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Post by hibernicus on Dec 9, 2013 11:31:49 GMT
A couple of clarifications: (1) Post hoc ergo propter hoc (i.e. if first A happens, then B happens, A caused B) does not constitute PROOF, but it does constitute a HYPOTHESIS which can legitimately be tested by then looking for proof/disproof, and what actually happened also constitutes DATA which has to be taken into account.
(2) The question "what could they have learned from the continental churches which could have allowed them to avert the catastrophe" is too narrow. If A predicts a catastrophe and B does not, the fact that A was no more effective than B at averting the catastrophe does not alter the fact that A has been shown to have greater insight into the situation than B. This of course cuts both ways; it is equally legitimate to contrast the liberal predictions of a massive post-Vatican II revival with the gloomier predictions of traditionalists.
(3) There is a real problem in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the pre-Vatican II Irish Church, because so much of the analysis has been written by secularists and liberal Catholics who play up the weaknesses and ignore the strengths (and who see it only in relation to what came after it) - but any account which emphasises its strengths surely has to start from what we already know, however flawed that understanding may be.
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Post by shane on Dec 10, 2013 16:34:48 GMT
Hibernicus, you missed my point. In the previous post, you imputed Quebec's secularisation to the internal flaws of the local church. In the context of church inadequacies, you said "that sort of implosion doesn't happen without something being very wrong somewhere." That is a categorical statement, not a hypothesis. It was that simplistic reasoning that I took objection to, not your claim that the Quebec church is impeachable.
"It certainly shows that the policies actually pursued by the Irish bishops in the 1950s did not succeed"
This is a problematic assertion given that the "policies actually pursued by Irish bishops in the 1950s" were quickly jettisoned in the following decade, correlating with the beginning of Ireland's long-term secularisation. One might just as well argue that the correlation isn't coincidental and that the Church's decline isn't an indictment on the old pastoral methods, but on those that replaced them. The pre-conciliar praxis was premised on the notion of a fortress Church; the Church erected a damn around itself in order to hold back the corrupting influences of the modern world. Vatican II smashed that damn to pieces and allowed in a flood of highly toxic effluent. It's not at all obvious that a sceptical disposition to the merits of ecumenical dialogue (which in any case was also shared by the Vatican in that era, see how the Holy Office treated Yves Congar) was responsible for this in any way.
I also think you exaggerate the idea of bishops being blissfully oblivious to post-war realities, encapsulated in your previous claim that bishops assumed that "Ireland was immune from problems which existed elsewhere". I'd question how true that is; Irish bishops were far from being smug about the Church's future prospects. As Archbishop D'Alton lamented in 1951: "We have to face the fact that, with the rise of new inventions such as the cinema and the radio, we no longer enjoy our former comparative isolation. Our people are constantly being brought into contact with a civilisation for the most part alien and materialist in outlook."
My question isn't "too narrow"; it's in direct response to your earlier claim that the central problem in Irish Catholicism was refusing "even to consider that the Irish church might have something to learn" from the continental churches. Yet you have failed to specify how this might have reconfigured the impact of secularisation. The continental nations which 50 years ago were at the vanguard of pastoral and liturgical innovation are today ranked among the most secularised in the world. Surely this consideration ought to augur caution about imitating their endeavours? You claimed that the pastoral methods of 1950s Irish Catholicism 'failed', because Ireland today is thoroughly secularised. By the same standard, the pastoral methods of the continental churches have surely also 'failed'.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 10, 2013 19:14:27 GMT
I did not attribute Quebec's secularisation exclusively to the internal flaws of the local church. I said secularisation would not have taken place on such a massive scale without the local church being seriously flawed. There is a distinction between these statements. It is not meant to be a comprehensive explanation but a reasonable general hypothesis which can then be tested further. Refusing to entertain it on the basis that it is imperfect without going into details and arguing a better hypothesis ensures that understanding will never develop at all.
