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Post by Ranger on Sept 16, 2015 19:32:01 GMT
I know that there's already a thread on Desmond Fennell elsewhere on these boards ( link here for those interested), but I felt that perhaps this particular article is just a jumping off point for a few questions/reflections that occurred to me. The article is on Shane's blog here. I know that others on these boards have criticised Fennell for the idiosyncratic ideas he has developed in the last twenty years, (I have read none of his books so I can't possibly comment) but I think that this article from 1962 is deeply revealing; he seems to have analysed many of the faults of the Church and correctly guessed where they might lead. There are a few quibbles I would have with it; there are the seeds of his blind West-bashing in the last little section and naturally there are certain things he wasn't aware of such as the abuses in industrial schools etc. But his analysis of the blindness of our clergy and their inability to cope with a changing situation seems to be incredibly incisive and discerning. So my first question is, to what degree was he accurate in his observations? They seem to explain a lot of what went wrong, but it's difficult to tell if he is completely accurate. Contrast this piece from the hierarchy in the 1950s, though, and you'll see that the bishops were largely oblivious to much of what lay under the surface as Fennell suggested. Secondly, shortly after I read this piece earlier in the week, I was walking about on the northside of Dublin, watching people go by, and it struck me how different my experience of Ireland has been to those who grew up before now. I've previously thought that there's quite a gap between the experiences of generations but it struck me all the more forcefully having read such a lengthy article written at a time when the Church dominated Ireland about the possibility of its decline and then walking out into the streets to see people going about their lives without any reference to God. I know that one can't judge by appearances, but that is my experience. I started looking up old secondary school classmates on facebook afterwards, noting how different the world they post about is from the Catholic bubble I normally interact with both online and in person. Many of the same concerns (drama, concerts, funny videos and articles from around the internet, popular news stories) but no reference to a Church that once pervaded all of Irish life. I think that I am too sheltered and perhaps need to get out more and interact more with people outside of the small Catholic bubble; it really can become an echo chamber. It made me want to ask those from older generations (I am in my 20s, and I know that some who post here are in their 30s/40s/50s) what their overall impression of the Church in society was growing up, and how that has changed? I know that this issue has perhaps been discussed before here but it might be useful to have those experiences as a contrast to the very different world I grew up in, where Catholicism was not dominant but rather a small clique only some had access to. Apologies for the very rambling post, just throwing out some questions/reflections!
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 16, 2015 20:42:31 GMT
I am 38. I often wonder about the experience of Catholics your age, Ranger.
I was never a very observant kid. I didn't have my finger on the pulse at all. But Ireland strikes me, in retrospect, as a solidly Catholic country in the eighties. I often wonder how much of this was naivety on my part, that I just didn't realize how much irreligion there was. But I myself was not particularly religious; I remember being profoundly sceptical at some moments.
I do get the impression that there was relatively little anti-Catholicism, though; that most people saw the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church as good things, even if they didn't quite believe in them. Critique of the Church came (purportedly, at least) from within the Catholic tradition rather than outside. Again, this could be just my impression.
One thing I remember-- and this was in the early nineties-- was a boy in my class, a punk rocker and close to being a juvenile delinquent (though he was really a very nice and thoughtful fellow underneath, and I hear he has gone into organic farming!) asking our religion teacher why the Church didn't teach the Book of Revelation. The teacher smiled and said she'd been told she'd face that question. It has puzzled me since; how does the Church not teach the Book of Revelation? Did he mean in the education system? It always sticks in my mind as an example of the critique Catholicism faced at that time, in Ireland. Even the choice of the Book of Revelations seems interesting to me; the kid was attacking the Church for toning down its more lurid and sensational content-- for not being medieval enough, so to speak. This seems the opposite of the critique it faces today, when it is attacked for being too medieval and supernaturalist and rudely dismissed as a load of rubbish. You may think I am reading a lot into one exchange, but there is a reason it seems symbolic to me.
Incidentally, I am often surprised at how much Catholicism STILL pervades Ireland. I really think it does, just under the surface. I do not think our contemporaries are nearly as oblivious to Catholicism as it seems at first. Even the younger ones. Scratch a secularist and you get a seeker, or a lapsed Catholic. I have noticed this time and time again.
This is a subject on which I could write at great length, but I'm tired right now....nor do I feel I've been very clear here...
