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Post by hibernicus on Jul 22, 2013 17:52:29 GMT
Again, it's a question of emphasis. Suffering is not good for its own sake, and the goods of this world were given for our use and benefit. The big problem is when people elevate the view that suffering is always meaningless to a general principle, and take the view that we should never be asked to risk or sacrifice anything, even when we are asked to make a small sacrifice for the considerable benefit of others who are in straits.
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Post by farlow on Jul 22, 2013 18:07:09 GMT
Yes suffering when opportunities arise to love God and your neighbor.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 19, 2013 19:06:49 GMT
Rod Dreher discusses a piece by Ben Domenech which argues that the assault on religious liberty is an ongoing fall-out from the sexual revolution, because the sexual revolution defines sexuality as constitutive of one's very being - what you are, not what you do. (A subsidiary point is that what strikes me in the nineteenth-century debates on religious tolerance was precisely that religious belief came to be seen as what you are, not just what you do, so that it came to be regarded as tyrannical to force someone to contravene their deeply-held beliefs. One function of the redefinition of freedom of religion as freedom of worship is to reverse this process, so that religion is defined only as a series of discrete acts.) The significance of this in relation to the current controversy over the Mater Hospital's refusal to perform abortions (where the hospital's antagonists have been saying quite explicitly that religious liberty means freedom to worship and nothing more) is pretty obvious. Once again the left-liberals in the States have done the heavy lifting, and their finished product will be imported here and imposed en bloc on Ireland, where social conservatives are much weaker and more inarticulate and disorganised than in the States. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/mrs-patrick-campbell-religious-liberty/Here is the Domenech text, in case there are access problems in future: ricochet.com/main-feed/The-Future-of-Religious-LibertyEXTRACT This week should bring two significant Supreme Court decisions on the matter of same sex marriage, in the cases of Hollingsworth v. Perry (the California Proposition 8 case) and the United States v. Windsor (the DOMA issue). Personally, I think it would be a shame for the Court to hand down any sweeping ruling on the issues involved. Just like it did in Roe and Doe, the Court could stop the conversation, halting the ability of voices to be heard and for this to play out in a representative political sphere. Representative politics ought to represent, and the people and their representatives should decide what marriage is, and whether they wish to change their minds on it, not the Court. The Summer 2013 issue of The City, which mails this week, is full of smart writing on the issue of marriage and religious liberty. In editing the issue, I read a great deal of the work from Robbie George, Ryan T. Anderson and others who have been making essentially the natural law argument in defense of the traditional definition of marriage. The core of their argument is here. Upon closer inspection, I think they have really been arguing against the rise of something which has a much larger impact than just a small number of homosexuals getting married – they have instead been arguing against the modern concept of sexual identity. And this is a much tougher task, considering how ingrained this concept has become in our lives. During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense – "I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses" – and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar – in much the same way religion is for others. As Walker Percy wrote, "Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital." The problem with gay marriage is not about gay people getting married – they’ve already been doing that, or living that way. The problem with gay marriage is not that it will redefine marriage into a less valuable social institution in the eyes of the populace – that is already happening, has been for decades, and will continue regardless of whether gays are added to it or not. And the problem with gay marriage is not about the slippery slope of what comes next – though yes, the legal battle over polyamory and polygamy is inevitably coming, as the principle of marriage equality demands it does (these relationships already exist below the radar, albeit with more poly than amory involved – of the 500 gay couples followed in the respected San Francisco study, about half of the partners have sex with someone else with their partner knowing). No, the real problem with gay marriage is that the nature of the marriage union is inherently entwined in the future of the first line of the Bill of Rights: our right to religious liberty. Orthodox believers of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths were slow to understand this. I'm talking about something much bigger here than the discrimination lawsuits brought across the country against bakers and photographers: I'm talking about whether churches will be able to function as public entities in an era where their views on sin, particularly sexual sin, are in direct conflict with not just opinion but the law – and proselytizing those views from the pulpit or in the public square will be viewed as using the protection of religious expression to protect hateful speech. We saw this problem already in Illinois' marriage law, where churches that do not allow same sex unions would essentially have to close their doors to full participation in civil society. We see it as a constant issue regarding Canada's hate speech laws, where courts must discern whether quoting Bible verses amounts to “harming the public discourse.” We will see it more here. That obvious oncoming clash strikes me as the most troublesome aspect of this, and the one that has received the least attention in the