I might add that every age is equidistant from God and has its own virtues and flaws. The point I was making is not that it had nothing but flaws but that it is necessary to start from the presumption that there were flaws as well as virtues and and to work out what these were and how they related to one another. Do you really think that the 1950s Church had no flaws at all, or that it is irrelevant and illegitimate to ask what they might have been?
Your rival hypothesis appears to be that the collapse was due to external causes and that the existence of these means that no other explanation need be entertained, and that the choice was always going to be all or nothing.
My point is that the old pastoral methods (or rather a significant number of them) could not have been maintained anyway. (Let's take a few examples; internal migration from the land because of rising expectations of living standards is well documented in the decades before the Council, and this had serious implications in terms of vocations - because these came disproportionately from the country and the small towns - and of pastoral provision; economic protectionism failed to employ enough people at what was considered an acceptable living standard, and free trade/foreign investment was always going to produce a massive shakeup in the economy an other countriesd in society; a more developed economy was going to put new demands on the education system which would threaten the church's influence because it would require human and financial resources which the church couldn't have provided.) Are you really going to say that keeping open the industrial schools and the Magdalen asylums when they were being replaced in was a good idea, or that it didn't have consequences which we are still paying for in every sense of the word? Do you really think the Trinity ban, for example, could have been maintained indefinitely, given that it could not be comprehensively enforced and was therefore being implemented unevenly in a way which rewarded disobedience and punished those who obeyed?
I agree that the bishops were not necessarily smug about the church's future prospects (and I can actually cite statements like Cardinal D'Alton's from the first decade of the C20 or even earlier); what I am saying is that they were not sufficiently aware of the possibility that new approaches might be required or even possible (I might add that they were often quite innovative in using new forms of technology and publicity, more than is realised in retrospect). The point about the Mercier and Pillar of Fire Societies is not just that John Charles McQuaid slapped them down, it is the WAY that he did it. He operated on the assumption that numerous Catholics who had given distinguished service to the Church were so untrustworthy that they could not be allowed to exercise the least initiative in the matter, that their opinions were self-evidently worthless, and that the whole matter should be decided by his ipse dixit. This at the same time that he was willing to accept at face value the claims of a certain priest that his photos of nude children were purely artistic studies which had been misunderstood by the philistine laity. Are you really saying that this "the archbishop knows it all because he is archbishop" approach was not guaranteed to produce outward conformity and adolescent rebellion?
(I might add that whatever one may think of Congar, it is at least arguable that the Holy Office's attitude in the 1950s was mistaken, given that it adopted a different attitude in the 1960s. Surely you are not saying the Holy Office is infallible? I might add that its 1950s attitude to some extent reflected the fact that there are very few Protestants in Italy and it was not so immediately exposed to the pastoral issues facing the Rhine countries. I am not saying the Holy Office should just have been disregarded, I am saying it was capable of making mistakes.) What we could have learned from the Continental churches was not so much the solutions they attempted but the scale of the problems and the fact that those problems could not simply be wished away. What alternative approach do you think should have been taken, and why?
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Post by shane on Dec 10, 2013 21:17:38 GMT
Hibernicus, I invite you to re-read your previous posts. There is a noticeable variation between the assertions in your last post and in the two previous ones. Either you initially misstated or you have since revised your positions.
You previously claimed that "Underlying this was a wider assumption...that Ireland was immune from problems which existed elsewhere". Now you implicitly acknowledge that this claim is overstated, instead lamenting that bishops weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about pioneering pastoral innovation.
You previously criticised the Irish for lacking enthusiasm about continental initiatives yet now you qualify this to bemoaning the Irish failure to embrace the continentals' supposed superior appreciation of social problems.
