Nobody has a God-given ‘entitlement’ to be cruel

THERE’S hardly a more inoffensive character in the public eye at the moment than Father Ray Kelly. He’s the novelty act in this year’s Dancing With The Stars, following in the two-left-footed-footsteps of Des Cahill and Marty Morrissey.

Through his stint on the show, and his previous modest celebrity on Britain’s Got Talent, Fr Ray has done nothing but bring joy and gaiety to the nation. He has hurt nobody, offended nobody, insulted nobody. Naturally, the trolls are savaging him viciously.

Fr Ray’s crime is that, despite being barely able to put one foot in front of the other, he has failed to be voted off the talent show. As a man of God, he has also chosen to wear the odd sequinned jacket instead of sackcloth and ashes, while committing the even more unforgiveable sin of seeming to enjoy life. This, in the view of one caller to Liveline last week, brings his ‘Boss’, Jesus Christ, ‘into disrepute’.

It must be a great comfort to Jesus Christ to know that he has such kind and committed Christian warriors fighting his corner. Still, it is unlikely that Fr Ray has survived so miraculously and inexplicably long in the show without the support of his ‘Boss’, so these critics probably shouldn’t concern themselves too much.

Not that reason, or logic or, God forbid, the Christian concept of ‘live and let live’ ever halted a troll in full flight: all that is required, to merit their most malign and vile wrath is that they disapprove of you.

And disapproving of you, of the way you look or act or live your life, entitles them to heap any amount of venom upon you without restraint. And because they have this licence to abuse perfect strangers, they are never responsible for the consequences of their behaviour.

If Caroline Flack killed herself because she could no longer endure the cruelty of online trolls, well, they did nothing more than tell her what was what. They disapproved of her, of her flash lifestyle, her uncommon beauty and her domestic discord, and that entitled them to tell her so in the most brutal language possible.

‘I’m entitled’ was the response of one Twitter user when she was confronted, five years ago, about a stream of vile abuse she directed at the parents of missing toddler Madeline McCann. But when she then found herself under attack, after she was publicly identified by Sky News and investigated by police, she took her own life. Nobody truly knows why anybody, including Caroline Flack, makes that wretched decision, but perhaps the prospect of being the target of other folks’ ‘entitlement’ to abuse and vilify was just too much to bear.

ASIDE from his great singing, his terrible dancing and his relentlessly cheery nature, those trolls know nothing about Fr Ray Kelly. They don’t know what crosses he has had to shoulder in his life, and they don’t care. There is no sense of shared humanity, no acknowledgement that everyone has worries and everyone has days when they don’t want to get out of bed, that’s strong enough to rein in the trolls when they sense an ‘entitlement’ coming on.

They are ‘entitled’ to abuse Fr Ray in vulgar terms because he is not properly representing his faith – and, in their warped view, they are. They are entitled to invoke the biblical fate of John the Baptist, who was beheaded after Salome’s dance.

They are entitled to insult Fr Ray because Jesus Christ would never be caught ‘dancing with women’, according to a Liveline caller. Well, considering Jesus Christ’s first recorded miracle was to turn water into top-quality wine so as to keep the party going when a wedding feast looked like running dry, it’s highly likely that he did, actually, but then again, logic is never their strong point. They are entitled to say all of these awful things, regardless of the impact they might have on him, because they disapprove of Fr Ray.

After Caroline Flack’s tragic death, the hashtag BeKind, a quote from one of her own forlorn tweets, circulated on Twitter. Kindness, however, seems far too big an ask for the sort of people who claim a God-given right to abuse people of whom they disapprove. The people who will attack an inoffensive man like Fr Ray have no capacity to be kind, but we can live without either their judgement or their kindness. It would be enough if they’d keep their disapproval to themselves, and simply shut up.