rush to legalize. The argument has been more about benefits and social outcomes and “won't somebody think of the children”, ignoring the core problem, which raises challenges to the freedom of speech and expression the likes of which led to the pilgrims crossing the sea in the first place. The conflict between sexual liberty and religious liberty is unlikely to be one the religious will win, in large part because of the broad and increasing acceptance of an idea President Obama has espoused more than once in public: that the religious have a freedom to worship, and that's where it ends. When you leave the pew, you must leave your faith there. Among the religious, this is absurd – their entire lives are defined by their faith, in ways large and small. For both Christianity and Islam, the core of their faith is built on a call to take the message to the world, spreading it through public witness and preaching. Yet this belief in the limited freedom to worship is what led Obama's administration to argue that faith-based hiring and firing is a discriminatory act for religious entities. It will lead to similar cases in the years to come regarding the marriage issue, but not just focused in that space – expect it to factor in divorce proceedings, custody battles, and more points involving the nice folks from Child Protective Services. Expect it also to factor in dramatically expanding the scope of these discrimination lawsuits – think on the doctor in California who was brought up on discrimination charges for referring a lesbian couple to a colleague for artificial insemination. In a litigious society, those conscience conflicts will multiply, with pressure on anyone who "refuses and refers" to be stripped of their government-provided license or memberships in professional society. This will occur in part because the gay and lesbian population is distinctly different in comparison to the rest of the public when it comes to religion. Half of the LGBT population is atheist, agnostic, or religiously unaffiliated – and this makes them far less likely to respect the religious defenses of those they view as preaching and practicing bigotry, and recruiting people to join their bigoted club. Without religious liberty, there really is no such thing as free speech. When government can pick and choose which form of expression is religiously defensible and which is unjustified hate, it fundamentally alters the relationship between state and citizen. If a different path toward gay marriage had been followed – the compromise of a simple civil union approach to ensure access to rights and benefits – it's possible this clash could've been avoided. A federalist solution to marriage could've slowed the approach to the issue to a point where the concerns of the faithful could achieve proper protection. But those for whom sexual identity is paramount have insisted on redefining institutions, through a series of repeated flashpoints – from the Boy Scouts to the Catholic hospitals and adoption centers – disregarding any of the outcomes. The calculation is simple: ensuring the supremacy of their worldview is the goal, and those who disrespect it (for religious reasons or not) deserve to be shunned, regardless of the fallout for civil society. And there will be fallout. So the real issue here is not about gay marriage at all, but the sexual revolution's consequences, witnessed in the shift toward prioritization of sexual identity, and the concurrent rise of the nones and the decline of the traditional family. The real reason Obama's freedom to worship limitation can take hold is that we are now a country where the average person prioritizes sex far more than religion. One of the underestimated aspects of the one out of five Americans (and one out of three Millennials) who are now thoroughly religiously unaffiliated is that, according to Barna's research, they aren't actually seekers. They're not looking or thinking about being part of a community focused on spirituality, in prayer, fellowship, worship, or anything else. Their exposure to faith is diminished because they want it to be. In a nation where fewer people truly practice religion, fewer people external to those communities will see any practical reason to protect the liberty of those who do. The world could in time come full circle to Mrs. Campbell's old line: You are free to believe, as long as you don't do it in the streets, so as not to frighten the horses. END
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 19, 2013 19:16:09 GMT
Oh, and just in case anyone thought it was scaremongering to say that a much broader destabilisation and deconstruction of marriage is underway, the BBC have this piece on their website today giving a soft-focus glamourisation of a four-member "polyamorous" household. (Each of the women sees herself as "married" to both men and vice versa, the women also have a lesbian relationship, and each member of the household is free to carry on with outsiders provided the other members are informed in advance and approve after a discussion). The questioning and commentary is pretty softball and goes out of its way to avoid any suggestion that there might be problems with this set-up. In particular it avoids the question of children (there are none at present). Assuming they have not deliberately decided not to have children, there will almost certainly be problems in line when (for example) one of the women is pregnant and the other is not, or if the couple (or persons) who did not produce a child are asked to share childcare duties equally, or if one of the household members has a child with someone outside the household. The BBC does not raise such awkward questions because it is committed to the Permanent Sexual Revolution, just as it was back in the early 1970s when it ridiculed MAry Whitehouse as fuddy-duddy for criticising the legalisation of paedophilia in Denmark: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23726120
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 20, 2013 11:29:09 GMT
It's very clear that the objective here is to mainstream something which is eccentric at present.