Much of your post is based on straw men. I was not actually defending Irish pastoral methods; I was just cautioning against the idea that a continental alternative offers an exciting way forward, given the well-documented decline of the Church in Europe. I don't know where you got the idea that I think the Holy Office is infallible. I cited the Holy Office's authoritarian treatment of Catholic ecumenists (it basically kept ecumenists like Congar on a dog-leash) only to contextualise the movement's hostile reception among our own bishops.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2014 17:30:34 GMT
Some US Catholic and right-wing blogs have been picking up on an article by John Zmirak about tendencies among Catholic trads, which include monarchism and defence of the persecution of heretics by the state. I'm linking to Dreher's column because he says he can independently confirm some of Zmirak's anecdotes, which to be honest I would not believe on Zmirak's authority alone as he can be remarkably unscrupulous, and because of the extended discussion in his combox. I also link to some comments on the Zmirak piece by Fr Longenecker. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/among-the-neoreactionaries/EXTRACT [from Zmirak as quoted by Dreher} Let me start with a few vignettes. I was an eyewitness, or heard a detailed firsthand account, of each of these events, or else will provide a link to document it. - Just after the Chinese government crushed the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, a seminarian explained to me that he wished he “could have driven one of the tanks” that ran over the demonstrators and their makeshift Statue of Liberty. “Americanism is a far greater threat to the Church than communism,” he explained. He is now a priest — I saw him on the altar in October. [RECALL THAT SOME OF THE PROMINENT LATIN AMERICAN SIXTIES LIBERATIONISTS SUCH AS HELDER CAMARA STARTED OUT AS FASCISTS IN THE 1930S, AND THIS IS NOT AS ODD AS IT MIGHT SEEM - HIB] - It was a festive evening at the small Catholic college. A hearty dinner followed Mass for the feast of its patron saint. Now the students were gathered with the school’s faculty and leaders for a bonfire and robust songs. The high point of the night was the piñata, which the school’s director of student life hung from a hook. It was full of candy and shaped like a pig. Across it was written, “Americanism.” The student life director held up a bat, and told the students, “Okay, everybody, let’s SMASH Americanism!” The students lined up behind their teachers, their dean, and their college president, to smash whatever it was they thought was Americanism. (They had never been taught what Leo XIII actually meant by that word.) [IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY AMERICANISM, SURELY] - At this same school, in an academic discussion, the college dean explained the greater economic success of Protestant countries that embraced capitalism (compared to agrarian Catholic nations) as the “effects of Freemasonry.” The college president quickly corrected him, pointing out another critical factor: “diabolical intervention.” - That same dean, in a conversation with me, waved off the possibility of democratic reform in America. Moral reform, he explained to me, would only come in the form of a forcible coup d’état, by which “men of virtue” would impose their will “on the people, who will fall in line when they see that they have no choice.” That dean had previously criticized Franco’s Spain for being too lax. [EITHER FOR ALLOWING NON-CATHOLICS TO LIVE THERE AT ALL, ALBEIT UNDER HEAVY RESTRICTIONS, OR FOR EMBRACING ECONOMIC MODERNISATION UNDER THE OPUS DEI TECHNOCRATS RATHER THAN STICKING TO AUTARKY. I HAVE COME ACROSS IRISH TRADS WHO TAKE THE LATTER POSITION TO EXPLAIN THE DEMISE OF THE REGIME POST-FRANCO] - The historian at a large Catholic university gathered his friends and family on the day that the rest of us call “Thanksgiving.” But his clan called the holiday “Anathema Thursday,” and every year used it to mock the Protestant origins of America by hanging a Puritan in effigy. This same historian teaches those he mentors to call the Statue of Liberty “that Masonic bitch-goddess.” - At another small Catholic college, faculty and staff lead an annual pig roast, which they call an “auto-da-fe,” naming the pig each year after a prominent “heretic” before they immolate and eat it. [SOME COMMENTERS SUGGEST THIS IS A JOKE AND ZMIRAK DOESN'T GET IT. I SUSPECT THEY ARE CORRECT - HIB] - At still another small Catholic college, one of the teachers whom I met at a conference spoke effusively of “loopholes” a scholar had purportedly found in Vatican II’s endorsement of religious freedom. It seems that Dignitatis Humanae only forbids the State from using physical force in matters of religion. The Church, this young scholar explained, is not so constrained. The Church may imprison any baptized person and punish him for heresy. “So that means the Pope has the right to throw any Lutheran in jail?”, I asked skeptically. “I know, right?” he said, beaming a smile. “This is really exciting.” In subsequent weeks he sent me “proof” that George W. Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks. - Over at Ethika Politika, a Catholic writer followed his rejection of American liberalism and capitalism to a different logical endpoint, and attempted to rehabilitate Karl Marx, absolving him of all the evils historically perpetrated by communists, and urging his readers to find ways to be good Catholic Marxists.
