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Post by hibernicus on Oct 4, 2018 21:46:09 GMT
Only if you equate atheism with materialism. The really crucial issue is not whether God exists but whether He loves us and cares for us. The coexistence of populist atheism with a fascination with paganism and the occult is not IMHO as strange as it might seem (especially when it is borne in mind that atheists often visualise God as an object within the universe - which would be true of pagan deities, who are personifications of natural forces, but is not true of God as described by Abrahamic religions). HP Lovecraft was an atheist (the characters in his stories described as gods are in fact alien beings so unhuman and indifferent to humanity that the slightest encounter with them produces madness) but the extent to which he has influenced American popular culture - despite being a new England WASP, racist on an epic scale, and incidentally anti-Irish - suggests something very sinister. Pullman is a fairly clear example of the Romantic Satanist tradition going back to Shelley and Byron (bear in mind that Shelley was an atheist; Byron was more ambiguous, having had a terrifying upbringing by a Scottish Calvinist nurse which was hardly likely to impart a sense of God's love). Lord Dunsany was also an atheist (albeit with a fondness for the Book of Common Prayer) and one of his driving forces is a dandiacal aesthetic celebration of fancy over brute fact and a celebration of his ability to invent half a dozen deities before breakfast, though he did have a sense of common decency.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 5, 2018 22:28:34 GMT
Dennis O'Driscoll's book of interviews with Seamus Heaney,STEPPING STONES. What is striking about this is the extent to which Heaney's loss of religious faith in the late 60s/early 70s is central to the evolution of his poetry - away from concrete evocations of his past to finding meaning within the imagination itself. Although he refers to the actual loss of faith a lot he doesn't analyse it in any detail. What he seems to describe is growing up in a self-contained Catholic subculture (including St Columb's College), then moving into a wider world and discovering that that world not only pays little attention to the beliefs of that subculture but tacitly takes it for granted that they are not true, and eventually deciding that that world is so big and sophisticated, and his old world so constrained and backward, that the big world must be right (at least in matters of religion as truth, as distinct from tribal custom). It is suggested that the issue of contraception also played a role in this. What he is describing is the transition from real faith to Modernism - the belief that faith reflects our emotional needs and is acceptable in that sense, but it is intolerably oppressive to live and try to persuade others to live as if it is actually true. This attitude BTW is what Fintan O'toole and certain other commentators mean when they speak of "respecting" religion, accepting that it has a place in society etc - all on the assumption that the simulacrum is the real thing and the real thing is so far outside the bounds of possibility that it cannot be taken seriously at all. I suspect the experience which Heaney describes - the implosion of a tribal faith - was fairly widespread in late 60s and early 70s Ireland, especially among the educated young (sections of the working class and middle-class) and arty types, and that this reflects contemporaneous changes both in Irish society and in the wider world (including the Church). He remarks that when he taught at Carysfort in the 70s there was a notable difference between some of the older and younger staff in this regard and he was actually more Catholic than quite a few of the others though he was no longer a believer. IMHO what we have seen in Ireland since the 1970s has been to a considerable extent a working out of this generational change. BTW I recently came across a quite remarkably blasphemous poem by Denis O'Driscoll (from the 1970s, I think) which is prefaced with a quotation about the medical risks of the contraceptive pill. The poem compares women taking the Pill to martyrs receiving the Host, and exhorts its male readers to admire such women as martyrs offering up their bleeding bodies for their (the men's) sake.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 6, 2018 10:15:31 GMT
Dennis O'Driscoll's book of interviews with Seamus Heaney,STEPPING STONES. What is striking about this is the extent to which Heaney's loss of religious faith in the late 60s/early 70s is central to the evolution of his poetry - away from concrete evocations of his past to finding meaning within the imagination itself. Although he refers to the actual loss of faith a lot he doesn't analyse it in any detail. What he seems to describe is growing up in a self-contained Catholic subculture (including St Columb's College), then moving into a wider world and discovering that that world not only pays little attention to the beliefs of that subculture but tacitly takes it for granted that they are not true, and eventually deciding that that world is so big and sophisticated, and his old world so constrained and backward, that the big world must be right (at least in matters of religion as truth, as distinct from tribal custom). It is suggested that the issue of contraception also played a role in this. What he is describing is