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Post by hibernicus on Jan 29, 2010 18:25:31 GMT
This hostile account of Christina Gallagher appeared on a Fatima website which sees itself as having a mission to expose bogus seers in 1998. At the time I received it with some scepticism, but it resembles the account of Gallagher given in IMMACULATE DECEPTION. The link is posted for your information and this site does not necessarily endorse its views. www.unitypublishing.com/Apparitions/Gallagher.html
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Feb 11, 2010 9:56:32 GMT
I have read Immaculate Deception and I recommend it to anyone. I don't applaud The Sunday World lightly, but Jim Gallagher has done an exceptional job here. Mr Gallagher allows former HoP insiders speak and the portrayal of both Christina Gallagher and Fr McGinnity is horrendous. I find it hard to see Fr McGinnity as deluded - he seems willfully blind and he is the one doing most of the fundraising - compelling vulnerable old people into giving huge sums of money.
If I borrow from Hib's description of the ex-priest turned apocalyptic sandwich board Irish dancer, Neil Horan, there is an egotism underlying this. There are many relatively isolated people who believe the world is gone bad. The HoP is giving them a reason to feel special - and making them pay for the privilege. The thing is, if you think the world is going to end any day now, the €50,000 or €100,000 you have set aside for a rainy day means very little.
Mr Gallagher's account (it is very confusing that the alleged visionary and critical author share a surname) is very pro the genuine Catholic position and his criticism of the Church is on two counts. One is that Cardinal Brady has done little or nothing about Fr McGinnity's activity as mentioned above. The other is that Archbishop Neary has been much more forthcoming in his criticisms of the HoP to American and Filipino bishops than he has been at home.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 11, 2010 11:02:20 GMT
There is a rather poor play by Criostoir O Floinn called COTA BAN CHRIOST in which a young woman who has had various painful experiences with the clergy and is pregnant decides to take her revenge on them by approaching a parish priest and persuading him that she is a secon Virgin Mary. He takes her into his parochial house despite scandal and they are eventually ejected by a mob and have to flee to England. Various developments ensue.
It's not a good play because various plot developments evade the implications of the story, but also because the priest is too saintly. If O Floinn had been prepared to give a stronger role to vanity in the priest's decision we might I think come up with something like the story of Fr. McGinnity and Christina Gallagher; for IMMACULATE DECEPTION seems to suggest that Christina Gallagher is driven by a deep sense of resentment over the poverty of her early life and her experience of acting as a servant for well-off families in the area, which has given her a sense that she is entitled to whatever she wants no matter how much harm she does to others, and the contrast between the demure Madonna-like image projected by the woman in the play and the revelation of her real self driven by anger, contempt and resentment is very like the difference between the public image of Christina Gallagher and the rapacious, resentful, self-indulgent figure portrayed in the recollections of her disillusioned disciples.
(One point that O Floinn gets, BTW, though he doesn't know what to do with it, is the difference between the outward deference shown to priests in the Ireland he grew up in and the inner resentment which many of those deferential people felt towards them for various reasons.)
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Feb 11, 2010 11:50:29 GMT
I read Cóta Bán Chríost as a young and enthusiastic Conraitheoir when I read a lot of novels and plays by (more or less) contemporary writers in Irish (at the time I was trying to impress the grand-daughter of one such writer, not Ó Floinn, with my knowledge of her grand-father's work but then I came to my senses). I even heard Ó Floinn speak and I recall him referring to the fact he was in the same class in school as Seán Sabhat of Garryowen and Sabhat's death left a profound effect on him. Sabhat was almost a caricature of a Catholic nationalist of his day. But to return to the point, the play is apt. If I recall correctly (after two decades), the woman's brother had been a clerical student and it didn't work, with consequences for the family (perhaps in line with stuff in the vocations figure thread), so the woman takes her revenge on the church by deluding this good priest, who develops an affection for her through the play. And when she dies (suicide after remorse. She set out to destroy the priest to the extent of leaving evidence of a passionate affair in the house he expelled from), he intones the Mass for her soul. But Hibernicus is right - it is a mediocre play. It seems to prefigure some of the prurient nonsense Rev Pádraig Standún comes up with later though. Anyway, Christina Gallagher has found a sucker in Gerry McGinnity and he in his turn focussed on other suckers. I am sorry to use the expression. The suckers are generally old, lonely, vulnerable, inoffensive at worst and rather good generally. They are confronted by a world that they can't make sense of and seek comfort in the HoP. Christina Gallagher gives them this. The trouble is their living saint - the reports of an assumption corroborates Hibernicus' analogy with the pseudo-Virgin in Cóta Bán Chríost - is that she is a cynical, foul-mouthed, avaricious, lascivious con woman with a taste for the high life and no conscience about living on other people's painstakingly saved cash. I hope that Fr McGinnity's promise that Our Lady would look after the donors in spite of his position as a useful tool in this scandal. Especially by removing the scales from their eyes.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 11, 2010 15:56:10 GMT
I don't think it is quite fair to bracket O Floinn with Standun, because he takes the concept of a priestly vocation seriously. (In his autobiography he complains about a revival of the play in which the priest was presented as a clown, and emphasises that the part should be played entirely 'straight'.)