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 16, 2015 21:21:37 GMT
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF4Fw_1_obQThe "Night Light" segment at 2:08 into this excerpt from RTE's Christmas Eve 1986 programming is, for me, perfectly typical of the Irish Catholicism in which I grew up. In the last year or so I have been realising how much that atmosphere moulded me and my own faith, even though I am very aware of its faults. At one point, Fr. Martin Clarke refers to "our profound faith in Jesus Christ" as a dimension of "our national character". The fact that a priest had a soapbox on RTE in which it didn't seem unrealistic to make such a claim, says a lot to me. The younger contributors on this board must never have known a time when the Catholic faith was not embattled in Ireland. I often ponder that. Obviously, our supposed intelligentsia has been more or less openly attacking Irish Catholicism since at least the fifties, but I don't think they carried the day until maybe the mid-nineties.
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Post by Ranger on Sept 17, 2015 9:24:36 GMT
The younger contributors on this board must never have known a time when the Catholic faith was not embattled in Ireland. I often ponder that. Obviously, our supposed intelligentsia has been more or less openly attacking Irish Catholicism since at least the fifties, but I don't think they carried the day until maybe the mid-nineties. Thank you very much for those reflections, Maolsheachlann, that was kind of the type of response I was looking for. I didn't realise you were 38, I thought you were much closer to 30 than that haha! I highlighted the line above because you've hit the nail on the head. I notice an enormous gulf between my experience and that of practising Catholics of an older generation; many of them still make certain assumptions about the broader culture that I am certain do not apply. My parents are from an older generation, which is largely why I was raised Catholic and not just culturally Catholic, but it's interesting how often one of them will make an assumption that a young person is a practising Catholic who follows all of the Church's teachings on no other basis than they have not yet seen evidence to the contrary (and polite Irish people never seem to want to disabuse anybody of their false notions of them). My experience has been the opposite; I assume that somebody isn't practicing until I see evidence to the contrary. I'm not saying that I'm always right, but rather that that is what experience has taught me. Your comment about scratching a secularist and finding a seeker is true to a degree, but I think that the secularists are a different group again from the majority. I think of our society in terms of Jesus' metaphor of the hot, cold and lukewarm. If we who are practicing Christians are the hot, we are a tiny, tiny minority; there's a larger, noisier minority who are the cold (i.e. non-Christians passionate about their beliefs who are seeking) but (and I really don't want to be judgmental, but it's my honest experience) there's a larger group who are lukewarm in that to all appearances they couldn't give a toss. There's a large amount of Catholic cultural elements amongst them, in the Granny-will-light-a-candle-for-my-exams sense but there's no interest in going any deeper, at least that I could find. Any attempt at depth in conversation is rebuffed. Say in my class at secondary school (and granted, one class can go to an extreme, so I can't say if it's entirely representative), I was the only practicing Catholic I was aware of (to be fair, I only really started practicing my faith for its own sake at 17, but still) by the time it was Leaving Cert. There were a few who attended Mass because it was a family thing too. But in general, there were maybe three or four 'seekers' open to Catholicism, and two or three staunch atheists, and these were the only ones in a year of about 50-60 students who were willing to engage in a conversation about matters of faith or anything in any way deep. (My best friends consequently were the atheists!) The rest couldn't have cared less, or if they did they hid it very deeply. (You would have hated it, Maolsheachlann, all that smalltalk!) Incidentally, I noticed also very little enthusiasm for the Yes side in the referendum; the apathy seems to be across the board rather than just towards religion and I think a lot of it has to do with a highly materialist outlook. This might have been exacerbated because I was in a well-to-do private school. I attended one or two 'youth' retreats at this time, but the youngest people there were all in their late twenties and many who attended were in their late thirties/early forties. I've said before, it's a generation of Catholics I feel a deep sadness for, because it seems to be a lonely time for them. I can't imagine what it would have been like being 35 and Catholic in the 90s here. Conversely I went to a Catholic youth group, but although the lads who went there were much, much finer people than any I'd met elsewhere, the faith only stuck superficially. There weren't enough roots on account of difficult home situations for the most part. The first ever group of Catholic friends who were close to my age I ever had were actually Americans whom I met on my first trip over there. I think that teenagers are much luckier now in that groups like Youth 2000 will cater to a younger age range than they did, although there's nothing for the under-15s and there needs to be, urgently. In general the culture seems shorn of an awful lot of Catholicism to me. You'd be more likely to find cultural expressions of Catholicism on the street in Spain or Italy or somewhere like that. It's funny that the Fennell article got me going on this!
