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Post by pugio on Sept 24, 2014 10:06:50 GMT
Gerard Howlin wrote some excellent columns for the Irish Examiner. I often found them uncommonly insightful, bleak, and free of platitudes. Having seen the political system from the inside, he is refreshingly uninterested in pandering to popular sensibilities. However, I agree with Hibernicus that his articles on religious topics can be a little strange. By this I mean they appear to speak out of both sides of the mouth, or at least to be very coy.
This may be unfair. The man studied the history of the reformation as a postgraduate in Trinity College and I have noticed him several times in Harrington Street of a Sunday; he seems to be drawn to religion. It may be that Mr. Howlin’s own views are evolving as he writes. Within the same article he seems to develop lines of thought running in different directions entirely. The article quoted above by Hibernicus is a case in point.
I do not think Howlin was claiming that the state possesses an inherent ‘moral project’ at all. The only time he explicitly uses that phrase is in an approving reference to Archbishop Karol Wojtyla’s ‘instinctive wariness of the state as a moral project’, a wariness born of his experience of communism and Nazism. He also notes that Wojtyla invoked the “objective moral order” to limit state power. These, we gather, were positive developments.
And yet Howlin’s actual target seems to be the ‘subservience of secular to religious authority’. He appears to welcome ‘a departure from an orthodoxy previously shared across sectarian lines about where ultimately the judgment seat should be situated in society’, without answering that question himself. I suspect he envisions it situated within the individual conscience rather than in the hands of the state.
After all, it is the ‘nexus of religion and power’ that bothers him. It should probably bother any Christian too. But a facile separation between ‘religion’ on the one hand and ‘politics’ on the other is not the answer; it is scarcely even coherent. Despite his nod towards John Paul II’s invocation of an objective moral order to limit state power, the emancipatory potential of religion does not seem to occur to him. Instead he puts “objective moral order” in speech marks.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 25, 2014 7:43:57 GMT
Which government was Gerry Howlin an advisor to?
I've seen interesting stuff by him in the past, but the weekend article in the Irish Catholic seemed to get side-tracked where he had some good material on his hands. I much prefered the contributions on the late Dr Paisley by Fathers Tim Bartlett and Joe McVeigh. Very interesting that it was the first time I saw Father McVeigh in a clerical collar since Father Paddy Ryan SCA was a candidate for the European Parliament in Munster in 1989.
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Post by pugio on Sept 25, 2014 11:53:06 GMT
He was an advisor to Bertie Ahern. PR I believe.
That's interesting about Father Paddy Ryan, who I have never heard of. Indeed, I've never heard of any Catholic clergyman running for European office. What was the background to that candidacy?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 29, 2014 7:44:18 GMT
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Ryan_(Irish_priest)A lot of the material about Paddy Ryan is circumstantial or hearsay; all we know is that the Belgian authorities deported him here rather than extradite him to Britain. This was in 1988, when wild debates were raging about extradition to Britain, very much in the context of miscarriages of justice there. At this time, Richard Greene was thrown out of Fianna Fáil. Fr Ryan used his notoriety to stand for the European election the following year, and I think the occasion of mirth was seeing him flanked by Frs Joe McVeigh, Des Wilson, Piaras Ó Duill OFM Cap and I think Fr Brian MacCraois (brother of the hunger striker Raymond McCreesh, but I could be very wrong here). The dramatic thing is that all were wearing black suits and clerical collars and most of them are not known for it. Years later, Fr Wilson gave evidence during an action taken by the then Fr Pat Buckley against the Diocese of Down and Conor and I remember a distinguished judicial figure active in Latin Mass circles saying it was the first time he saw Fr Wilson in clerical dress. I reminded him of this previous instance and he answered "So, it's the second time.."