- At America magazine, a commentator wrote dismissively, even patronizingly, of that magazine’s greatest contributor — Father John Courtney Murray, SJ — for his attempt to embrace American liberty and infuse it with an understanding of natural law. It was clear that such attempts had already failed, and that Catholics should embrace political quietism, withdrawing to separatist communities and hoping for toleration, the commentator wrote. [THIS IS A PERFECTLY DEFENSIBLE VIEW QUITE DISTINCT FROM THE ONES MENTIONED ABOVE- HIB] END www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2013/12/illiberal-catholics.html
A couple of points: (1) Although Zmirak is politically a palaeocon and George Weigel a neocon, they are both quite similar in their attitude to America (e.g. see it as the highest civilisation which all other should imitate). The big difference is that Weigel is more intellectually sophisticated and Zmirak less diplomatic (i.e. he can point out some of the more problematic aspects of Catholic history and of American politics which Weigel glosses over).
(2) Zmirak's eulogy of the Enlightenment and America is very selective - he takes the view that America equals the JEffersonian small-government tradition (given that the Hamiltonian nationalist belief in a strong state and economic interventionism has also been around since the Founding Fathers, for good or ill, this is pretty dodgy) and that the Enlightenment equals America. The idea that there might be substance to some historic Catholic criticisms of the Enlightenment (for example, that it was often used as underpinning by absolutist rulers, which is one reason why the cult of Catholic monarchism is so misplaced) or that America as defined by Zmirak might not be the summit of human perfection, is treated as equivalent to wanting to burn heretics,
(3) Zmirak also equates any form of "paternalism" (i.e government intervention in the free market) with tyranny, so that the Inquisition, the Gulag and the Welfare State are inextricable from one another. This might be a little more convincing were it not that Mr Zmirak has in the past declared his passionate support for immigration controls and said that if he believed Catholicism required opposition to them he would leave the Church. The trouble is that if you believe as Zmirak does that taxation is theft, you must also believe that immigration controls are theft (because everyone's labour is their own property, and by excluding someone from the market with the highest returns for their labour, their property is being devalued).