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Post by Ranger on Sept 17, 2015 9:25:42 GMT
Btw, the punk rocker incident is very telling! I think that a huge amount of our understanding can come through single incidents that suddenly unveil a new piece of the puzzle for us. I know that this happened to me many time in secondary school.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 17, 2015 10:51:45 GMT
It seems to me a real problem in apologetics and evangelism that so many Catholics, especially conservative Catholics, seem to trace everything back to Protestantism. As though Protestantism was the original heresy, or the only heresy. Or as though Richard Dawkins was just a development of Martin Luther. Or as though the history of Europe was the history of the world. It's like they can't think outside the narrative of Christian history.
Alive!, for all its undoubted shortcomings, is at least aware of the real 'state of play' in this regard.
A lot of Catholics don't seem to realise that, even before arguing which Church is the true Church, even before arguing that Christianity is the true religion, even before arguing for the existence of God, the very credibility of the the supernatural, and the relevance of the question, needs to be addressed-- at least, for a huge section of the population.
(And I don't think this contradicts what I said about Catholicism still pervading Ireland just under the surface. It's under the surface, emotionally and spiritually, but it's completely off the agenda intellectually most of the time.)
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Post by Young Ireland on Sept 17, 2015 15:18:13 GMT
The younger contributors on this board must never have known a time when the Catholic faith was not embattled in Ireland. I often ponder that. Obviously, our supposed intelligentsia has been more or less openly attacking Irish Catholicism since at least the fifties, but I don't think they carried the day until maybe the mid-nineties. Thank you very much for those reflections, Maolsheachlann, that was kind of the type of response I was looking for. I didn't realise you were 38, I thought you were much closer to 30 than that haha! I highlighted the line above because you've hit the nail on the head. I notice an enormous gulf between my experience and that of practising Catholics of an older generation; many of them still make certain assumptions about the broader culture that I am certain do not apply. My parents are from an older generation, which is largely why I was raised Catholic and not just culturally Catholic, but it's interesting how often one of them will make an assumption that a young person is a practising Catholic who follows all of the Church's teachings on no other basis than they have not yet seen evidence to the contrary (and polite Irish people never seem to want to disabuse anybody of their false notions of them). My experience has been the opposite; I assume that somebody isn't practicing until I see evidence to the contrary. I'm not saying that I'm always right, but rather that that is what experience has taught me. Your comment about scratching a secularist and finding a seeker is true to a degree, but I think that the secularists are a different group again from the majority. I think of our society in terms of Jesus' metaphor of the hot, cold and lukewarm. If we who are practicing Christians are the hot, we are a tiny, tiny minority; there's a larger, noisier minority who are the cold (i.e. non-Christians passionate about their beliefs who are seeking) but (and I really don't want to be judgmental, but it's my honest experience) there's a larger group who are lukewarm in that to all appearances they couldn't give a toss. There's a large amount of Catholic cultural elements amongst them, in the Granny-will-light-a-candle-for-my-exams sense but there's no interest in going any deeper, at least that I could find. Any attempt at depth in conversation is rebuffed. Say in my class at secondary school (and granted, one class can go to an extreme, so I can't say if it's entirely representative), I was the only practicing Catholic I was aware of (to be fair, I only really started practicing my faith for its own sake at 17, but still) by the time it was Leaving Cert. There were a few who attended Mass because it was a family thing too. But in general, there were maybe three or four 'seekers' open to Catholicism, and two or three staunch atheists, and these were the only ones in a year of about 50-60 students who were willing to engage in a conversation about matters of faith or anything in any way deep. (My best friends consequently were the atheists!) The rest couldn't have cared less, or if they did they hid it very deeply. (You would have hated it, Maolsheachlann, all that smalltalk!) Incidentally, I noticed also very little enthusiasm for the Yes side in the referendum; the apathy seems to be across the board rather than just towards religion and I think a lot of it has to do with a highly materialist outlook. This might have been exacerbated because I was in a well-to-do private school. I attended one or two 'youth' retreats