Surely reporting should be objective, and opinions should be reserved for editorials and commentary. Miriam Lord's "colour pieces" in The Irish Times (which are never in the least bit funny or colourful) are first-hand accounts of current events (classed as "News" on the website) and it should be her duty to remain impartial. This she doesn't do-- on the abortion issue, certainly, she makes no attempt to hide her bias.
As in this article today:
As Walsh outlined what can happen as a result of “post-abortion trauma”, one wondered how the fabric of Irish society hasn’t completely disintegrated given the amount of our womenfolk who have had abortions.
Jim is a committed campaigner and has taken his cause on to the floor of the Seanad on countless occasions. He is not a man to mince his words, known for his graphic and gruesome accounts of what is done to foetuses in the womb.
But even allowing for his track record of formaldehyde-infused stories of women destroyed and babies in buckets, yesterday’s contribution to the debate on the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill was disgusting.
She then lambasts the Senator for a graphic description of what actually happens to the aborted foetus. But why? Why are facts so dangerous? Why should the truth be taboo? Why are the same people who are usually so devoutly anti-censorship suddenly squeamish when it comes to the reality of abortion? (Peter Hitchens sagely described abortion as the only act of violence not regularly shown on television.)
Later on, she allows: The Senator stressed at the outset that he believes “human life is inviolate from conception to natural death”. That is a legitimate and not uncommon belief.
Legitimate? For now it's legitimate. How long before it becomes hate speech? The boundaries of political correctness are being rolled forward all the time.
Showing posts with label anti-Catholicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Catholicism. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Saturday, July 6, 2013
The Incredible Shrinking Crowd
I tend to feel bad about how terrible I am at making estimates, but the Irish news websites today make me feel better. The Irish Times guesses that thirty-five thousand people marched in today's Rally for Life in Dublin, while The Irish Independent hikes that up to fifty thousand.
Somehow, I managed to not realize there was a rally on today. (I have just come back from a week on the continent, in my defence.) I was taking a bus into the city centre and didn't know why the traffic had been stopped. I had some business to do in O'Connell Street, and was there for about twenty minutes. In all that time, the flood of demonstrators heading to Kildare Street never slackened. After I had followed them there, someone announced from the stage that the march was still coming down O'Connell Street.
Bad at estimates as I am, I think it was a lot more than thirty-five thousand.
Somehow, I managed to not realize there was a rally on today. (I have just come back from a week on the continent, in my defence.) I was taking a bus into the city centre and didn't know why the traffic had been stopped. I had some business to do in O'Connell Street, and was there for about twenty minutes. In all that time, the flood of demonstrators heading to Kildare Street never slackened. After I had followed them there, someone announced from the stage that the march was still coming down O'Connell Street.
Bad at estimates as I am, I think it was a lot more than thirty-five thousand.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Irish Times Praises Enda Kenny's Courageous Stand Against the Unborn Child
Nobody expects objectivity from The Irish Times when it comes to the abortion issue, or indeed anything that might involve any reference to the Catholic Church, but this embarrassing schoolgirl love letter to the Taoiseach, from Miriam Lord, is especially cringe-inducing.
The political nerds went scurrying for their history books when the Taoiseach uttered a phrase destined for the history books of the future.
“I am proud to stand here as a public representative, as a Taoiseach who happens to be a Catholic, but not a Catholic Taoiseach,” he told the Dáil, invoking the shades of devout leaders past who pledged allegiance to faith first and country second.
On an otherwise uneventful Wednesday morning in Leinster House, Kenny, without any fuss, laid down a milestone in Irish political history.
Furthermore, a Taoiseach stood in the Dáil chamber and called out the despicable behaviour of a small section of Irish society that deems it acceptable to threaten and intimidate elected representatives who do not cleave to their world view.
I wonder what form of threatening and intimidation Miriam Lord is talking about? Threatening to use the vote to punish politicians who cast their vote against the right to life? Isn't that just democracy?
In his speech, the Taoiseach referred to the supposed intimidation tactics that are in use:
“I am now being branded by personnel around the country as being a murderer; that I’m going to have on my soul the death of 20 million babies. I am getting medals, scapulars, plastic foetuses, letters written in blood, telephone calls all over the system, and it’s not confined to me . . .”
One has to wonder why the Taoiseach feels the abortion issue should be the only one in which powerful feelings are not expressed and heated rhetoric used. I often see Socialist Workers Party posters that complain about a "war on the poor". Is that equivalent to accusing Mr. Kenny of being a war criminal?
When the Savita Halapannavar tragedy occurred, there were many demonstrations which blamed Irish abortion laws for the death of the unfortunate woman. Just look at this article from the Guardian, and the accompanying picture of a woman holding a placard which reads: "Her blood is on your hands". What's the difference? (By the way, I saw no such placards at Pro-Life rallies.)
I'm interested, too, in the litany of harassment of which Mr. Kenny complains. "I'm getting medals, scapulars, plastic foetuses, letters written in blood..." Is sending somebody a medal or a scapular an objectionable act? Is making a telephone call to an elected representative an act of intolerable aggression? If Mr. Kenny had to fill out his list with such feeble examples, my suspicion is that this supposed campaign of intimidation is greatly exaggerated.
The political nerds went scurrying for their history books when the Taoiseach uttered a phrase destined for the history books of the future.
“I am proud to stand here as a public representative, as a Taoiseach who happens to be a Catholic, but not a Catholic Taoiseach,” he told the Dáil, invoking the shades of devout leaders past who pledged allegiance to faith first and country second.
On an otherwise uneventful Wednesday morning in Leinster House, Kenny, without any fuss, laid down a milestone in Irish political history.
Furthermore, a Taoiseach stood in the Dáil chamber and called out the despicable behaviour of a small section of Irish society that deems it acceptable to threaten and intimidate elected representatives who do not cleave to their world view.
I wonder what form of threatening and intimidation Miriam Lord is talking about? Threatening to use the vote to punish politicians who cast their vote against the right to life? Isn't that just democracy?
In his speech, the Taoiseach referred to the supposed intimidation tactics that are in use:
“I am now being branded by personnel around the country as being a murderer; that I’m going to have on my soul the death of 20 million babies. I am getting medals, scapulars, plastic foetuses, letters written in blood, telephone calls all over the system, and it’s not confined to me . . .”
One has to wonder why the Taoiseach feels the abortion issue should be the only one in which powerful feelings are not expressed and heated rhetoric used. I often see Socialist Workers Party posters that complain about a "war on the poor". Is that equivalent to accusing Mr. Kenny of being a war criminal?
When the Savita Halapannavar tragedy occurred, there were many demonstrations which blamed Irish abortion laws for the death of the unfortunate woman. Just look at this article from the Guardian, and the accompanying picture of a woman holding a placard which reads: "Her blood is on your hands". What's the difference? (By the way, I saw no such placards at Pro-Life rallies.)
I'm interested, too, in the litany of harassment of which Mr. Kenny complains. "I'm getting medals, scapulars, plastic foetuses, letters written in blood..." Is sending somebody a medal or a scapular an objectionable act? Is making a telephone call to an elected representative an act of intolerable aggression? If Mr. Kenny had to fill out his list with such feeble examples, my suspicion is that this supposed campaign of intimidation is greatly exaggerated.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
A Not-Very-Critical Review of The End of Irish Catholicism? by Vincent Twomey
The End of Irish Catholicism?
D. Vincent Twomey SVD
Veritas Publications, 2003
The first thing that occurs to me about The End of Irish Catholicism? is that the question in the title is never really answered. The book is more diagnostic than prophetic in nature.
Perhaps this is inevitable. I, for one, have no predictions to make about the future of Irish Catholicism. Of course, as long as there are any practicing Catholics on this island, there will still be an Irish Catholicism of some sort-- and, with such a huge majority having declared themselves Catholic on the recent census, it's hard to see the faith of our fathers going the way of the Irish Elk any time soon.
But will Catholicism survive as a social and cultural force on this island?
It only takes a look around most Sunday or weekday Mass congregations to feel very bleak about this. All too often there are empty pews, and the smattering of worshippers are mostly in their sixties or seventies or beyond. Our priests, too, are mostly well into their twilight years. A decade or two more, and what will become of those congregations? Will church after church have to be sold off? Will Catholics get used to making long treks to the nearest Mass? When journalists in that future Ireland talk about "the church"-- if they talk about any church, that is-- will it still be assumed that they mean the Catholic church?
But it's not all doom and gloom-- in fact, the state of the Church in Ireland seems quite contradictory in many ways. Though many congregations are scanty-- and it has to be remembered that I am writing from a Dublin perspective, and the situation in rural areas is very different-- at other times, churches are packed. St. Teresa's Church in Clarendon Street is often full for Mass, even on weekdays, and there is always a queue for confessions. The Archbishop of Dublin drew a crowd when he came to UCD to celebrate Ash Wednesday Mass this year. The Veritas Catholic shop in Abbey Street seems to do a booming trade. Younger Catholics tend to be more orthodox, and the decline in vocations seems to have levelled off.
