A Clerihew

Christina Rossetti
Never showered in confetti.
Whenever a swain made her his target
She said: "Sorry, I'm writing Goblin Market."

The Feast of St. Finbarr

Two saints' day posts in a row!

Today is the feast of St. Finbarr (550-660), who is the patron saint of Cork. He's mentioned in the motto of University College Cork: "Where Finbarr taught, let Munster learn." Which I like because it's both religious and provincial-- literally provincial. (Don't people get tired of everything being about the world, the world, the world, global, global, global, international, international, international?)

Finbarr is also the name I chose for my confirmation name. I chose it entirely because I liked the sound. I didn't know anything about Finbarr. I'm not even confident I knew he was a saint.

 

I had my confirmation (with the rest of my class in school) in Our Lady of Victories church in Glasnevin (a very modern church with a lot of stained glass and which somewhat resembles some alien spaceship). I would have been eleven or twelve. I remember I wore a new cream safari suit, which I had for a considerable time afterwards. I also remember my sponsor (who was my uncle) saying: "A bit of an anti-climax, isn't it?". How edifying!

A confirmation name is a strange thing. You never really use it. I only use mine when I'm using my name and I want to sound pompous (like I have to try, right?), styling myself: "Maolsheachlann Tiernan Finbarr Ó Ceallaigh".

Every now and again I do remember to pray to St. Finbarr, at least in recent years. I'll do so again now. Watch over me, St. Finbarr!

St. Pacificus of San Severino

Today is the feast day of St. Pacificus of San Severino (1653-1721), who was canonised in 1839.

Have you ever heard of him? I haven't.

He went deaf and blind at a relatively young age but still held a position of authority in a monastery and worked miracles.

I suppose his reputation suffers from the fact that there are so many Italian saints.

Anyway, I really like that there are lots of days in the year when the saint of the day is pretty obscure, and there are no special feasts.

Anti-Political Correctness Vows

Today I found myself toying with the idea that there should be anti-political correctness vows in the same way there are baptism vows. I'm always impressed by the solemnity and poetry of the baptism vows, which are renewed at the Easter Vigil:

Do you reject Satan?

I do.

And all his works?

I do.

And all his empty promises?

I do.

Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?

I do.

And so on. There are three more and they are considerably longer.

Vows concentrate the mind. I think anti-PC vows could go something like this:

Do you reject political correctness in all its forms?

I do.

Do you reject all identities based on grievance?

I do.

Do you reject the conflation of trivial and imaginary harms with serious harms?

I do.

Do you reject arbitrary changes in language in the name of sensitivity-- even if you have to go along with them in some circumstances?

I do.

Do you reject the concept that anybody has less right than anybody else to use a particular word or give an opinion on any subject whatsoever?

I do.

Do you reject the attribution of historical guilt to people for injustices that occurred before they were even born?

I do.

Do you reject weaponized false dichotomies, such as victim-oppressor and transformation-stasis?

I do.

Tell me if I missed anything obvious. (By "transformation-stasis", I mean the sort of rhetoric you're surely familiar with: the appeal to gradual and organic evolution in the past to justify complete transformation in the present.)

I Love This Quotation

"Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people would stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him. If you went to take a bath, the bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing."

St. Gregory of Nyssa describing the theological excitement surrounding the First Council of Constantinople.

A Random Thought

I mentioned in a previous post that I was reading a biography of an Irish leftist, one who lived through most of the twentieth century. Reading it, I was struck once again with a thought that has often occurred to me; that all these radical leftists, most of whom had a deep disdain for the Catholic Church and the bourgeois middle classes, somehow managed to stay faithful to their wives and keep their households together. Many of them even raised large or relatively large families.

Actually, the leftist I was reading about did leave his wife for another woman-- but only in his old age, when Irish society had already liberalized around him.

My assumption is that, when lifelong marital fidelity was expected and taken as normal, it wasn't felt as irksome or onerous. Challenges which today are seen as unendurable were simply taken on the chin, par for the course. Nobody thought you were heroic for putting up with another human being for forty or fifty years.

This seems to me typical of the whole movement of Irish society in my lifetime. I watched Irish society secularize all through my lifetime-- the process had already begun before I was born. And it seems to me that the ebbing of Catholicism from Irish life has had all kinds of bad consequences, on a deep level-- that even people who weren't at all religious benefitted from the elevating effect Catholicism had on society.

It comes out in so many things. A sense of the sacred and of awe. A sense of the dignity of the human person. A respect for manhood and womanhood, and indeed childhood. That's just a few off the top of my head.

I've often thought of trying to write a blog post about the ideal of marriage that, it seems to me now, was unspoken but all-pervasive in the Ireland my childhood. It was really quite beautiful. It was anti-romantic and romantic at the same time-- a combination that is, strangely, far from uncommon. The stereotype of the mother and father were both comical, but with an undercurrent of respect and affection. Or so it seems to me.

Shades of Meaning

Here are a list of words. Tell me what associations or nuances they have for you. Perceptive readers will notice a pattern to them.

Guy.

Fellah. (It was hearing someone use this word on a bus that started this train of thought.)

Bloke.

Dude.

Chap.

Lad.

Gent.

Geezer.