Ceilt agus Cealg

Publication Instance Details #901

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	Yes	No	No	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	Genocide Racism/anti-Semitism/Sectarianism
War / Genocide Referenced	Genocide: Holocaust
Irish Context	Other Specific Irish place or place-name mentioned
Languages	Irish
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	The speaker of the poem discusses the hypocrisy and failures of the Catholic church. Much of the poem speaks about the speaker's own experience within the church and the fear and anger that interactions with clergy, nuns, and priests, engendered in him. There are implications of sexual abuse of children in the poem by religious figures. The speaker's anger at his treatment by the church is palpable, and he condemns them for the skewed, vengeful, evil, version of Christ that they learned in the Catholic Church. Notable is the discussion of anti-semitism in the poem, which the speaker claims led to Auschwitz occurring. The church, he alleges, allowed this to happen because of their inherent anti-Semitism and disgust of Jewish people. The poem concludes with the speaker's musing about the real Christ, who he has merely glimpsed. He mentions that he would not even recognise the 'real Christ'.