The End of Irish Catholicism? attempts to describe how we got where we are now, and to suggest possible measures towards revival.
At the beginning of the book, Dr. Twomey addresses a topic of particular interest to me-- the link between patriotism and religion, nation and faith. He says, "growing up in the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s, I was certainly aware that part of our self-identity as Irish Catholics was to see ourselves as Christian Jews, God's chosen people, materially weak but spiritually strong, spread diaspora-like throughout the world, ever loyal to the faith of our fathers." He then describes this notion of chosen-ness as being "of dubious theological value", and points out that "the New Israel is not any particular race but is made up of Jews and gentiles, that is, people from all races and nations now united in one faith..."
However, a Christian is not obliged to renounce national feeling, and Dr. Twomey quotes Solzhenitsyn: "Nations are [part of] the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special aspect of divine intention." And the author is himself rather critical of the modern Irish attitude to nationhood: "The very concept of nation, not to mention nationality, seems to have vanished from public discourse, not least due to the 'Troubles' in the North-- we now refer rather disparagingly to 'this island'. In addition, national identity is difficult to reconcile with the vague cosmopolitanism of our new mid-Atlantic identity."
One thing I really like about this book is that Dr. Twomey resists the temptation to caricature the Irish Catholicism of the twentieth century. It has become rather fashionable to do this-- to find the seeds of our current spiritual "recession" in the devotional "Celtic Tiger" of previous generations. I think this is too simple. It is true that the faith of our fathers (and mothers)-- or, more accurately, of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers-- was often quite naive and ritualistic, focused on popular devotions such as First Fridays and sacramentals like the Miraculous Medal. We often hear that the faith of the Irish had become so complacent and unthinking that it crumbed at the first tides of secularism.
I don't really go along with these criticisms. I think every generation has to answer for itself. Perhaps lots of people went to Mass in the forties, fifties and sixties because it was the done thing. But I am sure that thousands, tens of thousands, went out of genuine religious fervour. Nor is a devotion to sacramentals, pilgrimage and popular devotions a bad thing.
A more plausible explanation for Ireland's crisis of faith comes with Dr. Twomey's description of the post-Vatican II atmosphere. Suddenly, everything seemed to be up in the air. "Things were permitted, like attending services in a Protestant church, which up to then had been strictly forbidden under all kinds of dire penalties...few have pondered the effect it must have had on the majority of priests, many of whom, up to relatively recently, controlled all the strings. The ground had been taken from under them."
An intriguing theory that Dr. Twomey puts forward is that Irish Catholicism had rather more in common with English puritanism than we like to think. Ireland, in comparison with Catholic countries on the continent, had little concept of sacral time and space, of religious festivity, of the cult of saints and martyrs. Dr.Twomey instead posits that traditional Irish Catholicism focused on an intensely moralistic, anti-sensual, anti-sexual piety that he describes as "angelism". This is also a familiar argument from John Waters.
I'm not sure what to make of this, either. Irish Christianity has always had an ascetic, rather sombre flavour to it. In this it is much like Russian Christianity. This seems to me a matter more of tone than of doctrine. Ireland never seemed to fit into the spirit of Belloc's couplet:
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine
There's always laughter and good red wine.
Edward Feser, the Thomistic philosopher, has pointed out that attempting to distill a spirit of Catholic culture is contrary to the very catholicity and universality of our Church-- that Catholicism embraces and consecrates all that is good in every culture. Ireland has its unique gifts and temptations, just as continental forms of Catholicism have their own.
Dr. Twomey calls for a rediscovery of Catholic festivity and community celebration. I wonder about this. My own guess is that religious joy overflows into festivity, and not the other way around. I don't think people come for the parties and stay for the prayer, but vice versa. Of course, Dr. Twomey is not making such a claim himself, but I suspect that this mentality exists elsewhere.
One powerful argument that Dr. Twomey makes is for the recovery of contemplative life: "In Ireland over the past two centuries, most religious orders were engaged in some form of apostolic work, or, as they are called today, active ministeries, such as teaching, nursing, or missionary activites abroad. There was always a core of strict contemplatives, men and women, and indeed most active orders (especially of women) had, before the Council, evolved into semi-contemplative orders with strict enclosure. The initial implementation of the decrees of the Council by the active congregations resulted in the gradual removal of the contemplative dimension almost entirely....good and necessary though these social concerns are, one may well ask: should they be the main focus of our attention for those consecrated by vows to the religious life? Or should men and women religious perhaps be more concerned with testifying to 'mankind's yearning for its heavenly home', as the Council put it?"
I think this is right on the money. As Tennyson wrote, "more things are wrought in prayer than this world dreams of", and the story of Mary and Martha should be a permanent reminder to Christians that we are forever tempted to value bustle and activity over the "direct line" to our Creator. It seems to me that nothing is more radically counter-cultural and (in the best sense) subversive than prayer. Making it a priority is, in itself, an act of renewal, an affirmation of Christian identity.
Besides this, I believe that our culture thirsts for prayer more than for social workers. We can see this in the endless flood of prayer requests that the Poor Clares receive. I see it, also, whenever I visit the UCD church, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. This small (but handsome) church rarely seems to attract more than a handful of worshippers outside Mass times, and is often to be found empty. But the book of prayer intentions by the door seems to be written in almost every day, and usually several times a day. Turning these poignant pages, I always feel I am seeing a different Ireland to the one we see on television and in the media-- an Ireland of sleepless nights and silent rooms and unquenchable spiritual yearning.
Dr. Twomey's book was written in 2003, and I wonder if the author himself would now consider the proposals in his chapter "Beyond Church vs. State" to be at all plausible. "Perhaps, also, the time has come...to consider working towards a concordat between the Catholic Church and the Republic of Ireland that would define more clearly, and anchor in international law, the relationship (and so the authentic separation) between Church and State". The tide now seems to be running in the opposite direction. Dr. Twomey deplores a comment by a recent Minister for Justice "that he would accord the Church's canon law the same status as the rules governing a golf club". Even that seems benign now.
Rather than seeking greater institutional relations between Church and State-- even relations that emphasise Church/State separation-- it seems wiser, at this point in time, for the Church to regard the hand of Caesar with suspicion. The Church authorities in Ireland surely made the right decision in not seeking any public funding for the International Eucharistic Congress this year-- as evinced when one texter to a recent radio show, in the wake of the latest anti-Church frenzy in the media, wondered whether the taxpayer was paying for this event and suggested that, if so, such funding should be removed.
Dr. Twomey complains of a fatalistic attitude amongst Catholic and, especially, religious orders in Ireland, as though secularisation was some inevitable law of history. This is certainly a strong tempation. We live in a culture in which deterministic thinking has almost become a second nature to us (even while we are encouraged, by the fashion and entertaintment and advertising industries, to assert our individual freedom ever more aggressively-- and ever more superficially).
When it comes to the future of Catholicism in Ireland, and our attitude towards it, the two great temptations remain-- as always-- presumption and despair. We hear the note of despair when Catholics of the liberal stamp suggest that the Church has to reformulate its doctrine according to the spirit of the age. But perhaps we hear it also in the most stubbornly traditionalist Catholics, who seem to see the Church as nothing but a sign of contradiction, and a bulwark against every manifestation of modernism.
As for the note of presumption, I think we hear that whenever any sign of "green shoots" are hailed as a new Spring-time of the Church. Not only is this presumptious, it is foolish. We can only cry "revival" so often before we lose all credibility, like the ageing Marxist who always believes the Revolution is just around the corner. We should give thanks for every welcome development, while firmly resisting the temptation to make too much of it.
Our Lord has told us not to be afraid, that he will be with us even to the end of the age, that he who perseveres to the end shall be saved, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against his Church. That is all we can know, and it's enough. What the future holds for our own era and nation, we cannot know.
In a final appendix, Dr. Twomey welcomes the phenomenon of a greater lay interest in theology, and calls for greater academic study of the subject in Ireland. Here I must simply defer to his authority, while admitting a personal scepticism. I once lodged, very briefly, with a gay philosophy PhD student who taught (I can't remember if it was theology or philosophy) in a well-known institute of Irish theology. His living room walls were bedecked with rather erotic drawings of nude men. The philosophers he tended to cite were Heidegger and Nietzsche and other figures who are hardly within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. When I think of lay theological studies in Ireland today, I think of him. Perhaps that is unfair.
