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Post by shane on Mar 23, 2012 2:28:26 GMT
The same mass apostasy of the urban working classes can also be seen in Orthodox countries, and was a factor in the Russian Revolution, where the proletariat was generally very secularised. The Orthodox have not drastically altered their liturgy like the Roman Church has, though traditional liturgy there doesn't seem to have been much of a bulwark against secularisation. (In Greece, which did not suffer communist persecution, church attendance is still very low.)
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 23, 2012 9:35:42 GMT
Some people can guess I was at the late Mgr Serge Keleher's funeral and from time to time I have attended the Divine Liturgy in Holy Cross College (and before that in St Kevin's Oratory and before that in St Paul's, Arran Quay - when I was younger, I had more time for this; in recent years, it could have been on an annual basis). I thought that the contrast between the Divine Liturgy congregation since the influx of Ukrainian and other eastern European immigrants and the consistent congregations at EF Masses wherever you go. I don't like using the word 'normal', but that was what occured to me. The congregation were there, not out of any ideological conviction and they represented a cross-section of the Ukrainian community. Most were in working class jobs, though many of these came here with third level qualifications which just don't transfer. Many were working class people.
There are working class people at the EF Masses too - but I think there was a better sprinkling of thick Dublin accents at Ss Michael's and John's and St Paul's in the late 80s and early 90s than at St Kevin's today. I know some people believe the way forward is to forge the Mass as a centre of the elite. I think this is a bad strategy.
With regard to the Orthodox and the secularisation of the working class - there was some limited outreach in pre-revolutionary Russia. But the Orthodox Church failed there. Right now, it seems to assume it represents Russia and Russians will inevitably gravitate back to them, which to me is unwise. There was very high practice of Orthodoxy in Greece, even in Athens, right up til the 1970s.
The industrial revolution is something the Church had a hard time coming to grips with, and though the English-speaking Catholic world seemed to be doing well with this until the Council it has fallen away since. But though the working class is secularised, it is so without the sort of bitterness that one gets from the middle class anti-clericals. Priests who have worked in deprived districts in Dublin, Galway and elsewhere have told me that the people are very courteous to them and that they often have a collection of sacramentals in their houses - they just don't go to Mass. The anti-clericalism of the yawn rather than the roar. What the Irish Times or the Labour Party drone on about means little or nothing to them. The people more likely to be confrontational tend to be the middle class. To be honest, the proletariat have more of an excuse. But another way of stating this is to ask if the Church has a strategy to tap into working class good will.
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Post by shane on Mar 23, 2012 10:22:14 GMT
Alaisdir, I have noticed that about the congregation at St. Kevin's. It seems to have a very middle-class profile. I didn't know that Greece had high religious practice until recently. That's interesting. The Greek Orthodox Church suffered from a string of embarrassing sex and financial scandals in recent years that really dented its reputation. I hear that the standards there are nowhere as high as in other Orthodox countries and they suffer many of the same problems we do. Here is an extract from a 2005 'Athens News' editorial, commenting on the sex scandals: agis10.tripod.com/id15.html"Priests are only spiritually beholden to the church. Their real employer is the state, which will this year spend 157 million euros on their salaries and pensions. They are, by law, civil servants, and poorly performing ones at that. Churches charge for their services, although they are supposed to be free. It goes beyond the big three, baptism, marriage and the Great Ushering Off: individual priests illegally charge to perform blessings, exorcisms and other indispensable services. In the countryside, itinerant priests who are supposed to service more than one village often refuse to do their rounds without inducement. Across the country, services are poorly attended because they are poorly performed. The Greek Orthodox liturgy, founded on the mystery of faith, the power of church theatre and a musical tradition going back to ancient times, is today mumbled out of tune, in neon-lit domes. In short, people aren't getting their money's worth, and are in the process losing the beauty of their tradition. "
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 23, 2012 19:00:48 GMT
