I love my Local Library

You can't beat a good book burning. It's the next best thing to burning the author, which, unfortunately, is no longer allowed under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Mind you, it is not clear whether the Inquisition (Vatican CDF) subscribes to some of this modern pussy claptrap, as they seem to be still seriously embedded in the business of burning holy authors without any heed to claims for fair treatment under human rights legislation. Of course, the Vatican State is a strange sort of creature in the community of nations. Now you see it, now you don't.

Anyway, when Seán Fagan published his latest book, What happened to sin?, in 2008, a complete rewrite of an earlier 1977 book, all Hell broke loose. The Good Father was silenced and his order, the Marists, ordered to buy up and destroy all available copies of the book (or all of his books, I can't quite get a handle on this one).

Well the Marists jumped to comply with this medieval instruction and, as any economist would tell you, the value of any remaining copies must have rocketed.

There were two sources they couldn't touch, however: those people who had already bought the book, and, a little surprisingly for those of us brought up under Pius XII, copies in the public library system.

Now, in my day, the libraries would have been pressganged into this witch-hunt, and any copies not surrendered by the authorities would have been vanished from the shelves by over-zealous Catholics.

So I got to wondering just what was the current position on Sean Fagan's books in the public library system. I had just got a copy myself of What happened to sin? in my local library, so I checked out the position online.

The sin book was plentiful in the Dublin City Public Library system with 9 copies of the 2008 version, 2 copies of the original 1977 version, and 1 copy of the 1989 reprint, all available. And his other major book, Does morality change? was also there in abundance with 6 copies of the 1997 original and 7 copies of the 2003 version available. And remember, this is only the Dublin City branches.

So the day is thankfully gone when a heretic church could dictate what the public could, or could not, read. Isn't this some progress?

I'll end with the craven statement from Seán Fagan's order, the Marists, presumably aimed at those lucky enough to be able to read those copies of his books which escaped the eternal (man made) fires of Hell.

Why, oh why, could the Marists, or the Redemptorists for that matter, not have a guy like the one below incharge?

Benedictine Prioress Christine Vladimiroff

Pro Vita Sua

Seán Fagan is in his eighties but he writes and thinks like a young man, a wise young man with buckets of experience behind him.

I have just finished reading his book What happened to sin? Originally written in 1977, he has since updated it in 2008.

I really don't know where to start. It is such a relevant and inspirational book that it is hard to see anyone of good faith taking issue with it.

One of his other books, Does Morality Change?, originally written in 1997, was condemned by the Vatican (CDF) on its republication in 2003, on the following grounds (as reported by the Irish bishops):

“the denial of the binding force of the Magisterium [Rome] on conscience”; “the uncritical acceptance of the tendency ‘to substitute a dynamic and more evolutionary concept of nature for a static one’,”; “the effective rejection of the church’s understanding of the natural law (illuminated by revelation)”; “the explicit denial of moral absolutes, specially those concrete acts which are intrinsically wrong”; and “the promotion of a false understanding of conscience”.

I would have thought that these sound more like grounds for praise than condemnation. Of course, they are a hostile presentation of Seán Fagan's ideas by a power-mad bureaucracy that feels threatened by him. They fail to present the inspirational context in which these ideas are put forward, and they fail completely to see that Seán Fagan's thinking could be the salvation of a church which is failing in its duty to its members and which even some of its own highest officials acknowledge is rotten at parts of its core.

I found What happened to sin? the most inspirational book I have read since John Robinson's Honest to God. It is a game changer. Don't be put off by the use of the word sin, and you could even dispense with the divine in its content, and you would still have a programme for good (Godly?) living to bring you in sight of the Promised Land.

I read it as an unbeliever, but with an eye to what its thinking might mean for the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church on the lines promised by Vatican II some half a century ago.

It is a plea/recipe for individual moral responsibility in a buck passing and uncaring world. It debunks the power-enhancing strategems of church administrations over the last decades, centuries even, in favour of person-based moral growth.

It is a disgrace that this man has been silenced, though not very effectively it would seem. It is a sad reflection on the moral pygmies who reported him, those who silenced him, and those, who by their own silence, consent to the outrageous treatment of this holy man.