My own guess is that, if all Irish Catholics knew their Catechism, that would be an extraordinary advance in faith formation. It seems to me-- especially flicking through the pages of The Irish Catholic-- that Irish Catholicism will certainly not perish for the want of seminars, courses, book launches and magazines.
But doubtless I am wrong to be so cynical. As Dr. Twomey says, "Once people begin to think about their faith, they will in time search for, and find, the truth." Or as Chesterton put it, if every human being lived to be a thousand years old, everybody would end up either a Roman Catholic or a stark nihilist. The problem with dissidents who call for a "debate" in the Church is that they don't realise the debate has been going on for centuries, and has in fact already reached conclusions on most of the topics they consider to be unaddressed.
The End of Irish Catholicism? gives suggestions rather than answers, and it's hard to see how it could give easy answers to such vexing questions. I wonder how Dr. Twomey would have written the book today, and if he would have substantially altered any of the arguments and proposals he makes.
When it comes to Irish Catholicism today, I think even the most bullish secularist would have to admit-- to quote the title of a perennial favourite on Donncha O'Dulaing's radio show Failte Isteach-- "There's Life in the Old Dog Yet".
D. Vincent Twomey SVD
Veritas Publications, 2003
The first thing that occurs to me about The End of Irish Catholicism? is that the question in the title is never really answered. The book is more diagnostic than prophetic in nature.
Perhaps this is inevitable. I, for one, have no predictions to make about the future of Irish Catholicism. Of course, as long as there are any practicing Catholics on this island, there will still be an Irish Catholicism of some sort-- and, with such a huge majority having declared themselves Catholic on the recent census, it's hard to see the faith of our fathers going the way of the Irish Elk any time soon.
But will Catholicism survive as a social and cultural force on this island?
It only takes a look around most Sunday or weekday Mass congregations to feel very bleak about this. All too often there are empty pews, and the smattering of worshippers are mostly in their sixties or seventies or beyond. Our priests, too, are mostly well into their twilight years. A decade or two more, and what will become of those congregations? Will church after church have to be sold off? Will Catholics get used to making long treks to the nearest Mass? When journalists in that future Ireland talk about "the church"-- if they talk about any church, that is-- will it still be assumed that they mean the Catholic church?
But it's not all doom and gloom-- in fact, the state of the Church in Ireland seems quite contradictory in many ways. Though many congregations are scanty-- and it has to be remembered that I am writing from a Dublin perspective, and the situation in rural areas is very different-- at other times, churches are packed. St. Teresa's Church in Clarendon Street is often full for Mass, even on weekdays, and there is always a queue for confessions. The Archbishop of Dublin drew a crowd when he came to UCD to celebrate Ash Wednesday Mass this year. The Veritas Catholic shop in Abbey Street seems to do a booming trade. Younger Catholics tend to be more orthodox, and the decline in vocations seems to have levelled off.
The End of Irish Catholicism? attempts to describe how we got where we are now, and to suggest possible measures towards revival.
At the beginning of the book, Dr. Twomey addresses a topic of particular interest to me-- the link between patriotism and religion, nation and faith. He says, "growing up in the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s, I was certainly aware that part of our self-identity as Irish Catholics was to see ourselves as Christian Jews, God's chosen people, materially weak but spiritually strong, spread diaspora-like throughout the world, ever loyal to the faith of our fathers." He then describes this notion of chosen-ness as being "of dubious theological value", and points out that "the New Israel is not any particular race but is made up of Jews and gentiles, that is, people from all races and nations now united in one faith..."
However, a Christian is not obliged to renounce national feeling, and Dr. Twomey quotes Solzhenitsyn: "Nations are [part of] the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special aspect of divine intention." And the author is himself rather critical of the modern Irish attitude to nationhood: "The very concept of nation, not to mention nationality, seems to have vanished from public discourse, not least due to the 'Troubles' in the North-- we now refer rather disparagingly to 'this island'. In addition, national identity is difficult to reconcile with the vague cosmopolitanism of our new mid-Atlantic identity."
One thing I really like about this book is that Dr. Twomey resists the temptation to caricature the Irish Catholicism of the twentieth century. It has become rather fashionable to do this-- to find the seeds of our current spiritual "recession" in the devotional "Celtic Tiger" of previous generations. I think this is too simple. It is true that the faith of our fathers (and mothers)-- or, more accurately, of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers-- was often quite naive and ritualistic, focused on popular devotions such as First Fridays and sacramentals like the Miraculous Medal. We often hear that the faith of the Irish had become so complacent and unthinking that it crumbed at the first tides of secularism.
I don't really go along with these criticisms. I think every generation has to answer for itself. Perhaps lots of people went to Mass in the forties, fifties and sixties because it was the done thing. But I am sure that thousands, tens of thousands, went out of genuine religious fervour. Nor is a devotion to sacramentals, pilgrimage and popular devotions a bad thing.
A more plausible explanation for Ireland's crisis of faith comes with Dr. Twomey's description of the post-Vatican II atmosphere. Suddenly, everything seemed to be up in the air. "Things were permitted, like attending services in a Protestant church, which up to then had been strictly forbidden under all kinds of dire penalties...few have pondered the effect it must have had on the majority of priests, many of whom, up to relatively recently, controlled all the strings. The ground had been taken from under them."
An intriguing theory that Dr. Twomey puts forward is that Irish Catholicism had rather more in common with English puritanism than we like to think. Ireland, in comparison with Catholic countries on the continent, had little concept of sacral time and space, of religious festivity, of the cult of saints and martyrs. Dr.Twomey instead posits that traditional Irish Catholicism focused on an intensely moralistic, anti-sensual, anti-sexual piety that he describes as "angelism". This is also a familiar argument from John Waters.
I'm not sure what to make of this, either. Irish Christianity has always had an ascetic, rather sombre flavour to it. In this it is much like Russian Christianity. This seems to me a matter more of tone than of doctrine. Ireland never seemed to fit into the spirit of Belloc's couplet:
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine
There's always laughter and good red wine.
Edward Feser, the Thomistic philosopher, has pointed out that attempting to distill a spirit of Catholic culture is contrary to the very catholicity and universality of our Church-- that Catholicism embraces and consecrates all that is good in every culture. Ireland has its unique gifts and temptations, just as continental forms of Catholicism have their own.
Dr. Twomey calls for a rediscovery of Catholic festivity and community celebration. I wonder about this. My own guess is that religious joy overflows into festivity, and not the other way around. I don't think people come for the parties and stay for the prayer, but vice versa. Of course, Dr. Twomey is not making such a claim himself, but I suspect that this mentality exists elsewhere.
One powerful argument that Dr. Twomey makes is for the recovery of contemplative life: "In Ireland over the past two centuries, most religious orders were engaged in some form of apostolic work, or, as they are called today, active ministeries, such as teaching, nursing, or missionary activites abroad. There was always a core of strict contemplatives, men and women, and indeed most active orders (especially of women) had, before the Council, evolved into semi-contemplative orders with strict enclosure. The initial implementation of the decrees of the Council by the active congregations resulted in the gradual removal of the contemplative dimension almost entirely....good and necessary though these social concerns are, one may well ask: should they be the main focus of our attention for those consecrated by vows to the religious life? Or should men and women religious perhaps be more concerned with testifying to 'mankind's yearning for its heavenly home', as the Council put it?"
I think this is right on the money. As Tennyson wrote, "more things are wrought in prayer than this world dreams of", and the story of Mary and Martha should be a permanent reminder to Christians that we are forever tempted to value bustle and activity over the "direct line" to our Creator. It seems to me that nothing is more radically counter-cultural and (in the best sense) subversive than prayer. Making it a priority is, in itself, an act of renewal, an affirmation of Christian identity.
Besides this, I believe that our culture thirsts for prayer more than for social workers. We can see this in the endless flood of prayer requests that the Poor Clares receive. I see it, also, whenever I visit the UCD church, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. This small (but handsome) church rarely seems to attract more than a handful of worshippers outside Mass times, and is often to be found empty. But the book of prayer intentions by the door seems to be written in almost every day, and usually several times a day. Turning these poignant pages, I always feel I am seeing a different Ireland to the one we see on television and in the media-- an Ireland of sleepless nights and silent rooms and unquenchable spiritual yearning.
Dr. Twomey's book was written in 2003, and I wonder if the author himself would now consider the proposals in his chapter "Beyond Church vs. State" to be at all plausible. "Perhaps, also, the time has come...to consider working towards a concordat between the Catholic Church and the Republic of Ireland that would define more clearly, and anchor in international law, the relationship (and so the authentic separation) between Church and State". The tide now seems to be running in the opposite direction. Dr. Twomey deplores a comment by a recent Minister for Justice "that he would accord the Church's canon law the same status as the rules governing a golf club". Even that seems benign now.