at this time, but the youngest people there were all in their late twenties and many who attended were in their late thirties/early forties. I've said before, it's a generation of Catholics I feel a deep sadness for, because it seems to be a lonely time for them. I can't imagine what it would have been like being 35 and Catholic in the 90s here. Conversely I went to a Catholic youth group, but although the lads who went there were much, much finer people than any I'd met elsewhere, the faith only stuck superficially. There weren't enough roots on account of difficult home situations for the most part. The first ever group of Catholic friends who were close to my age I ever had were actually Americans whom I met on my first trip over there. I think that teenagers are much luckier now in that groups like Youth 2000 will cater to a younger age range than they did, although there's nothing for the under-15s and there needs to be, urgently. In general the culture seems shorn of an awful lot of Catholicism to me. You'd be more likely to find cultural expressions of Catholicism on the street in Spain or Italy or somewhere like that. It's funny that the Fennell article got me going on this! Anything that Ranger has said is broadly in keeping with my own experience. The main difference would be that the cultural Catholicism in my experience was stronger, even if the catechesis was sub-par. Primary wasn't too bad, as the deficiencies of Alive-O were partially made up for through the use of Marian devotions, including the Rosary, though moral theology was definitely lacking. Secondary was much worse, as with the exception of one teacher from the North who seemed very much into his faith, religion was not taken very seriously by the teachers in my experience, in spite of the school's Catholic ethos, and was frequently used as a filler or an informal assembly (the main religion teacher was the deputy principal, so to be fair she did have other responsibilities). Although my family are practising Catholics, I didn't really start taking the faith seriously until I started college. Even now, it is a struggle for me to develop an interior spirituality and I don't pray as often as I should. The biggest problem for me has always trying to get involved with other like-minded Catholics and this forum does fill that breach for me to some extent. I didn't get involved in youth groups at all in secondary school as I was (and still am to a degree) a very shy person. Apologies for going on and on, but I agree that this is a fascinating subject and thanks Ranger for bringing it up.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 17, 2015 19:06:44 GMT
That is all very interesting, Young Ireland, but I found a couple of things you said especially interesting.
One was the lack of an interior spirituality. This is something I also struggle with and I wonder if it is the case with any others of the contributors here. I am always eager to attend Mass and feel upset if I could have attended and didn't, for instance through poor time management. I'm always glad I've gone. And yet, I very frequently get bored at Mass, find it difficult to concentrate, etc. Contemplative prayer is also something I struggle with. I try to spend time before the Blessed Sacrament every day, where possible, but I find it hard to spend more than a few minutes without getting antsy. I understand the concept of having a conversation with God but it's not something I've ever been good at doing. It is so much easier for me to read or write about spiritual subjects than it is to "be still, and know that I am God." Sometimes I feel tempted to say that I am religious but not spiritual.
The other was the mention of shyness. I am also a very shy person. This might (or it might not) surprise those on this forum who have met me. I was cripplingly shy when i was younger and it's still something I struggle with. I've often thought about writing something about Christianity and shyness. How do you evangelize if you are shy? I am in awe of Ranger's work with Night Fever, approaching strangers in the street and inviting them to light a candle in a church. I won't claim I absolutely couldn't do that, but I find it hard to even imagine. I think this question of shyness is one that has not really been broached much, for all I know. One thing that is good about Catholicism, for shy people, is the impersonality of the liturgy and the sacraments. You know what is expected of you and there is little or no improvisation. But I think even extroverted people appreciate this, because there is such dislike of gladhandling at the sign of peace. I nearly always agree with Breda O'Brien, but I didn't like one article in the Irish Catholic where she called for a more personal and familial atmosphere at Mass and in parishes. And I didn't even disagree with the objective, but if it involved any kind of pushiness it would be pushing shy people AWAY.
I didn't mean to derail the discussion. I agree with Young Ireland that Ranger really hit on a fascinating subject here and I'm interested to hear other views, especially since we have quite a range of ages on the forum.