Funny I was thinking of Paul VI's prediction of the consequences of contraception in Humanae Vitae earlier this morning. This is another one. I can imagine that not long down the road, young people will be complaining about the oppression of monogamy and the present dark days.
Have people yet to realise that the current state of affairs has already been unsustainable for some time and is continuing to go in the wrong direction?
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 21, 2013 20:43:17 GMT
The oppression of monogamy talk is already well under way. The last couple of decades' discussions of Catholic sex scandals, Magdalem asyla and so one have some of the following as their subtexts: (1) The Christian teaching that sex should only take place within marriage between one man and one woman is unworkable and cruelly frustrating. Anyone who tries to practice it will be left hopelessly lonely and frustrated, probably driven mad, and suffering from unbearable guilt. (2) The only way a semblance of it can be maintained in a society is by suppressing vast areas of knowledge so that people are ignorant and naive, and by inflicting hideously cruel punishments on those who are found out in order to terrify everyone else into toeing the line. (3) Those who advocate Christian teaching in this matter are either driven demented by trying to live up to it, or conscious hypocrites who don't live up to it themselves (or both; they are driven mad and engage in hideous perversions they would never have sunk to had they been left to live normally promiscuous lives). (4)Those who advocate Christian teaching in such matters are really engaging in power-trips; they make people feel guilty so that they can manipulate them and have power over them. (5) Therefore the mere advocacy of Christian teaching on sexuality is a form of malevolent slut-shaming, and the only healthy response is to reject it openly and publicly and to suppress its advocacy. Sexuality should be consequence-free and seen purely in terms of self-empowerment, wherea anything goes between consenting adults.
This of course has some obvious flaws of its own (it assumes sex has no personal or social consequences and is therefore entirely private and not subject to moral judgement, but it does, but it does - as do any human action, given that we are life-limited beings of limited capacities; it ignores the fact that people who see sex in terms of self-empowerment often do so by exercising it to humiliate and shame others, as recent events in connection with Slane indicate)
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 21, 2013 23:18:07 GMT
What is interesting to me is how this agenda stalled and has now speeded up again. I would say that the assault on monogamy and chastity, and the related institution of the family, was at full throttle in the sixties and seventies; then it took a reverse, and even apostles of sexual liberation spoke about commitment and responsibility and so forth (maybe Aids had something to do with this); now the assult on monogamy and chastity is picking up speed again, although lip-service to the family remains almost universal. ("Different models" of family, to be sure.)
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 25, 2013 16:29:49 GMT
Agreed, Maolseachlainn. I think it has something to do with the fact that over the last 20 years a generation has come of age, and into positions of influence, which take the sexual revolution for granted, while over the same period the last generation influenced by the world before the sexual revolution has died off or retired. What we are seeing IMHO is the working out of an ethos based entirely on the concept of self-invention and self-fulfilment, found on both libertarian Right and liberal-left. (Indeed, one of the odder aspects of the whole upheaval is that the Old Left were very often sexual puritans, precisely because they believed in subordinating individual self-fulfilment to collective well-being.) There is also I suspect a relationship between the sexual revolution and the breakup of the Fordist economic order (i.e. the idea of skilled working-class jobs for life with certain guaranteed rights/privileges such as trade union recognition. The overlap between old-style Catholic social teaching and the more conservative type of Anglo-American trade unionism was quite startling in retrospect, both in terms of faults and virtues.) I remember seeing a newspaper article recently which argued that in Britain marriage is becoming purely a middle-class institution, and one reason for this was that with the demise of working-class lifetime employment working-class people are more reluctant to make lifetime commitments.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 26, 2013 9:31:28 GMT
That last post of Hibernicus lays bare the problem that we have. The situation which the working class are in is a result of socio-economic chaos which is a result of the post-industrial order now emerging. The pity is that the liberal left partys seem to have no interest in providing a remedy, but don't challenge the libertarian right. You could probably write a conspiracy theory on this, but the convergence of views are suggestive of something even more ugly than Des Fennell or Theodore Dalrymple might comment on.