Rather than seeking greater institutional relations between Church and State-- even relations that emphasise Church/State separation-- it seems wiser, at this point in time, for the Church to regard the hand of Caesar with suspicion. The Church authorities in Ireland surely made the right decision in not seeking any public funding for the International Eucharistic Congress this year-- as evinced when one texter to a recent radio show, in the wake of the latest anti-Church frenzy in the media, wondered whether the taxpayer was paying for this event and suggested that, if so, such funding should be removed.
Dr. Twomey complains of a fatalistic attitude amongst Catholic and, especially, religious orders in Ireland, as though secularisation was some inevitable law of history. This is certainly a strong tempation. We live in a culture in which deterministic thinking has almost become a second nature to us (even while we are encouraged, by the fashion and entertaintment and advertising industries, to assert our individual freedom ever more aggressively-- and ever more superficially).
When it comes to the future of Catholicism in Ireland, and our attitude towards it, the two great temptations remain-- as always-- presumption and despair. We hear the note of despair when Catholics of the liberal stamp suggest that the Church has to reformulate its doctrine according to the spirit of the age. But perhaps we hear it also in the most stubbornly traditionalist Catholics, who seem to see the Church as nothing but a sign of contradiction, and a bulwark against every manifestation of modernism.
As for the note of presumption, I think we hear that whenever any sign of "green shoots" are hailed as a new Spring-time of the Church. Not only is this presumptious, it is foolish. We can only cry "revival" so often before we lose all credibility, like the ageing Marxist who always believes the Revolution is just around the corner. We should give thanks for every welcome development, while firmly resisting the temptation to make too much of it.
Our Lord has told us not to be afraid, that he will be with us even to the end of the age, that he who perseveres to the end shall be saved, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against his Church. That is all we can know, and it's enough. What the future holds for our own era and nation, we cannot know.
In a final appendix, Dr. Twomey welcomes the phenomenon of a greater lay interest in theology, and calls for greater academic study of the subject in Ireland. Here I must simply defer to his authority, while admitting a personal scepticism. I once lodged, very briefly, with a gay philosophy PhD student who taught (I can't remember if it was theology or philosophy) in a well-known institute of Irish theology. His living room walls were bedecked with rather erotic drawings of nude men. The philosophers he tended to cite were Heidegger and Nietzsche and other figures who are hardly within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. When I think of lay theological studies in Ireland today, I think of him. Perhaps that is unfair.
My own guess is that, if all Irish Catholics knew their Catechism, that would be an extraordinary advance in faith formation. It seems to me-- especially flicking through the pages of The Irish Catholic-- that Irish Catholicism will certainly not perish for the want of seminars, courses, book launches and magazines.
But doubtless I am wrong to be so cynical. As Dr. Twomey says, "Once people begin to think about their faith, they will in time search for, and find, the truth." Or as Chesterton put it, if every human being lived to be a thousand years old, everybody would end up either a Roman Catholic or a stark nihilist. The problem with dissidents who call for a "debate" in the Church is that they don't realise the debate has been going on for centuries, and has in fact already reached conclusions on most of the topics they consider to be unaddressed.
The End of Irish Catholicism? gives suggestions rather than answers, and it's hard to see how it could give easy answers to such vexing questions. I wonder how Dr. Twomey would have written the book today, and if he would have substantially altered any of the arguments and proposals he makes.
When it comes to Irish Catholicism today, I think even the most bullish secularist would have to admit-- to quote the title of a perennial favourite on Donncha O'Dulaing's radio show Failte Isteach-- "There's Life in the Old Dog Yet".
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Eamon Gilmore's Children
I recently picked up a copy of The Left Tribune, the Labour Youth freesheet. (I work in UCD, and a heap of them were left lying in one of the hallways.) I read through the entire issue. I did this because I don't want to be a ghettoised conservative Catholic, never opening my mind to other streams of opinion.
I remember I was enough of a socialist in my youth to feel a sense of jubilation-- mild jubilation, mind you, but jubilation-- when the Spring Tide brought a record number of Labour TD's into the Dáil in 1992. In my college years, I was even more of a socialist (in my own uninformed and inactive way), but I was already getting sick of the liberal, progressive and identity politics that seemed to be tangled up with the red flag. I remember approving very much of this old trade union slogan, when I came across it in a book:
Eight hours work, eight hours play,
Eight hours lie-a-bed, and eight bob a day.
That was enough socialism for me, and never mind all the political correctness.
Even now, as a two-fisted traditionalist conservative-- though I fear I might alienate some of my readers in admitting this-- I feel a lot more affection for socialists than I do for libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. If conservatism is the worship of the free market, then I would rather not be conservative. Thankfully, it's not, and we don't have to choose between a naive belief in the infallibility of private enterprise and an equally naive belief in government intervention as the answer to every problem.
However, in the Ireland of 2012, it seems that there is no left outside the liberal left, as the April '12 issue of The Left Tribune shows.
The very first photograph (if you don't count an ad) in the twenty page journal-- a photograph that accompanies an article headed "How is Labour Shaping Society?"-- shows a demonstrator whose placard reads "Did we Vote on your Marriage?". The text of the article includes the sentence "Some progress has been made. Particularly welcomed by most Labour supporters was Minister Ruairi Quinn's push to end the patronage of schools by the Catholic Church...this element of progress will hopefully produe strong social dividends to come." Later on, the article laments Labour's failure to introduce same-sex marriage.
The first article of the publication is headed "What Will Labour's Legacy Be for Single-Parent Families?". The article deals almost entirely with welfare entitlements. A post-script mentions that Census 2011 shows that there are 215,300 families "headed by lone parents with children, 87 per cent with mothers". But the article nowhere asks why there are so many fatherless and motherless families, and how this can be reversed. It seems government intervention only involves picking up the pieces.
The third article, by a UCC student, is a call for abortion to be introduced in Ireland. It describes the ambiguous legal position after the Supreme Court's X-Case ruling, and says: "In a debate so steeped in moral and religious bias, it may be the difficult to have an articulate debate on the issue of reproductive rights." (Religious bias is bad enough, but imagine dragging moral bias into an issue like abortion!) "Taking the lonely trip 'on the boat' to England is not the ideal situation either psychologically or financially for a woman who is already dealing with a traumatic situation, and yet it is a lonely trip that is made by about 10 or more Irish women every day. Worse still is the growing trend of women and young girls buying unregulated abortifacients online or seeking other DIY solutions. Women should be supported by both the state and the medical system in such a case, even if it is unpalatable for some."
As with most abortion-related discourse on the liberal left, the writer simply assumes the agreement of the reader. The moral case for abortion is not argued at all-- the only justification invoked are court rulings. Talk about legalism!
A whole-page article opposite sets out its stall pretty plainly: "Life-Saving Abortions Aren't the Only Abortions we Should be Legalising." In chillingly calm terms, the young woman writes: "Discourse on abortion should stop focusing on saving women's lives and start focusing on the most common reason for seeking an abortion-- a woman simply does not want to go through with the pregnancy." Well, at least the pretence is dropped-- finally, after decades of subterfuge.
Later on in the article there is a surprising admission: "If we accept that a foetus is not a life, then the X-case doesn't go far enough. If we think that it is a life, then rape, incest, or the threat of maternal suicide are no reasons to end it." But once again, the question goes a-begging. It seems that all members of Labour Youth are on the same metaphysical page when it comes to the definition of human life.
Which should have been borne in mind by the writer of the article on page nine: "A Mature and Republican Approach to Diplomatic Relations with the Vatican". The writer blusters: "Recently in Cork, local Fianna Fáil councillor O'Flynn claimed that the closure [of Ireland's embassy to the Vatican] was to satisfy the godlessness of the Labour Party, to which he was throughly and comprehensively rebuked by our own Cllr Michael O'Connell. It would almost be amusing if it weren't such an insult, considering the numerous people of all faiths within the party, and the values we hold that can be considered Christian among others".
There seems to be a contradiction in this publication's attitude to Catholicism. On the one hand, it assumes a support for abortion and gay-marriage that is impossible for a faithful Catholic to share. On the other, it asserts that the Labour Party contains members of "all faiths"-- including Catholicism.
If you cannot be a social democrat-- or a radical or a progressive or whatever other term the members of Labour Youth might use to describe themselves-- without supporting anti-traditional marriage or the murder of the unborn child, surely Catholics have the right to insist on core values, too? Are the liberal left the only believers who are permitted to hold dogmas?
This writer, however, does make some effort to moderate his anti-Catholic stance: "the Catholic Chuch has been an institution fundamentally linked to what it means to be Irish since the failure of the secular-pluralist rebels of 1798. Irish nationalism, a driving force even today, was increasingly linked to Catholicism by both nationalists themselves and the British once the Anglican church was disestablished here. It has been argued that the Church usurped the role of the monarchy once such a vacuum was created after the Treaty. [I wonder why a republican thinks that the abolition of monarchy would create a vaccuum?] Hospitals, schools, care of the poor, these roles were fulfilled by the Church where there were no other groups or societies to do so. For that reasons, the radicals arguing that we must spend far more money than we need to in order to have an embassy can be understood, if not agreed with."
