pope's determination to root out what he once described as the "filth" in the church.

Now in case you're wondering, it seems that for Shanahan the 'filth' of the church revolves around homosexuality:

This has been particularly necessary in the Irish church, with its quasi-establishment status and puritanical character, which made it difficult to be open about sexual impropriety, particularly of the homosexual variety.

In Ireland -- where a priest in the family was a practical ambition and a glorified ideal -- too many very young boys were herded into junior seminaries where they were never going to mature properly, a recipe for homosexual pedophilia.

Homosexuality was tolerated in some seminaries, particularly in the Anglophone world, but in the present politically correct climate it seems that we are not allowed to mention that problem even though it seems to have been the bulk of the matter.

And there you have it. Homosexuality is a problem, and homosexuality and pedophilia are intricately linked.

Hallelujah. What joy to discover on Easter Sunday that child fiddling by heterosexuals - unless under the deep, malign influence of homosexuals - isn't an issue. And what a relief to realise that homosexuality is closely linked to filth. And that even though she's not allowed to mention it, still Shanahan manages to mention it, and there, it's done and mentioned. And it's the bulk of the matter. Homosexuality, that is. Which is all you can expect of trendies.

In the end, though, the trendies, the modernisers and others who ridicule the church's teachings on sexuality should remember the hierarchy often did what it was advised to do by psychologists and other so-called experts. It got priests counselling and treatment -- but admittedly then stupidly moved them on.

Dearie me, why on earth would these so-called modernisers and trendies and others who ridicule the church's teachings on sexuality be concerned at a little poofter bashing 101, as demonstrated by Shanahan? On a verbal and mental level about a rough equivalent to the thugs lurking outside a public facility on a beat.

What on earth would these so-called experts with their stupid counselling and treatment know about the deeper matters of faith and the creeping ugliness of homosexuality? As opposed to the splendid purity of homosexual haters remaining true to the old testament.

But it's possible to detected a glimmer of discontent in Shanahan's pea-brained defence of the church, which is ready to see itself as suffering anti-semitic persecution while managing to persecute homosexuals as the root cause of it all:

With the reports of the scandal creeping closer to the Pope, perhaps the laity is justified in asking whether the episcopal structure should be renewed to bring the laity and hierarchy closer.

Eek! Closer to George Pell and the pope? Isn't there some other way forward?

Certainly training for the priesthood has changed dramatically since many of these scandals first happened. Candidates are older and aspirants are encouraged to have life experience.

What? Like having a fuck, before being made to give up the idea of fucking? Until a stray parishioner wafts by? Because let's face it, the greatest scandal when I was growing up was not the way the priests did a bit of fiddling behind the altar with the altar boys. That was expected. It was the way they cut a swathe through unhappily married women who turned to them for counselling.

Is that what "life experience" means?

With an influx of married Anglicans, people are talking about the parish clergy being permitted to marry which, although no remedy against pedophilia, brings clergy closer to the people.

WTF? Being permitted to marry and thereby save yourself from burning is no remedy against pedophilia?

Does this mean, and I'm shocked as my head is in turmoil, that some heterosexuals might actually indulge in pedophilia as well? Oh god, please stop the grave from revolving, or even tilting. Please say it ain't so.

But then comes the defiance and the recalcitrance from Shanahan. As the west loses interest in militant Christianity, it seems that it's on the rise in such exciting places as the Philippines:

But amid all the media clamour we should remember the church is part of a very long story without borders. There are more baptisms in The Philippines each year than there are in France, Italy, Spain and Poland combined.

Yeay, go Imelda Marcos. Plenty of shoes, and salvation along with them.

We should be thankful that these scandals are being acknowledged and purged at last. The church has gone through worse, but it needs to heal itself if society is to be healed too.

