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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2013 21:35:59 GMT
I don't think I expressed myself very well in that post - just for the record I know that the soul's acceptance of God must be a free-will offering and cannot and should not be compelled, and I also know that blind faith and credulity are real dangers, as illustrated for example by the accounts linked below: dialogueireland.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/house-of-prayer-turned-our-mum-into-a-fanatic/dialogueireland.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/what-is-happening-with-the-palmarians/But what does strike me is that the attitude that choice is what matters and that we should never give up the ability to choose (or put it another way, that trust is dangerous and we should never trust anyone) is very problematic (not to mention that the people who emphasise choice are often less than happy when people choose to disagree with them). If you look at the ACP comboxes, for example, the people who post in them are generally not happy that other people should engage in elaborate liturgical ritual - they want it suppressed completely. One possible reason for this and for the cult of ugliness, might be understood through a famous scene in Brecht's THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI in which the Hitler character is shown being tutored on self-presentation by a classically trained actor, and as he learns his lesson he is slowly transformed from a nobody into Hitler the mesmerising speechmaker. The implied lesson is a form of puritan distrust of art because of its power to manipulate, and a sense that the audience must be constantly invited to become active participants and cannot be allowed/trusted to take in the drama without immediately analysing it. I think the ACP combox brigade have a similar distrust of beauty, ornament and ceremonial because they see it as a trap and a snare by which we are blinded and enslaved. I don't know if I have made myself any clearer, but maybe a few more questions will draw it out.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 6, 2013 22:06:59 GMT
I'm not being snotty when I say that probing the mindset of the ACP seems a forlorn exercise-- their attitude seems to be no more complex than "If Rome wants it, we don't want it". Their attitudes show no internal consistency-- for instance, they are all for reform in general but all against it when it's proposed by the Holy See, as with the alterations in the missal.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2013 22:19:33 GMT
They are actually quite consistent on that point. They are for reform that moves the church in the general direction of Protestant congregationalism and against reform (such as the new translation) which moves the Church away from that direction. (Note that by "they" I say the sort of people who post in the comboxes and make up the leadership team - not the rank and file, most of whom seem to see it as a trade union for priests.)
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Post by shane on Dec 6, 2013 22:21:02 GMT
One thing I dislike about Weigel's approach to faith is its excessive individualism. He is far too optimistic about the modern world. I think this explains his utter dismissal of traditional Irish Catholicism. He totally misses the social element of religion and is oblivious to the secularising force of modern culture. In this 1957 paper 'Priests and People in Ireland', Kevin Smyth, S.J. pointed out how important Catholic culture is in retention and transmission of the faith:
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 6, 2013 22:41:41 GMT
Hibernicus, I think maybe I know what you mean. Would a good analogy be the characters in a horror film, who-- after having already seen, say, a mysterious figure moving about in a photograph, and perhaps a woman disappear into thin air-- say, "This can't be happening! It's not possible!", when some other mysterious thing happens. Or indeed, the way the disciples continue to be incredulous after they've witnessed Jesus's miraculous powers. (I never understand that. If he could walk on water, and raise Lazarus, why doubt he could rise from the dead?) Sometimes I think our Lord's words, "Moses, in whom you trust, accuses you", means (on one level) that all the worldly philosophies that deny the Gospel will be shown, when we "see face to face", to be self-refuting and self-contradictory, and that deep down we knew this all along.
Simply put: once your intellect and spirit have accepted the Catholic faith, it is sheer perversity to hold open that door of "choice". Is that maybe close to what you mean?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2013 22:52:20 GMT
I think Weigel represents an attitude that already existed in American (and Australian, and British middle-class Catholicism) before the Second Vatican Council - a reaction against Irish immigrant Catholicism, and a dislike or contempt of its characteristic strengths, It is quite true that, as James Hitchcock points out, quite a lot of people called "conservative" Catholics in the decades after the Council were regarded as liberals before the Council, and had simply maintained the same principles while the culture changed around them. There is a trad critique of conservative Catholicism which sees it as simply recapitulating the pre-conciliar liberalism which led to the disasters of the post-conciliar epoch and expecting to produce a different result, and I must say there is something in this. The problem for this trad critique is that there were indeed real problems with old-style Irish Catholicism, and one illustration of this is the way that the Irish bishops reacted to English Catholic reports on emigrant leakage from the faith. Their response to suggestions that this might be partly due to catechetical and pastoral failings in Ireland was not to propose alternative suggestions and interpretations - it was to refuse to consider the possibility at all, and do their best to suppress any discussion of the subject. (The Irish manuscripts Commission recently published a 1950s report on the conditions and lifestyle of Irish emigrants in Britain, prepared jointly for the English and Irish bishops; it was not published at the time because the Irish bishops flatly refused to allow it unless a section on the causes for lapsation which suggested some of those causes might stem from deficiencies in Ireland was deleted. Admittedly, being lectured by the English has never been a pleasant experience and was bound to be sensitive, but that was simply ostrich tactics and we can now see the result.)