On the debit side of the ledger, the writer then makes the inevitable (and fair) point that the power of the Church in Irish society facilitated the clerical abuse scandals, and follows it with the usual round of hysterical anti-Catholic allegations: "Coupled with the nature of the Vatican as a state, an extremely rich enclave in Italy that was effectively created by Mussolini, and the damage done by the church with regard to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the other sort of radical advocating ending diplomatic relations with the Vatican can also be understood, and again, if not agreed with."
The Mussolini slur is cheap and hilarious. As for the mention of the AIDS epidemic, I'm always bewildered by the attitude of Church-bashers on this topic. The Church forbids the use of condoms, it is true. She also forbids sex outside marriage. If African Catholics are so much in thrall to the Vatican on the one, surely they would also comply with the other, which would hardly give much impetus to a sexually-transmitted epidemic.
The writer of the article seems to be the only person in Ireland who believes that the Vatican embassy was closed for economic reasons-- ah, the sweet naivety of youth!
He admits that "the fact of the matter is that most Irish people continue to claim Catholicism as their religious viewpoint, no matter how serious they are about it." Amusingly, he adds: "Futhermore, many of our new Irish from Easter Europe are Catholics as well. It would be extremely disrespectful to them to snub the leader of their church in such a way while other, more productive options are available." Multiculturalism trumps anti-Catholicism-- at least for the moment.
The writer concludes that "the approach of our government has been quite correct on this issue, and indeed, is the only mature one in sight". A little earlier, he had written: "We already have a building in Rome for diplomatic activity in the form of the Italian embassy. Indulging the Vatican's absurd position on joint embassies at large expense is not reasonable in any sense of the word." Except, perhaps, if the Vatican is the one (relatively) safe place on Earth that the Church has to stand upon, surrounded as it is by a whole cordon of countries that have tried to trample on Catholic rights within living memory. Is it so ridiculously that the Holy See feels the need to assert its independence and sovereignty, even symbolically?
Even this article doesn't exhaust this twenty-page newspaper's anti-Catholic swipes. A review of James Plunkett's Strumpet City doesn't miss the opportunity to mention that "the hypocrisy and culpability of the Church is highlighted in the compelling storyline facing the ambitious but naive Father O'Connor and the deeply troubled Father Giffley, whose ham fisted attempts to make a change are but an endeavour to make up for a life spent in self-loathing and alcoholism".
There is also an article on the proposed constitutional convention-- which seems to take the line that our constitution should be tinkered with just because it is seventy years old. (If it's not broke...break it, I guess.) It supports the removal of "socially conservative anachronisms" (such as any mention of blasphemy, traditional marriage, and the special role of women in the home) but then complains that "while all of these proposals are welcome, they are not exactly revolutionary." (Why should they be?)
What is interesting is that the newsletter's articles on more bread-and-butter topics, such as the Fiscal Treaty and the proposals to re-introduce student fees, are written in a much more open-minded and factual manner. In fact, the article on student fees supports their re-introduction (with grants for poorer students) and there is an article supporting the Fiscal Treaty, as well as one opposing it. I wonder if any consideration was given to pro- and con- articles about abortion or same-sex marriage?
To ask the question (as they say) is to answer it. The core values of the left in our age are not social democratic but liberal and secularist. The real enemy, it seems, is not the multinational company, or poverty, or exploitation. The real enemy is the baby in the womb and the old man in the Vatican.
I remember I was enough of a socialist in my youth to feel a sense of jubilation-- mild jubilation, mind you, but jubilation-- when the Spring Tide brought a record number of Labour TD's into the Dáil in 1992. In my college years, I was even more of a socialist (in my own uninformed and inactive way), but I was already getting sick of the liberal, progressive and identity politics that seemed to be tangled up with the red flag. I remember approving very much of this old trade union slogan, when I came across it in a book:
Eight hours work, eight hours play,
Eight hours lie-a-bed, and eight bob a day.
That was enough socialism for me, and never mind all the political correctness.
Even now, as a two-fisted traditionalist conservative-- though I fear I might alienate some of my readers in admitting this-- I feel a lot more affection for socialists than I do for libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. If conservatism is the worship of the free market, then I would rather not be conservative. Thankfully, it's not, and we don't have to choose between a naive belief in the infallibility of private enterprise and an equally naive belief in government intervention as the answer to every problem.
However, in the Ireland of 2012, it seems that there is no left outside the liberal left, as the April '12 issue of The Left Tribune shows.
The very first photograph (if you don't count an ad) in the twenty page journal-- a photograph that accompanies an article headed "How is Labour Shaping Society?"-- shows a demonstrator whose placard reads "Did we Vote on your Marriage?". The text of the article includes the sentence "Some progress has been made. Particularly welcomed by most Labour supporters was Minister Ruairi Quinn's push to end the patronage of schools by the Catholic Church...this element of progress will hopefully produe strong social dividends to come." Later on, the article laments Labour's failure to introduce same-sex marriage.
The first article of the publication is headed "What Will Labour's Legacy Be for Single-Parent Families?". The article deals almost entirely with welfare entitlements. A post-script mentions that Census 2011 shows that there are 215,300 families "headed by lone parents with children, 87 per cent with mothers". But the article nowhere asks why there are so many fatherless and motherless families, and how this can be reversed. It seems government intervention only involves picking up the pieces.
The third article, by a UCC student, is a call for abortion to be introduced in Ireland. It describes the ambiguous legal position after the Supreme Court's X-Case ruling, and says: "In a debate so steeped in moral and religious bias, it may be the difficult to have an articulate debate on the issue of reproductive rights." (Religious bias is bad enough, but imagine dragging moral bias into an issue like abortion!) "Taking the lonely trip 'on the boat' to England is not the ideal situation either psychologically or financially for a woman who is already dealing with a traumatic situation, and yet it is a lonely trip that is made by about 10 or more Irish women every day. Worse still is the growing trend of women and young girls buying unregulated abortifacients online or seeking other DIY solutions. Women should be supported by both the state and the medical system in such a case, even if it is unpalatable for some."
As with most abortion-related discourse on the liberal left, the writer simply assumes the agreement of the reader. The moral case for abortion is not argued at all-- the only justification invoked are court rulings. Talk about legalism!
A whole-page article opposite sets out its stall pretty plainly: "Life-Saving Abortions Aren't the Only Abortions we Should be Legalising." In chillingly calm terms, the young woman writes: "Discourse on abortion should stop focusing on saving women's lives and start focusing on the most common reason for seeking an abortion-- a woman simply does not want to go through with the pregnancy." Well, at least the pretence is dropped-- finally, after decades of subterfuge.
Later on in the article there is a surprising admission: "If we accept that a foetus is not a life, then the X-case doesn't go far enough. If we think that it is a life, then rape, incest, or the threat of maternal suicide are no reasons to end it." But once again, the question goes a-begging. It seems that all members of Labour Youth are on the same metaphysical page when it comes to the definition of human life.
Which should have been borne in mind by the writer of the article on page nine: "A Mature and Republican Approach to Diplomatic Relations with the Vatican". The writer blusters: "Recently in Cork, local Fianna Fáil councillor O'Flynn claimed that the closure [of Ireland's embassy to the Vatican] was to satisfy the godlessness of the Labour Party, to which he was throughly and comprehensively rebuked by our own Cllr Michael O'Connell. It would almost be amusing if it weren't such an insult, considering the numerous people of all faiths within the party, and the values we hold that can be considered Christian among others".
There seems to be a contradiction in this publication's attitude to Catholicism. On the one hand, it assumes a support for abortion and gay-marriage that is impossible for a faithful Catholic to share. On the other, it asserts that the Labour Party contains members of "all faiths"-- including Catholicism.
If you cannot be a social democrat-- or a radical or a progressive or whatever other term the members of Labour Youth might use to describe themselves-- without supporting anti-traditional marriage or the murder of the unborn child, surely Catholics have the right to insist on core values, too? Are the liberal left the only believers who are permitted to hold dogmas?
This writer, however, does make some effort to moderate his anti-Catholic stance: "the Catholic Chuch has been an institution fundamentally linked to what it means to be Irish since the failure of the secular-pluralist rebels of 1798. Irish nationalism, a driving force even today, was increasingly linked to Catholicism by both nationalists themselves and the British once the Anglican church was disestablished here. It has been argued that the Church usurped the role of the monarchy once such a vacuum was created after the Treaty. [I wonder why a republican thinks that the abolition of monarchy would create a vaccuum?] Hospitals, schools, care of the poor, these roles were fulfilled by the Church where there were no other groups or societies to do so. For that reasons, the radicals arguing that we must spend far more money than we need to in order to have an embassy can be understood, if not agreed with."
