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Post by hibernicus on Nov 9, 2010 12:32:20 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 11, 2010 14:54:33 GMT
Whereas Fr Longenecker's observations were not what I conjectured from the title, I thought them most apposite and more could be said about this. For the last couple of decades, the Church in Ireland has been planning for a priest-shortage - and they got it. I don't mean to say that there are no problems, but it is to some degree manufactured. The zeal which a lot of priests promote a certain type of laity to positions in parishes suggest it is wished for. This goes a step further than Fr Longenecker's statement that we get the future we plan for. As Hibernicus said in the elections thread, be careful what you wish for.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2011 21:19:53 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2011 11:03:17 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 30, 2011 19:47:28 GMT
Fr Zuhlsdorf has the story, and there are some interesting comments on it. wdtprs.com/blog/2011/11/atlantis-rises-us-seminaries-are-changing/#commentsLet me make a couple of suggestions about why we are far from this here: (1) Many US seminarians are graduates of specifically Catholic universities which allowed them to receive advanced formation in their faith. There is nothing equivalent in Ireland - our universities are very secular and staff often deliberately set out to undermine students' faith. I remember this from my own college days over 20 years ago, and I fear it is worse now. (2) Changes in US seminaries are often brought about by a new bishop imposing his will on the diocesan seminary. Since Maynooth is the national seminary all/most of the bishops would have to agree in order to push through changes in opposition to the permanent administration, and this would be much harder to do. (This is one reason why I sometimes think it might have been better to close Maynooth and keep some of the diocesan seminaries.) (3) The US Hierarchy is so large and diverse it was never possible for the liberals to impose a "party line" everywhere - there were always a few holdouts. The Irish bishops have traditionally been more conformist and tended to close ranks. This will be exacerbated by having a smaller hierarchy, and also I fear by the view that the abuse scandals mean "best practice" must be enforced everywhere and local initiatives can't be tolerated. (Remember some commentators have been busy blaming the abuse scandals on traditional concepts of priestly formation and discipline, which would imply that to revive traditional approaches is equivalent to promoting abuse.) (4) Catholic media and evangelisation are at a pretty low ebb in Ireland compared to the US, and this in turn reduces the likelihood that candidates will be clear-sighted and determined enough to persevere amid opposition. Sorry to sound like a wet blanket, but I think we have to face how bad things are if we are to do anything about it.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 29, 2012 21:58:50 GMT
The American social commentator Walter Russell Mead discusses a recent decision by the US Methodist Church to keep its present policy of giving its ministers lifetime tenure, even though this tends to place the security of older and/or mediocre ministers above encouraging more inspired/active young ministers. By "blue" Mead is referring to the American equation of blue=Democrat/liberal vs. red=conservative/Republican. He often discusses the ongoing collapse of what he calls the "blue social model", the belief that large bureaucratic institutions underwritten by state power and economic interventionism can guarantee security and prosperity for the American people. (BTW Mead is an Episcopalian/Anglican, and he voted for Obama in 2008 so he's not a straightforward conservative partisan - he's calling it as he sees it):- blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/10/29/methodists-choose-blue-death/EXTRACT ...This decision completes the transformation of this venerable church. In the old, heroic days, Methodist clergy had no rights. They were circuit riders going from one backwoods settlement to the next, through wind and rain and snow. Like Jesus, they had no home or security beyond that provided by God. But their fiery sincerity and purity of vocation were so compelling that Methodism became the largest denomination in the country. There’s no fear of anything like that happening now. These days, Methodist preachers don’t make many converts. In fact, the church is shrinking. But Methodist ministers now enjoy something like tenure so perhaps from their point of view this is all for the best. A nice job in a shrinking church is much comfier than a saddle in wintertime. This new decision ensures continuing Methodist decline, less because of the content of the decision than because of what it says about the values and the priorities of a clergy that believes that Christian ministry should be a stable, middle-class profession with guaranteed benefits and lots of perks. Many Methodist preachers, of course, like their colleagues in other denominations, work hard and