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.