On the debit side of the ledger, the writer then makes the inevitable (and fair) point that the power of the Church in Irish society facilitated the clerical abuse scandals, and follows it with the usual round of hysterical anti-Catholic allegations: "Coupled with the nature of the Vatican as a state, an extremely rich enclave in Italy that was effectively created by Mussolini, and the damage done by the church with regard to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the other sort of radical advocating ending diplomatic relations with the Vatican can also be understood, and again, if not agreed with."
The Mussolini slur is cheap and hilarious. As for the mention of the AIDS epidemic, I'm always bewildered by the attitude of Church-bashers on this topic. The Church forbids the use of condoms, it is true. She also forbids sex outside marriage. If African Catholics are so much in thrall to the Vatican on the one, surely they would also comply with the other, which would hardly give much impetus to a sexually-transmitted epidemic.
The writer of the article seems to be the only person in Ireland who believes that the Vatican embassy was closed for economic reasons-- ah, the sweet naivety of youth!
He admits that "the fact of the matter is that most Irish people continue to claim Catholicism as their religious viewpoint, no matter how serious they are about it." Amusingly, he adds: "Futhermore, many of our new Irish from Easter Europe are Catholics as well. It would be extremely disrespectful to them to snub the leader of their church in such a way while other, more productive options are available." Multiculturalism trumps anti-Catholicism-- at least for the moment.
The writer concludes that "the approach of our government has been quite correct on this issue, and indeed, is the only mature one in sight". A little earlier, he had written: "We already have a building in Rome for diplomatic activity in the form of the Italian embassy. Indulging the Vatican's absurd position on joint embassies at large expense is not reasonable in any sense of the word." Except, perhaps, if the Vatican is the one (relatively) safe place on Earth that the Church has to stand upon, surrounded as it is by a whole cordon of countries that have tried to trample on Catholic rights within living memory. Is it so ridiculously that the Holy See feels the need to assert its independence and sovereignty, even symbolically?
Even this article doesn't exhaust this twenty-page newspaper's anti-Catholic swipes. A review of James Plunkett's Strumpet City doesn't miss the opportunity to mention that "the hypocrisy and culpability of the Church is highlighted in the compelling storyline facing the ambitious but naive Father O'Connor and the deeply troubled Father Giffley, whose ham fisted attempts to make a change are but an endeavour to make up for a life spent in self-loathing and alcoholism".
There is also an article on the proposed constitutional convention-- which seems to take the line that our constitution should be tinkered with just because it is seventy years old. (If it's not broke...break it, I guess.) It supports the removal of "socially conservative anachronisms" (such as any mention of blasphemy, traditional marriage, and the special role of women in the home) but then complains that "while all of these proposals are welcome, they are not exactly revolutionary." (Why should they be?)
What is interesting is that the newsletter's articles on more bread-and-butter topics, such as the Fiscal Treaty and the proposals to re-introduce student fees, are written in a much more open-minded and factual manner. In fact, the article on student fees supports their re-introduction (with grants for poorer students) and there is an article supporting the Fiscal Treaty, as well as one opposing it. I wonder if any consideration was given to pro- and con- articles about abortion or same-sex marriage?
To ask the question (as they say) is to answer it. The core values of the left in our age are not social democratic but liberal and secularist. The real enemy, it seems, is not the multinational company, or poverty, or exploitation. The real enemy is the baby in the womb and the old man in the Vatican.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
If This isn't Hypocrisy, What Is?
The Catholic primate of Ireland is held to account for an investigation into sex abuse that occurred more than thirty years ago and in which he played a relatively minor role. He points out that it was not his responsibility to report the sex abuse discovered to the parents of the abused children or to the authorities, that responsibility resting with his superiors.
Government ministers, senior politicians, journalists, and an easily-led public clamour for his resignation-- including Eamon Gilmore, the Tanaiste and leader of the Labour Party.
An RTE current affairs programme, all the way back in dim and distant 2011, falsely accuses a Catholic priest of sexually abusing a girl and fathering her child. Today, the Labour Party member and Minister for Communications, Pat Rabbitte, said that he had not sought any resignations from the board of RTÉ-- the people who should assume ultimate responsibility for the actions of the national broadcaster.
Church-bashing? Anti-Catholicism? What, here, in liberal and pluralist and tolerant Ireland?
It will almost certainly get worse, as the militant secular wing of the Labour party gain in strength and confidence-- not to mention their sympathizers in other political parties, and in other walks of Irish life.
Government ministers, senior politicians, journalists, and an easily-led public clamour for his resignation-- including Eamon Gilmore, the Tanaiste and leader of the Labour Party.
An RTE current affairs programme, all the way back in dim and distant 2011, falsely accuses a Catholic priest of sexually abusing a girl and fathering her child. Today, the Labour Party member and Minister for Communications, Pat Rabbitte, said that he had not sought any resignations from the board of RTÉ-- the people who should assume ultimate responsibility for the actions of the national broadcaster.
Church-bashing? Anti-Catholicism? What, here, in liberal and pluralist and tolerant Ireland?
It will almost certainly get worse, as the militant secular wing of the Labour party gain in strength and confidence-- not to mention their sympathizers in other political parties, and in other walks of Irish life.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Irish Media is Giving us our Two-Minutes Hate
In its second minute
the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down
in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown
the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired
woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that
of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very
straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he
were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston
had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy
Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.
1984, George Orwell
The Irish people are now being treated to their Two-Minutes Hate of Cardinal Seán Brady and the Catholic Church, in the same way that the Party members in Orwell's novel are daily required to rant and fulminate against Goldstein, the Party's obligatory enemy and focus of antagonism.
I do not believe that this is really (for the most part) about abuse, or about the failure to speak out against abuse or paedophilia. If this was what the media outcry was really about, then Senator David Norris-- who appealed for clemency on behalf of a friend convicted of statutory rape in Israel-- would surely be subjected to the same kind of villification, the same calls to resign his office.
I have never been sexually abused. I accept that I cannot understand or appreciate the pain that abuse victims go through. It is easy, incredibly easy, to politicize somebody's pain, to forget the living, breathing human beings involved-- and there is always the temptation to leap unthinkingly to the defence of something you love, as Catholics in Ireland love their Church. I regularly pray for all abuse victims.
And yet, for all that, I still believe that the media reaction to the BBC documentary on Cardinal Brady's (minor) role in the history of Fr. Brendan Smyth is excessive and hysterical. Cardinal Brady has pointed out that, even under current guidelines, the responsibility to inform the authorities would not rest with somebody in the role he played at the time. He was acting under conditions of confidentiality. I don't know whether he should resign or not, but I do think that the story hardly deserves to dominate the headlines and news broadcasts in the way it has, both yesterday and this morning.
The Irish Times editorial today began:
DESPITE ALL that has happened in relation to the clerical abuse of children, the Vatican’s response still revolves around the requirements of canon law and the protection of church authority. Unambiguous endorsement of the actions taken by Cardinal Séan Brady regarding the late Fr Brendan Smyth, following the BBC’s This World documentary by reporter Darragh MacIntyre, has firmly placed the importance of internal discipline and obedience above personal conscience.
Is there not a chance that "obedience above personal conscience" might also come to characterize our relation to the State and the law? After all, although Fr. Brendan Smyth should definitely have been reported to the gardai, there are situations that would not be so clear-cut. Are we moving towards a society where everybody will be legally obliged to file every suspicion with the authorities? Is the State infallible? With the attack upon the Seal of Confession, and the proposal to increase the State's power to intervene in family life with the Children's Referendum, are we seeing not only the Two Minutes' Hate, but also the beginning of the Big Brother society?
1984, George Orwell
The Irish people are now being treated to their Two-Minutes Hate of Cardinal Seán Brady and the Catholic Church, in the same way that the Party members in Orwell's novel are daily required to rant and fulminate against Goldstein, the Party's obligatory enemy and focus of antagonism.
I do not believe that this is really (for the most part) about abuse, or about the failure to speak out against abuse or paedophilia. If this was what the media outcry was really about, then Senator David Norris-- who appealed for clemency on behalf of a friend convicted of statutory rape in Israel-- would surely be subjected to the same kind of villification, the same calls to resign his office.
I have never been sexually abused. I accept that I cannot understand or appreciate the pain that abuse victims go through. It is easy, incredibly easy, to politicize somebody's pain, to forget the living, breathing human beings involved-- and there is always the temptation to leap unthinkingly to the defence of something you love, as Catholics in Ireland love their Church. I regularly pray for all abuse victims.
