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Post by hibernicus on Feb 5, 2013 22:41:23 GMT
It recently struck me firstly, that the history of English Catholicism seems to be much better documented and more subject to scholarly research than that of Irish Catholicism; secondly, that part of the reason for the popularity of English apologists like Chesterton, Belloc, Ronald Knox etc in early twentieth-century Ireland and of past and present English Catholics among present-day conservative American Catholics is that things English are seen as classy (this is not confined to US Catholics; it also relates to the CS Lewis cult among evangelicals, and Peter Hitchens has suggested it helps to explain why his brother Christopher was so popular with US atheists); thirdly, that this sense of articulate Catholicism as a West British and upper/middle-class phenomenon has contributed to Irish anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism. I'm opening this thread for discussion of this phenomenon, and of English Catholicism and its relationship to Ireland more generally. Feel free to try out your ideas on the subject, or anything related to it.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 6, 2013 11:43:48 GMT
Great topic. I think the popularity of English apologists in Ireland is partly because Catholicism was obviously a deliberate choice for them, being a minority denomination. And of course it seemed something of a "defection". I think Protestant anti-Catholicism seemed to have diminished in England from the time of Charles Kingsley's hostility to Newman. Converts to Catholicism, like Chesterton and Coventry Patmore and Belloc and Alfred Noyes, were seen as batting for Christianity against atheism rather than for Catholicism against Protestantism. By Chesterton's time, a Protestant opponent like Dean Inge no longer seemed to be Christian in any recognisable way anymore.
The whole English classy thing does still seem to pertain; Fr. Dwight Longenecker, the former Anglican-turned-Catholic-priest who blogs at Standing on my Head, said it was a severe case of anglophilia that turned him to Anglicanism (or at least influenced him).
I am also an anglophile and I personally feel the pull of that "old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through morning mist" appeal of Anglicanism. I have a strong and sympathetic interest in the fortunes of the Church of England. Unlike many conservative critics, I think Rowan Williams is a great man. I hope that more and more converts will stream from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and if they do so, I believe they will be enriching the Catholic Church in England with their traditions of tolerance, pragmatism, reasonableness and modesty. Admittedly it was the abuse of all those virtues which kept them sundered from communion with Rome, but they are still virtues.
As for the Brideshead thing, I am never sure what to make of this. Take Alexander Pope, for instance. Was he a Catholic in a serious sense? Or was it merely a form of family loyalty? It's hard, reading his works, to sense much of a Catholic worldview.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 6, 2013 21:32:28 GMT
The impression I get is that Pope was fundamentally a deist and thought all religions were more or less the same; he did accept the last sacraments but said he didn't think they were necessities. This is eighteenth-century rationalism, and would have been found in many Continental Catholics at the time. Brideshead is actually something rather different. The Flyte family in that novel does contain matter-of fact Catholics (both the Countess, who is the one from a long recusant ancestry, her husband having converted to marry her, and her eldest son) and these are pretty unsympathetic. Waugh is interested in the Flytes because they are spectacularly useless and ornamental, rather like objets d'art - he emphasises that they have no real power or social role. (It's interesting in this context that the most likely real-life original for the father in the novel was actually a member of the Cabinet which took Britain into war in 1914, albeit such a junior one that if he had resigned over the issue - as he thought of doing - it would have made no difference.) Conor Cruise O'Brien's jibe that Waugh seems to suggest that the obnoxious utilitarian Hooper is not only obnoxious, but seems to have no soul "or if he has, it is not remotely comparable to the genuine aristocratic article" has a good deal of substance. One part of the appeal of a certain type of English Catholicism is that it sees itself as representing a cause which is safely and glamorously lost, like Jacobitism - combined with some very unglamorous complaints that the socialists (many of them with equally strong Catholic credentials) are putting up the taxes.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 6, 2013 21:52:27 GMT
Or what Tolkien called "the long defeat", though we expect a Tolkienesque eucatastrophe at the end.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 7, 2013 22:37:19 GMT
Tolkien's melancholy has its own dangers, of which Tolkien was well aware. There's a reason why Theoden and Denethor are two of the most vivid characters in THE LORD OF THE RINGS - they embody in different ways the temptation to despair which Tolkien recognised as one of his greatest dangers.
BTW Dean Inge from what I have heard of him was in some ways closer to Christianity than many modern theological liberals. He was basically a Stoic pessimist like Marcus Aurelius, and while that is not a Christian worldview it came out of the same culture as classical Christianity and shared some of the same points of reference.