One problem the Orthodox have is their view of church-state relations. They believe that the Latin church's problem is that it is legalistic and grasps for worldly power, and that the Church should concern itself with matters of the spirit and leave matters of this world to the temporal ruler. This can lead to problems even when there is an Orthodox ruler (the Tsars left the Patriarchate of Moscow vacant for centuries and ran the church through lay civil servants) and it easily translates into submission to the powers that be, whoever they are. (BTW the various characters who are demanding that the Pope should cease to be a temporal sovereign on the grounds that his mission is purely spiritual are advocating a state of affairs which, whether they realise it or not - and some do IMHO realise it - would very soon produce either the sort of Erastianism to which Orthodoxy (and even more so Anglicanism) are prone, or else a Church of the catacombs. The big problem about the Lefebvrist demand for a confessional state is that where such a thing exists it tends to produce the sort of subservience of church to state described in Greece (above). Fabio Barbieri has an interesting post on this which points out that Lefebvrism and liberation theology have more in common on this than they like to realise: fpb.livejournal.com/618317.html#commentsEXTRACTS The idea that the Church can be independent of the State - an idea that many modern statesmen, including Obama, still haven't completely absorbed - only really became prevalent in the last three centuries, and even so it left a lot of people behind. The first Protestant churches, and the Anglicans, were state bodies, even more purely than the contemporary Catholic Churches, and however much they might prate about the right of private judgment. They only existed where the local princes said they could. It is for that reason that they have, in the long run, not made the transition to the contemporary world very well. Even after the various princes lost power or interest, Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians and so on kept the instinct to stick to what the boss says, and identified the boss with the various societal leaderships which managed to make their views sound like the voice of the people; hence the disheartening show of supposed Christians throwing the Bible and Holy Tradition overboard bit by bit. And that is even where the political power did not in fact directly impose such betrayals, as it did to the state Lutheran churches of Scandinavia, to the Church of England, and so on. Those who actually picked up the opportunity and ran with it were those bodies that had never been the tools of any state power, beginning with the Baptist churches, and to whom the congregational principle was more than just some sort of political excuse not to have a bishop. These churches started out as the most insignificant of the insignificant - there is not even a clear starting point or a famous founder; a number of congregations seem to have started in various places in England and New England, and just gradually found each other, and never anything but the sketchiest of common beliefs. And today they are a power across continents, rooted from Russia to Latin America and from Africa to England, and have imposed their image on the whole of Protestantism, so that "Protestant" and "Evangelical" are almost synonymous. The Catholic Church, poisoned nearly to death by the state-church principle, nonetheless was struggling towards the idea of independence even before the earliest Baptist congregations gathered. The main reason why the Jesuits got a bad name - and the reason why the Catholic kings of all Europe demanded and eventually obtained their suppression - is that their theologians theorized the independence of the Church. As long as the vast majority of Catholics were subjects of no more than four absolute sovereigns - the kings of Portugal, Spain, France and the Emperor (later Emperor of Austria), independence was a practical impossibility, and indeed the so-called Age of Enlightenment saw the high tide of State control and use of the Church, reaching the stage of self-conscious theorizing as "Gallicanism" and "Febronianism". What the French Revolution demanded of the Church - total and declared obedience to the State - was what all the "Enlightened" despots of the time, except for the atheist Frederick II of Prussia, had been consciously working towards. Both sides of the struggle were enemies of the Catholic Church, as I pointed out here: fpb.livejournal.com/517145.html . But that was only part of the breaking point. The other part is the growing number of Church bodies that were either under non-Catholic sovereigns or large minorities in non-Catholic countries. By 1815, all the strongest non-Catholic sovereigns in Europe were responsible for vast bodies of Catholics: Britain for Ireland, Prussia for Silesia and west Poland, Russia for east Poland and Lithuania, the Netherlands for Belgium - in fact, Catholics were an overall majority of the briefly united Kingdom of the Netherlands, which soon made trouble. It was becoming a more and more common experience for Catholics to live in states that had no relation to their church, and to deal with them as an independent group. The balance finally tipped when, as a direct result of the last and worst English attempt to exterminate Ireland's Catholics, a huge mass of Catholic immigrants poured over the English-speaking world (http://fpb.livejournal.com/554795.html ). While at the same time the old Catholic powers drifted in various ways towards institutional anti-clericalism - which was to dominate all of Portugal, France, Spain and Italy after 1871 - the English-speaking Catholic Church, spear-headed by millions of hungry Irishmen, her path opened - oh delicious irony! - by the conquering sword of its