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 10, 2014 21:05:40 GMT
An interesting piece spelling out the difference (in "ideal type" terms) between "conservative" and "liberal" interpretations of the Church, and raising the interesting possibility that the tendency of liberal Catholicism to turn into a form of bureaucratic oligarchy is not coincidental: www.crisismagazine.com/2014/is-the-church-inherently-conservativeEXTRACT The great issue that separates progressive from more traditionalist Catholics is whether the Church will return to type. To answer that question “yes” is to say that the Church has an essential nature—a basic structure, set of beliefs, and way of functioning—that is sometimes obscured by corruptions or distortions but can be counted on to reassert itself in a purer and more vigorous form. In effect, it is to view the Church as a living being that retains her identity as she develops, and is subject to occasional infirmities but thereafter returns to health. People attached to modern ideas of progress don’t expect and don’t want that to happen. Present-day thought doesn’t like types, and it likes the idea of returning to type even less. It rejects organic comparisons for institutions, and prefers to view them as constructions for consciously chosen goals rather than products of essential forms that exist and endure whether we like them or not. We are Church, such people often say, and how we do Church determines what Church is. Such claims have strong moral overtones. Belief in enduring forms is identified with stereotypical thinking of a kind that rejects change and difference in favor of an imaginary world of eternal essences. That kind of thinking, it is thought, lends itself to a reactionary and oppressive approach to politics and religion that denies human freedom and tries to force an abstract ideal based on an imaginary and idealized past on obdurate reality. Scratch a traditionalist, many people say, and you find a fascist. On such a view, the Church becomes, if she is true to her vocation, the form taken from time to time by man’s response to God’s action in the world, or perhaps God’s action itself insofar as He acts through willing human instruments. It’s either what people are doing in response to God, or what God is doing through people He’s enlisted. Either way the Church disappears as a continuous and internally coherent institution, and becomes the happenstance outcome of some other force. Progressives say that the “other force” is the Holy Spirit, while skeptics are likely to identify it with various worldly projects that want to make use of the resources and popular prestige of the Church, or perhaps with a spirit that is far from holy. In any case, the progressive conception means that faith in the one holy Catholic and apostolic Church, and with it the meaning of the word “Catholic,” lose clear definition. The life of religion loses the element of rational public and corporate conviction, and of looking to the past and holding to what has been found good and worthy of love and loyalty. Instead, it becomes a matter of launching into the unknown based on some personal insight or inner assurance, or more likely of following the guidance of prophets claiming special knowledge who say they will help us sing a new Church into being. Such views may be modern, but they’re not new, since they’ve been held by antinomian visionaries throughout the ages. The twelfth century Calabrian abbot Joachim of Flora, who seems to have been personally holy although his views were officially condemned after his death, is famous for proposing that the Age of the Son, governed by the institutional Church, would soon give way to the Age of the Holy Spirit, based on the Gospel but transcending its letter as well as the need for disciplinary institutions. There have been numerous such figures over the centuries. Our situation today does of course have features that distinguish it from previous times. One is that the technocratic understandings that dominate social life today promote the view that the world is simply what we make of it. That view undermines organic conceptions and the idea that institutions have essential forms to which they tend to return. Another is that mass higher education, and the resulting spread of modish ways of thought, make the conceptual dissolution of the Church into a loosely associated succession of situations seem normal to many churchgoers. One result of such tendencies is that the dream of going beyond the authority of the institutional Church has become mainstream and bureaucratic. Instead of twelfth century abbots in rags, barefoot Franciscan spirituals, or Münster-style enthusiasts engaging in total violent revolution, we have conferences of academics and other mild-mannered bureaucratic functionaries with formal certifications and retirement plans. The attitude toward hierarchical authority is nonetheless similar and must be judged by its fruits. We determine the value of understandings by whether they help us deal with the world, and of visions of the Church by their effect on her and her members. As things are, the Church has lasted 2000 years. It seems impossible to understand how she could have done so, humanly speaking, without