St Gerry of Belfast

When Margaret Thatcher was in power, this man’s voice was not even allowed to be broadcast. But now he is given his own broadcast pulpit on a Sunday evening to preach the gospel to the nation. Yes, the good Catholic boy Gerry Adams is on a journey ‘to discover the real Jesus’ and today he expounds his Christology: the terrorist Jesus; Christus Victor, Dominus Hibernae, Pro Deo, Rege et Patria, Hibernia Unanimis

And the C4 website styles Gerry Adams a ‘politician and supporter of the IRA’.

Supporter?

They make it sound like a home game against Glenavon FC.

He was rather more than a supporter: he was a ‘commanding officer’ – one who leads, has control, formulates strategy, gives orders, exerts authority and ensures obedience and submission.

And he describes himself as an 'Irish Catholic who, despite all the let-downs and scandals that... the Church has been embroiled in, remains a member'.

Re-read that very carefully.

He says he remains a Roman Catholic despite the let-downs and scandals the Church has been embroiled in.

Well, let us hope His Holiness is grateful and honoured by Gerry Adams’ condescension and forbearance.

But how is it that he remains incommunicate with the Roman Catholic Church after ‘all the knee-cappings let-downs and murders scandals that he has ordered been embroiled in’?

How is it that all of Irelands bishops (of which there is a surfeit) never sought to deter him from his murderous pathology by initiating disciplinary proceedings to excommunicate him? Turning a blind eye and covering up paedophilia is one thing. But terrorism, torture and murder?

We are told: ‘Adams explores how Jesus's core message - that of love, forgiveness and advocacy of non-violence - has affected him and other members of his community... As someone who has defended the resort to arms by Republicans in Northern Ireland, he reflects on how he reconciles this with the teachings of Jesus... Equipped with his new knowledge of Jesus, Adams ends by revealing his personal relationship to Jesus's teachings and how they relate to his own life experiences.’

Well, Cranmer can hardly wait.

If Gerry Adams is going to appeal to Augustine or Aquinas and the ‘Just War’ theory to explain the IRA campaign of terror, he will manifest the poverty of his theology and the void of his spirituality.

He is not remotely penitent, and, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft has observed of Martin McGuinness, if he were a Serb, he would be indicted at The Hague.

‘Or try another comparison, the respective fate of two terrorist leaders. One is a white Catholic Irishman, the other a dark-skinned Muslim Palestinian; one is asked to present a programme on Jesus, the other is brutally bumped off – an assassination which, like all such by Mossad, will never be publicly condemned by the US. Suppose that, at the height of the IRA violence, Adams and McGuinness had been the objects of "targeted killing" by MI6. It's interesting to speculate what the American reaction would have been.

‘The British media are sometimes accused of a bias against Israel. But would Channel 4 ask an unrepentant Islamist terrorist who had killed ordinary Israelis to present a programme on the Prophet Mohamed? Or, for that matter, Ratko Mladic to talk about Orthodox Christianity and the Serbian monastic tradition?’

Are there really any differences between the religio-political ideologies and terrorist methods of Gerry Adams and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh?

And Geoffrey Wheatcroft hits the nail right on the head with this:

‘Compare and contrast, as exam papers say. The IRA and its front organisation Sinn Fein want to undo the partition of Ireland that was effected by the creation of a separate province of Northern Ireland in 1920. To that end the IRA deliberately murdered many people, including ordinary Protestants, and that end, if not the means, "is shared by many of our citizens", Blair says, as well as by millions of Irish Americans.

‘Hamas wants to undo the partition of Palestine that was effected by the creation of a separate state of Israel in 1948. To that end it has deliberately murdered many people, including ordinary Jews. And that end, if not the means, is shared by hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims as well as others in Asia and Africa. Why does their support not equally validate the objective?’

Doubtless there will be those who will assert there is no evidence that Gerry Adams was a commander or was ever in the IRA, blah, blah, blah. Yet only yesterday, Delours Price, the first female member of the IRA, said that Garry Adams ordered her to ‘disappear people’.

She led the unit that bombed London in March 1973, and states unequivocally that Gerry Adams was her Officer Commanding from whom she took orders in person, which included the ‘disappearances’ of IRA members Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee and Joe Lynskey, not to mention the Belfast mother-of-ten Jean McConville.

Gerry Adams is an unrepentant liar, murderer and man of blood.

And yet still he remains in communion with the Church of Rome.

Why is he so tolerable to the Roman Catholic hierarchy, when the mother of a nine-year-old girl who was raped and made pregnant by her step father is excommunicated for permitting an abortion?

As appalling as abortion undoubtedly is, how can it be more mortal a sin than leading one of the most effective terrorist organisations in the world? How can it merit excommunication more than a lifetime of involvement in robbery, fraud and drug-dealing; murdering hundreds of one’s fellow-citizens – men, women and children; the attempted assassination of the British Prime Minister and her entire Cabinet; lying to protect a paedophile brother; and facilitating a known paedophile to work with children?