The big problems with the play are as follows: (1) Since the plot which the woman hatches would only work if the priest involved was sincere (a hypocrite would have simply sent her away) and she has ruined his life to avenge wrongs with which he was not involved and for which he was in no way responsible, the audience's sympathies must necessarily be skewed against her and in favour of the priest. It's almost as if O Floinn could only express a degree of anti-clericalism (and he had some legit reasons for this - he got sacked unheard from a National Teacher's job because he refused to do unpaid menial work for the school manager - i.e. the parish priest, was blacklisted by the hierarchy because he had been sacked, and would have had to emigrate - he was a married man with a large family - if a Christian Brothers' school in co. Dublin had not employed him) if it was presented in a double-insulated form to remove any possibility that the audience might end up siding with her. (It is explained at length that while other priests - including the ones who did her brother wrong - are indeed snobbish, the priest is not a snob and comes from a humble background.) It would be a better play if the priest's acceptance of her miraculous claims was influencd by mixed motives such as spiritual pride and desire for singularity. I might add that O Floinn has a characteristic inability to appreciate viewpoints different from his own; in the later two volumes of his autobiography, for example, he declares both implicitly and explicitly that anyone who dislikes Pearse, disapproves of the Easter Rising, or supports the continuance of partition cannot be merely mistaken - they must be British agents. He can't comprehend how anyone could sincerely think differently.
(2) The second point relates to the ending. O Floinn has brought the characters to a point where the logical conclusions are either that the priest will definitively turn his back on the priesthood and take up the roles of husband and father, or that he will leave the woman and her child, for whom he now represents the only possible hope, and return to the priesthood. O Floinn evades this dilemma by having the woman kill herself and her child, and the shocking thing is that the audience are led to see this as a happy ending, with O Floinn's approval and even to feel that she has somehow atoned for her wrongdoing by a noble act of self-sacrifice. It would be a much better play if he did leave the priesthood (whatever objections other than dramatic might be raised to such a course of action). This romanticisation of suicide is IMHO much more serious than whatever element of prurience there is (very small, I would say) in the portrayal of the growing mutual attraction of priest and woman.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 11, 2010 17:38:45 GMT
One problem with IMMACULATE DECEPTION is that Gallagher (the writer) does not know much about the history of Marian apparitions and related subjects so he does not pick up on the ways in which the delusional version on offer at the House of Prayer counterfeits the genuine article. For example, he doesn't pick up on the fact that it is fairly common for visionaries/locutionists to have a close emotional tie with a spiritual director and/or amanuensis who expresses their insights in more theologially sophisticated terms. Fr. McGinnity, I suspect, sees himself as St. St. Claude de la Colombiere to Christina Gallagher's Margaret Mary Alacoque, or perhaps Clemens Brentano to her Catherine Anne Emmerich. IMMACULATE DECEPTION also desn't pick up on the significance of a report that Christina Gallagher told Fr. McGinnity Our Lady had said he would be the new St. Patrick. The point of this, I rather think, is that St. Patrick tells us in the CONFESSION that he was initially rejected for the episcopate because of a friend's betraying testimony, but afterwards was reassured that he was God's instrument. I suspect Fr. McGinnity interprets his experiences in a similar light, as trials which will precede his final triumph. Indeed, we must hope his eyes are opened.