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 28, 2014 22:01:12 GMT
One point that struck me quite recently is the extent to which the Irish media in recent years seem to celebrate public nudity as an expression of bravery, strength, self-assertion, etc and a blow against "old-fashioned" Catholic ideas of modesty, chastity etc. This seems to have been featuring on Irish TV and newspapers quite a bit in recent years. A few examples: (1) One of the Irish TV channels very recently had a short series in which a female presenter covered various aspects of Irish life. The first episode showed her attending a nudist convention, interviewing nudists, and finally sharing a hot tub with several of them. I did not watch it, but the newspapers had copious articles thereon. (2) Every year an event called "The Dip in the Nip" (a mass nude swim whose participants seek sponsorship for cancer charities) gets extensive media coverage, together with blether about how this shows Catholic Ireland has changed, yada yada yada. (3) Some years ago the "artist" Spencer Tunick (who stages events at which large crowds of people are photographed together naked - the British papers regularly publish some of these photographs and I must say they strike me as dehumanising, an assertion that people are bodies and nothing but bodies etc) held two of his events in IReland - at Blarney and the North Wall in Dublin. For weeks beforehand the IRish papers were urging their readers to take part in it, and afterwards certain columnists were full of self-congratulation for participating in it. What strikes me about this is that far from celebrating the body it is actually downgrading it, treating it as a meaningless instrument that your real self can do anything with because it doesn't mean anything - the sexual revolution is all about desacralisation of the body, and denouncing the concept of guilt in connection with it as "shame" (i.e. something externally imposed which other people use to control you). Anthony Daniels is an atheist but perhaps because he approaches the issue as an outsider he is very perceptive on how the casualisation of such matters - the removal of reticence, shame and guilt - actually means the death of intimacy (because intimacy requires shared secrecy). Given the role of "the right to privacy" in various court cases asserting the sexual revolution, it's really striking how far said revolution ends by abolishing privacy. Rod Dreher had a recent post about a news story involving a case involving the teenagers in a particular American county where a large number of male high school pupils were getting their female classmates to send them photographs, which the males sent to all their friends and then posted on a website. When the police investigated, they were amazed to find that not only did the males see this as no big deal, the females didn't either - in fact some of them were proud to be so displayed. It wasn't just that those involved didn't mind the violation of privacy - they didn't seem to understand, let alone expect, the concept of privacy in the first place. How do you preach Christian sexual morality in a society which has developed such a mindset - not just not practising it or not opposing it, but seeing it as utterly outlandish, alien and unthinkable?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 28, 2014 22:21:16 GMT
It's interesting to me that Kevin Myers, one of the few voices of Irish conservatism (kind of), is an enthusiastic defender of nudism. In some ways I wonder whether society has become more rather than less stringent about nudity, at least, same-sex nudity. When you read nineteenth century novels it's surprising how ready men were to bathe naked together-- something I would not be eager to do even with close friends. If I recall rightly, Newman's Loss and Gain features several instances. I suppose it does come down to a sense of reverence towards the body which today seems to be almost incomprehensible to many. Being a SENSE it's hard to know how to convey it. Mark Dooley wrote a blog post about it some time ago. www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2185479/The-dangers-letting-hang-out.html
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 29, 2014 22:03:30 GMT
I don't remember it in LOSS AND GAIN (might you be thinking of RH Benson's novels, which certainly have such scenes), though it was certainly a common Victorian practice (in some respect the High Victorians were less "Victorian" than the early twentieth century). This is one reason why there was such hostility to mixed bathing in the late C19/early C20 (though the hostility extended to cases where both sexes were wearing bathing-clothes). The old-style single-sex Forty Foot with its male nude bathing was a last survival of that older practice. One reason for their more relaxed attitude to male nude bathing was that homosexuality was not openly spoken about and friendship was much more exalted (and much less likely to be seen as potentially sexual) than in the post-Freudian era. What struck me about the examples I mentioned was not nudity as such but exhibitionism - they all involve not simply nudity on one's own or with an intimate, but deliberate self-exposure to a general audience including large numbers of strangers (after all, what raised the issue for me was precisely media coverage, which encapsulates what is absent with a couple bathing together or an individual on some secluded beach) and a denial of the concept of intimacy (which involves an experience shared between intimates but withheld from outsiders). The Dooley piece is very good.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 29, 2014 22:29:06 GMT
I've never read Benson so it can't be him. Come to think of it, it may have been Brideshead Revisited, which I re-read very recently, and which of course is set considerably later. Heaven knows why I thought it was Loss and Gain.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 31, 2014 21:52:23 GMT
I'll check LOSS AND GAIN whenever I find time, just in case I'm the one who's mistaken.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 4, 2014 9:09:30 GMT
This whole thing about nudity is that it is not the fact of nudity, but the attitude towards it and the prurient context they are placing it in.
Re: single sex nude bathing, I made the point on the modesty thread that many 19th century convents were built on private, inaccessible beaches. For those who haven't seen the point, this is why. Following the development of swimwear, nuns took to bathing discreetly in more public beaches. But I also recall that anyone who does the baths in Lourdes does so naked. Obviously sexes are segregated.