a remarkably functional and well-integrated pattern of basic principles. Adaptability has no doubt been necessary for her survival, but if she were a happenstance agglomeration of people, beliefs, and practices she would have disappeared long ago. Nor does God’s protection and guidance by itself seem an adequate explanation for her survival, since without continuity of basic form and principle there would be nothing distinct to have survived. We would not speak of the survival of the Church, but of a succession of historical situations with some overlapping features but no common identity. From early times the Church has been hierarchical and authoritative. Antinomian and anti-institutional movements have been episodes in her life, but they haven’t lasted long or turned out well on their own terms, so they’ve evidently been at odds with the nature and necessities of Catholic life. Institutional form and function are not everything, but they are not nothing either, any more than the human body and its constitution, functioning, and well-being are nothing. Catholicism is a religion of incarnation. That means it recognizes without reserve the claims of the spirit, but also the necessity for the spirit to become concretely present in our world through the sorts of things—such as bodies and institutions—that make up the world. Such things may be unruly and backward at times, but they are basic to the world Christ came to redeem, so they can’t simply be rejected and suppressed. The claim that belief in essential forms and natures is oppressive is odd. If such things don’t exist, the world becomes the shifting outcome of conflicting forces and there is nothing in it that is distinct enough to be oppressed. It is not possible to oppress a momentary configuration of eddies in a stream. Or if such things do exist, but they continually transform themselves, then politics becomes something for experts or visionaries who have a special gift for reading the signs of the times. It loses the connection to settled ways of thought needed for rational cooperative self-government. In either case politics becomes something that properly belongs to the few with little possibility for legitimate criticism by outsiders, and is likely to become oppressive in the usual manner of successful radical political movements. END
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 18, 2014 20:51:09 GMT
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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 19, 2014 12:22:33 GMT
Some US Catholic and right-wing blogs have been picking up on an article by John Zmirak about tendencies among Catholic trads, which include monarchism and defence of the persecution of heretics by the state. I'm linking to Dreher's column because he says he can independently confirm some of Zmirak's anecdotes, which to be honest I would not believe on Zmirak's authority alone as he can be remarkably unscrupulous, and because of the extended discussion in his combox. I also link to some comments on the Zmirak piece by Fr Longenecker. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/among-the-neoreactionaries/EXTRACT [from Zmirak as quoted by Dreher} Let me start with a few vignettes. I was an eyewitness, or heard a detailed firsthand account, of each of these events, or else will provide a link to document it. - Just after the Chinese government crushed the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, a seminarian explained to me that he wished he “could have driven one of the tanks” that ran over the demonstrators and their makeshift Statue of Liberty. “Americanism is a far greater threat to the Church than communism,” he explained. He is now a priest — I saw him on the altar in October. [RECALL THAT SOME OF THE PROMINENT LATIN AMERICAN SIXTIES LIBERATIONISTS SUCH AS HELDER CAMARA STARTED OUT AS FASCISTS IN THE 1930S, AND THIS IS NOT AS ODD AS IT MIGHT SEEM - HIB]- It was a festive evening at the small Catholic college. A hearty dinner followed Mass for the feast of its patron saint. Now the students were gathered with the school’s faculty and leaders for a bonfire and robust songs. The high point of the night was the piñata, which the school’s director of student life hung from a hook. It was full of candy and shaped like a pig. Across it was written, “Americanism.” The student life director held up a bat, and told the students, “Okay, everybody, let’s SMASH Americanism!” The students lined up behind their teachers, their dean, and their college president, to smash whatever it was they thought was Americanism. (They had never been taught what Leo XIII actually meant by that word.) [IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY AMERICANISM, SURELY] - At this same school, in an academic discussion, the college dean explained the greater economic success of Protestant countries that embraced capitalism (compared to agrarian Catholic nations) as the “effects of Freemasonry.” The college president quickly corrected him, pointing out another critical factor: “diabolical intervention.” - That same dean, in a conversation with me, waved off the possibility of democratic reform in America. Moral reform, he explained to me, would only come in the form of a forcible coup