TWENTY years ago, then Catholic Archbishop Samuel Carter took a quite predictable position on abortion in his effort to link his religious beliefs with ethics, and to bring that whole anti-abortion stance as an open, strong influence on public policy.

I wrote a column criticising his position, but dared to supplement it with the suggestion that a man who had taken a vow of celibacy, and whose only experience of an intimate relationship with a woman and a family were based on third-hand anecdotal ‘evidence’, ought not to have such power to decide what a woman wants to do with her unborn child.

One of his Catholic acolytes who was a regular columnist jumped to his defence and described my column as the most amoral he had ever read. No surprise there.

The thing is, the church community of 20 years ago — especially the leadership comprising the various denominations — were not used to being challenged on their religious-dogma-as-law bully pulpit. By whatever route of scholarship, or by virtue of being ‘frocked’, once a man became leader of his specific denomination, especially in the Catholic and Anglican faiths, his words were never to be taken lightly in the broad society; in fact, it was his desire that the common folk, the sheep, saw them as divinely inspired, and he, a man to be singled out and given the respect befitting a king or an emperor.

The sacred cows of 20 years ago no longer exist, but apparently someone forgot to send the memo to the highly esteemed Father Richard Ho Lung, a man who has closely moved among some of the most socially impaired and physically dispossessed people in Jamaica.

Like an artist seated before his canvas, and a skilled surgeon under the lights performing a delicate operation, Father Richard Ho Lung has had his ‘calling’ — that intense desire inside of a person to embark on a particular profession or vocation.

I don’t think that I would be comfortable working on the back of a garbage truck or cleaning the cancerous sores of a homeless person. But, had there been a tweaking of circumstance sometime early in my life, or just an extra twist of a DNA strand, maybe I would be quite content to perform such work.

The late Mother Teresa once said that she saw ‘God in the broken body’. One got the sense that if she was trying to display empathy and sympathy for the terminally ill, better words could have been used to describe what she was trying to convey — that is, if she didn’t want to make it seem that she was savouring those many sad moments.

A few weeks ago Lisa Hanna, minister of youth and culture and former Miss World, dared to do something which no normal, lucid person would care to do. She went to the beach!

Her son snapped a picture of her in beachwear and it was pasted on her Facebook page. The politically deranged and the religious right went insane. But, of them all, Father Richard Ho Lung topped the list for seeing Hanna in swimwear as the devil returned as per a Gleaner column, ‘Lisa Hanna: Disappointment of the year 2014’.

“The minister of youth has clearly articulated for the youth what our future youth must be. Do you Jamaicans want your children to do what Lisa Hanna has done? If you wish them to be like her — worldly, secular and empty of any values but the self — then we are in for another Sodom and Gomorrah.

“To me, Lisa Hanna is the disappointment of the year, our minister of youth and culture. I am reminded of Lucifer’s fall from heaven. I hope that our youth will not follow her example.”

This is what happens when arch religionists fail to recognise that their stale, rigid and anti-female dogma has long died with the memo which they never read. The founder of Missionaries for the Poor is a former Jesuit priest. And, according the Gleaner piece:

“As a former Jesuit priest, we were all called to correct, reprimand, and be prophetic, whether hated and rejected or not. Truth is sacred to us — we will live and die for it. What we care about is the soul of the people; for when we die, the flesh corrupts, but the soul lives. Then we face our maker, whether it be heaven or hell (and whether we believe in such verities or not).”

As a deeply religious man and a member of the Catholic church, Fr Ho Lung is imperiled to be forever buried in the myths guiding him where eternal life is the ultimate objective, and the most certain shortcut away from that attainment is the body of woman, the temptress, the one who made man fall from grace in the mythical Garden of Eden.

I am forced to pinch myself and remind myself that the year is 2015 and not 1515.

Recently in the USA, GOP likely candidate for president in 2016, Mike Huckabee, a former preacher, saw in Beyonce all of the same sinful ‘attributes’ that Fr Ho Lung has seen in Lisa Hanna, something deeply ‘disturbing’ to both of them: Woman in all of her beauty!

Fr Ho Lung could easily have made out a better argument on which to criticise the minister. But when he asks, “Do you Jamaicans want your children to do what Lisa Hanna has done?”, I am forced to ask, what did she do apart from going to the beach? This is high comedy!

So, who will be called to correct the former Jesuit priest, or does he believe that the sheep of 20 years ago are still around. His criticisms of the minister went way beyond personal and indicated that he was not being as frank as we would have liked him to be.

On the assumption that Fr Ho Lung is on top of all his faculties, and on an island surrounded by some of the finest beaches in the Caribbean, it ought to be expected that Minister Lisa Hanna, a woman, would want to go to the beach at least once in her lifetime. Is the former Jesuit priest saying that his main beef with her is the beautiful bikini bottom? Or does he believe that she would be better off in a frock worn by Catholic priests?

Something is glaringly unresolved in Father Ho Lung’s criticism of Minister Hanna’s beach picture.

As a man, I will admit to certain vulnerabilities whenever I am near to the lady of my desires. I am, however, unafraid to express them to the fullest. And, unlike Fr Ho Lung, it doesn’t worry me too much if the devil and the temptress show up in the same person. Amen!

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