I am not in a position to produce an exhaustive analysis here and now, but I will observe that in my lifetime, I saw a situation where the working classes held onto traditional Catholic morality and devotionalism in a way that the middle classes were abandoning it. Groups such as the Workers' Party were at work at undermining this, but they weren't totally successful. My caricature of hard left student in the 1980s and 1990s was invariably middle class, as seen as one particular Trotskyite in the Dáil has been known as "Rich Boy" Barrett long before he achieved any elected position. Though the working class were more appreciative of the Church than their middle class counterparts, I don't believe the Church appreciated this. Most seminaries I witnessed were by, for and of the middle classes. This was particularly egregious in Dublin where assignment to a working class parish was seen in terms of punishment. There are a number of "traditionally-minded" young priests in the Archdiocese for whom the prospect of being assigned to Ballymun or Darndale is a horror too great to be contemplated. And some people wonder what Archbishop Martin meant when he talks about the newer vocations being fragile. I have to say, I know a couple of younger priests in other dioceses who told me they found it much easier to function in the working class areas rather than the middle class areas, where there was more cynicism and hostility.
On the other hand, there religious who themselves come from impeccable middle class backgrounds and bat for the perceived marginalised while treating the working class as if they have something.
The point I am driving at is that the working class are the ones who are being cut adrift here. Neo-liberal economics has no time for them - they are just another collection of statistics. Hibernicus is correct on the end of a "job for life". Aside from cities like Dublin and Cork, localised industries such as Carroll's cigarette factory in Dundalk provided this sort of deal. A friend of mine from Dundalk said a job in Carroll's was like a job in the civil service. The prevailing economic conditions internationally don't see value in this anymore. They propose a model which doesn't take employee loyalty or the benefit of experience to the employer into much account. Everything seems to hinge on ledger entries.
At present, the globally competitive companies want employees who are "flexible". The perceived "brightest" and the "best" might have to work in Amsterdam one year, Singapore the following year, then Chicago and maybe Sydney after that. I'm exaggerating, but you get my point. None of the above are conducive to family life, no matter what studies say. I think there needs to be a re-evaluation of economics and Catholic social teaching to react to the current pattern - and it's consequences.
Factor in the Sexual Revolution, which was fueled by chemical contraception and the widespread toleration of abortion (if you want to analyse hypocrisy in relation to abortion: compare the apparently restrictive abortion legislation in some countries and how commonly this occurs. Look at euthanasia, which is related to the points I am making too, for the same reasons). Paul VI predicted the commodification of sex which followed. We are talking about a commodification of human life; a true culture of death; in the words of a group of post-Marxist academics with an uncharistic admiration for the Pontiff Emeritus, an anthropological emergency. John Waters wrote in the Irish Times recently he tried to make this point on TV3 recently, but was frustrated with the presenter (parroting instructions from the producers) confronting him with the sexual abuse scandals.
There are more aspects of this crisis I could go into which none of the parties, political, academic or media, are giving attention to (and I believe the greater number of clergy and religious are missing a stream running through the papacies of JPII, BXVI and FI which is more unified than people might grasp following a superficial survey). Education is one. Employers only want the education potential employees need to make money. What they do outside the job is their own affair. I don't know what society the liberal left want, but it looks peculiarly like "Aprés nous la dèluge" right now.