d’état, by which “men of virtue” would impose their will “on the people, who will fall in line when they see that they have no choice.” That dean had previously criticized Franco’s Spain for being too lax. [EITHER FOR ALLOWING NON-CATHOLICS TO LIVE THERE AT ALL, ALBEIT UNDER HEAVY RESTRICTIONS, OR FOR EMBRACING ECONOMIC MODERNISATION UNDER THE OPUS DEI TECHNOCRATS RATHER THAN STICKING TO AUTARKY. I HAVE COME ACROSS IRISH TRADS WHO TAKE THE LATTER POSITION TO EXPLAIN THE DEMISE OF THE REGIME POST-FRANCO] - The historian at a large Catholic university gathered his friends and family on the day that the rest of us call “Thanksgiving.” But his clan called the holiday “Anathema Thursday,” and every year used it to mock the Protestant origins of America by hanging a Puritan in effigy. This same historian teaches those he mentors to call the Statue of Liberty “that Masonic bitch-goddess.” - At another small Catholic college, faculty and staff lead an annual pig roast, which they call an “auto-da-fe,” naming the pig each year after a prominent “heretic” before they immolate and eat it. [SOME COMMENTERS SUGGEST THIS IS A JOKE AND ZMIRAK DOESN'T GET IT. I SUSPECT THEY ARE CORRECT - HIB] - At still another small Catholic college, one of the teachers whom I met at a conference spoke effusively of “loopholes” a scholar had purportedly found in Vatican II’s endorsement of religious freedom. It seems that Dignitatis Humanae only forbids the State from using physical force in matters of religion. The Church, this young scholar explained, is not so constrained. The Church may imprison any baptized person and punish him for heresy. “So that means the Pope has the right to throw any Lutheran in jail?”, I asked skeptically. “I know, right?” he said, beaming a smile. “This is really exciting.” In subsequent weeks he sent me “proof” that George W. Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks. - Over at Ethika Politika, a Catholic writer followed his rejection of American liberalism and capitalism to a different logical endpoint, and attempted to rehabilitate Karl Marx, absolving him of all the evils historically perpetrated by communists, and urging his readers to find ways to be good Catholic Marxists.
- At America magazine, a commentator wrote dismissively, even patronizingly, of that magazine’s greatest contributor — Father John Courtney Murray, SJ — for his attempt to embrace American liberty and infuse it with an understanding of natural law. It was clear that such attempts had already failed, and that Catholics should embrace political quietism, withdrawing to separatist communities and hoping for toleration, the commentator wrote. [THIS IS A PERFECTLY DEFENSIBLE VIEW QUITE DISTINCT FROM THE ONES MENTIONED ABOVE- HIB] END www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2013/12/illiberal-catholics.html
A couple of points: (1) Although Zmirak is politically a palaeocon and George Weigel a neocon, they are both quite similar in their attitude to America (e.g. see it as the highest civilisation which all other should imitate). The big difference is that Weigel is more intellectually sophisticated and Zmirak less diplomatic (i.e. he can point out some of the more problematic aspects of Catholic history and of American politics which Weigel glosses over).
(2) Zmirak's eulogy of the Enlightenment and America is very selective - he takes the view that America equals the JEffersonian small-government tradition (given that the Hamiltonian nationalist belief in a strong state and economic interventionism has also been around since the Founding Fathers, for good or ill, this is pretty dodgy) and that the Enlightenment equals America. The idea that there might be substance to some historic Catholic criticisms of the Enlightenment (for example, that it was often used as underpinning by absolutist rulers, which is one reason why the cult of Catholic monarchism is so misplaced) or that America as defined by Zmirak might not be the summit of human perfection, is treated as equivalent to wanting to burn heretics,
(3) Zmirak also equates any form of "paternalism" (i.e government intervention in the free market) with tyranny, so that the Inquisition, the Gulag and the Welfare State are inextricable from one another. This might be a little more convincing were it not that Mr Zmirak has in the past declared his passionate support for immigration controls and said that if he believed Catholicism required opposition to them he would leave the Church. The trouble is that if you believe as Zmirak does that taxation is theft, you must also believe that immigration controls are theft (because everyone's labour is their own property, and by excluding someone from the market with the highest returns for their labour, their property is being devalued). Very interesting. I recall that Pierre Treadeau, architect of the Quiet Revlution in Quebec, had fascist sympathies during the 1940s.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 19, 2014 17:01:42 GMT