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2013 23:01:21 GMT
YEs, Maolseachlainn, I think that is getting close to what I mean. What really sparked this off was a poster in the ACP combox (not a member but a supporter) who defended the ACP for not taking a position on abortion by saying that the decision of the individual conscience was sacred and not even God would override it. In one way that is correct, but to take it as saying that no-one else, even God, could say that an individual's decision was wrong and that choice was what matters irrespective of what is chosen would lead to the paradoxical view that Satan's rebellion was of equal moral stature to Michael's obedience.
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Post by shane on Dec 6, 2013 23:11:24 GMT
Hibernicus, Weigel's attitude extends beyond the old style Irish immigrant ghetto Catholicism. He subscribes to American exceptionalism and is equally dismissive of pre-conciliar Portuguese, Quebec and Spanish Catholicism ( see this notorious article). Also I have never read a 'trad critique' that denied that were "real problems with old-style Irish Catholicism". To me that seems something of a straw man. Personally I also would question the extent to which catechetical defencies prompted lapsation among Irish immigrants. When someone up sticks from a rural community, they leave behind all the familiar surroundings - the family, the parish church, the local priest, the school, and go instead to an alien environment where the traditional conventions, attitudes and commitments don't exist. Obviously this puts stresses on habitual religious commitments. If you want to claim that Irish catechetics was the problem behind Irish immigrant apostasy, you would have to compare the mass attendance rates of Irish immigrants in England to English-born Catholics in England. Otherwise it's just dubious extrapolation
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 6, 2013 23:39:16 GMT
I'm not qualified to comment on the discussion between Hibernicus and Shane but one thing I think might be said is that Irish Catholicism did not, in fact, wither and die at the first gusts of secularism. The present triumph of Irish secularism is, I think, the proverbial overnight success that was years in the making-- at least since the days of The Bell. How much of that was demographics, cultural inertia etc. and how much of it was a successful intellectual and catechetical defence by Irish Catholicism I would not pretend to know.
Is there something to be said for the idea that the failure of Irish Catholicism in the late twentieth century was, to borrow the title of a book about resistance to the Nazis, an honourable defeat?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2013 23:45:28 GMT
The problem was that mid-twentieth century Irish Catholics often genuinely believed that they had the key to effective evangelisation and that if only other Catholics would do as they did all would be well. (There was in fact something in this - the Legion of Mary is the prime example - but it wasn't the whole story.) Cardinal Daly's memoirs recall how he arrived as a student in Paris confident that if the French would only copy the Irish all would be well, but he soon realised that the French faced a host of problems which the Irish had not faced but were certain to face in the near future. The problem is not that there was lapsation - as you say, a good deal of lapsation was to be expected in the circumstances. The problem was in the refusal even to consider that the Irish church might have something to learn, and the attitude that anyone who even suggested such a thing was out of bounds. (The problem BTW was not uniquely Irish - one of the church's perennial problems has been in adapting the parish system to moving populations; in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries the French church had to cope with the shift in population from the rural west to the industrialising east, and spent a great deal of time arguing why Bretons seemed to lose their faith as soon as they arrived at the railway station in Paris.)
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Post by shane on Dec 7, 2013 0:06:39 GMT
So hibernicus, what lessons should the pre-conciliar Irish bishops have derived from churches elsewhere that might have made a substantial difference? Their innovations certainly haven't immunised them from cultural shift and societal secularisation; indeed those churches have actually disintegrated at a much more rapid pace than the Irish church. The 'lessons' that Cardinal Daly picked up and applied from his French experience were hardly auspicious. You could even argue that Irish Catholicism has weathered the storm relatively better than the continentals (certainly the state of the church here isn't any worse than on the continent) and that vindicates the sceptical attitude of the Irish bishops.