serve their congregations admirably. That is not the point. The point is that we’ve come to take for granted that you can serve Heaven and have a tasty little helping of Mammon on the side — not riches, but security and predictability. The clergy and the paid employees of the mainline churches remain locked into a world view that is destroying the institutions on which they subsist. They are thinking like trade unionists and bureaucrats when the very foundations of their world are being swept away. END OF EXTRACT A good deal of this is true of Catholic clergy as well IMHO. This is not purely a liberal thing - it was visible in the Anglophone Churches well before Vatican II; from the missionary church to emigrants and peasants of the C19 it had become focussed on institution management. This is not just corruption - there are some things a peasant/immigrant/missionary church can't do in terms of theological understanding/higher education/liturgy, and a people's church has its own faults often connected with bigotry and superstition - but there are definite costs and now we are seeing some of them. (A comparison might be with the development of Conventual Franciscanism after Francis, or the development of the Northumbrian Church from St Aidan to St Bede. In neither case was the development wicked, and it brought certain blessings that could not have existed without it; yet there's still a sense something was lost.) One very subversive way of looking at the liberal-Catholic agenda can be found in James Hitchcock's THE RISE AND FALL OF RADICAL CATHOLICISM, in which he argues that it represents the desire of an upwardly-mobile professional elite (the Catholic clergy) to conform to the attitudes of the professional class in which they find themselves, and to reap the personal benefits; to take the view of the Methodist clerics discussed by Mead, who prefer security over mission. (This of course is not a matter of conscious personal dishonesty and many radical clerics genuinely did and do work with and among the poor for social justice; we're talking of a class mentality.) What the ACP programme amounts to is that the Catholic church should drop any awkward remnants of asceticism and of a distinctive evangelising mission, and become something like the mainline denominations in the US, run by nice middle-class bureaucrats, lay or clerical, in accordance with nice bureaucratic regulations which make everything predictable and easily regulated. In this context the assault on clerical celibacy is very relevant, because the purpose of celibacy is precisely to free one up for mission - to make oneself an eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven- which is why when the sense of mission is lost it so easily degenerates into the gossipy intrigues of court eunuchs. Those Methodist circuit riders, and many other Protestant missionaries and travelling preachers, were indeed heroes of the faith, but much of the cost was borne by clerical wives and children. The answer is easily discernible - a return to the sources, like St Dominic and his mentor Bishop Diego telling the Papal legates that if they wished to convert the Albigensians they must leave off their pomp and ceremony and go among them as simple preachers, or St Aidan walking the roads of Northumbria to preach the Gospel. But saying this is one thing, and doing it is another. I am certainly very far from doing so, and don't know how to begin. Psalm 59 1 You have rejected us, God, and burst upon us; you have been angry—now restore us! 2 You have shaken the land and torn it open; mend its fractures, for it is quaking. 3 You have shown your people desperate times; you have given us wine that makes us stagger. 4 But for those who fear you, you have raised a banner to be unfurled against the bow.[e] 5 Save us and help us with your right hand, that those you love may be delivered. 6 God has spoken from his sanctuary: “In triumph I will parcel out Shechem and measure off the Valley of Sukkoth. 7 Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim is my helmet, Judah is my scepter. 8 Moab is my washbasin, on Edom I toss my sandal; over Philistia I shout in triumph.” 9 Who will bring me to the fortified city? Who will lead me to Edom? 10 Is it not you, God, you who have now rejected us and no longer go out with our armies? 11 Give us aid against the enemy, for human help is worthless. 12 With God we will gain the victory, and he will trample down our enemies.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 30, 2012 12:12:24 GMT
Aren't our current priests pretty ascetical though? Apart from celibacy, there are very low and diminishing salaries and ever-increasing demands on their time, plus hostility from secular society as well as (often) Irish Catholics themselves. I think the members of the ACP, to a great extent, signed up when there was enormous prestige going with the job and it could be (possibly) a fairly cushy one if you kept your head down. Today I stand in awe of any man who enters a seminary in Ireland. It must take enormous courage and preparedness for self-sacrifice, and a mentality not so far from the first mendicant friars, or even a soldier entering a warzone.
