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Post by hibernicus on Feb 11, 2011 14:10:22 GMT
Our now departed friend Goldenfleece struck me as a sneering snob who made tastefulness the touchstone of truth and was not prepared to engage with cirticism, but he did raise an important point. The great popularity of "Italianate" devotions among Irish Catholics reflected their ability to appeal to and attract an unsophisticated audience - which is not a bad thing, given that many of them were specifically designed to appeal to the uneducated and open their hearts to receive the faith - but has there not been too much reliance on them? For example, do not certain forms of Marianism seem to raise Mary almost to the status of a deity? (I know that this is often a misunderstanding of, say, Montfort or Liguori, who see devotion to Mary as ultimately Christocentric - but the fact that so many Montfortian devotees recall this initial scandal as something they had to overcome in themselves shows IMHO that there is a real problem - andof course those who say "But they did overcome it" are often less likely to come across those who did NOT overcome it and who in some cases may even have been lsot to the Church). Similarly, while suspicion of signs and wonders may often mask a deeper scepticism and a desire not to make a show of oneself in front of "respectable" unbelievers, it can also be a necessary exercise fo prudence - whereas an indiscriminating credulity about such things, which some people see as virtuous, can lead straight to hysteria, to dodgy devotions, or to the exploitation of trusting believers by predatory fraudsters and impostors. Perhaps I should sum this up - is there a sort of devotional intoxication which we should avoid or minimise?
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 14, 2012 23:06:31 GMT
And here's a related point. I have come across some people who think certain traditionalist groups (such as the Institute of Christ the King) are too continental/Italianate in their approaches and practices and don't take sufficient account of established Irish traditions - but given (a) that in the nineteenth century Irish Catholics adopted with great enthusiasm numerous continental devotions and practices, which they continued to cherish for generations (b) Irish devotional practice has been thrown into such confusion in the decades since the Vatican Council that it's hard to speak of stable devotional traditions at all in the Irish context, why should they not experiment with continental devotional practices and see how they are received? (Perhaps the significant word here is "experiment" - which implies willingness to change the approach if it doesn't work out. If they are operating on the basis that, say, Roman customs are always and everywhere the best simply because they are Roman, and must be adopted throughout the Church on that basis, that would certainly be problematic.)
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 16, 2012 12:30:58 GMT
You have a point, Hibernicus. The Irish Church of recent centuries seems never to have been happier when embracing the most recent Roman fad, especially evident in the C19th devotional revolution and the aftermath of the glorious Vatican II and as a result, Irish faithful don't remember their traditions (as is apparent at almost any traditional Mass in Ireland).
But the Institute of Christ the King seem to manufacture tradition as they go along, to press allegedly Roman practices for the sake of it and even to innovate as suits themselves (eg, their use of the title canon, which is untraditional). Selective Ultramontanism is the order of the day here.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 16, 2012 20:31:53 GMT
"The most recent Roman fad" does not, I think, quite cover the phenomenon. The Irish Church was more reliant on Roman practice than other European churches in the early modern period because of its penal situation (e.g. the Roman rite was universally adopted rather than having local uses - even in England there was a trickle of Sarum Use survival among recusants right into the C19; in some respects the Church of Ireland was more "mediaeval" than the Catholic Church because it took over such features as the mediaeval parish structures, so that Church of Ireland parishes are often called after local saints while their local Catholic counterparts are named after Continental saints.) The devotional revolution of the nineteenth century often presented itself as reviving practices which had existed in mediaeval Ireland (e.g. the re-establishment of the Corpus Christi procession in Cork in the mid-1920s was accompanied by reference to the 1603 incident when some Cork citizens held an eucharistic procession to express their hope that they would enjoy greater freedom under the newly-crowned James I than under Queen Elizabeth, whereupon some of them were executed by the authorities to show they were mistaken) or which might reasonably have been expected to spread to Ireland if it had remained under Catholic rulers (e.g. the arrival of Counter-Reformation preaching orders like the Redemptorists and Vincentians, with their missions). Furthermore, this sort of Romanisation was pretty general in the C19 because (1) the ancien regime ecclesiastical structures had been disrupted by the Revolutionary Wars and Rome seemed to offer the model of best practice (2) Many local uses had been messed about by rationalist reformers in the C19, so adopting the Roman use seemed the best guarantee of orthodoxy. (3) Modern communications made it easier to spread Roman practices (and also put a premium on uniformity as people moved around more and were more likely to be confused by local variations - I think the very Romanocentric nature of Irish Catholic practice in the C19 is intimately linked to its position as an emigrant church). Indeed, similar phenomena can be found in earlier centuries. As I may have mentioned on this board before, I have a private devotion to St Bede as the patron saint of historians, and when I read descriptions of how St Benedict Biscop, the founder of the Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery, created a sensation by travelling repeatedly to Rome to acquire relics and books, building a great church on the Roman model, and importing craftsmen to teach locally-recruited monks how to make stained glass and practice Gregorian chant (neither of which had been heard of in those parts before) the nineteenth-century Irish devotional revolution comes at once to mind. (This parallel was invoked by Fr Faber when he called his fledgling religious order the Wilfridians before merging them with the Oratorians, St Wilfrid having done the most to bring the Anglo-Saxon Church into line with Roman practice.) Indeed, one of the most impressive things about Bede is that despite his Roman-style formation and adherence to the Roman date of Easter, he still presents the early Irish missionary St Aidan as a model of evangelisation and personal sanctity, and a reproach to certain corruptions he saw creeping into the contemporary Northumbrian Church. Perhaps someone should start a Society of St Aidan? What does I think bother me about dismissive views of nineteenth-century imported devotions is that they actually seemed to succeed to a considerable extent in reaching the poor and uneducated and that their eradication in the name of authenticity has to a great extent left a vacuum. (Their success wasn't just in evangelising lax-Catholic populations; Anglican ritualists deployed them with considerable success in the East End of London). I would also have thought that any revival is necessarily going to be selective and over-enthusiastic; the problem would be as you say if it becomes a law unto itself.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 12, 2012 23:34:33 GMT
A post from RORATE CAELI about the differences between Marian maximalists and minimalists at Vatican II (argues maximalists see Mary in relation to the hypostatic union, i.e. the incarnation, whereas minimalists emphasise her in relation to the Church). I post this for information and do not wish to comment on the questions at issue or how far this post is an adequate description of the debates. Note this reference to Irish support for the maximalist position, which is fairly obviously related to the Legion of Mary's Monfortian view that Mary's position is so exalted that no praise can be high enough for her. EXTRACT On the evening of September 22, 1961, Congar notes: “I am aware of the drama that has accompanied me all my life: the need to fight, for the sake of the Gospel and the Apostolic faith, against the Mediterranean and Irish development and proliferation of a Mariology that does not proceed from Revelation, but is sustained by Pontifical texts” [135]. END OF EXTRACT www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19978542&postID=8980692301995781791
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