Nudity in itself is not wrong, but culture has required privacy. The problem here is the way that it is treated. But then again, I remember hearing of young people joining witch covens because they held their ceremonies with everyone naked. Seasoned witches said they watched them drop out quickly, because when the inquirers got used to it, they realised standing around naked was very boring. Besides, the location I recall was near Termonfeckin in Co Louth, which can't be too warm for ten months of the year.
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Post by pugio on Nov 5, 2014 15:40:58 GMT
The sort of naked self-promotion (pardon the pun) that Hibernicus refers to surely does owe quite a bit to the sexual revolution and the changing attitudes to the body that this introduced. But it can also be seen as part of the broader tendency towards flagrant narcissism. This has really become a striking feature of our culture, particularly among my own generation. Nudity is just its physical expression. I have found that the younger someone is, the less likely they are to have a sense of the private. I must admit that the implications for human intimacy did not occur to me.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 5, 2014 21:31:47 GMT
Narcissism is integral to the sexual revolution, because it is presented so often in terms of power and self-assertion rather than mutuality. (If you look at the rhetoric of empowerment which surrounds the aggressively sexualised marketing of certain singers and performers, usually but not always female, you will get the idea.) I think consumer capitalism - its promotion of a perpetual hunger of the ego - does have something to do with it, though this can be oversimplified.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 5, 2014 21:52:20 GMT
The irony is that the sexual revolution, far from actually rewarding narcissism, leaves so many people feeling worthless, ugly, rejected, used or otherwise unhappy with themselves-- you only have to look at the headlines on the cover of a woman's magazine to see how deep the anxieties run. As C.S. Lewis said, one of the Devil's favourite tricks is not only to sell you something worthless but to swindle you out of even that much. I think that people generally have more self-esteem when the subject of sex is treated with reserve and reverence.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 10, 2014 20:21:54 GMT
A particularly depressing column in the IRISH TIMES today. The column section (there's another item in the column) is headed "Just when you thought the Catholic Church couldn't sink any lower" and denounces the Church because a spokesman said that Brittany Maynard, an American woman with brain cancer who publicly announced she was going to commit suicide after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and has now in fact done so, was wrong to do as she did. Note that she did not merely commit suicide; she consciously deployed her death as part of the campaign for "death with dignity", and was widely used as a poster child for the pro-euthanasia campaign. I've seen this being debated on the US blogosphere for weeks but have not raised it previously because there wasn't a direct Irish angle and I didn't like to turn someone's death into a debating point. Jennifer O'Connell now proclaims that it is wicked even to say Ms Maynard's action was wrong and points out "she wasn't a Catholic" so it's wrong to engage in "moralising over values to which she never claimed to subscribe". So the rightness of euthanasia should be treated as self-evident, and the view that suicide is wrong is just some irrational Catholic thing? Intolerance in the name of emotivism, how are you? A very bad sign of the level of public debate. www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/jennifer-o-connell-boys-who-like-elsa-girls-who-like-dracula-1.1992230?page=2EXTRACT It’s hard to imagine anyone expressing anything but empathy and sadness for her. But that would be to underestimate the Catholic Church’s ability to turn an occasion for compassion into an opportunity for proselytising. Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, called her death last week an undignified “absurdity”. He told the Ansa news agency: “Brittany Maynard’s act is in itself reprehensible, but what happened in the consciousness we do not know. This woman [took her own life] thinking she would die with dignity, but this is the error.” He added that he was not judging her. The fact that Maynard was not even Catholic didn’t stop the church moralising about values to which she never claimed to subscribe. So it’s probably too much to hope that anyone in the Vatican would take a minute to read her last message and learn something about genuine compassion and love in the face of the greatest adversity... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 10, 2014 20:46:58 GMT
Like you, Hibernicus, I found something distasteful in this woman's death and plight becoming so public. Of course, it's well-known how contagious suicide is. (Or, at least, it's so claimed; I've seen this disputed, so I can't claim it's a fact, but it seems highly plausible.)
Jennifer O'Connel's last line is inaccurate. This lady faced great adversity, and we can only have sympathy for her. But the reason for her suicide was because she wanted to avoid a greater adversity. A person in a similar situation who faced "the greatest adversity" would keep affirming life until the very end. A pity O'Connell does not have the grace to accept that the Church's stance may be motivated by a different notion of compassion.
The one thing that I tend to agree with her on is that it might be better not to comment on particular cases.
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