But I could be naive, or simply missing the point.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 30, 2012 21:30:07 GMT
Indeed priests getting ordained now can expect pretty stringent conditions (not to mention being called all sorts of names which are too well-known to repeat here). What I am thinking of is the interesting point (which the CATHOLIC VOICE makes, albeit in a clumsy way) that lay bureaucrats and pastoral workers etc are actually paid MORE than priests (at least in the Dublin archdiocese) and that much of the ACP-and-affiliates agenda amounts to advocating a fully bureaucratised church run by lay professionals in which the lay leader/administrator/pastoral worker is the norm and priests are very much subordinate and exist only as "sacramental ministers" and then on sufferance. One explanation which occurs to me is that when we hear complaints about the "old" model of a clerically-run church as excluding the laity (and there was indeed a good deal of condescension and contempt towards the laity in those days, don't get me wrong) this tends to overlook the fact that the laity were expected to have their own lives and social function as their major preoccupation and were to carry the teaching of the church into it. The "liberal" view seems to a considerable extent to assume that the life of the church consists simply of what people do in church (since moral standards etc are to be taken from the norms of society as a whole, rather than the church trying to missionise society with its own beliefs) in which case if the laity are not running things in church they have no function at all. This is a bit crudely put but I think I'm onto something.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 31, 2012 21:52:40 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Nov 4, 2012 15:33:41 GMT
I wrote on this board before about this group; www.prayer4seminarians.com/I have been touch with one of the men involved and there are 110 men preparing to become priests here. He is in contact with vocation directors throughout the country and his figures are up to date. I don't think we should panic too much yet, but pray for them, fast for them and encourage good men who we feel may be called to discern. What else is to be done after that but leave it to God? If you email them you will be sent a prayer card with a name of a seminarian. I pray for my seminarian every morning. I encourage anyone reading these boards to contact the group and take one of these young men under your wing in prayer.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 26, 2012 19:38:13 GMT
Fr Zuhlsdorf picks up on the formation of the Association of Catholics in Ireland (the recently-created lay allies of the ACP). This leads to another gloomy combox discussion on the state of the church in Ireland, with our old friend Supertradmum adding her tuppence about socialism in Ireland going back 100 years, and about her own Anglophilia. Other commenters argue over the impact of Vatican II wdtprs.com/blog/2012/11/yet-another-group-of-dissidents-forms-where-else/#comments Here is an interesting comment from a Capuchin -does anyone know him? EXTRACT Br. Tom Forde OFM Cap says: 25 November 2012 at 11:28 am I offer Mass in the school where I work everyday and the chalice I use is from the Penal era. Back then things were very bad here and the faith was in dire straits. Still a Dublin silver smith made a beautiful silver chalice with simple, classical lines and engraved it with a small crucified Christ and an inscription to Thomas Corcoran, a Capuchin like myself. Those men have long gone to their rewards and we Irish Catholics are still here. Ireland has problems – so doe the rest of the Church! The Dutch child abuse scandal got very little attention on the web and there are scandals looming in India and Africa. We have always had scandals and rebels. The ACI, like the ACP, are an unrepresentative minority of poorly catechised liberals. The real problem, in Ireland as in the rest of the West, is that after forty years of poor catechesis, the impact of the ‘sexual revolution’ and the other fads that have swept over the West most Irish people are indifferent. The clergy have largely been fed a diet of Rahner et al, encouraged to be liturgically experimental and pastorally liberal. The bishops have towed the Roman line in public and who knows what they’ve taught in private. Check out lxoa.wordpress.com where Shane has resources on what was going on over the years. There are still