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Post by Ranger on Sept 17, 2015 20:43:01 GMT
That is all very interesting, Young Ireland, but I found a couple of things you said especially interesting. One was the lack of an interior spirituality. This is something I also struggle with and I wonder if it is the case with any others of the contributors here. I am always eager to attend Mass and feel upset if I could have attended and didn't, for instance through poor time management. I'm always glad I've gone. And yet, I very frequently get bored at Mass, find it difficult to concentrate, etc. Contemplative prayer is also something I struggle with. I try to spend time before the Blessed Sacrament every day, where possible, but I find it hard to spend more than a few minutes without getting antsy. I understand the concept of having a conversation with God but it's not something I've ever been good at doing. It is so much easier for me to read or write about spiritual subjects than it is to "be still, and know that I am God." Sometimes I feel tempted to say that I am religious but not spiritual. Have you tried writing your prayer out before the Blessed Sacrament? Something I learned to do when abroad. I think it requires an effort to stay focused on God and not on the act of writing so that it doesn't merely become a cathartic exercise, but I find when I can't focus it can be a good way to actually speak to God and there is a history of so-called 'prayer journals' in the Church, at least for the last short while.The other was the mention of shyness. I am also a very shy person. This might (or it might not) surprise those on this forum who have met me. I was cripplingly shy when i was younger and it's still something I struggle with. I've often thought about writing something about Christianity and shyness. How do you evangelize if you are shy? I am in awe of Ranger's work with Night Fever, approaching strangers in the street and inviting them to light a candle in a church. I won't claim I absolutely couldn't do that, but I find it hard to even imagine. I think this question of shyness is one that has not really been broached much, for all I know. One thing that is good about Catholicism, for shy people, is the impersonality of the liturgy and the sacraments. You know what is expected of you and there is little or no improvisation. But I think even extroverted people appreciate this, because there is such dislike of gladhandling at the sign of peace. I nearly always agree with Breda O'Brien, but I didn't like one article in the Irish Catholic where she called for a more personal and familial atmosphere at Mass and in parishes. And I didn't even disagree with the objective, but if it involved any kind of pushiness it would be pushing shy people AWAY. I'm actually quite shy myself. One reason I've gone to Nightfever is because I feel a need to push myself out of my comfort zone so as not to grow complacent; I have actually only made it a few times myself.I didn't mean to derail the discussion. I agree with Young Ireland that Ranger really hit on a fascinating subject here and I'm interested to hear other views, especially since we have quite a range of ages on the forum. Well, it's interesting to see where the discussion leads! But yes, would be interested to hear other views on the original questions.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 18, 2015 11:08:24 GMT
Thanks for that prayer journal suggestion, Ranger. It has benefits and drawbacks. I'll mull on it!
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Post by Ranger on Sept 19, 2015 10:17:50 GMT
As I said, I don't always do it (in fact most of the time I don't) but there are times it's the only way I can 'raise my heart and mind to God' as the Catechism says.
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Post by assisi on Sept 19, 2015 20:41:08 GMT
When I was in my teens and twenties (I'm 55 now) living in the North, the churches were generally packed in the 60s and 70s. Undoubtedly many identified Catholicism and Nationalism as tribal identifiers and as counterpoints to the fear of being overwhelmed by loyalism/unionism. But, thinking back, there was little discussion and understanding of Catholicism, many people's faith, particularly the younger generation, was quite superficial and lacked depth. Mass attendance seemed more like habit than anything more substantial. I remember when the movie 'The Exorcist' came out (1973/74) lots of folk were saying that it made them come back to mass attendance/faith again because it was so scary and upsetting - and I remember thinking that their faith must have been pretty brittle if a movie influenced them so much, and, true to form, their return to the faith faded out again with time.
During the 60s, 70s and 80s, apart from loyalism and some republicans who thought the church should do more to support their cause, there would have been much less hostility towards Catholicism in the mass media that we now experience. I spent a few years in Dublin in the early eighties as a student but didn't experience any real undercurrents of hostility. At that time I remember reading an article by a journalist called Desmond Fennell and thinking how he stood out from all the, admittedly few, writers I read in the papers. The difference about Fennell that struck a chord with me was that his article (I can't remember the exact content of the article now) talked about Ireland, religion and probably morality, whereas what I read elsewhere was generally non-religious, non-spiritual (i.e. politics, economics, sport etc).