One interesting thought is that under the Union the natural political allies of Irish Catholics were quite different from what you'd expect in abstract terms. Irish NAtionalists though Catholic themselves tended to line up with the Radical Nonconformists and secularising Liberals, whereas the high Church Anglicans (and even many English Catholics) were on the other side.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2013 23:09:05 GMT
Have any of you read Waugh's A Bitter Trial? I didn't realise that he could barely stop himself from renouncing his faith because of what happened and at the end of the book Belloc's granddaughter stated "I didn't leave the Church, the Church left me." Belloc's granddaughter!
It charts Waugh's and Cardinal Heenan's letters back and forth through the sixties. I wonder if Belloc, Chesterton and Waugh would have looked sideways at the Church had they lived through the fruits of V2.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 22, 2013 23:58:05 GMT
I have heard of the book but haven't read it yet. (I believe there are two editions.) To be honest I can see why a Bellocian would react that way to Vatican II, because Belloc's mindset was that the Latin countries (France in particular) had more or less a monopoly on civilisation and were the only real Catholics. I have mixed feelings about Belloc - in some ways a lot more grown-up than Chesterton and with real talent and courage (if you want to get a sense of what Belloc meant to his admirers at the time read Fr Michael O'Carroll's memories of meeting him as a student in his memoir A PRIEST IN CHANGING TIMES), but also with strong elements of cruelty and cynicism. His Gallomania was taken to absurd lengths (in the 30s he was predicting France and Poland together could beat Germany even without Britain), many of his late histories are hackwork and outrageously biased (Fr Thurston rightly hauled him over the coals for claiming in his HISTORY OF ENGLAND that the Anglo-Saxons, whom Belloc despised for being Germanic, made no lasting impact on Britain - a view as absurd as saying that the Normans made no lasting impact on Ireland) and his glorification of Jacobinism when he was young and fascism/absolute monarchy when he was old are actually quite consistent in exalting the unconstrained will to power. Waugh we know about - the man was really in despair towards the end of his life, but then he was in despair for much of it anyway - one reason he became a Catholic was to preserve himself from suicide, and he said that those who asked how such a bad man as he was could be a Catholic should realise he would have been much, much worse without the Faith. (I paraphrase, but this was essentially what he said.) Chesterton might have reacted better, given that he was an Anglican for most of his life and used to a vernacular liturgy. I can even see him going off the deep end on the other side in terms of populist dumbing-down; his love of whimsy might leave him vulnerable to it. (OTOH his deep love of logic might have restrained him - he said he got more Thomist as he got older.)
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 23, 2013 0:03:05 GMT
One example I can think of of the drawbacks of Brideshead Catholicism in the Irish context is to be found in Tim Pat Coogan's characteristically repulsive memoir. Coogan blames his mother for the family's economic plight after his father's death (he claims she saw herself as too much of a gentlewoman to work), present her high-profile Catholicism and Marian devotion (she wrote a book on Knock Shrine and was connected with the place for decades) as part of these pretensions to gentility, and strongly implies that his own militant atheism, ultra-nationalism and fondness for coarse and vulgar language are partly shaped by his reaction against his mother's pretentiousness. It is unsafe to trust Coogan on anything at all, but I must say his description of his mother's mentality does sound horribly plausible.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 23, 2013 11:28:13 GMT
Liturgy didn't seem very important to Chesterton. Apparently he rarely if ever went to church before he became a Catholic, and even then he was never very enthusiastic about going. He said a creed that would get him out of bed early in the morning had to be true.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 23, 2013 11:55:03 GMT
This may be not directly related, but since you opened the door to related subjects, I hope that's OK.
I have to say, for my part-- although I say now and I will repeat that ultimately I profess Catholicism because I believe it is TRUE-- there is an element of reaction in my own attitude towards faith. The following quotation from Chesterton, which described his reaction to the jigoism in England at the time of the Boer War, could be applied to my own feelings, substituting Ireland for England and the attack on the Catholic Church (or, indeed, all religion) for the war on the Boers:
"I saw all the public men and public bodies, the people in the street, my own middle-class and most of my family and friends, solid in favour of something that seemed inevitable and scientific and secure. And I suddenly realised that I hated it; that I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.
"What I hated about it was what a good many people liked about it. It was such a very cheerful war. I hated its confidence, its congratulatory anticipations, its optimism of the Stock Exchange. I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law."