BTW the discussion of Dick Hogan's role in this is sadly revealing. It appears that Hogan is sincere because he actually did complain to the Newspaper Ombudsman about the reports on Christina Gallagher (something that Gallagher herself and her other lieutenants singularly failed to do despite much huffing and puffing, and which suggests he is acting in good faith) but that - if his complaint is accurately summarised by the book - it completely takes it for granted that Christina Gallagher is genuine and does not need to be proven to be such, and maintains that it is intolerable that her veracity should be questioned in any way at all. I am bound to say this is pretty much in line with the intellectual level of the IRISH FAMILY when Dick Hogan was running it - it just reacted to events without trying to develop a consistent line or address criticisms, it was always predicting great victories and when these didn't materialise it just forgot all about them and produced new predictions without analysing the reasons for the setback. How sad to see someone who did so much good work enslaved by Sapphira.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Feb 23, 2010 19:59:48 GMT
I think lots of people got snared by the HoP. It seems to have also led to the collapse of Islandeady.
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Post by goldenfleece on Feb 3, 2011 14:18:11 GMT
Do you recall the words in the Gospel to the effect of "If they say He is secret rooms, heed them not!" Do you not also think that television relay of unratified opinions about our Blessed Mother and the sight of tastelessly gigantic chapel furniture and statues could well be what the Apocalypse means by the image of the Beast ? A room where a retrospectively dressed woman tries to pass every anecdotal facet of her life as something saintly and answers phone calls about ideas she can have no authority upon ? I am personally convinced that the instructions of Popes about televising Mass should have been heeded here at least and then the parody of faith would have not been allowed to prosper. Also there is a serious derangement of doctrine preached by this station. It puts Our Blessed Mother on the level of her Divine Son. I leave to you to recollect what John XXIII said this did to Mary.In the wake of thorough disobedience, many other distortions follow and the internet takes them everywhere. That is why I shall no longer even mention the name of this enterprise and the orders which were created to make it run and now destroy daily the inspiration of Clare and Francis Assisi with ugliness and pretentiousness.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 7, 2011 21:52:55 GMT
Goldenfleece appears to have an obsessive hatred of EWTn, partly based on issues of artistic taste. May I suggest that he opens a new thread to argue this rather than spreading it over threads that have nothing to do with it, and that he sets out a coherent argument rather than engaging in sneers. I can think of several saints who went in for forms of devotion which might be regarded as tacky or simple-minded; that doesn't mean they were not saints. Sneering at american pro-lifers on the grounds that they hold other political views which you regard as "anti-social" is also a very bad sign; I can think of quite a lot of abolitionists who held views on other matters which were highly problematic but they were still right about slavery, and those who defended slavery becuse of the dottiness of its opponents were seriously mistaken (to put it mildly). I notivce that he also sneers at nuns who wear traditional habits as "retrospectively dressed" and assumes such nuns can have no serious intellectual credentials. Let's hear some specific mistakes she has made rather than just sneering. If you reall ythink that tasteless church furniture is equivalent to the image of the Beast, I suggest that you seek professional help. What if the Beast is distinguished by his refined tastes?
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Post by goldenfleece on Feb 8, 2011 9:32:24 GMT
I'm going to leave this board. Why can nobody-but nobody!-say one word about the horrifying ideas including militarism and bad taste that are part of EWTN and he not be shunned in language like yours ? Nuns are no longer to tote mediaeval habits and laugh like stupid hyenas at their ridiculous anecdotes ...that is wrong. If you cannot see that...Anyway you said nothing about the fact that Jesus warned us that impostors like her and Ms Gallagher would arise. I think you are the biased party not I. Goodbye.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 10, 2011 10:48:13 GMT
Goldenfleece can dish out criticism, but it seems he can't take it. Accusations of being an impostor should be only made where there is good evidence to back them up. I call Christina Gallagher an impostor based on the descriptions of her behaviour and lifestyle made ON THE RECORD by former disciples and reproduced in the book IMMACULATE DECEPTION (together with descriptions of her numerous mansions etc). If Goldenfleece has evidence of this sort he should let us know it - if not, he should confine himself to criticise these people as mistaken, misguided etc without suggesting that they are deliberately deceiving people - as he does by calling them "impostors".
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 30, 2011 11:13:18 GMT
Since Christina Gallagher features on the "TV3 programme" thread I am moving this thread up for the convenience of anyone who wishes to refer to it in conjunction with the later thread.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 30, 2012 21:33:19 GMT
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Post by kittyandjoe on Jul 9, 2012 18:26:26 GMT
Well its some four years Later, & satan's deciples havn't brought the House down.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 10, 2012 11:24:18 GMT
There is a theory, widely held, that it is Satan's disciples who are holding the House up in the first place.
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