THE thunder of rolling heads within the Catholic Church in recent years - and the heirarchy's failure to deal publicly with the allegations of paedophilia within its ranks - threatens to lead to a view of the clergy as hapless freaks in a secular world, out of step with current morality. The recent media pictures of the extradition of Brendan Smith somehow said it all: the clenched, confused, pain-filled grimace, which somehow passed for a defiant grin.
If, as many claim, the unnatural loneliness of celibacy is at the heart of many of the patriarchal Church's problems, Michael Harding - a colourful, unorthodox former priest himself, and now a regular Abbey-stable playwright - plunges into the topic again with his new play, Sour Grapes, which opens at the Peacock tonight.
Probably his most fiercely angry work to date, it describes the outlandishly feudal power-struggles within an unnamed college seminary, in a play which fleshes out the premise of The Kiss, a short monologue he wrote for Tom Hickey a couple of years ago, and which gingerly circled a priest's momentary lapse in kissing a sleeping boy's open mouth - an act which brought about his undoing.
Sour Grapes may turn out to be Harding's most controversial work - curiously, less because of its raucous and wide-ranging attack on the organised Church and more because of its focus on the human forces which give rise to the cover-ups, let alone the atrocities of the abusive acts themselves.
Although exaggerated by the white heat of his satiric attack, it is an alarmingly credible vision of cynical, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed curates, all driven by corporate-style ambition. On a deeper level, these men are tormented by crises of faith and sexuality, their blackly-comic, misogyny a springboard for excavating many of the old arguments for radical Church reform.
Toying with our prejudices, Harding has constructed another twisting psychological whodunnit of fractured theatrical devices and time-frames. His play concerns the investigation of sexual wrongdoings which lie behind the suicide of a sensitive young seminarian; a beautiful, emotionally disturbed St Francis type (played by Shane Hagan), whose devotion to the Virgin turns pathological, once an experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a senior, cleric erupts into the light.
The high-minded, ambitious dean (Barry Barnes) is forced to take the allegations seriously, unfortunately when it is too late. His chief suspect is now a bishop (Clive Geraghty) who refuses to help with the inquiries ("Ask me arse", the latter splutters, storming out of a room). The only other person who can help is the hate-filled old Canon (Pat Laffan), the last of the old blackthorn cleric's; a local tyrant over his remote parish.
Whatever about these unreconstructed old boys, Harding paints a hilarious horror-picture of a future clergy in the making through a series of emotionally immature, freshly ordained young male characters: the lily-livered sensitivities of the camp, whinging Father Ciaran (Tom Murphy); and the cynicism of the episcopal aspirant (Frank Laverty), po-faced companion to the high-living, singing go-boy, Dermot, (Andrew Bennett) - only three months ordained and already up to his neck in sexual indiscretion.
The barren humanity of the monochrome all-male clerical world, with all its ludicrous anachronisms, provides rich pastures for a playwright. A few years ago, Harding's lyrical novel, Priest, was at the vanguard of critical commentary on the Irish clergy, yet in ways his insistent work in this area has been overtaken by events.
For a very young audience, Father Ted may, with its masterfully-timed idiocy, have swept away the last vestiges of priestly decorum. Older people will find, despite all the ear-flattening bad language, that Harding's bleak picture of ostensibly sexless men ageing into inflexible arrogance - men for who it is difficult, but not impossible, to feel some sympathy - comes from a man in a dam, good position to comment.