Now, I hesitate to write this, because I don't want anyone to suspect me of mere contrarianism (and only because this suspicion might, just possibly, make somebody out there feel a doubt about the truth of Catholicism-- our Lord said we would have to account for every idle word.) I wholeheartedly believe in the truth of the Faith. If I could not have assented to it honestly, I would have retained my dislike of its enemies, but in the manner of a Santayana or a Theodore Dalrymple.
Nevertheless, I understand the appeal of a "Brideshead Catholicism", in the sense of defending something that is on the backfoot. As Peter Hitchens put it in his book The Rage Against God:
"I talked to very few people about [my rediscovered faith], and was diffident about mentioning it in anything I wrote. I think it true to say that for many years I was more or less ashamed of confessing to any religious faith at all, except when I felt safe to do so. It is a strange and welcome side-effect of the growing attack on British society that I have now completely overcome this. Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, much easier to acknowledge."
I am very aware of the dangers of this sensibility. There is a danger of snobbery, of anti-populism, of using faith as a form of self-expression and identity building ("I thank you, God, that I am not as other men".) There is a danger, too, of using Catholicism as a kind of barricade against the modern world, as if anti-modernism (in the broad sense) was a tenet of the Faith. So I think it is useful to be aware of these psychological drives so we know how to resist and avoid them.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 27, 2013 8:54:37 GMT
If I ever have the leisure to pursue in depth studies of anything, I would like to be able to compare the enthusiasm for the First World War by Catholic commentators in Britain and France (Ireland as well no doubt) with the attitude of Catholic commentators in Germany and Austria-Hungary. If my Russian was a bit better than it is, I would extend this to the Catholics there too. Chesterton opposed the Boer War but was favourable to the First World War.
I am not a conviction pacifist, but I believe war is the absolute last resort. I would say, for example, it is a pity that Britain and France didn't get tough with Germany earlier. About a decade ago, I briefly worked in Ludwigshafen, which was in the demilitarised side of the Rhine. In 1936, Hitler broke the Versailles Treaty by sending troops across the bridge connecting Mannheim and Ludwigshafen - my hotel room overlooked that bridge. The German troops carried guns loaded with blanks and were under orders to turn back if French troops were present and fired. I think this was a missed opportunity - but the context of the Second World War was altogether different to others we have faced.
The conflict in the Middle East comes to mind. Am I alone in thinking the new regimes are invariably a disimprovement on their predecessors?
I'm well off the point, but I'll try to return to it. It is a feature of the Brideshead Catholicism to prove English patriotism by being even more patriotic than the next man. There is something similar in German Catholicism outside Bavaria. Belloc doesn't fit into this, but Waugh probably does.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 27, 2013 11:35:07 GMT
In some respects Belloc and Chesterton are the opposite of Brideshead Catholicism (though they fit it in other respects, such as their Jacobitism, their dislike for financial capitalism, their Englishness being seen as classy by non-English audiences). Brideshead Catholicism in the strict sense admired the existing English gentry and mourned their displacement in the twentieth century. The Chesterbellocian view was that the English aristocracy had long since sold out to the forces of heartless cosmopolitan finance (at the Reformation, at the Enclosures, under Disraeli etc) and lost any claim to be a real aristocracy deserving deference. The portrayal of the cold-hearted Lord Ivywood in Chesterton's THE FLYING INN, who ends up trying to subject England to Islamic rule (ironically given later developments, Belloc and Chesterton often use Muslims as "code" for Jews as unassimilable Asiatic outsiders) is an example of this. Ivywood is a combination of the Romantic image of Lord Castlereagh and of the Gladstonian denunciation of Disraeli's aristocratic supporters for siding with the Turks against fellow-Christians in the Balkans. The real Brideshead Catholic would never have held, as Belloc and Chesterton did, that the French Revolution was a glorious triumph of the people over decadence and corruption and that it would have been a good thing if Napoleon had won the Napoleonic Wars. The echt Brideshead Catholic also tends to have a soft spot for the Hapsburg Empire whereas Belloc and Chesterton saw it as the epitome of soulless tyranny, decadence and decay (more or less as an Italian nationalist would have seen it). They both had a strong infusion of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and exaltation of the rebel (this I think, as well as Catholicism and ruralism) underlies their sympathy for the Irish). Belloc IMHO was really a Gallican who thought whatever was good for France was good for the Church, and his view of history is an importation of the French these royale interpretation of history into the British context. (The these royale holds that the extension of royal power over the nobles and other subordinate interests was a good thing because it made for stability and equality under the king; the rival these nobiliare view is that the extension of royal power was tyrannical and the nobility stood for the public liberty and not just for their own interests. The British Whig view of history can be seen as a form of these nobiliaire.) It's very revealing that he glorifies Philip the Fair's suppression of the Templars (a show trial and put-up job if ever there was one) because he sees the Templars as bankers (which they were) and their downfall as the exertion of political power over the forces of commerce. There is a certain Belloc-Waugh similarity in that they both tried to reinvent themselves as country squires, but Belloc was more interested in the getting-his-hands-dirty side of country life than Waugh. I think Belloc does fit into the superpatriot mould, but he's harder to recognise because his expression of it took the form of arguing that England was something different from what most English people supposed it to be (i.e. the Bellocian view was that the real England was Catholic and rural and its civilisation derived from the French and from the Latin tradition, as distinct from the traditional view that England was Protestant and commercial and its story was one of the assertion of political liberty derived from the Anglo-Saxons against Continental Catholic absolutism).