own traditional enemies in London, poured as relentlessly as a lava flow unchecked across the face of five continents. And it did so on an entirely volunteer basis, supported purely by the endeavours of its individual members, with no support and little sympathy from imperial or federal authorities: fpb.livejournal.com/534114.html . By 1850, the Pope felt strong enough to throw a direct challenge to the world's greatest empire, and established a new hierarchy of bishops over the British mainland itself. The British huffed and puffed, but found there wasn't anything they could do. An enormous new body of churches suddenly reared up across the world, grown in a conscious tradition of relying only on itself and on its own forces, law-abiding but wholly autonomous of the State. Today the Catholic and Evangelical churches are the two most potent and lively Christian realities in the world, spread across the continents, and growing. Everything that comes from the bad old tradition of state churches is rotten or dead, and even the Orthodox are learning to be independent of the Tzar. That, by the way, is the link between the First and the Second Vatican Councils: as the First Council - that was left unfinished when the troops of the King of Italy stormed Rome and the Council Fathers scattered - had only defined the role of the Pope, the Second defined the whole Church - bishops, priesthood, laity. There is much about Vatican II that bewilders an impartial observer: it condemned no heresy - not even Communism - and its constitutions, while admirable, do seem like a restatement of the obvious. But they are a restatement of Church doctrine in terms of the new world in which the State Church has died and the Church as a whole must live in a wholly autonomous way. That is why it was summoned and that is why it spoke. And since history is the greatest of comedian and the master ironist of all ironists, I might as well close by placing the Council malcontents in their place in this frame of interpretation. It does not take much to understand that the "spirit of Vatican II" gang, the people who apparently want to turn the Catholic Church into an imitation of the American Episcopalians, belong to the same trend that has wrecked the old, state-supported Protestant denominations: that is, to a kind of person who instinctively seeks the sanction and support of what seems the contemporary consensus; that is, someone who wants the approval of an earthly power, and not having it in the state, looks for it in the consensus. But on the other hand, the so-called conservative dissident and schismatics, Lefebvrites and sedevacantists, can all be seen, with no effort at all, to be nostalgic for the state church and the King's authority. That is the real burden of all their songs; that is what Lefebvre preached about all the time. The real, live burden of his doctrine was the evil of the Revolution. In short, both the open opponents of Vatican II and its abusers and subversors are basically motivated by their itch for a political, terrestrial authority, king or revolution or consensus. Leonardo Boff and Marcel Lefebvre are brothers under the skin. END
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 23, 2012 19:06:46 GMT
My view on the question of elites is that this can be seen in a good and bad way. The good way is to seek to use our talents and training to help the Church and strengthen the weaker brethren temporally and spiritually; the bad way is to see ourselves as a little sect of the righteous in a world of those who are lost and deserve to be lost. There's a reason why neo-gnostics often try to infiltrate or manipulate traditional Catholicism (this BTW is what WB Yeats would have liked to do to Irish Catholicism - divide it into an exoteric body of sheeple and an inner elite of enlightened occultists - and that is what the Evolists and Guenonists are still trying to do to trads today). We also have to remember that the liturgy comes from God and not from us. The latter was the besetting temptation of Anglican Ritualists, and commentators often said that they came across as play-actors because they were consciously trying to re-create what Catholics took for granted. The danger is the exaltation of the will and the idea that the Church or the TLM are a discovery that I have invented or which belongs to me.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 23, 2012 19:45:23 GMT
I'm surprised that the working-class attitude is as you described - I had assumed the would have been more influenced by the vicious hostility towards the Church as spoilsports and hypocrites seen in the mass media (the rants about the report of the special visitation I believe really burned up the airwaves). One interpretation of the post-Vatican II changes is that they amounted to a middle-class takeover (i've seen this argued by leftists as well as by trads) and that John Charles McQuaid's belief that if exceptions were made for "enlightened" middle-class Catholics they would rapidly drive a coach and six through every doctrine of the faith and turn the church into a middle-class debating club actually had a good deal of substance.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 23, 2012 20:55:04 GMT
First of all, I read the Athens News article Shane cited - it's fascinating. I think that the difference between Greece and the rest of the Orthodox world is absence of persecution or tension.
