Why the Irish state should pay judges, policemen and soldiers to attend catholic mass in this day and age is beyond me. But I was not surprised when I recalled the religious worship forced onto me and colleagues in a previous occupation…that being a member of the Defence Forces.

In the autumn of 1989 I joined the Irish Army Air Corps as an apprentice aircraft mechanic. Initial training comprised of basic infantry training to 2 star private standards, a further 18 months academic technical training was followed by two years on the job training in aircraft hangars or workshops. This was in turn followed by some more military training to pass out as 3 Star Private with a technical grade. There were 50 of us in the 53rd Apprentice Class, disparagingly known as the “50 turds”.

Our first full day in the Air Corps saw an introduction by the camp chaplain. He set about drawing an overview of the Defence Forces rank structure on a blackboard from top generals all the way down to the very lowest ranked apprentices. He pointed out with great glee to a classroom full of eager 16 and 17 year olds that we were the lowest of the low and I got the feeling that he considered us the dregs of the Air Corps.

We were told as apprentices that chaplains had equivalent rank to Commandants and as such this put them in the officer rank structure, way above us men. This particular chaplain appeared to relish his “rank” and his ego let it show, this was in your face Catholicism whether you liked it or not.

After our initial 4 months of military training we were sent to the apprentice school in January 1990 to study such subjects as airframes, propulsion, electrics, hydraulics and other subjects such as religion. Not only were we “trained killers” learning how to fix airplanes, but the Department of Defence also saw fit to instruct us in catholic faith and morality. So our last class from 1530 to 1630 every Friday was religious instruction and you could not be excused.

Also during the year there was a religious “celebration” called the mission. The mission was a retreat over 3 days with long masses every day I think it was a devotion to “our lady” or something like that because the Defence Forces is a big fan of hers. Again there was no opt out you had to go to mass. I remember being caught falling asleep in one of the masses by a young 2nd Lt who took me aside and snarled at me that “the mission was not an excuse to have a honk”.

During the two years of academic training we had to live in the barracks in the style of a boarding school, only let out every Wednesday to socialise until the 2359 curfew or every first weekend to go home to family. Other weekends would find enforced study periods and “dirty details” such as litter detail, raking grass or cleaning sheds. Once Lt. “Shep” Mc Cormack ordered 50 of us to rake a rugby pitch free of grass because the officers were due to have a match. Our orders were we weren’t going anywhere until the pitch was raked, no home to mammy, no out to see girlfriends etc. There was only one snag, there were no rakes only 2 sweeping brushes. So 48 of us got down on our hunkers and walked backwards through the field raking the grass with our fingers.

Sunday mornings on the other hand meant we were ordered onto parade in our best nip & tucker for mass. Once we were marched to the church going inside was optional and sometimes depending on the NCO or officer in charge we who opted out could go back to bed or go to breakfast. On other occasions those non-religious were ordered to stand outside the church until mass was over, sometimes in the rain.
Once we left the apprentice school and stopped living in we were assigned to particular units “up camp” either in technical workshops or aircraft squadrons. But once a month, I think on the first Friday, there was a mass parade whereby every member of the Air Corps in Baldonnel had to fall in on the square in their No. 1 uniform and over 1,000 of us were marched up to the church. This time entry was optional but I remember on many occasions the Regimental Sargent Major ordering lower ranks to attend and if some outlined their lack of faith they were ordered to stand outside the church in whatever weather until mass was over. I subsequently found out that if the resident priest was away the substitute priest was paid by the number of attendees at the mass, so everything makes sense in hindsight when you follow the money trail.

Another big pomp and ceremony religious occasion was the annual blessing of the airplanes and the odd tool box, spanner or multimeter. The first airplane blessing I attended was I think in 1990 and an airplane fatally crashed the next day, without so much as a refund from the priest. One aircraft blessing ceremony I remember took place in BFTS hangar with a couple of airplanes washed & polished and organised around a makeshift altar. Again all personnel were forced to attend the blessing but the “padre” announced that those who did not wish to stay for mass were free to leave.

We all fell out of ranks to make towards the exit but it was blocked by the Regimental Sergeant Major who ordered everyone back to mass. I remember one particular corporal (or maybe sergeant) who would not go back to the mass and he was promptly arrested and placed in detention under armed guard, this being 1995 not 1895.

