Whenever there is a fray involving the Catholic Church and its practices, you can be sure that into it will jump my old friend Father David O'Hanlon. Like an avenging Old Testament angel, he is always on hand to defend the church and attack all those who stray from the one true way, as best known to himself.
His language is robust and his faith secure. He shoots from the hip and he takes no prisoners.
Yet despite the man's regular appearances in the letter pages of this newspaper, a full address in Co Meath and a reputed age of 32, there are people who, because of his wildly intemperate views, question his very existence. Some believe he is no more than a lonely unattached spleen, or a perennially leaking bile duct. Others believe him to be a discarded fictional character, perhaps from Spike Milligan's Puckoon, frustrated for ever at his exclusion from that comic masterpiece.
I myself like to think of him as the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, left behind by his more temperate and appalled companions; and a life spent cantering about the pastures of Meath must be a particularly cruel torture for such a being.
At any rate, Father O'Hanlon recently surfaced again in the letters page, this time to condemn the practice of inter-communion ("false-tongued, backdoor proselytism") and the "sheer bitterness and impudence" shown by Church of Ireland personnel regarding the matter. Catholics who took communion in non-Catholic churches were duly patronised - they are "motivated largely by politeness, not theology".
A master of the jocular insult, Father O'Hanlon then asked if Anglicans offered ham sandwiches to their Jewish guests, "in the spirit of `inclusion', of course".
For his admirers, this was a satisfyingly vitriolic contribution. Father O'Hanlon concluded by noting that, as he observed three years ago, "it used to be soup. Now it's sherry."
Some readers may need their memories jogged here. The famous soup and sherry controversy had its origins in the spring of 1998 in a west of Ireland parochial house, when the parish priest's housekeeper served sherry to a visiting bishop after the soup course rather than before. The parish priest was horrified, but it was too late to intervene. The bishop courteously accepted the drink, but it was clear he was unhappy.
On being later chastised by her employer, the poor housekeeper, a decent young girl of 42 from Castlegregory, entered an enclosed order of nuns, where she hopes that the daily regime of self-flagellation will eventually save her soul.
The affair would have ended there, but word got out, and spread. Some time later a Church of Ireland minister had the "impudence", as Father O'Hanlon would say, to express the view in a local paper that the taking of sherry before or after soup didn't really matter all that much.
Father David O'Hanlon then entered the fray. He spelled out the facts and poured vitriol on untroubled waters. The controversy was beginning to ignite, but Father O'Hanlon failed in his efforts to get the Catholic chefs of Ireland to back him: they said they were "too busy" to comment on such an irrelevant and "petty" issue.
Father O'Hanlon persevered, stirring up the issue. Eventually he succeeded in dividing the entire nation. Families were set against families, brother against brother.
A final push was still needed.
Father O'Hanlon wrote to The Irish Times and claimed that the "sherry first" crowd, or "sherry-firsters" as they were now known, had outrageously indulged in "false-tongued, back-door proselytism" by inviting "soup-firsters" into their homes and plying them with sherry the minute they got through the door. The innocent dupes, "motivated largely by politeness, not theology" accepted the drink and were thus lured away from their faith.
Father O'Hanlon had no evidence to back up this claim, but such things hardly matter when a man is in the right. And whatever of his physical existence, that is where you will always find Father David O'Hanlon.