I read on Tuesday that Father Martin McVeigh, a priest in the Northern Ireland village of Pomeroy, showed a slideshow of graphic pornographic images to a group of parents and an eight-year-old child and I thought, why oh why weren't my parents Catholic?!
I grew up Southern Baptist. Do you know why Baptists disapprove of having sex standing up? It could lead to dancing.
I never saw pornography of any kind as a child, unless you count the time when I was six and Sister Jenkins, a large woman, tripped over her slip on her way to the pulpit to deliver a testimonial. That was quite a hoot. She was uninjured, through the power of the Lord. The slip had commenced a rapid drift from Sister Jenkins's ample hips upon her arising from the back pew. It came increasingly into view beneath her skirt line with each ponderous step and as she passed the front pew, Brother Macintosh reached for the offending undergarment to remove it, I suppose, lest it offend the eyes of the Almighty. He failed in his attempt at decorum but succeeded in tripping a big old Baptist woman with her own lingerie.
I doubt most of the congregation saw anything unseemly but from my wee vantage point I caught an eyeful of flesh that could not quite conceal something resembling a bulldog with a broken jaw.
Those were simpler times.
Nowadays churchgoers never know when they might catch a glimpse of hardcore porn at a school meeting to discuss their children's first communions. Apparently Father McVeigh takes no responsibility for the explicit gay footage that somehow made its way onto his memory stick, telling a local newspaper, "I don't know how it happened but I know what happened."
For what it's worth, I bet it's not the first time some gay porn made its way onto a priest's stick.
One of America's best known Catholics, Rick Santorum, has made no comment on the matter, but I did find this photo, which is completely irrelevant.
I found another photo as well and I hope my sisters like it as much as I do.
The author, his parents and two sisters at the First Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, circa 1972. Custom vest orders accepted by special request.