I became an atheist around the age of 17 or shortly after I joined the Air Corps although on my entry application I had put my religion down as RC. It was interesting to note that my application needed to be accompanied by a parental “Form of Consent” because we were technically child soldiers. This “Form of Consent” noted that I lived in the “parish” of Ashbourne, not a town. I had to get my father to sign this form because it stated “Where the applicant’s father is alive and both parents reside together, the father must sign this form” it then had to be witnessed by either a commissioned officer serving in the defence forces, a member of the Garda Siochana not below rank of Sergeant or a clergyman.

In my later years of service I attempted to officially change my religion from RC to none but when I tried I was ridiculed in the orderly room and my request was dismissed. A day or two later I was phoned by a recently promoted corporal and notified that I was being detailed to present gifts to the altar at the annual airplane blessing ceremony. I thought this was a wind up related to my attempt to officially change my religion and promptly told him to “fuck off”. I found myself very quickly having to apologise to said corporal but point out that I didn’t believe in any god and definitely was not presenting gifts at a religious ceremony. I subsequently found myself washing dishes for a month in the cookhouse and believed I was being religiously persecuted only to find out weeks later I was in fact being punished for some other simultaneous misdemeanour.

In my later years in the Air Corps the chaplain that served was a nice humble chap but he still spend his day pushing religion and attempting to evangelise the flock. If you ever bumped into him he was always offering prayer books or invitations to mass. This was repeated in every barracks up and down the country, there was a priest on “commandant” salary of up to €68k with fuck all else to do but preach to personnel going about their jobs as soldiers, sailors or airmen. Mass was held in every barracks every day and you were free to leave your work to attend.

Some of the chaplains I am sure were bored out of their tree but some very much got into the drinking and socialising that was army life. Some chaplains even did unusual things like paratrooper courses and commando type courses, indeed the chaplain of Gormanston barracks lost his sight in one eye and fractured his skull jumping off a bridge into Blessington lake. It wouldn’t surprise me one little bit if there is an Irish Chaplain out there that is a trained sniper.

It is interesting to note that I signed up to the Air Corps at age 17 for a 9 year contract and if you wanted to leave the Defence Forces before the 9 years were up you had to pay up to £5,000 to buy out your service. There was one provision in the regulations however, if you wanted to leave the Air Corps to join the priesthood the £5,000 was waived. So to be useful somewhere else cost £5,000 but to be a professional charlatan was free.

Overall I spent 9 happy years in the Air Corps and enjoyed them greatly, learnt a lot and made some great friends and on some occasions I even did some work, it is just a pity that religion had to impinge on your working day to a level you just couldn’t imagine in civvy street.

The number serving in the Defence Forces now stands around the 10,000 mark and, for this number, the State sees fit to “employ” 17 Catholic chaplains on salaries of between €58,000 and €68,000 per annum with an unearned military rank equivalent to Commandant.

The question must be asked, why do the Defence Forces employ priests? Why is more than €1m handed over by the State to the Catholic Church to pay chaplains? While private citizens have done much to free their lives of Catholic Church influence, the state institutions are still held firmly in its grasp.

There are those of course that claim that the transformation is symbolic not literal, which I have not concerned myself with here as they are essentially saying nothing. I limit my inquiry only to those who claim a literal transformation.

I decide some time ago therefore to investigate over a 2 year period these claims. Since the results of this have been sitting on a shelf for some time I thought it useful to disseminate a short summary of my tests and summary of my results to the internet. The hope is that further testing can be suggested that I might have missed and which I can now take up the mantel again and continue to engage in.

Experimental setup:

As a setup I obtained “normal” and “consecrated” hosts in sufficient numbers and continued to do so over the 2 year period to make sure that I was working with both “fresh” and “dormant” samples. Both are surprisingly easy to obtain as those that have them seem keen to be rid of them.

As the transformation was meant to be into something resembling human flesh I, where possible, also used volunteer skin samples in my tests.

Blind experimentation:

To remove and risk of bias in the experiments I performed ALL experiments in the following fashion. I used 4 cracker samples in all cases.

Sample A: Chosen randomly by me from the “normal” pile.
Sample B: Chosen randomly by me from the “consecrated” pile.
Sample C: Chosen randomly by a third party from either pile without informing me which it was from.
Sample D: Chosen randomly by a third party from the other pile without informing me which it was from.
Sample E: Collection of random skin samples from human volunteers, myself included.

The order of the samples was then hidden and mixed from me by another separate party so that until the results were in I would not know if the results connected to samples A, B, C or D.