homosexual cliques in the Church (Rome has them too it is rumoured) even among the younger clergy. The majority of the young are indifferent or hostile because they have never been taught the faith neither have their parents. They are rejecting what they do not know. They are bombarded with American or American-style trash TV . The web makes porn easier to get than than sweets! Is it any wonder we are in trouble? We are a small country (no more than 300 miles by 150) with only about 4.7 million people. We are easily dominated by the cultures of the West and we’ve swallowed all the garbage we’ve been fed. There are signs of hope though – a chapter of the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy has been suggested, there are many who still pray and we have our saints to intercede for us. I offered Mass in a full parish church this morning supplying for a young priest whose on his own with two churches to run. There were lots of kids but it was respectful and prayerful. I like living in Ireland. It is my home and the home of my ancestors as far back as we can go and we’ve always been Catholic. The present economic situation, the social problems, the loss of faith, make it hard for people but it is a good country to live in. The people are generally kind, good humoured and easy-going. There is a deep faith in Ireland and if some of our ancient prophecies are true the Catholic faith will not die out but will return renewed. Unfortunately they also say we won’t see the end of the world – we’re to sink beneath the sea seven years before hand! C’est la vie! END
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 26, 2012 20:55:52 GMT
"First, the Irish labourers’ preference for socialism and even Marxism, which dates back over a 100 years..."
Yes, every time I pass a construction site I see the builders deep in Das Kapital, on their coffee breaks.
Unfortunately she is right about most of the other stuff, although happily anti-Englishness seems to be a thing of the past.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 15, 2013 22:45:29 GMT
A TELEGRAPH blogger discusses the position of Christians in Britain in relation to today's European Court of Human Rights judgement upholding some (but not all) discrimination against Christians by employers. Allowing for our historically higher rates of religious observance, much of what he says is relevant to the situation of Catholics in Ireland - and I suspect the resemblance will be even closer in the next 20 years when the last of those catechised/recruited before 1968 die off or retire. blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100198311/christians-need-to-find-some-old-time-zeal/EXTRACT ... the Christian in me understands that the judgment reflects a pattern of de-Christianisation within Britain itself. We are no longer the voice of a presumed majority, but rather the voice of one minority among many. Our right to practise what we believe is, understandably, being weighed up against the rights of those who don’t agree with us – with a slight bias towards the latter. It’s Christianity versus modernity, and modernity is winning. Take gay marriage. Although the Government insists that no church will be compelled to carry out gay marriages, more than 1,000 Catholic priests wrote a letter to this newspaper last week protesting that equalities legislation makes a nonsense of this guarantee and that attempts to legalise gay marriage amount to the renewal of historic persecution against Catholics. I, too, am a Catholic – and the idea that the wedding of Adam and Steve can be likened to Cromwell’s rampage across Ireland strikes me as hysterical. But it reflects a wider panic among religious conservatives – the fear that a metropolitan political establishment is conspiring against us. It is certainly historically unusual that the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Prime Minister are self-described atheists, while the Prime Minister ascribes to a faith as noncommittal (and, one suspects, expedient) as his position on Europe. But our elites aren’t that distant from the values of their constituents. The 2011 census showed that the proportion of Britons describing themselves as Christian fell in the past decade from 71.7 per cent to 59.3 per cent. Although technically still a majority, if you interrogated that 59.3 per cent as to what they mean by “Christian”, then you’d probably find the traditional definition being imaginatively stretched. A 2012 survey by the Theos think tank found