In a way, the sexual abominations promoted are a matter of indifference; the rejection of traditional morality passes up the possiblity of analysing other aspects of the anti-civilisation that appears to be emerging.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 26, 2013 22:28:17 GMT
One particularly egregious example of clerical contempt for the working-class was on display in the Ryan Report - there was a pattern of moving abuser priests from middle-class into working-class parishes, on the assumption that the faithful in such parishes were more likely to be deferential and less likely to make trouble (or at least to do so effectively). There were, I think, old and new varieties of Catholic snobbery. The old version which long pre-dates Vatican II and was already in full swing in the STRUMPET CITY era, encouraged middle-class Catholics to see themselves as a sort of aristocracy inherently superior to the grubby plebs. The post-Vatican II variety rests on the cult of the bureaucratic expert, who is assumed to know better than the vulgar and ignorant sheeple. Here are a couple of interesting posts from the British LMS Chairman's blog in which he discusses the research of (ex)-Fr Anthony Archer OP on the decline of working-class Catholic practice in Newcastle-on-Tyne. ONe reason which came across very clearly in his interviews was that old-style devotionalism appealed on a variety of levels, whereas the more analytic and verbal approach associated with the vernacular MAss and the post-Vatican II era discouraged the inarticulate. www.lmschairman.org/2013/06/a-sociologist-on-latin-mass.htmlwww.lmschairman.org/2013/07/the-old-mass-and-workers.htmlEXTRACT I've just finished reading Anthony Archer's classic 'The Two Catholic Churches: a study in oppression' (see also my previous post). It is a fascinating book, imperfect in many ways but still containing some precious insights. The main idea is that the working class were betrayed by the changes to the liturgy, spirituality, and what we might call the general orientation of the Church, following the Second Vatican Council. This is such a surprising, and such a closely-argued claim, that it is worth a blog post. IMG_9001 There is something rather dated about Archer's way of talking - all this stuff about working class culture is very redolent of the sociology of the 1970s. This is partly because that culture has, depending on your definition, either disapeared completely or become a much less significant part of our national life. There are, nevertheless, some very interesting critiques of post-war public policy from what we might call the 'old left', socialists who believed in the organic nature of society and the importance of the family, who were aghast at the effect on the working class by processes such as slum-clearance (and what replaced the slums) and de-industrialisation. Archer fits into this general trend. The first point is that, as Archer says, the Catholic Church was the only Christian church to hold the allegiance of significant numbers of the industrial working class in England. This is a fact of great significance and itself demands explanation. The explanation, in a nutshell, is that the Anglican church was so identified with the establishment that when Anglican farm workers moved to the cities to become factory hands, leaving the social structure of village life behind, with its pressures to go to church, they had no interest at all in practicing. The non-conformists were essentially lower-middle class. The Catholic Church of the 19th century had an appeal for the working class, both indiginous and Irish-immigrant, for two immediate reasons. It let everyone in: you didn't need to be wearing a smart suit of clothes. And it had considerable critical distance from the establishment. IMG_9008 The latter was partly a matter of long-term persecution, but as time went on the old Catholic gentry hoped that they would be increasingly accepted by their peers. The great 19th century Churchmen took a different line: to the horror of some of the old families, as things got easier they didn't seek to blend in but to push the envelope with more exotic ritual, more Italianate churches, more assertive social teaching. The social teaching never had a chance to influence the state, but it was part of a set of distinctive values, a vision of what society should be like, at odds with the way society actually was. It was also linked to the great long-term project of Catholic restoration: the hierarchy, the splendid churches, the guilds, of the Middle Ages were to be built back up brick by brick. The ancientness of the liturgy was naturally essential in this appeal to the past. A tough-minded spirituality of perseverance in adversity was necessary to it also. The result was something appealing to the less comfortable members of society: the working class, and particularly the Irish, when they started arriving in large numbers with the potato famine of the 1840s. It was also appealing to a lot of intellectual converts, and indeed to many aspiring middle-class people. The traditional Mass, as I have quoted Archer as saying, enabled people to engage with it at many different levels. So did the whole structure of Catholic life and thought: from popular devotions right up to neo-Thomism, there was something for everyone. IMG_9010 Archer's critique of the changes after Vatican II is based on the fact that the aspects of the Church which were most appealing to the working class were swept away, and what was brought in was appealing only to the educated and leisured middle class. Out went the Latin Mass in which everyone could engage at their own level; in came an English Mass where your engagement is supposed to be strictly controlled: exactly what the banal phrases mean, what responses to make, when to be friendly to your neighbour, etc.. Out went popular devotions, in came cliquely little groups at house-Masses, charismatic gatherings, or parish councils. Out went the Church as a sign of contradiction, an eccentric, exotic, refuge from society, where truth and authority were alone to be found; in came a Church in which the bishops talked as equals to Anglican bishops, and attended state functions. Out went the spirituality of perseverence in adversity; in came a way of 'finding Jesus' to escape from middle class problems such as lonliness and depression - or just hypochondria. The inspiration for the changes, after all, did not come from any attempt to find out what the bulk of Catholics wanted: it came from theologians, who wanted the respect of their Protestant colleagues. IMG_9017On the new spirituality of 'meeting Jesus', often in the context of charismatic groups, Archer observes, 'The availability of such groups offered a solution for those who regarded the sacred as mediated through participation rather than ritual efficacy...' Again, on the working class: 'Theirs was not the world of an intellectual elite and their religious idiom not that of a specially constructed rationality. Since they spent less time alone or in reading and introspection, and found their solidarity in larger numbers, their religious framework did not bear so much on individualistic expectations as on people gnerally. It did not find expression in that form of religion understood as individual conversion. Hency the emphasis on helping rather than harming people and on the dimension of religion that expressed belonging to one's own kind.' This is, as they say, an interesting angle on 'the changes'. I'll have more to say in a future post about Archer's assessment of the weaknesses of the pre-conciliar Church, and the social changes which undermined it. END
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 27, 2013 9:26:54 GMT
Dr Shaw's treatment of the Anthony Archer study is very interesting and some of it reflects what one priest found; and what I have seen myself. Many working class Catholics no longer attend Mass, but maintain a collection of older devotions, probably have statues or pictures in their homes (and also in their cars: take a look at the amount of rosary beads and Padre Pio's on display in any series of parked vehicles). One of my priest friends told me he had to carry out house blessings and install statues in houses of people he never saw at Mass and that he could walk safely in clerical dress in this area even when the worst of revelations came out. (Interesting counter-point to the Ryan Report; this is despite what the hard left are trying to do in these areas).
