Spittle and Vaseline.

I've been thinking a lot in the last week or so about a story I heard of a little boy who left Dublin when he was about eleven years old and travelled to London to join a seminary and train as a Catholic priest.

He was the oldest of six children and his decision to follow this vocation was probably a source of great pride to his parents and his siblings.

But when he was there, he found himself subjected to blatant violence in the form of beatings (not in the least unusual in any school in London in the mid-Sixties, it has to be said) but also to less blatant - indeed, thoroughly covered-up - sexual abuse. He and countless others learnt the facts of life whilst being physically penetrated "with spittle and Vaseline."

Now, many years later, the man is grown up. He never became a priest. He has lost touch with his god. He has managed to make his life a good one, a successful one, in spite of a slow start. His early adulthood was blighted by indecision and lack of confidence, and he was marked as a restless spirit. But now he is internationally recognised for what he does, and he tries to make the best use of his position.

So, he began to talk about what happened to him. "When you speak out about something, then the disease of silence begins to lose its power." Which is how I heard his story.

People were incensed, they were outraged, they were horrified. They begin to say things like: "The Catholic Church owes him an apology!"

But suppose - just suppose - that some fairly high-up member of the church hierarchy were to telephone this 60 year old man at his home in New York to effect some kind of apology. Yes, that would be a wonderful start.

But a start to what?

See, if you apologise to one person, then it stands to reason that you should take the process further. My question is not where the apologies should begin, but where would they end?

Who will apologise to the millions of Jews exterminated like vermin during the Second World War whilst the Pope stood idly by? Literally, stood idly by. (I'm thinking of what happened when the Nazi's rounded up the Sephardic Jews from their ghetto in Rome.)

Who will apologise for the women who have died giving birth to their tenth, eleventh, twelfth child, or whose lives continue to be little better than that of indentured slaves as a result of the church's failure to embrace modern birth control?

How about the countless hundreds of thousands of lives blighted in Africa by AIDS? The church could easily have simply accepted people's true nature where sexual activity is concerned, and promoted the use of condoms instead of continually banging on and on about the pipe-dream of marital fidelity.

Will the souls of all those women burnt at the stake as 'witches' in the Dark Ages ever be apologised to, or handed an official pardon? I doubt it, somehow. Who will express regret to the memories of those millions of women throughout history who have been branded as harlots and ostracised for the 'sin' of bearing a child out of wedlock?

What about all the Muslims killed during the Crusades? And I do not just mean the Crusades in the Eleventh Century. How about the ones going on right now?

And why should it stop with the Catholic Church? Who is going to say sorry to lesbians and homosexuals denied opportunities to live openly and to express their true natures by the Church of England, or the Evangelicals in the United States of America? Who is going to bow their heads in sorrow at the plight of the Palestinians routed from their homes on the West Bank to make room for illegal Jewish settlers? What about the countless numbers of Hindu women who were expected to immolate themselves on their husband's funeral pyres? Or who are murdered or mutilated by their fathers and brothers for the crime of falling in love with the 'wrong' man? Or the girls in Afghanistan denied the right to an education that might gove them a chance to make something out of their lives? Or the woman in the Sudan faced with the prospect of being whipped like an animal for the 'sin' of wearing trousers?

I suppose that, if someone were to telephone the middle-aged man in Brooklyn and apologise for the Catholic Church's utter failure to protect him when he was an impressionable and sensitive twelve year old boy, that would be a start. Of sorts. Maybe that is where the whole process has to begin - not with grandiose damage-limitation gestures engineered by public relations executives, but simply with one human being speaking quietly to another and expressing genuine regret.