As a student I didn't 'know' or understood 'the times' we were living in as I was too preoccupied with student life and student insecurities to analyse what was going on around me. But I think that it would (and should) have been quite clear to more mature and thinking Catholics apart from Fennell. The Ego Materialism that Fennell talks about, in my opinion, was given a big impetus by the 'social revolution' of the 60s - the protests, the music, the hippie movement, the rise of TV and advertising etc and was slowly permeating Irish culture. However I do think the Troubles obscured things somewhat and made people focus on the immediate Irish problem without seeing, as clearly as they could, the secular tide creeping in (at that point ironically Nationalists would have been looking to Europe and America to assert some influence over the excesses of British rule in the North). Also the EU had not attained the level of political influence it currently has.
In more recent books and articles Fennell has re-articulated the general idea of ego materialism, using the phrase 'consumerist liberalism' to define the current ideology that holds sway and is hostile to Catholicism. Unfortunately, if he is as prescient now as he was in 1962 then we might have trouble ahead, as outlined in the excerpt from a recent essay of his below:
As the new millennium arrived, that was the situation. For as long as the power to buy and do of governments, corporations and consumers keeps increasing, and the teaching that this new western life is morally the best life ever, continues to have force for some, the West's post-European system will continue to function. It still has some years to go before it matches the life span of its more conservatively post-European Soviet counterpart. That the American system could last as long as that seems possible. That it can endure much longer is excluded by the extreme fragility of its life-support mechanism. Inevitably, within a matter of years, there will be an end to the continuous increase of the power to buy and do, and with that the main source of the system's ersatz sense and social glue will vanish. Ipso facto, its vaunted moral superiority will become an irrelevant twaddle. Nothing will then remain to prevent the direct and continuous impact of its senselessness and effective normlessness on the consciousness of westerners, nor to make the system's senseless and unloved life framework seem a good life. Bereft of its life-support mechanism, it will turn sufferers into opportunists whom the ever-growing number of regulations, and the ever-better-equipped police forces, will fail to tame. Like a creeping earthquake, first here then there, the chaos of the utopian values and rules will translate into a violent social disintegration which long-foretold ecological disorder will exacerbate. The only effective remedy will be the eventual slow emergence of a new civilisation—providing, as do all civilisations, sense and internalised norms, and relegating Europe’s, after Rome’s, to history.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 19, 2015 21:01:51 GMT
Fascinating stuff, Assisi. Thank you.
Someone I met on a FÁS course (a government training course) in 2001 was an atheist and an Irish republican who went to Mass every week out of tribal loyalty. I was an atheist myself at that time, and I remember thinking how stupid that was, and how wrong it seemed.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 21, 2018 22:45:03 GMT
The more sophisticated version of "blame it all on Protestantism" is that Protestantism derives from nominalism, a strand of late mediaeval thought which sees God in terms of will rather than reason, which had deeply influenced late mediaeval Catholicism well before the reformation. The "do as you're told and don't ask questions" mindset of a certain strain of old-style Irish Catholicism might perhaps be presented in similar terms.
BTW Des Fennell seems to me to have something of the same problem. He likes to talk about values being adopted because people choose to adopt them (or because an elite adopt them and impose them on others) which presents it in terms of pure power, but at the same time he refers to certain values being better suited to us,more normal etc which implies they are intrinsically superior/true. I'm afraid he plays a three-card trick, appealing to will when he is challenged and to truth when he is putting forward his own beliefs. OTOH his attitude that what he believes is self-evidently true and questioning it constitutes automatic moral disqualification might be seen as a distortion of realism (the opposite view to nominalism).
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Post by assisi on Nov 23, 2018 19:56:18 GMT
Re-reading the original Fennell article in Ranger's original post it is pretty amazing how prophetic much of it was, seeing that it was written in 1962, some 56 years ago.
For example, on the fledgling Common Market:
The Common Market is purely and simply an economic arrangement which may or may not develop into a West-European super-state — we have no sure guarantee that it will do so. But in that strangely hysterical way in which our public men and public organs idolised the United Nations, they are now, in turn, idolising and canonising the Common Market.
He talks of 'Soft Charity':
But there is another way of being “reasonable” which is not so much a betrayal of truth as of charity. I mean that “soft” charity which always wants to appear kind and which implicitly rejects the need for loving harshness or stern affection, denying them a legitimate existence. Life without charity is a desert or a jungle; life filled with mushy charity is a swamp.
How accurately does this describe the emphasis on mercy at the expense of truth or justice that we now encounter in much of the Church today. And how accurately does it nail the secular creed that feelings trump truth when it suits their agenda.
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