And yet, for all that, I still believe that the media reaction to the BBC documentary on Cardinal Brady's (minor) role in the history of Fr. Brendan Smyth is excessive and hysterical. Cardinal Brady has pointed out that, even under current guidelines, the responsibility to inform the authorities would not rest with somebody in the role he played at the time. He was acting under conditions of confidentiality. I don't know whether he should resign or not, but I do think that the story hardly deserves to dominate the headlines and news broadcasts in the way it has, both yesterday and this morning.
The Irish Times editorial today began:
DESPITE ALL that has happened in relation to the clerical abuse of children, the Vatican’s response still revolves around the requirements of canon law and the protection of church authority. Unambiguous endorsement of the actions taken by Cardinal Séan Brady regarding the late Fr Brendan Smyth, following the BBC’s This World documentary by reporter Darragh MacIntyre, has firmly placed the importance of internal discipline and obedience above personal conscience.
Is there not a chance that "obedience above personal conscience" might also come to characterize our relation to the State and the law? After all, although Fr. Brendan Smyth should definitely have been reported to the gardai, there are situations that would not be so clear-cut. Are we moving towards a society where everybody will be legally obliged to file every suspicion with the authorities? Is the State infallible? With the attack upon the Seal of Confession, and the proposal to increase the State's power to intervene in family life with the Children's Referendum, are we seeing not only the Two Minutes' Hate, but also the beginning of the Big Brother society?
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
"Shocking" BBC Documentary Reveals What Everybody Knew Already...
...that is, that the Catholic Church in Ireland conducted its own investigations into allegations of child sex abuse rather than reporting each allegation to the gardai, and that Cardinal Sean Brady, when working as a notary on an enquiry into accusations against Father Brendan Smyth, obediently went along with that system-- which he now describes as "an unhelpful culture of deference and silence."
I feel I should blog about something like this, just to prove that I am not ignoring it, but the truth is that news stories like this one barely interest me at all. A lot of the time I don't even read them. They simply demonstrate (again) two things that I knew already-- the first is that the media, whether through bias or mere sensationalism (or both), love to stick the boot into the Catholic Church, and the other is that both the Church and wider society didn't treat the phenomenon of child sex abuse with the gravity it deserves until very recent times.
I feel I should blog about something like this, just to prove that I am not ignoring it, but the truth is that news stories like this one barely interest me at all. A lot of the time I don't even read them. They simply demonstrate (again) two things that I knew already-- the first is that the media, whether through bias or mere sensationalism (or both), love to stick the boot into the Catholic Church, and the other is that both the Church and wider society didn't treat the phenomenon of child sex abuse with the gravity it deserves until very recent times.
Monday, April 30, 2012
From the Blurb of "Prolife?: The Irish Question" by Michael Solomons (1992)
Beginning with intimidation of a pharmacist in the 1930s, the national record is one of persistent, Church-inspired, state interference in the most private areas of personal and family concern, coupled (until quite recently) with a reluctant provision of public health facilities for women...Scandals abound, from statistics of mortality in the late 1930s, through to the 1976 banning of Guide to Family Planning as indecent or obscene, and the rise of Youth Defence, the physical wing of a metaphysical movement. If there is such an entity as "the national psyche", then it's worth asking if obsessive concern to protect the unborn is not, in some unconscious way, a reaction prompted by guilt feelings about recent patriotic slaughter.
I love this kind of "heads I win, tails you lose", join-the-dots logic. You can prove anything using it, or at least you can call on it to buttress any argument. It's the kind of logic that led Christopher Hitchens to argue that Stalin and Mao's massacres were not, as they seem on the face of it, black marks against atheism, but in fact yet another crime to be laid at the feet of religion-- since the Stalinist and Maoist cults of personality were a kind of secular religion, and since Stalin and Lenin were heirs to the power of the Romanovs, who had invoked the divine right.
Or again it is the kind of logic that denounces the Catholic Church as being anti-sex and obsessed by sex at the same time. Or that accuses the Catholicism of preaching docility and resignation when it urges its flock to fix their hopes upon heaven rather than this passing world, but also-- since the charitable works of millions of nuns and priests and lay Catholics are too obvious to simply be ignored-- accuses it of slapping band-aids on capitalist/imperialist/patriarchal society, in order to stave off the Revolution.
I like the idea of a national psyche. But there is so much guff and unverifiable, unfalsifiable nonsense posited about it that-- well, come to think of it, the guff can be quite entertaining, too, in its place. Let's just not take it any more seriously than it deserves. Save it for the pub.
I love this kind of "heads I win, tails you lose", join-the-dots logic. You can prove anything using it, or at least you can call on it to buttress any argument. It's the kind of logic that led Christopher Hitchens to argue that Stalin and Mao's massacres were not, as they seem on the face of it, black marks against atheism, but in fact yet another crime to be laid at the feet of religion-- since the Stalinist and Maoist cults of personality were a kind of secular religion, and since Stalin and Lenin were heirs to the power of the Romanovs, who had invoked the divine right.
Or again it is the kind of logic that denounces the Catholic Church as being anti-sex and obsessed by sex at the same time. Or that accuses the Catholicism of preaching docility and resignation when it urges its flock to fix their hopes upon heaven rather than this passing world, but also-- since the charitable works of millions of nuns and priests and lay Catholics are too obvious to simply be ignored-- accuses it of slapping band-aids on capitalist/imperialist/patriarchal society, in order to stave off the Revolution.
I like the idea of a national psyche. But there is so much guff and unverifiable, unfalsifiable nonsense posited about it that-- well, come to think of it, the guff can be quite entertaining, too, in its place. Let's just not take it any more seriously than it deserves. Save it for the pub.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Don't Look at me in that Tone of Voice
"Then there are the usual suspects, lay voices who make a living from defending the institutional church when it is safe to do so, when outrage is settling after the Cloyne report.
It was the same after the Ferns, Ryan and Murphy reports. Their immediate reaction is practised horror. Then, with time, they’re back to their slithering ways, diluting truth, minimising the wreckage, playing it all down."
Who said this? I don't think it will surprise you too much to learn it was Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent of the Irish Times, who seems to be training for a career as press officer of Atheist Ireland or the Humanist Association of Ireland.
Notice that "the usual suspects" are not named, and that their horror at the reports of child abuse in the Catholic church are described as "practiced". And presumably their "slithering ways" means putting the abuse within the Catholic church into its wider social and historic context. McGarry doesn't have to cite any facts at all. He can simply question motives and he feels his case is made.
This is a tactic used constantly in the attack upon the Church. Whatever its prelates or defenders say or do is assumed to be simply a cover for sinister motives and power-plays. I read one article in a left-wing magazine (Look Left) analysing the Catholic Church as a corporation that was jostling for a new market sector, having lost its existing market.
All this came into my head today as I was reading Ancestral Voices, a 1994 book about religion and nationalism in Ireland by the late Conor Cruise O'Brien.
"The Cruiser" had a reputation as an intellectual, presumably a calm and lucid intelligence that could see beyond the distortions and caricatures of partisan debate. Surely he was a man of facts and logical connections, no matter what else you might have thought about him?
I haven't finished Ancestral Voices but I have rarely encountered such a dossier of unwarranted assumptions, false inferences, and tendentious arguments. O'Brien is so eager to establish a link between violent nationalism and Catholic sectarianism that anything and everything serves to confirm his prejudice. Dots that are miles apart are gleefully joined.
It begins on the very first page-- we are treated to this quotation from the Catechism of Irish History (1876):
Q. Have the Irish preserved the faith preached to them by St. Patrick? A: Yes, the Irish have ever been conspicuous for their devoted attachment to the faith from which not all the horrors of persecution nor the blandishments of proselytism have been able to separate them.
This, says, O'Brien, "assumes that 'the Irish' means Irish Catholics, and nobody else. The assumption has been very strong in the Irish Catholic culture...it also worth noting that this has been the official Catholic doctrine. The Catechism was issued with the highest ecclesiastical approval under Cardinal Cullen".
So there you go. O'Brien's rather strained interpretation of one line in a catechism becomes the official teaching of the Church in Ireland. And that's just the beginning.
I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm already flabbergasted by the sheer multitude of aspersions O'Brien casts. Here are some examples:
"...the most revealing aspect of the whole controversy was the unwilling testimony, in support of Healy's contention, supplied by Parnell's defenders. When cornered on the moral issue, these invariably suggested that being a Protestant, Parnell could not be expected to understand, as a Catholic would, that adultery was wrong. None of them ever said this right out, but everyone knew this was the theme..."
(...)
"Redmond, for his part, never again referred in public to the Church's role in the destruction of Parnell. That a veil should be drawn over all that had been an implicit condition of his election to the leadership of the reunited Party."