Trudeau as a young man was very consciously a liberal Catholic; in his later career the liberalism increasingly swallowed up the Catholicism. HE and similar Quebec intellectuals always had a dislike of Quebecois popular piety and desire to come up with an intellectually-respectable alternative. I think a lot of both left-Catholic and right-Catholic extremists (sometimes the same people - Mounier's ESPIRIT group are another example of a social-Catholic group that was fooled successively by fascism and Stalinism) were motivated by reaction against the smugness and limitations of the liberal-bourgeois order and desire for an alternative social vision. Dorothy Day was certainly left in politics (though utterly orthodox) and heavily influenced by Chesterbelloc, who are seen as conventionally on the Right. (This could often apply to reaction against Church authorities as well; mid-century bricks and mortar bishops and religious superiors may have talked of social justice but generally had a tight grip on the bottom line, and there are a lot of stories about how church entities who were real-estate owners handled their tenants...) There were serious problems with this enterprise, and that is where the subsequent sacralisation of "mainstream" economic liberalism (on the left) or social democracy (on the right) comes from. Whether this is just repeating the original problem is another matter.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 6, 2014 23:33:07 GMT
An interesting piece from the American Conservative which argues that the real division within American Catholicism is not between liberal and conservative but between two types of conservatism. The first argues that America/modernity (in this context the two can be seen as synonymous, even though an European - for instance- might have a different view of what "modernity" consists in) is fundamentally compatible with Catholicism, and indeed that they fulfil each other. This goes back to the John Courtenay Murray thesis that the American Founding with its appeal to rights conferred by nature and nature's God embodies Catholic natural-law theory without realising where it came from. The other view is that America/modernity is founded on principles which are fundamentally flawed and anti-Catholic - in particular the concept of the sovereign, autonomous and endlessly liberated Self as the fundamental social unit which must be released from all ties and constraints. This piece has many fascinating links and a guide to some of the personnel on both sides of the debates: www.theamericanconservative.com/a-catholic-showdown-worth-watching/
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 6, 2014 23:45:44 GMT
And since the last post might be seen as favouring the "separatist trad" attitude, here's another piece which shows up the limitations of the "palaeo-trad" approach. Mark Shea picks up on a truly demented denunciation of JRR Tolkien as a gnostic on RORATE CAELI, which includes claims that there is no such thing as myth/metaphor in the Bible and it's heresy to say so, that classical or pagan myths can never be vehicles for Christian thought/evangelisation (the very long Christian literary tradition of allegorising classical myths to bring out Christian implications, familiar to anyone who knows anything about mediaeval/Renaissance literature, is thereby cast into the dumpster), that the fact that Tolkien's writings appeal to nazis and drug-addled hippies means not that they are flawed but that they are pure evil (does that mean that because there are racist and marxist interpretations of the Bible, the Bible is thereby proved to be racist or marxist? Is Thomas More to be condemned because some dodgy characters admired UTOPIA?) etc. From the combox to the Shea post I learn that the author of this charming piece is actually an indult trad priest, a member of the FSSP. This is extremely depressing. www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/02/reactionary-catholics-warn-of-the-evils-of-j-r-r-tolkien.htmlHere is the original RORATE post, in case you don't believe me rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-fantasy-writing-of-tolkien-was.htmlI have heard complaints that there is a Jansenist subculture in the FSSP seminary in Nebraska (except that Pascal would have been ashamed to produce something as simplemindedly censorious and crudely rationalist as this). This seems the strongest piece of evidence for that claim I have seen so far.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 6, 2014 23:48:09 GMT
Now that I think of it, Utopia and the Lord of the Rings might be seen as parallel - imaginative works by faithful Catholics set in a world before revelation to show "natural religion" at its best.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 9, 2014 16:15:09 GMT
What exactly is a reactionary? I stumbled across something there and there is a lot of talk about reactionaries. I'm not sure if I'd be considered one or not.
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Post by Young Ireland on Feb 9, 2014 16:20:47 GMT
Antaine, they are not referring to practicing Catholics in general but to the SSPX and sedevacantists (I personally think the term is uncharitable, though that does not excuse their behaviour). Have a look at the SSPX schism thread, you'll get a good insight into their mindset there.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 9, 2014 16:24:42 GMT
Okay, thanks Young Ireland.
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