that only 31 per cent believe Jesus rose from the dead and 41 per cent believe in life after death; 25 per cent prefer the very un-Christian notion of reincarnation. Moreover, the real test of a living faith is public worship – and C of E attendance has fallen to a pitiful 1.5 per cent or so of the population. To put this in perspective, every year fewer children are baptised in an Anglican church than there are people who told the census that they are practising Jedi. Secularists who try to tell us that Britain has never really “done” Christianity anyway need to Google it. Christianity has shaped our culture and constitution. And far from having always adhered to a mythical English reasonableness, it has often “out-fundamentalled” the American fundamentalists. For instance, today’s Quakers might seem a dwindling sect bordering on agnosticism, but there was a time when they were a mass movement that threatened the social order of England. Although nominally pacifists, they outraged the religious establishment of the 17th century by disrupting church services and preaching nude in imitation of the prophet Isaiah. On July 29 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote: “A man, a Quaker, came naked through the [Westminster] Hall, only very civilly tied about the privates to avoid scandal, and with a chafing-dish of fire and brimstone burning upon his head… crying, 'Repent! repent!’ ” But the apocalyptic universe of British Christianity in the 17th century was followed by the relative spiritual malaise of the 18th, when many Church of England temples stood empty. The history of religious observance in Britain is thus one of peaks and troughs. In the mid-19th century, Anglican church attendance hit about 50 per cent. But while we imagine the Fifties were an age of cultural conservatism, attendance by then had fallen to 25 per cent. None the less, the key difference between the Britain of the Fifties and the Britain of today is the decline in passive identification with Christianity. About 67 per cent of infants were baptised in the post-war years, reflecting an almost subconscious association between national and religious identity. You were born British, so you were born Christian – and you were taught what that meant in schools. Faith permeated society to the degree that it shaped attitudes towards sexual practice and even the opening hours of shops. It affected politics, too. Recall the old saying that the Labour Party is “more Methodism than Marx”. So this is what has changed. In our new consumer-driven, postmodern order, Christians have to compete with people pushing other religions or no religion at all. We no longer enjoy a privileged status in the popular imagination. And while it’s easy to blame politicians and courts for this, responsibility ultimately lies with the true believers. The only thing that will renew British Christianity is to drop all the lazy presumptions that Britain is basically Christian, and start again from scratch. If Christians want their country back then they need to drop the complaining and rediscover some of that Quaker zeal. Preferably without the nudity... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 16, 2013 9:04:00 GMT
Interesting reflection. What strikes me immediately is the question about the pathetic Michael Harding's theological training in Maynooth and the fact he was ordained and briefly served as a priest of the Kilmore diocese.
I don't need to rehash the malaise in religious education in Ireland since 1970, but this was complimented by a collapse in standards in the seminaries. I think of the calibre of many of the ordinations of the late 60s, 70s and early 80s. Mr Harding is one case. But we could look at the likes of Father Pádraig Standún or Fr Pat O'Brien of the Tuam diocese, of the late Fr John O'Donoghue of the Galway diocese (academically bright, but remembered for the drivel in Anamchara) - and you wonder what went on. I don't believe the Pontifical Irish College in Rome produced great models of priesthood at the same time and I'd be curious to see what sort of guy left.
At this stage, the religious orders are in a much worse state than the secular priesthood. To throw in the Roman connexion, the Irish Franciscan and Augustinian provinces sent virtually all their clerical students to Rome and, at least in the case of the Augustinians, almost all went to the Gregorian University which is traditionally the most prestigious. Yet both provinces are shells of what they once were.
