It looks like some kind of crude anti-clerical satire. The skinny young priest is in the middle of what seems to be a gynaecological ward of a Dublin hospital.
He starts to sing: "I'm a great big bundle of joy/ I'm the Chattanooga shoe-shine boy." As he does so he dances across the shiny floor. The camera cuts away to the faces of the women in the beds. Each is a picture of hideous embarrassment and deep discomfort, masked by a fixed, beaming smile. The women clap along when the priest tells them to. He looks like a maniac in thrall to happy delusions, shuffling his feet, clapping his hands, crooning away in a thin imitation of Bing Crosby. The mortification of the women is increasingly obvious to everyone except the priest, who clearly imagines that he is giving them the thrill of a lifetime. No one tells him to stop.
The scene is surreal, but it is not satiric. It is part of Peter Lennon's riveting documentary The Rocky Road to Dublin, shot in Ireland in 1967 and recently re-released. In the making of the film, Lennon and the cinematographer Raoul Coutard followed Fr Michael Cleary around for a few days, and the scene in the hospital is part of their footage. Taken as a whole, the sequence, in which Cleary is viewed rather sympathetically, is crucial viewing for anyone who really wants to understand last week's Ferns report on clerical child abuse.
It captures better than anything else I've seen the strut of a priestly princeling in the Ireland from which we have recently emerged. To watch Michael Cleary on his rambles around working-class Dublin - telling newly-weds what to do in their marriage, patronising older men, doing his Elvis impersonations whether anyone likes it or not - is to see God's gift to the world. It is also to see something that is seldom acknowledged: the way Irish Catholics helped to corrupt their priests by obedience, indulgence and easy absolution. They fed a vanity that soured into arrogance and the abuse of power.
The institutional church rightly gets the blame for its grotesque failure to meet its responsibility to protect children. But it is too easy to forget that when the issue of child sexual abuse began to surface in Ireland from the 1980s onwards, the most aggressive attacks on attempts to acknowledge the problem and do something about it came not from bishops and priests but from lay Catholic organisations. Much of that opposition cohered around the attempt to prevent the introduction to primary schools of what is now accepted as an immensely successful programme to give children a language in which to articulate any concerns they might have about abusive approaches.
Stay Safe is a gentle, careful programme, specifically tailored to Irish schools. Its introduction, however, was met by the formation of Parents Against Stay Safe. The programme was introduced in September 1991. By September 1992, when Pass was formally launched, a full-scale campaign was under way to stop Stay Safe. It was conducted largely in the provincial press, on local radio and in conservative Catholic publications like The Democrat, The Brandsma Review, Outlook and Angelus. But it also included the issuing of solicitors' letters to teachers in north Kerry, threatening them with legal action if they taught the programme.
A flavour of the attacks on the programme can be gathered from an article by the chairman of PASS in Tralee in the Kerryman in March 1993: "Child sex abuse is not nearly as prevalent as the Stay Safe programme suggests. It is these grossly exaggerated claims which persuade many parents to accept the Stay Safe programme . . . We ask why the exaggeration? Is it to create a scare that will provide an excuse for the introduction of this programme? . . . This programme invades the privacy of the child and the family, and is essentially, whether intentionally or not, anti-family . . . The introduction of this programme into our national schools could result in the break-up of families, and the removal of non-abused children from their parents' care, with resulting damage to the family as a whole, including the allegedly abused children."
The Southern Star, meanwhile, ran a lengthy report of a public meeting in which an American right-wing campaigner denounced the programme. Throughout the report, and in the headline, Stay Safe was referred to as "Safe Sex". The thrust of the article was that the "Safe Sex programme being mooted for Irish primary schools" actually "prepared the children for abuse". Irish primary teachers, in other words, were using the programme to groom children for sexual abuse.
This kind of disgusting nonsense was backed by a number of prominent priests, but it was spread to an overwhelming extent by lay organisations. And it had an effect. Just last week The Irish Times reported that 20 per cent of primary schools still don't use the Stay Safe programme. There may be various reasons for this figure, but one of them is surely a residual distrust from a hysterical campaign. It is just one legacy from a culture which could see no evil unless it came from the usual suspects.