David Norris (Independent)

I want to show where this could lead. I am a great admirer of Fr. Brian D'Arcy. He has done enormously important work as a broadcaster and writer and has held out a lifeline to people whose lives have been fractured by personal circumstances of one kind or another. He is also a man I genuinely admire intensely. Fr. D'Arcy has the courage of his convictions and, in a gentlemanly way, challenged the senior authorities of his own church, including on television, which is extremely courageous. While I do not wish to embroil him in further controversy, he has published a book which I have been reading because I am interviewing him on Monday.

In the book, A Different Journey, Fr. D'Arcy describes his formation in a monastery near Enniskillen as follows:

There wasn't much formal education involved, except perhaps in spiritual practices: how to meditate, be silent and repeat endless rosaries. We memorised the monk's alphabet, which had quotes like, "I am a worm and no man". It was about killing your self-esteem, even though most of us hadn't much of it to kill...

Each of us had five whips about four inches long of this tightly knitted twine with a rope handle long enough to make sure you could beat your backside. After night prayers, three times a week, we went to our rooms and whipped ourselves on the bum for as long as it took to say five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys and five Glorias.

There was, Father D'Arcy writes, hardly any spirituality taught and most of the practices were designed to encourage blind obedience rather than an interior life of genuine holiness. He also describes a notorious case of a novice master telling a novice from a farming background to plant cabbages upside down. While the novice knew it was wrong, he did as he was told out of blind obedience. "Humiliations like that destroyed good young men", Fr. D'Arcy adds.

I do not refer to these passages to be provocative, nor do I wish to insult the Roman Catholic Church. The test of the greatness of the church is that a good and decent man such as Fr. D'Arcy survived these silly, dangerous practices and still does extremely good work. The definition of a cult provided in the legislation exactly coincides with the witness of a continuing priest of the Roman Catholic religion. This is the area into which the Minister is foolishly straying. It is for this reason that I support Senator Regan's amendment to delete the section.