The faithful cannot but be affected by this sort of stuff and, given our cultural, or should that be anti-cultural, dependence on British television these days, it is only a matter of a short time before our statistics mimic those outlined by Dr Stanley in the Telegraph blogs.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 16, 2013 21:17:27 GMT
Rod Dreher offers his own thoughts on the ongoing secularisation of America and its long-term social implications: www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christianity-decline-societ/#post-commentsEXTRACT I think the reader’s distinction between belief and practice is a critically important one. From my childhood, I recall that only some people were churchgoers. My family certainly did not regularly frequent the church. Yet aside from irregular churchgoing, we lived like Christians without thinking about it. There was no question but that what Christianity taught about how to behave was true, and authoritative. All of us fell short of the Christian standard, and most of us, I think, knew that we did, and how we did. The point is, there was a widely shared standard by which to judge our conduct. When I was a teenager and suddenly all skeptical and righteous, I used the distance between what we said we believed, and the way we behaved, to challenge my father. He told 17 year old me to go to church on Easter with my mom and my sister. Oh yeah? said I. If it’s so important to go to church on Easter, why are you going turkey hunting instead? He went turkey hunting after all, and let me stay home, if I promised to read the Bible. I promised, and I made good on it, but boy, was I satisfied that I had exposed the hypocrisy of the adult world. No big surprise, then, that encountering Soren Kierkegaard in college lit my brain on fire, and brought me to an adult faith in Christianity. I especially adored his Attack Upon Christendom, which was SK’s vicious broadside against the state Lutheran church in Denmark. His point was that when Christianity is reduced to bourgeois morality, and when we are considered Christians only by virtue of nominal membership in a community, then true Christianity ceases to exist. I thought then that he was correct, and though I have a slightly different take on it now, I think the radical Protestant SK was far, far more right than wrong. He was right that “Christendom,” in his formulation, can serve as an inoculation against the kind of commitment true Christianity demands. I have known people who rarely bothered to check their own beliefs and behavior against a Gospel standard, because they assumed that because they were baptized and behaved respectably, that they were Christians in good standing. I have been that person. Still am to a great degree, but I’m working on it. Put aside the theology, and consider the matter sociologically. We have lived through, and are living through, the de-Christianization of the West. It is very far advanced in Europe, and advancing here. An orthodox Kierkegaardian might say that this is a good thing, because though it will result in a widespread falling away from formal adherence to the Christian faith, it will increase the quality of those who do believe, because it will have been a conscious choice — a choice that, in many places, will have been made in full awareness that to be a Christian is to stand outside of one’s own culture, and even against it. I can see why this would appear preferable, from a theological angle, to a Christian culture of lukewarmness and conformity. From a sociological point of view, though, I think the news is very bad indeed, and for the reasons the New England reader brings up. However imperfect and flawed Christians have been over the cultures and centuries, Christianity has been, in my view, on balance a very good thing for us. The book to read is Paul Among The People, by the classics scholar Sarah Ruden. Ruden is a young progressive Quaker who defends St. Paul from his many modern critics. I interviewed Sarah on my old Beliefnet blog, but you might also want to check out this Christianity Today piece. Ruden’s view is that we read St. Paul today and compare him unfavorably to the way we see the world, especially on matters related to feminism and homosexuality. When you read Paul alongside pagan literature of the period, a very, very different image of him emerges. Paul actually comes across as a radical opponent of some extremely ugly normative practices in Roman society and culture. For example, male homosexuality in his day was almost entirely about powerful Roman men enslaving and raping boys — something that was widely accepted. Paul stood against that, Ruden shows. And Paul also defended the dignity of women in a classical world that devalued them. Her main point is that taken in historical context, Paul’s views are actually far more in line with what we believe today than with what was mainstream in the Greco-Roman world. It was the faith Paul preached and did more than anyone else save Jesus Christ to define that gave us most of what is particularly good about Western civilization. This is not to say that we ever lived in a Golden Age. I was reading just this week a testimony by a close comrade of St. Louis, King of France, in which he recounted in plausible detail the holiness of the king. And he casually mentioned that the great and pious king so hated blasphemy that he would do terrible things to blasphemers. I am very glad indeed that we don’t have monarchs who torture blasphemers today, even as I wish we had monarchs who lived and practiced as St. Louis did in other ways. The point is that Christianity gave us a set of standards around which to measure our conduct, and our progress toward moral goodness, in the same way Islam has done for the Islamic world, and other creeds and schools of thought (e.g., Confucianism) have done for other civilizations.... END OF EXTRACT I always mean to find out more about Kierkegaard, as he was a major influence on the novelist Walker Percy, whom I greatly respect. I never seem to find the time.
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