In a very long and fascinating article examining the woes of the French Church (The Furrow, May 1952) Fr Daly himself noted that the French often overlooked the Irish experience when they themselves could learn from it:
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 7, 2013 21:43:26 GMT
To start off with: as Hitchcock admits in retrospect, some of the suspicions which the old-style authoritarian bishops held about the liberals of their day were actually justified and it is clear that many pre-Vatican II liberals' claims about rediscovering authentic Catholicism were actually fronts for disdain for popular Catholicism and desire to adapt themselves to modernity. (I would say for example that Sean O Faoileain's professions of being an "authentic Catholic in the great European tradition as distinct from the provincial European variety" really amounted to "I want to go to Mass as an aesthetic experience without being constrained by any awkward moral commandments, and to keep a mistress without any priest being so uncultivated as to tell me this is wrong" - in other words something identical with John McGahern's worldview, except that McGahern was a good deal more clearsighted about what that worldview really entails.)
That being said, I think Weigel actually has a point about something being wrong with many expressions of traditional Catholicism. Quebec is the real poster child for his argument; it went from having one of the highest rates of Catholic observance in the world to having one of the lowest in just over a decade. That sort of implosion doesn't happen without something being very wrong somewhere. OK, quite a lot of the secularists of the Quiet Revolution started out as Catholic liberals and their secularism can be seen as the working out of the full implications of their liberalism, but you have to ask what made that sort of liberalism seem plausible in the first place - and the answer is the extent to which Catholic traditionalism in Quebec hitched its wagon to Maurice Duplessis's authoritarian regime and was discredited when that regime imploded after Duplessis's death. (The way in which Duplessis handled labour conflicts, for example, was highly damaging to the church's reputation.)
I also think that the full extent of the decline and fall of Irish Catholicism has yet to be worked through, and that we are going to end up with a situation very like Quebec (where public culture is aggressively secularist and anti-Catholic and practise rates reduced to a faithful nucleus dismissed as dowdy provincials) - we'll just have taken longer to get there. The argument of Weigel and Co is that their approach is best suited to maintaining a faithful remnant who not only cling to the faith but can adapt and survive and make their presence felt, whereas the old approach in their view was like the BAttle of Aughrim - a great and well-drilled army, formidable while its main position was intact, but once its flank was turned rapidly disintegrating into rout and massacre. I confess that I often find myself thinking of Aughrim in recent years.
A few problems with the pre-Vatican II church do spring to mind (a) creeping infallibility - having the personal preferences of the bishop imposed as matters of obligation even on matters which were morally neutral (John Charles MCQuaid on church art, for example)
(b)legalist rigorism; taking the view that the harshest form of church law should always be applied even when different approaches existed elsewhere, and that such differences simply represented the weak-kneed conformity of -say - English Catholics. Look at the popularity of the ultra-rigorist Fr Robert Nash SJ as a Catholic commentator (even acknowledging that Fr Nash had his good points; he was just as tough on business morality as on sexual morality, for example). Fr Nash really took the view that any sort of natural pleasure was an occasion of sin and should be stamped out whenever it appeared, as an act of mortification.
(c)This was combined with a prescriptive attitude to social doctrine in which there was an assumption that the church had all the answers if only they could be properly worked out and need not bother with empirical investigation or advice from elsewhere. This had disadvantages both big (the highly abstract advocacy of corporatism a la Portugal, the way in which someone like Alfred O'Rahilly always conducted his numerous polemics on the assumption that opponents were in actual bad faith) and small (for example, while some bishops did make moves to replace industrial schools and orphanages by newer forms of care, they seem to have lasted as long as they did - certainly much longer than in Britain, and if a few decades doesn't seem that much longer it made all the difference for the unfortunates who experienced them - because in part of an assumption that they were part of the church and to criticise them was to criticise the church)
(d)Underlying this was a wider assumption that cultural protectionism could be maintained indefinitely and that Ireland was immune from problems which existed elsewhere - this being related to some very unpleasant assumptions about the lower orders knowing their proper station (these were not unique to Ireland; John XXIII was actually the first Pope to spell out in so many words that it was not enough for the peasantry to know their station and that they were entitled as a matter of justice to better living conditions).