But Dr Shaw pointed out not in so many words; there no longer is a working class culture. The reason why is because the Fordist arrangement is gone. I think that the present trad movement in Ireland, at least (Britain might be different but most other parts of the world follow the Irish pattern: we're more typical of the international trad experience) is excessively middle class. I don't think simply appearing with trad vestments will bring anyone in. This needs long term engagement - and that in the face of the fact that Catholic social teaching needs to be re-asserted.
Whatever about the continent, the English-speaking world still had high male and working-class participation on the even of the Council. This is gone now. Even the clerics with the affection for smells and bells Catholicism are probably not equipped to back this up with necessary social work and agitation necessary in these districts. Yet another case of the harvest being great and the labourers few. Praying to the Lord of the Harvest might be the order of the day in this respect.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 27, 2013 15:30:26 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 29, 2013 20:43:13 GMT
Here is another post about Blessed Dominic BArberi, and it has the exact Newman quote: www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2013/08/bl-dominic-barberi.htmlEXTRACT At the height of his struggle over his conversion, Newman had written: “If they want to convert England, let them go barefoot into our manufacturing towns, let them preach to the people like St. Francis Xavier – let them be pelted and trampled on, and I will own that they do what we cannot…let them use the proper arms of the Church and they will prove they are the Church”… END OF EXTRACT Any volunteers?
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Post by chercheur on Sept 2, 2013 23:10:24 GMT
Agreed, Maolseachlainn. I think it has something to do with the fact that over the last 20 years a generation has come of age, and into positions of influence, which take the sexual revolution for granted, while over the same period the last generation influenced by the world before the sexual revolution has died off or retired. What we are seeing IMHO is the working out of an ethos based entirely on the concept of self-invention and self-fulfilment, found on both libertarian Right and liberal-left. (Indeed, one of the odder aspects of the whole upheaval is that the Old Left were very often sexual puritans, precisely because they believed in subordinating individual self-fulfilment to collective well-being.) There is also I suspect a relationship between the sexual revolution and the breakup of the Fordist economic order (i.e. the idea of skilled working-class jobs for life with certain guaranteed rights/privileges such as trade union recognition. The overlap between old-style Catholic social teaching and the more conservative type of Anglo-American trade unionism was quite startling in retrospect, both in terms of faults and virtues.) I remember seeing a newspaper article recently which argued that in Britain marriage is becoming purely a middle-class institution, and one reason for this was that with the demise of working-class lifetime employment working-class people are more reluctant to make lifetime commitments. It's not so much that the working clas are reluctant to make life time commitments as that they assume a lifetime commitment from the ultimate breadwinner....The State. Etymologically matrimony is the care for and protection of the mother. That function in the working class is now de facto the role of the state. In an implicit sense working class women with children see themselves as married to the state which has lifelong and inescapable "matrimonial" ( in the etymologically meaningful sense ) commitment to them. When understood like this the effective disappearance of marriage from the welfare class is easily explained
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 27, 2013 21:34:04 GMT
This blogpost from an American Catholic involved in politics at state level captures very well just how demoralising the tolerance of "dissent" within the Church has been: www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2013/09/the-public-scandal-of-pro-abortion-pro-gay-marriage-catholics-in-high-places/EXTRACT Frankly, I think it’s time our leaders in the Church (the bishops) got their heads together and came up with some sort of consistent way of dealing with situations like this. The paradigm the Church is using is that Congresswoman Pelosi is under the spiritual guidance of her personal religious leader, which would be her pastor, who is acting through her bishop. They are supposed to make decisions such as whether or not she may take communion, I would guess because they are the ones who know her and understand her spiritual situation. I would guess that things are done this way because the Church is a pastoral rather than a political institution. The purpose