St Kevin's certainly is middle-class and is even more so on the day that the Lassus Scholars perform. Other EF Mass centres are a bit more representative. I am a bit afraid of the encouraging of an elite in this context as I think it will lead to the worse option that Hibernicus accepts.
Hibernicus is correct in what he states and quotes regarding the view of the Orthodox and Protestants toward Church-State matters. I like the suggestion that both radical and tradional dissenters are seeking the same thing - the world view is very similar between the two.
The Second Vatican Council does seem to be a middle class phenomenon. What John Charles McQuaid thought is correct, but the man's legacy left the Church in Dublin skewed this way.
Though Hibernicus' observation of the mass media is correct, the question is how much attention the working class pay to it. It has some effect, but how much?
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 31, 2012 21:57:01 GMT
Here is an interesting piece (from a French SSPX source) on the danger of trads creating a self-sealing environment which repels anyone who isn't a member already: rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/03/relevant-thoughts-trad-environments.htmlEXTRACTS Our priories, if they try to be truly supernatural, do not attract as many as they should. Why? We are undeniably often inaccessible to the men of this age. Our nearest goal is not to attract everyone, clearly, but those souls that display a certain openness to the Faith and to God's Love. Even these souls are sometimes discouraged when coming to our chapels. The reasons? A heightened mistrust, divisions and criticisms that show only pride, disparaging comments on clothing, bitter and useless political arguments. Thanks to the subliminal instruments of the devil... Thanks to those people who know better than God the speed with which souls should move forward... Let us try to lower the obstacles for conversions rather than heightening them. But that is not enough: we must attract. Missionaries have always achieved this for 2000 years: adapting as much as possible to the target population, guided by a sense of finality and by Christian moral principles. Fr. Guillaume Gaud THE "TRAD ENVIRONMENT" There should not be a "Trad environment". Catholic Tradition is not supposed to be a social milieu, because Christianity is not that. Tradition must ressemble all social environments, and welcome them with their own identities. We are not for the elimination of classes. The dressing trends that have, little by little, become dominant among us reflect modesty - which is necessary -, but modesty is not limited to Trad dressing fashions. By willing to impose clothing rules, we put people off more than we form them. The consequence is a sort of freeing oneself excessively from those rules, which then moves onto immodesty. A further consequence is a sort of sclerotic portrayal of Tradition, which seems to live in the 1950s - not very attractive! Yet the force of bringing people together within Catholic Tradition is in the logical relationship between our Faith and our daily life. This coherence must reflect our conviction and our sincerity, and not only rules. Catholic Truth is truly brought into light by it. And this is what attracts. But let us remain always as close as possible to our contemporaries of good will. We must then be firm with regard to ourselves, but shine with mercy and understanding for our neighbor. Then he will love our firmness! Father Guillaume Gaud, SSPX (Apostol, newsletter for the priories of Fabrègues and Perpignan, France - La Porte Latine - "The dilemmas of our bastions of faith", excerpts) ... 66 comments: MJ said... It's refreshing to hear this, and from an SSPX priest no less. Trad communities, especially personal parishes, can be very separatist. They live in isolation on the fringes of society, and this is extremely off putting to Catholics on the outside. It's not enough for newcomers to accept Catholic dogma; in some places you're expected to accept 19th century standards of modesty and other weird social customs that probably never existed. I think some priests encourage this by focusing on socially irrelevant topics in their preaching, but it's not a healthy environment for anyone. If we really believe the traditional liturgy is good for the whole Church, then we should do whatever we can to make it accessible to mainstream Americans and not turn traditional Catholicism into a sect. Individuals also have a responsibility to evangelize by participating as full members in society and not turn themselves and their families into "Amish" Catholics. 30 March, 2012 22:40 END OF EXTRACTS
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 31, 2012 22:54:00 GMT
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Post by shane on Mar 31, 2012 23:23:53 GMT
There is a very interesting discussion here on the low Mass: www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2012/03/classical-tradition-not-what-some-might.htmlFor what it's worth, I strike a half way position. I think the low Mass is an organic development (though I'm totally opposed to the aliturgical 'dialogue Mass') but I would love to see a revival of congregational singing of the divine office (...easier said than done, I know) as is still common in the eastern churches.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 1, 2012 21:16:16 GMT
