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Post by Account Deleted on Jun 25, 2018 20:49:12 GMT
www.thejournal.ie/culture-minister-josepha-madigan-mass-4090879-Jun2018/"It might have been better, for example, if there was training for us in a situation like that where we weren’t sure whether we could read the Gospel or not. We chose not to in the end." "We didn’t do the collections and everybody pulled together and handled it very well, but I do think that there’s a bigger issue here. I think the church should be ordaining women, I think it should be optional that priests can marry." This is from a Minister of the Word (but clearly not a Deacon). We have a huge problem with Catholic catechesis, and knowledge of the liturgy, in this country. That should be addressed before any lay involvement, to cover "shortage of priests." I know of another parish where a member of the congregation (not deacon or priest) is invited by the priest to "talk" on the Gospel of the day. We always say it boils down to catechesis, but I think we have to ask the question...is it simply that the congregations and parish teams don't care? If they were catechized, would they even listen? Most of us on this forum, I would imagine, are almost entirely self-catechized. It's not difficult. The information is more readily available now than ever before. That is a good point. It comes down to whether you care what the church teaches and why - as the way of (and to) Christ. Part of the function of the priesthood is to explain just that, esp. for those who don't have time or spiritual experience - to feed Christ's flock. It takes, what, 7 years of training and formation for a Deacon or Priest to preach authoritively on the Gospels and perform the sacraments (or limited liturgy for Deacons)? The trouble is, average Catholic is getting catechised (erroneously) by statements like hers in the media, from lay people, or those with enough perceived qualification in selective canon law to call two thousand years of Church doctoral tradition "codology", with no public clarification/correction from clergy. In a sense, Ms. Madigan called for just that - training. But I don't think we on this forum are typical of most Catholics in Ireland, and for the average person in the street, I think they'll just read this news as Josepha Madigan says mass, calls for women priests, so what's the problem with women priests, if they're already "saying mass" - therefore it must just be confirmation of that mysogynism Mary McAleese was talking about too. Who'll tell them of Vatican moves towards women deacons, or the Pope's recent reiteration that there will never be women priests, and - more importantly - why there won't be? There's no public counteraction by the bishops by the on-going media spin machine eroding the Catholic culture (and eroding it among lay Catholics). It's starting to show, badly. Heresy is going mainstream. There seems little difference in the minds of these public Catholics between their "personal faith" and Protestantism. I recently heard calls for a Chile-style resignation and replacement of all bishops in Ireland for their failure to respond to this, and a robust evangelisation of Ireland, treating it as purely missionary territory once again. I'm beginning to see the merit in that suggestion. If the leaderless flock don't take the time to seek the Lord's will, or aren't guided to Him by the apostles successors, then they will take their guidance from wherever they'll hear it.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 25, 2018 21:33:00 GMT
The primary issue is that Josepha Madigan should not have any role in the church at all after her promotion of abortion. The secondary issue is the confusion between a lay-led communion service (which alas will become more widespread given the drought of priestly vocations) and Mass; this distinction is being blurred by the media and others through a mixture of ignorance and malice. Really, the Irish church authorities' quiescence over this trivialisation of human life and desecration of the Eucharist is beyond shocking.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 26, 2018 21:22:00 GMT
Fr Gerard Moloney has rather a muddled piece in today's IRISH TIMES declaring that the culture wars have now decisively been lost by the church, and that's a good thing because the church ought not to be part of the establishment and ought not to rely on the state to uphold its teachings. What we need now is tolerance, rather than a new intolerance as bad as the old. There are some problems with this view: (1) It treats certain issues which Ireland has been debating since HUMANAE VITAE as mere matters of positive church enactment, like the old rule that one must abstain from meat on Fridays on pain of sin. In fact, many of them involve claims about the nature of reality which must either be true or false, and whose rejection involves a positive declaration that the rejected view is false and harmful (e.g. in a great deal of recent media commentary one sees the implicit or explicit statement that to advocate chastity outside of marriage and fidelity after marriage is positively evil). Similarly, if abortion is homicide it cannot be a matter of indifference that the state permits it, and by permitting it (and in other ways) encourages it. (2) There is more validity in his point about the church and the establishment, because a lot of the abuses arose from a sense that clerics were so exalted as to be above the law (there were, for example, a couple of bishops who were notorious drunk-drivers but were only caught when they tried it in Britain; teachers who were sacked after personal disputes with clerical school managers were routinely blacklisted from teaching in any Catholic school in the country without reference to the details of the dispute, etc). The problem is that the establishment must observe some moral principles, and these may be actively hostile and damaging to the church unless some way is found to influence them. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/beware-the-new-ireland-does-not-become-as-oppressive-as-the-old-1.3543292
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 15, 2018 19:11:52 GMT
Big interview with Declan Ganley in the SUNDAY BUSINESS POST today, a lot about how stunned he still is by the result of the referendum, how worried he is about the view that all rights derive from the state, etc. Worth reading if you can get hold of it.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 27, 2018 21:47:18 GMT