Sample summary of Experiments performed:

The samples were then subjected to many tests of which this is a random but not exhaustive sample list:

1 ) Burning tests, testing energy released in burning, burning time, change in mass of sample between before and after burning, color of flame (light wavelengths measured).
2 ) Chemical testing: Disolving in various chemicals and measuring energy releases, mass changes, chemical composition of diluted samples.
3 ) Degradation testing: Observing the differences in samples left to their own devices to measure differences in chemical breakdown due to food “going off” etc.
4 ) Luck testing: Engaged in various tests of luck in the presence of, or following the consumption of Samples from each group. Dice Games. Lottery Ticket use. Guessing Games and much more.
5 ) Emotional testing: Gauged personal subjective impression of mood changes in a group of volunteer subjects in the presence of, or following the consumption of, Samples from each group over 24 hour periods.
6 ) Priest testing: Proffered Samples to a selection of priests who were unable to identify which crackers were “normal” and which were “consecrated”.
7 ) Float testing: Tested the floating properties of each Sample.
8 ) Mass testing: Tested for differences in mass, density and other physical properties between samples, including aerodynamic abilities and resistance to physical stress such as piercing with nails (rusty and normal), tearing, toasting, hammering, bending, stamping and more. It has been suggested to me independently a number of times… seriously by those of a theistical bent, and jokingly by those who are not… that I rename this section the “Torture Testing”.

Summary of Results:

There was in ALL tests absolutely NO difference between the samples at any stage except for minute expected differences in mass between all samples (even internally among each sample group) which are within expected tolerances for normal human food manufacturing variances.

There was in ALL tests NO significant overlap of comparative results between any crackers and any human skin samples.

Conclusion:

There is no basis at this time apparent to support any claims that there is any form of “literal” transformation in the “consecrated” samples.

Further Study:

I still posses a number of samples of each time and am more than happy to engage in further testing should anyone manage to submit a test idea that I have not yet engaged in.

Recent attempts to soften its impact, by illustrating it with nonreligious images and rebranding it as a pause for reflection, simply make it worse. This suggests that people of all religions and none can unite under a Roman Catholic call to prayer.

If RTE was to broadcast a minute of atheist propaganda at prime time every day, most people would intuitively realise that this would be inappropriate. And the problem would be made worse by illustrating atheist propaganda with religious images.

In a religious State, the State broadcasting system would be promoting religion; in an atheist State, the State broadcasting system would be promoting atheism. In a secular State, it would do neither, and that is what Atheist Ireland wants to see happen.

However, this is not true. A Vatican official has explicitly described the crimes contained in this document as being “on the same level” of seriousness. They are the “Delicta Graviora”, the crimes which the Catholic Church considers the most serious of all, and which are reserved to the Holy See for judgment.

In 2007, the Vatican published a pamphlet on Paedophilia and the Priesthood, written by Monsignor Raffaello Martinelli, an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and member of the editorial commission of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This pamphlet explicitly states:

“The seriousness with which the Church evaluates and judges acts of pedophilia is shown by the fact that with a new law passed in 2001, the Holy See (and not the local bishops) decided to reserve the right to judge those crimes…

The fact that the Pope wanted to reserve to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — a dicastery of the Holy See — judgment of the acts of pedophilia committed by priests, shows that the Church considers those acts to be very serious, serious crimes on the same level of the other two serious crimes — reserved to the Holy See — that can be committed against two sacraments: the Eucharist and the holiness of confession.”

In 2010, with the updated document Normae de Gravioribus Delictis, the Vatican has now added the attempted ordination of women to this strange list of the most serious crimes of all.

And the direction of the comparison is not that they consider these theological crimes to be as serious as sexually abusing a child, but that they consider sexually abusing a child to be as serious as these theological crimes, to be judged by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be the Congregation of the Inquisition.

For example, sexually abusing a child is listed not as a crime against the child, but as a crime against the Biblical commandment forbidding adultery. And attempting to ordain a woman attracts a more serious punishment than sexually abusing a child. This is the type of morality that results when people put theology ahead of reality.

Ethical issues should be evaluated on the basis of human rights, compassion, well-being and suffering, not on the basis of theological dictates from people who believe they are getting messages from the creator of the universe.

In the earliest written Biblical reference, Paul says the risen Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time [1 Cor 15:3-8]. Yet in the earliest written Gospel, called Mark, the allegedly risen Jesus does not appear to anybody. A different writer later added that part [16:9-20] to the Mark story, with the risen Jesus saying that people who believed in him could safely drink poison.