The link doesn't seem to work - not for me, anyway. Let's clarify this - are you saying merely that you personally disapprove of the dialogue Mass, or that you think it should actually be suppressed? I came across an apologia recently by a nineteenth-century convert from Quakerism, in which he compares the Catholic contemplative tradition with the Quaker practice of being moved by the spirit at Meetings and argues that while Catholic practice at Mass appears strange and unfamiliar it actually reflects a realisation that the important thing is to achieve a spirit of contemplation and reverence while the Anglican practice of vernacular liturgy (and presumably congregational responses, though I am not quite sure if that was Anglican practice at that stage) reflects a rationalist spirit which is fatal to true religious devotion. This seems a fair enough rationale for your view on dialogue v silent MAss, though I think the author like many converts was inclined to project what Catholicism should be in theory onto how it actually operates in practice. HE argues that the basic distinction ought to be between what is intended to convert and what is intended to edify those already converted. The problem with applying this in our own day is I think that potential converts have less knowledge and understanding of what the MAss represents and it is necessary to make more of a conscious effort to reach out tot hem.
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Post by shane on Apr 2, 2012 0:37:38 GMT
hibernicus, the link is working for me (on another computer). Can you try it once more please? I would not support suppressing the dialogue Mass in continental Europe. It is too late in the day to attempt doing that, though I do regret that it was ever introduced there in the first place! I would hope that it would not be introduced where it does not have historic precedent. I think it's reasonable to assume that had the Second Vatican Council never happened, the dialogue Mass would be normative in Ireland today. Cardinal Conway ( see here - pg. 13) gave it cautious (and misguided IMHO) approval. Dom Murray's view of the dialogue Mass was a lot more hostile ( see here - pgs. 60-61 ... click 'download', then 'Download anyway', there are no viruses attached) and I'd basically agree with him. Would be interested in your view on the latter's 'conclusions' and on the former's ideas on 'responses by the congregation'.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 2, 2012 20:53:09 GMT
The link is working now. I suspect the High Anglican writer's view on Low Mass relates to contemporary Anglican-Catholic polemics. At that time the Low Mass would have been standard for Catholics (extending, for example, to ten or fifteen-minute Masses for congregations on their way to work) while Anglo-Catholics placed more emphasis on solemn ritual. (It was not unknown for them to draw on the mediaeval Sarum Rite, which is much more elaborate than the TLM - indeed Pugin and other Catholic Gothic revivalists hoped Sarum would become the standard use in England again, and the triumph of the Roman Rite was driven, among other factors, by its being what the Irish immigrant congregations were used to - and from eastern liturgies as well.) Although there was a noble tradition of Anglo-Catholic ministry in slum areas, Anglo-Catholicism tended to be seen by both Evangelicals and Catholics as a type of self-conscious middle-class playacting (whereas Catholics took their practices for granted), while the Anglo-Catholics in turn maintained that they were an educated elite able to reach sections of the English people repelled by the peasant mentality of the "Italian Mission to the Irish". I might add that this sort of attitude was shared by many middle-class Catholics, and the C20 liturgical movement tended to be seen as an affair of self-conscious intellectuals and middle-class enthusiasts trying to mark themselves off from the inmates of the Camden Town and Scotland Road ghettoes. We can still IMHO see this class divide in some forms of traditionalism. When Damian Thompson sneers at the England & Wales Latin Mass Society as the "Low Mass Society" and complains that its existing members resist the influx of recent Anglican converts who want more elaborate liturgies, he is echoing those earlier Anglican ritualists. (It is worth noting that Mr Thompson is an upwardly mobile bright young man from a working-class background who likes to sneer at his grandmother's Fatima devotions.) The first wave of British LAtin Mass trads and pro-lifers were to a great extent working-class LAbour supporters; their successors are a different kettle of fish. One criticism that could be brought against the whole liturgical movement (and I mean the whole C20 one including the revival of Gregorian chant and Solemn MAss a la Fortescue) is that it despised