Luckily, in terms of healing, at an early age I had the chance to read Boccaccio's The Decameron as he ripped through a decadent medieval church and priests with vigorous pestles (available in an old fashioned verbose translation at Project Gutenberg here):

... if now I live in mortar sin, I will ever abide there until it be pestle sin: concern yourself no further on my account. Moreover, let me tell you, that, whereas at Pisa 'twas as if I were your harlot, seeing that the planets in conjunction according to lunar mansion and geometric square intervened between you and me, here with Paganino I deem myself a wife, for he holds me in his arms all night long and hugs and bites me, and how he serves me, God be my witness.

Yep, a little pestle and mortar action will fix what ails you, but does it matter what constitutes a mortar, be it mouth or bum, or whether a couple of mortars work out their own arrangement?

Almost seven hundred years on, and still the Roman church, with its fixation on a chaste clergy doesn't have a clue. And nor does Angela Shanahan. Because here's how she opens her argument:

These priests and the bishops who shielded them should have been better than other people. The argument that these awful crimes against children occur in other walks of life, which they do, is not really getting the point, either. Yes, we live in a milieu of dehumanising sexual licentiousness, which normalises sterile perversions and robs the young of their innocence.

Yep, a world of dehumanising sexual repressiveness, which normalises sterile perverse notions of virginity and chastity and sexual abstinence, and robs the young of their enjoyment of their sexuality.

Oh sorry, got that transcription wrong.

Better strap on the old cilice, lash myself twenty times, and head off to a cave for a year as a hermit (or should I head up the old pole and do a Simon of the desert? And you in the corner, stop sniggering, by old pole, I meant an old wooden pole).

But the fact the cancer is everywhere doesn't excuse the failures of clergy who are supposed to guide us out of this morass. The irony is that many people, particularly campaigners for sexual libertarianism, don't think the clergy should be better than rest of us.

According to the atheistic inhabitants of a looking-glass world, and the pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and "free condoms for all" campaigners, the church should quit teaching sexual morality based on the natural law.

Que? Morality based on the natural law? And what natural law would that happen to be, as opposed to the arcane constructions of a biblical text overgrown and overlain with centuries of patriarchal repressive thinking? Perhaps we're thinking of Montesquieu's natural law? But didn't he think that polygamy and polyandry might be perfectly natural?

I digress from Shanahan:

These scandals are very difficult for the ordinary Catholic laity to face because they are mixed up with so much anti-Catholic opinion and downright falsehood about the church and the hierarchy that is fostered by its enemies. Therein lies a problem.

So, while ordinary lay Catholics want these scandals uncovered and purged, there is anger at the vulgar, secular, media pot calling the church kettle black.

Ah the vulgar secularist media. And who better to evoke it than a scribbler for Chairman Murdoch? How silly of the vulgar secularist media to think that the black church kettles are being asked to lead inordinately silly and repressed lives as compared to the tea and cucumber sandwich lifestyle of an English vicar. Go Anglicans with your sensible middle of the road moderate pursuit of eternal nonsense ...

Indeed there seems to be a frantic attempt to get as many scalps as possible, the ultimate one, of course, being the Pope's.

Oh no, not the Pope! And with that titillating, optimistic thought, that at last a Pope could be made to fall on his sword (you there, the sniggerer in the second row, by sword, we meant an actual sword made of metal), we must leave Angela Shanahan brooding about the Roman church.

After all, it's time to celebrate the true meaning of Ēostre with an easter egg hunt (dark chocolate of a pure kind only please) and lashings of hot cross buns, so we can crunch our teeth into that tasty white cross.

And now for some strange reason, a few words from Joe Orton. He came to an untidy end, but lordy, did he have some fun along the way. From Oscar Wilde to Joe, a sense of humour is the only way to deal with the Shanahans of the world:

“Every luxury was lavished on you - atheism, breast-feeding, circumcision. I had to make my own way.”

“Reading isn't an occupation we encourage among police officers. We try to keep the paperwork down to a minimum.”

“The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste”

(Below: as usual, women cop both the pestle and the mortar. More on this Mali standing female figure with mortar and pestle here).