(e) The classic Irish disease is the combination of an unreally idealised public image which cannot be challenged in public (because to do so is to give ammunition to external enemies - the Brits, the communists, whoever - with private awareness that the reality is much less exalted, leading to bitter and corrosive cynicism
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Post by shane on Dec 8, 2013 17:35:43 GMT
hibernicus, with respect, nothing in your post comes close to addressing the question I posed to you: what lessons should the pre-conciliar Irish bishops have derived from churches elsewhere that might have made a substantial difference? Nobody is claiming that pre-conciliar Irish Catholicism was flawless (though I think your analysis of its flaws is exaggerated and overgeneralised, and I would remind you of the saying, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"), but you identified its central problem as refusing "even to consider that the Irish church might have something to learn" from the Church in other countries. Exactly what are you referring to? What special characteristics possessed by the continental churches might have immunised us from secularisation if we had endeavoured to imitate them? And why haven't those qualities buffered the churches in Europe from their well-documented collapse in Mass attendance and vocations?
BTW your claim that Quebec's secularisation necessarily means that there was "something very wrong" with Quebec Catholicism is verging perilously close to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 8, 2013 22:46:52 GMT
The fact that there was a collapse in Quebec of that speed and scale may not prove that something was wrong, but it creates a prima facie likelihood that this was the case. Certainly it shows that Quebec Catholicism was not as strong as was believed in the previous era, and by extension that those who thought it was stronger were mistaken.
Similarly, I don't think it is simply possible to exclude what happened next from any assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of 1950s Irish Catholicism - one has to assess why this change was possible before saying it was inevitable.
To say something was wrong BTW is not the same as to say that anything could have been done about it. It certainly shows that the policies actually pursued by the Irish bishops in the 1950s did not succeed, whether or not alternative policies would have worked better. The question is what are we to do now, given the conditions we find ourselves in; just as the theological readjustments which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire (e.g. the shift from Eusebius' claim that the empire was specially blessed and underpinned by God to Augustine's distinction between the City of Man and the City of God which is only fully realised in heaven) whether or not earlier adoption of that change could have prevented the disaster.
I think the Irish collapse has still to work its way through completely, and that 20 or 30 years from now Ireland will be pretty much like Quebec. We are falling from a higher base than the Continentals, but the trajectory is the same; we seem to be repeating their errors without learning from them. I think the American Church is in a better state than we are, despite its well-known problems, albeit for reasons which may not have been possible to replicate here (the fact that the US church was too big to impose a single top-down approach, the fact that Catholicism there is to some extent countercultural, which was both a liability and an asset, the existence of an extensive network of Catholic third-level education).
Are you really saying that NOTHING which the bishops could have done would have made any difference at all, and that therefore there is no point in even asking the question? I did not BTW claim to be offering a comprehensive account of the pre-Vatican II Irish Church, but pointing out some faults which are extremely obvious in hindsight. (Not just in hindsight, BTW; Frank Duff and Fr Michael O'Carroll were making some very cogent points pre-Vatican II about the failure of Irish Catholicism to develop a deeper inner spirituality and the tendency of the bishops and clergy to assume that the laity and lower clergy, however committed, simply could not be trusted to take the initiative on anything without compromising their faith.) If you want an alternative possibility, let's start with this - the accounts of John Charles McQuaid's response to the Mercier and Pillar of Fire Societies make it quite clear that he chose to interpret elements of canon law, which elsewhere were interpreted to allow such private exchanges, as not only permitting but compelling him to suppress the societies. (He may not have formally suppressed the societies, but he imposed conditions on them which the non-Catholic members would never accept and which were founded on the assumption that the Catholic members, who included senior clerics and laity whose services to the church were well-known to him, were totally incapable of defending the faith when challenged by non-Catholics.) His fear that such discussions might lead to religious indifferentism did have a certain validity, but the way he handled it wound up producing this effect under worse circumstances - instead of developing gradually they were brought in in a context which made it seem the Church was changing its whole approach by a sheer act of will. Quite frankly I think some degree of inter-religious dialogue aimed at mutual understanding was a good thing in itself, that its practice in good forms might not have prevented the development of bad forms but it might have kept these from developing so recklessly and harmfully as they have done.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 8, 2013 22:55:02 GMT
This is a very interesting and educational discussion. I hope you both develop it some more. This is a good forum but I sometimes think it could do with some more disagreement!
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