Oxford professor Richard Dawkins has described the Catholic Church as "one of the forces for evil in the world."
This is so "mainly because of the powerful influence it has over the minds of children," he says. And, where accusations of clerical child sex abuse were concerned, "deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are", they were "not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up a child Catholic in the first place," he says.
A zoologist with strongly aetheistic views, Prof Dawkins writes in an article for The Dubliner magazine, published today, "I am delighted that one of the leading Roman Catholic seminaries for the training of young priests in Ireland is closing down because it can't get recruits.
"When I read that in the newspaper, it left me smiling for the rest of the day. However, if the Catholic Church does die in Ireland - and I devoutly hope it will - I hope that it will not be replaced by some other idiotic superstition like New Age-ism or some other kind of religion," he says.
The Catholic Church had over the centuries developed "brilliant techniques in brainwashing children; even intelligent people who have had a proper, full cradle-Catholic upbringing find it hard to shake it off when they reach adulthood." It was far more skilled [at brainwashing] "than, for instance, the Anglican Church, [who are\] mere amateurs in the game."
The Catholic Church had also "an extraordinarily retrogressive stance on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of technology which makes life easier for women without causing any sufering is likely to be opposed" by it.
Regarding clerical child sex abuse, he quotes from a letter sent him by a Catholic woman in the US who, when she was seven, was abused by a priest and whose schoolfriend died.
"She thought her friend was going to hell because she wasn't Catholic. For her there was no question that the greatest child abuse of those two was the abuse of being taught about hell. Being fondled by a priest was negligible in comparison."