The Gospels called Matthew and Luke, written a decade or more later, were the first to include the risen Jesus physically appearing to people. But in Matthew, this seems relatively commonplace, with the bodies of many dead people being physically resurrected, coming out of their tombs, and appearing to many people [27:52-53]. None of the other Gospels mention this incident.

Nor do the Gospels agree on where and how many times the risen Jesus physically appeared. In Mark he does not appear at all. In Matthew he appears twice, to the two Marys on a road [27:8-9] and to his disciples on a mountain in Galilee [27:16-17]. In Luke he appears three times: to a man and his companion on a road [24:13-32], to Peter in an unspecified place [24:33-34], and to his disciples and others in a house [24:36-53].

In John he appears four times: to Mary Magdelene who thinks he is a gardener outside his tomb [20:11-18], to his disciples twice in a house [24:19-23, 26-29], and to some of his disciples for breakfast after a fishing trip [21:1-12]. None of the Gospels include Paul’s remarkable claim that the risen Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time.

These fantastic and wildly inconsistent stories may have seemed convincing in more primitive times, written as they were as standalone stories in different places for different audiences, many of who believed the world was coming to an end within their lifetimes. They are no basis today on which to build a worldview about the nature of reality or how we should live together as sentient beings.

In fact, the penalties in the document suggest that the Vatican actually considers attempting to ordain a woman to be a more grave offence than sexually abusing a child.

A cleric who attempts either offence may be punished by dismissal or deposition, but a person who attempts to ordain a woman is also automatically excommunicated, as is the woman who attempts to be ordained.

These are the moral priorities that one might expect from a church that last year excommunicated a Brazilian mother for helping her raped nine-year-old daughter to have an abortion, without seeking to impose any penalties on the man who raped the child.

Ethical issues should be evaluated on the basis of human rights, compassion, well-being and suffering, not on the basis of theological dictates from people who believe they are getting messages from the creator of the universe.

This is an attempt to make innocent people feel guilty for serious crimes committed by members of the Roman Catholic clergy, and for the cover-up of those crimes by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Indeed, there may well have been some victims of these crimes in the very audience whom he was asking to do penance.

Bishop McKeown also said that “Our secular society – that so often likes to locate sin and repentance only in individuals rather than accepting the possibility of corporate responsibility – cannot easily comprehend the idea of doing penance and making reparation for others. But Pioneers and all Christians can.”

Secular society does not locate “sin” anywhere. Sin is a theological notion. Secular society involves people agreeing together how best to live together, based on our experience of reality. Democratic secular society is typically based on protecting human rights by the rule of law, not on blaming innocent people for the crimes of guilty people.

Atheist Ireland is campaigning for a secular state for a pluralist people, with freedom of belief for everybody protected by a government that is neutral on religion.

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I began my diary in February 1949 when I was just 12 years old and two years into my stay at the Sacred Heart Boarding School in Droitwich. Even though the writing has now faded it’s still clear enough to reveal my childhood preoccupations. There was my constant concern with accumulating money. “Collected debts up to amount of 4/6d.” “Got 3/- PO from granny.” “Found myself with 8/6d when I had collected up my debts.”

Even more space is devoted to religious observance. “Went to communion and offered it up for Mummy.” “Retreat was on today. Made my Lent resolution and I am going to try and keep it.” “Passion Sunday today. Did not serve mass. This is the first time I have not served for the last five Sundays.”

And then, running like a thread through all the assiduous debt collecting and pious altar serving, is my friendship with Richard Glenister. “Founded a club for essays with Glenister. Decided to read only good books.” “Had a bit of a quarrel with Glenister but made it up quickly.” “Memo. To try and keep up the Literature Club with Glenister and not let anyone else in.”

But nowhere in the closely written pages is there a single reference or a solitary allusion to the most significant feature of my life at boarding school with Richard. There is not a word about the fact that at the time we were both being sexually abused by two of the priests who ran the school.

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The first person in Ireland to have gone public – in 1995 – about his abuse by a Catholic priest has formally left the Catholic Church.

Andrew Madden, who was abused when an altar boy in Cabra parish in Dublin by Ivan Payne, wrote to the Dublin archdiocese before Christmas saying he wished to leave the Church. He received notice of his “cessation of church membership by formal act of defection. . .” from church authorities last week.

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