(...)
"Moran may have had clerical backing for the foundation of the paper, and both his paper and his Irish Ireland movement had significant, if discreet, support from the Hierarchy."
(...)
"The files of The Leader, from 1900 to 1914, constitute the only explicit exposition of Catholic nationalism that we have. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this whole area was generally covered by a fog of dissimulation and pseudo-occumenism. After 1921, in the new Irish State, that decorous fog descends again and has never really lifted since..."
(...)
"The Republic Tradition was dominated, in its formal ideology, and public expressions, by Wolfe Tone's doctrine of the Common Name of Irishman obliterating, in theory, all political differences between Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters. So no proper Republican could give public vent in explicit terms to anti-Protestant feeling. The constitutional nationalists had more pragmatic reasons for an equivalent inhibition. They needed to play down the sectarian tendencies among their supporters in order to convince their English Liberal allies...that modern Catholic nationalism was part of the tolerant Enlightenment."
(...)
"...in that period and in that paper, we have an opportunity to look at Catholic nationalism with the lid off. (Not that all Catholic nationalism is like this, but a great deal of it is, and it is normally screened from public view.) It was an opportunity that had never been presented before, and it "was never to recur."
(...)
"Formally, official nationalism during this period repudiated any such identity [Catholicism with nationalism], as it still does. Catholicism was religion, and nationalism was politics, two quite separate things. A person's religion was his private affair. Irish nationalism belonged to all the Irish....Few Protestants believed the old official version, or believe the present one. And I think many Catholic nationalists, in their hearts, don't believe it either."
(...)
"In the 1790s however, and under the impact of the French Revolution, Irish nationalism asserts itself for the first time, amongst Irish Catholics, as a force distinct from official Catholicism, and partly in conflict with the latter. Yet at a deeper level, the new Revolutionary nationalism appears to have been continuous, emotionally, with the older religious nationalism of the Counter-Reformation."
(...)
"Just as the Penal Laws presumed no such person as an Irish Catholic to exist, so the ideology of the Christian Brothers, fully countenanced by the Hierarchy at this time, presumes no such person as an Irish Protestant to exist (see the passage from Catechism of Irish History quoted at the outset.) And this attitude, in more diluted forms, is widespread today among Irish Catholics."
I haven't even reached page 60 of this tract yet. But there is something depressingly familiar about it all. The Church never seems to be attacked for what it actually says or does. It is nearly always attacked for imagined subtexts, motives and manouvres. Marxists believe that it encourages men to focus on the eternal rather than the worldly in order to protect the established order. Liberals believe that it is opposed to abortion and the ordination of women for misogynistic reasons. They also believe its sexual teaching reflects either a stigmatisation of sex or a hatred of it. The Church opposes homosexual acts because it is homophobic, not because it believes sexuality is ordered to the creation of life and the union of man and woman. And so forth.
But then, I would say all that, wouldn't I? Heaven alone knows what I really mean. I guess I'll have to ask Patsy McGarry.
It was the same after the Ferns, Ryan and Murphy reports. Their immediate reaction is practised horror. Then, with time, they’re back to their slithering ways, diluting truth, minimising the wreckage, playing it all down."
Who said this? I don't think it will surprise you too much to learn it was Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent of the Irish Times, who seems to be training for a career as press officer of Atheist Ireland or the Humanist Association of Ireland.
Notice that "the usual suspects" are not named, and that their horror at the reports of child abuse in the Catholic church are described as "practiced". And presumably their "slithering ways" means putting the abuse within the Catholic church into its wider social and historic context. McGarry doesn't have to cite any facts at all. He can simply question motives and he feels his case is made.
This is a tactic used constantly in the attack upon the Church. Whatever its prelates or defenders say or do is assumed to be simply a cover for sinister motives and power-plays. I read one article in a left-wing magazine (Look Left) analysing the Catholic Church as a corporation that was jostling for a new market sector, having lost its existing market.
All this came into my head today as I was reading Ancestral Voices, a 1994 book about religion and nationalism in Ireland by the late Conor Cruise O'Brien.
"The Cruiser" had a reputation as an intellectual, presumably a calm and lucid intelligence that could see beyond the distortions and caricatures of partisan debate. Surely he was a man of facts and logical connections, no matter what else you might have thought about him?
I haven't finished Ancestral Voices but I have rarely encountered such a dossier of unwarranted assumptions, false inferences, and tendentious arguments. O'Brien is so eager to establish a link between violent nationalism and Catholic sectarianism that anything and everything serves to confirm his prejudice. Dots that are miles apart are gleefully joined.
It begins on the very first page-- we are treated to this quotation from the Catechism of Irish History (1876):
Q. Have the Irish preserved the faith preached to them by St. Patrick? A: Yes, the Irish have ever been conspicuous for their devoted attachment to the faith from which not all the horrors of persecution nor the blandishments of proselytism have been able to separate them.
This, says, O'Brien, "assumes that 'the Irish' means Irish Catholics, and nobody else. The assumption has been very strong in the Irish Catholic culture...it also worth noting that this has been the official Catholic doctrine. The Catechism was issued with the highest ecclesiastical approval under Cardinal Cullen".
So there you go. O'Brien's rather strained interpretation of one line in a catechism becomes the official teaching of the Church in Ireland. And that's just the beginning.
I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm already flabbergasted by the sheer multitude of aspersions O'Brien casts. Here are some examples:
"...the most revealing aspect of the whole controversy was the unwilling testimony, in support of Healy's contention, supplied by Parnell's defenders. When cornered on the moral issue, these invariably suggested that being a Protestant, Parnell could not be expected to understand, as a Catholic would, that adultery was wrong. None of them ever said this right out, but everyone knew this was the theme..."
(...)
"Redmond, for his part, never again referred in public to the Church's role in the destruction of Parnell. That a veil should be drawn over all that had been an implicit condition of his election to the leadership of the reunited Party."
(...)
"Moran may have had clerical backing for the foundation of the paper, and both his paper and his Irish Ireland movement had significant, if discreet, support from the Hierarchy."
(...)
"The files of The Leader, from 1900 to 1914, constitute the only explicit exposition of Catholic nationalism that we have. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this whole area was generally covered by a fog of dissimulation and pseudo-occumenism. After 1921, in the new Irish State, that decorous fog descends again and has never really lifted since..."
(...)
"The Republic Tradition was dominated, in its formal ideology, and public expressions, by Wolfe Tone's doctrine of the Common Name of Irishman obliterating, in theory, all political differences between Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters. So no proper Republican could give public vent in explicit terms to anti-Protestant feeling. The constitutional nationalists had more pragmatic reasons for an equivalent inhibition. They needed to play down the sectarian tendencies among their supporters in order to convince their English Liberal allies...that modern Catholic nationalism was part of the tolerant Enlightenment."
(...)
"...in that period and in that paper, we have an opportunity to look at Catholic nationalism with the lid off. (Not that all Catholic nationalism is like this, but a great deal of it is, and it is normally screened from public view.) It was an opportunity that had never been presented before, and it "was never to recur."
(...)
"Formally, official nationalism during this period repudiated any such identity [Catholicism with nationalism], as it still does. Catholicism was religion, and nationalism was politics, two quite separate things. A person's religion was his private affair. Irish nationalism belonged to all the Irish....Few Protestants believed the old official version, or believe the present one. And I think many Catholic nationalists, in their hearts, don't believe it either."
(...)
"In the 1790s however, and under the impact of the French Revolution, Irish nationalism asserts itself for the first time, amongst Irish Catholics, as a force distinct from official Catholicism, and partly in conflict with the latter. Yet at a deeper level, the new Revolutionary nationalism appears to have been continuous, emotionally, with the older religious nationalism of the Counter-Reformation."
(...)
"Just as the Penal Laws presumed no such person as an Irish Catholic to exist, so the ideology of the Christian Brothers, fully countenanced by the Hierarchy at this time, presumes no such person as an Irish Protestant to exist (see the passage from Catechism of Irish History quoted at the outset.) And this attitude, in more diluted forms, is widespread today among Irish Catholics."
I haven't even reached page 60 of this tract yet. But there is something depressingly familiar about it all. The Church never seems to be attacked for what it actually says or does. It is nearly always attacked for imagined subtexts, motives and manouvres. Marxists believe that it encourages men to focus on the eternal rather than the worldly in order to protect the established order. Liberals believe that it is opposed to abortion and the ordination of women for misogynistic reasons. They also believe its sexual teaching reflects either a stigmatisation of sex or a hatred of it. The Church opposes homosexual acts because it is homophobic, not because it believes sexuality is ordered to the creation of life and the union of man and woman. And so forth.
But then, I would say all that, wouldn't I? Heaven alone knows what I really mean. I guess I'll have to ask Patsy McGarry.
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