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 3, 2013 18:19:39 GMT
"Ironically given later developments, Belloc and Chesterton often use Muslims as "code" for Jews as unassimilable Asiatic outsiders."
What evidence is there for this? I don't know anything about Belloc, but I have read plenty of Chesterton and never got this impression.
I have to say...sometimes I think contributors to this forum are almost hyper-sensitive about anything even resembling anti-Semitism, or capable of being mistaken for anti-Semitism by somebody somewhere. I understand that it is a reaction to the genuine anti-Semitism amongst some traditionalists, but I can't help feeling there is a danger of over-correction.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 3, 2013 18:43:24 GMT
If you have ever read Hilaire Belloc's THE MERCY OF ALLAH, the central character (and narrator) is a self-seeking Arab merchant who has all the characteristics stereotypically associated with Jews (enriching himself by usury without any sense that moral objections might be raised to the actions he describes, moving around as a nomad without roots in the land such as his victims posses, etc). The Islamic preacher in THE FLYING INN who gets taken up by the aristocracy for their own ends is given to producing various absurd exercises in history and etymology to argue that Britain was originally Islamic, seems to me to imply the well-known anti-semitic view that Jews as oriental strict monotheists would never be able to understand or adapt to Christian civilisation because they could not grasp the deep, taken-for-granted Christian assumptions on which it was based. (In the same novel Lord Ivywood has two unpleasant servants who take the lead in trying to close down Humphrey Pump's pub in the name of a prohibitionism which is really crypto-Islamic. One of them is a John Bull type called Bullrose, but the other is a nasty young man called Leveson who appears to be a Jew.) My own reading of THE FLYING INN and Lord Ivywood's alliance with the Turks is that Chesterton is drawing on the memory of Gladstone's "Bulgarian Atrocities" campaign in 1877-78. Disraeli's government supported the Turks, who had repressed a Christian uprising in Bulgaria with large-scale massacres, because they believed the collapse of the Ottoman empire would expand Russian influence and therefore endanger British influence, whereas Gladstone and his allies believed the Turks had put themselves outside the pale of civilisation and Russian intervention on behalf of the rebels was in the best interests of Europe. Gladstone himself, and many of his supporters, claimed that the real rationale for Disraeli's policy was that as a crypto-Jew he identified more closely with Islam than Christianity. (This was not a pure invention BTW; Disraeli had travelled in the East as a young man and romanticised the Ottomans, and his early novel TANCRED presents Islam and Judaism as more or less identical. Much of the romanticised view of Islamic tolerance derives from nineteenth-century Jewish Orientalists who (a) saw the similarities between Islam and Judaism in relation to ritual codes, diet etc (b) wanted to use the real though patchy record of Islamic tolerance to shame Christian Europe into greater tolerance - these scholars unintentionally provided a great boon to later Islamic apologists and a great embarrassment to present-day Zionists .)
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Mar 5, 2013 12:09:40 GMT
I can't remember the title of the famous poem of Chesterton's addressed to FE Smith (Birkenhead)
Russian peasants round their Pope, huddled Smith, Read about it all, I hope, do they Smith.
Somewhere in there is a line 'Since they hailed the Cross of Dizzy' which I gather refers to Tory support for Turkey in regard to the Bulgarian massacres. This was within a generation of Britain being allied to Turkey in the Crimea, for more or less the same reasons as Hibernicus outlines. Turkey was to get worse in their persecutions and it is a bit ironic that Britain and France found themselves allied to Russia against a Turkey allied to Germany in the First World War - during which the British made incompatible promises to Arabs and Jews which is one element in the current Middle Eastern problems.
However, before WW1, no one in the west at least perceived a great deal of hostility between Jew and Moslem, so I can see Hibernicus' point.
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