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.
I’ve often wondered what will happen once the ‘social capital’ accrued from centuries of Catholicism will run out. That capital meant a fundamental decency, solidarity and high trust society that all benefited from, including, as you say, non-believers. Someone from Malta once told me they worry about the same issue in regard to their island.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think that process is already very far advanced. I think the next stage will be euthanasia. I've honestly begun to wonder if we'll soon reach the stage where most deaths are essentially suicide. Canada seems to be going that way already.
DeleteAt the same time, a bit of a low-level revival of Catholicism is happening here, so who knows?
I often ponder what makes people gravitate toward this or that religion or ideology. It so often seems purely psychological to me. For instance, one major draw of Catholicism for me is the pervasive notion of taking joy in suffering, though I hate putting it in words like that because it doesn’t capture what I think it means. Obviously no one dreams of eternal suffering but rather of drawing so close to God during this life that no amount of earthly suffering can really hurt you, deepest where it counts the most. And the strength that comes from that will surely be glorious in the hereafter!
ReplyDeleteIn contrast, those inclined toward Protestantism just don’t feel this draw. Consequently, they can’t be excited about the trials of for instance marriage, can’t pray for trials because they want to grow that much. It ends up with what looks to me like white knuckling through difficulties and thus emerging from the other side not fundamentally transformed. And consequently more often failing whatever trial (divorcing, etc.)
Hmmm. Well, that's an interesting theory and obviously it fits with your experience. I must say, in Ireland, secularization has bitten so hard that "Catholic" is mostly a purely tribal term. And I don't really know a lot of Protestants, or at least I don't know them well enough to rate their attitudes to suffering. I know some Evangelicals but they don't really fit this scheme at all.
DeleteSadly there's a lot of Catholic triumphalism on the internet so I try to avoid saying anything at all negative about our Protestant brethren!
In this case, I don’t see it as necessarily negative. One can be too fond of suffering. For instance, I am frequently impressed by an eagerness to go to war against Satan in response to suffering among Prots. Whereas my Catholic family and I would turn more inward and probably sometimes wrongly attribute things to God that really were just Satan’s works. A lot of official Catholic teaching says to celebrate with total joy, but in practice there’s a damper on things. At least in America in practice Prots with their more “Benevolent Father Figure” view of God seem to have an easier time just having a party!
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