of excommunication is not to bash someone over the head and punish them. It is to save their souls by bringing them face to face with the gravity of their sins and giving them a shove to repent and change their ways. Public admonishments to not take communion such as the one directed at Congresswoman Pelosi are rare, and they should be. I think it’s appropriate only when the person in question is doing what Congresswoman Pelosi is doing: Committing grave sin in a public manner that encourages other people to also commit this grave sin. This is called scandal, and it should be taken seriously. There will always be temptations, but woe to those who do the tempting, Jesus said. Some translations use the phrase stumbling blocks. What it means is that there will always be people who lead others astray, who lead them away from following Christ, but that those people who do this are in even bigger trouble with God than those they lead. Public figures of today have a mind-boggling arrogance about the way they tempt others away from following Christ. They assert that their sins are not sins. They proclaim themselves faithful followers of Christ even as they trample all over His teachings and commit the most vile sins in front of everyone. They even twist their sins around and proclaim publicly that these sins are righteousness and that those who disagree with this are the ones who are committing sin. Whole denominations have thrown in the towel and forsaken the Gospels in their official teachings. They have themselves become tempters to sin. The Catholic Church has refused to do this. But powerful members of its laity, as well as many of its priests, have joined the other side in the culture wars against the Church, while maintaining that they are, in fact, faithful Catholics. The Church has taken a wink-wink attitude toward this for decades, and now we are all paying the price. No other denomination is so rife with this particularly egregious form of defiant public sinning as the Catholic Church. Prominent Catholics in all walks of life proudly parade their sins against human life and the sacrament of marriage before the public. They use the bully pulpit of their elected offices, media star positions and many-degreed professorships to proclaim an Anti-Christ Christianity that turns the Gospel on its head and makes it a teaching of death, debauchery and nihilism. This is not just individual sin. It is a vast cultural rebellion against the Church led by Catholics who occupy positions of power in our society. I agree with Cardinal Burke. Congresswoman Pelosi should not take communion. However, I think that singling out one member of Congress and aiming the discussion at her alone flies in the face of the reality of the situation. Catholics in public positions, including the clergy leaders of some of our Catholic Universities, are teaching an alternate form of the Gospels that conforms absolutely to the shifting paradigms of our deconstructing society and defies the teachings of the Church with equal absoluteness. This is not just one person, however prominent. It is a widespread, almost universal, defiance of the Church by those of her sons and daughters who sit in the seats of secular power. These people refuse to humble themselves and follow Christ. They insist that Christ should follow them. They don’t leave the Church. They demand that the Church change its definition of sin to suit them. They admonish the Church with all the arrogance of self-made gods that it should change 2,000 years of consistent Christian teaching to conform to them and their newfound personally created gospels of self-worshipping narcissism. They teach this to the whole society through their powerful positions in politics, media, education and science. They are as deadly for the soul of the Church as a basket of snakes. The old paradigm of individual bishops dealing with individual sins does not address this new reality. The fact that every single one of these self-made gods has found a bishop who will support them in what they are doing is an indication of how seriously deficient the Church’s response has been. We need consistent patterns of reaction from our bishops concerning this mass apostasy in the pews from prominent and powerful Catholics. They need to get together on this. At the same time, they need to follow their own rules themselves. Catholic institutions should inspire us to follow the Church’s teachings by their faithfulness to those teachings. I have had it with hearing about Catholic organizations that pay for contraception in their insurance, Catholic hospitals that do abortions, Catholic universities that ban the Knights of Columbus, or yet another priest who was making passes at boys and it was overlooked. We are entering tough times. The only way we are going to come through these times is if we begin by facing reality on reality’s terms. We need leadership in this from our bishops. END Discuss
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