Suzanne Moore in the GUARDIAN a couple of weeks back had a column howling and wailing over the rising tide of fundamentalism, as represented by the possibility that the US Supreme Court might reverse ROE V WADE. Amongst the symptoms of this fundamentalism she sees the complaints of parents and staff at a North London ultra-orthodox Jewish girls' school about the insistence of state inspectors in questioning pupils in their early teens in graphic detail about the extent of their sexual knowledge and beliefs on sexuality. Ms Moore sees this as patriarchy trying to assert control of women (never mind that a boys' school run by the same type of Orthodox Jew would presumably encourage similar reticence among its pupils). In other words, Ms Moore thinks the state should intervene to bring about the sexual liberation of children from insufficiently with-it subcultures, even against the will of the parents. I am increasingly worried that that is what the Children's Rights Amendment some years ago will be interpreted as underwriting. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/03/fundamentalism-is-coming-for-us-and-women-as-ever-will-be-firstwww.c4m.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/C4M-briefing_Ofsted-inspections-of-Jewish-schools_Apr-18.pdf
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 21, 2018 8:09:32 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 25, 2018 19:06:53 GMT
A Protestant lecturer from QUB (I don't know him) on the prospects for Protestant-Catholic alliances in Ireland's religious culture wars. The link to a 2016 story about the brother of a Bloody Sunday victim who voted TUV on the abortion issue is interesting. (I suspect he voted TUV rather than DUP as a purer protest vote,since the TUV have no prospect of actually getting elected.) www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/pope-francis-rides-into-irelands-new-culture-war/
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2018 23:47:40 GMT
The present issue of the CATHOLIC HERALD available in shops 6 December, has a review of an edited collection of Columba Press papers on 5 YEARS TO SAVE THE IRISH CHURCH? Contributors include Mary McAleese denouncing infant baptism. (I look forward to her proclaiming on the same principle that children should not be taught to read, write or speak any language until they are adults and can decide for themselves which language they prefer; this would be as disastrous for the victims as modern methods of catechesis are in spiritual formation.) Fr Brian D'Arcy proclaims that with the election of Pope Francis the holy Spirit came back into the Church, etc. The reviewer thinks most of the contributors, if consistent, should join the Church of Ireland. Personally, I wouldn't wish them on the C of I. The review does not seem to be available online (at present) but is worth reading if you can get the print edition. ADDENDUM - Now available online at the link below. The title refers to Fr Brian D'Arcy quoting the BEatitudes while ignoring Jesus' more stringent words: catholicherald.co.uk/magazine/a-strenuous-avoidance-of-the-hard-sayings/
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 20, 2018 19:30:02 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 9, 2019 9:03:27 GMT
Two dreadful stories in this morning's Irish Independent. In Washington DC, ecclesiastical authorities have reached a settlement with a woman who alleged the well-known known Opus Dei commentator, Father John McCloskey, groped her repeatedly through marital counselling. Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Lyons and Primate of the Gauls, Cardinal Barbarin is facing trial with priests of the archdiocese for failure to report abuse. When does this story stop?
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2019 18:33:58 GMT
More on Fr McCloskey at the link below. The combox has extensive discussion of him, and of Opus Dei more generally (ranging from very hostile to very favourable). Several commenters remark that on the basis of what we know so far (which is an important caveat) OD seem to have handled this better than other church bodies. Fr McCloskey is now suffering from early onset dementia, and there is some argument in the combox about whether the groping might be an early symptom of the dementia (which often produces sexual disinhibition) or whether it began too early and at a time when he was still functioning very effectively. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/celebrity-priest-was-a-groper-c-john-mccloskey/
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 5, 2019 21:24:01 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 5, 2019 21:27:48 GMT
BTW the American Conservative article linked in the post above gives a very good outline of the Habermasian vision of post-nationalist civic politics which underlies a lot of contemporary political discussion, though it neglects how the bitter experience of war and revolution in Continental Europe and, in our own locality, of the Northern Irish conflict makes it attractive to many people.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 6, 2019 9:57:45 GMT
BTW the American Conservative article linked in the post above gives a very good outline of the Habermasian vision of post-nationalist civic politics which underlies a lot of contemporary political discussion, though it neglects how the bitter experience of war and revolution in Continental Europe and, in our own locality, of the Northern Irish conflict makes it attractive to many people. The problem with that kind of rationale is that it is, in my view, reactionary in the purest sense. We should strive, as Matthew Arnold put it, to "see life steadily, and see it whole" rather than being conditioned by events close to us in space and time. The latter attitude just tends to send us running from one mistake to its opposite. Apparently Thomas Hobbes was inspired to write Leviathan (which I've never read, and will almost certainly never read) because of the chaos of the Civil War. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that it calls for an authoritarian state in order to combat such chaos. I think we often see a similar logic when it comes to the North and the Troubles. The fact that group loyalties or ethnic identity or tradition could lead to clashes becomes a rationale for seeking a totally atomistic, individualist, consumerist society there instead.
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Post by Young Ireland on Mar 25, 2019 21:39:56 GMT
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