folk-piety and tended to promote in the name of understanding a self-consciousness which is inimical to the spirit of worship; in trying to promote (as they saw it) best practice they overlooked what was good in current practice and in destroying it wound up with a minority movement while those who had been reached by the older style were left with noting at all. A comparison might be drawn with the ceremony of marriage. Up until about 50 years ago marriages were often performed extraordinarily casually, especially among working-class people. (I have heard of instances of a couple getting married early in the morning after which the new husband just went off to work as usual.) As the marriage ceremony and associated celebrations have become more elaborate and more extensive, marriage itself has become a self-conscious minority interest; the older practice took the importance of marriage for granted while the newer one tries to hype it up with adventitious celebrations precisely because the thing in itself is no longer seen as particularly important. (The decline caused the extravagant self-consciousness, I should add - not the other way around.) The older style of popular Catholicism was not of course perfect and the self-consciousness was in part a legitimate reaction to modern circumstances, but it still seems something has been lost - how and why we need to discuss more thoroughly.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2012 1:27:01 GMT
There is a lot of good will among the working classes for the Church when confronted with it in the form of an actual real life person. Perhaps you are not aware of this but I know quite a few people who would have starved in the 50s were it not for the Church. That's not forgotten. There is quite a bit of resentment about contraception being banned but that's it, from a poverty aspect it's understandable.
Older people working class people of course love the priests and the Church but there is a "so what? it's over" attitude that seems prevalent among late teens/ early twenties who attend Mass toward the paedophile scandal, you have to laugh at that "whatever" attitude. I do think engaging them with a nun or priest knocks down that barrier. A lot of anger dissipates when confronted with a priest or nun, particularly in clericals or a veil, I've seen that.
My parish in Dublin is full with a good mix of ages, less youth obviously but still alive and kicking. I wrote before about the need for priests to knock on doors and one of our priests announced recently that he will be knocking on all the doors of the parish to introduce himself properly. I have noticed though that lately when priests die or retire in working class communities they are replaced with foreign priests. I wonder is this tactical, to replace the image of the Irish paedophile priest with a young, eager, foreign priest? Would this be true in anyone else's parish, it it tactical appointing or just the luck of the draw?
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jaykay
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Post by jaykay on Apr 12, 2012 14:19:18 GMT
"Anglo-Catholicism tended to be seen by both Evangelicals and Catholics as a type of self-conscious middle-class playacting (whereas Catholics took their practices for granted)," Hibernicus: yes, I think there's an awful lot of truth in that, when you consider how (relatively) unselfconsciously ordinary people of yesteryear, particularly the men, would readily take part in e.g. elaborate devotional processions with outdoor Benediction, the Blessed Sacrament under a beautiful canopy, priests in elaborate vestments or lacy cottas, wearing birettas, temporary altars lavishly (some might say gaudily) decorated in the windows and doorways shops and ordinary houses. Yet these same men would have fallen dead at the notion that they might wear a pink-coloured shirt, which would have been seen as an unconscionable assault on their masculinity!! Now, it seems, so many people seem self-conscious in the face of even a smidgin of the ceremonial that was once taken for granted, as if it's somehow "improper", whereas of course it's an integral part of the proper honour we try to give God. There's been a real attitude of "Could not this ointment have been sold..." abroad for too many years now. louise: our local Dominican church is likewise always very full for the main Masses (particularly the Saturday evening one, for some reason). It is far from being a "middle class" enclave, however one might define that class in the Ireland of nowadays. In fact in my town I would venture to say that the Church has become quite a "working class" and "lower middle class" phenomenon, since a lot of the "middle class" properly speaking - and I know quite a lot of them, there aren't that many, despite the pretensions of some - have deserted in droves, following the trend basically. Believe me, it's not due to any deep philosophical convictions - most of them wouldn't know Thomas Aquinas from Sergio Aguero. Unfortunately, most of my family are included in that category also.
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