the transition from real faith to Modernism - the belief that faith reflects our emotional needs and is acceptable in that sense, but it is intolerably oppressive to live and try to persuade others to live as if it is actually true. This attitude BTW is what Fintan O'toole and certain other commentators mean when they speak of "respecting" religion, accepting that it has a place in society etc - all on the assumption that the simulacrum is the real thing and the real thing is so far outside the bounds of possibility that it cannot be taken seriously at all. I suspect the experience which Heaney describes - the implosion of a tribal faith - was fairly widespread in late 60s and early 70s Ireland, especially among the educated young (sections of the working class and middle-class) and arty types, and that this reflects contemporaneous changes both in Irish society and in the wider world (including the Church). He remarks that when he taught at Carysfort in the 70s there was a notable difference between some of the older and younger staff in this regard and he was actually more Catholic than quite a few of the others though he was no longer a believer. IMHO what we have seen in Ireland since the 1970s has been to a considerable extent a working out of this generational change. BTW I recently came across a quite remarkably blasphemous poem by Denis O'Driscoll (from the 1970s, I think) which is prefaced with a quotation about the medical risks of the contraceptive pill. The poem compares women taking the Pill to martyrs receiving the Host, and exhorts its male readers to admire such women as martyrs offering up their bleeding bodies for their (the men's) sake. In the North of Ireland, for a considerable time, we have had the absurd situation of one half of the population (or whatever the percentage is now) being described as Catholic and nationalist when most of them are neither one nor the other-- as evinced by their main representatives being secularist Marxist internationalists.
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Post by assisi on Oct 9, 2018 14:19:29 GMT
[/quote]In the North of Ireland, for a considerable time, we have had the absurd situation of one half of the population (or whatever the percentage is now) being described as Catholic and nationalist when most of them are neither one nor the other-- as evinced by their main representatives being secularist Marxist internationalists.[/quote]
At the start of the troubles most working class non-unionists were indeed old fashioned nationalists and Catholics (undoubtedly many were cultural or tribal Catholic only). As with elsewhere in the West, these identities are no longer 'fashionable' as you know.
Sinn Fein are opportunists who see votes in the Identity Politics/Globalism stance and think nothing of dropping Catholics and nationalists as yesterday's props.
I have no time for Sinn Fein. They have sold out Irish sovereignty to Brussels and Germany, and have sold out the Irish children via their public celebration of abortion.
However much I dislike Sinn Fein however, it looks like the SDLP, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have all been going in the same direction. The only real difference is that Sinn Fein will embrace that leftist virtue signalling (support for Palestine, Catalonia for example) a bit more fully than the others. In short all the mainstream parties are internationalists, not just Sinn Fein.
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Post by assisi on Oct 9, 2018 15:11:34 GMT
Dennis O'Driscoll's book of interviews with Seamus Heaney,STEPPING STONES. What is striking about this is the extent to which Heaney's loss of religious faith in the late 60s/early 70s is central to the evolution of his poetry - away from concrete evocations of his past to finding meaning within the imagination itself. Although he refers to the actual loss of faith a lot he doesn't analyse it in any detail. What he seems to describe is growing up in a self-contained Catholic subculture (including St Columb's College), then moving into a wider world and discovering that that world not only pays little attention to the beliefs of that subculture but tacitly takes it for granted that they are not true, and eventually deciding that that world is so big and sophisticated, and his old world so constrained and backward, that the big world must be right (at least in matters of religion as truth, as distinct from tribal custom). It is suggested that the issue of contraception also played a role in this. What he is describing is the transition from real faith to Modernism - the belief that faith reflects our emotional needs and is acceptable in that sense, but it is intolerably oppressive to live and try to persuade others to live as if it is actually true. This attitude BTW is what Fintan O'toole and certain other commentators mean when they speak of "respecting" religion, accepting that it has a place in society etc - all on the assumption that the simulacrum is the real thing and the real thing is so far outside the bounds of possibility that it cannot be taken seriously at all. I suspect the experience which Heaney describes - the implosion of a tribal faith - was fairly widespread in late 60s and early 70s Ireland, especially among the educated young (sections of the working class and middle-class) and arty types, and that this reflects contemporaneous changes both in Irish society and in the wider world (including the Church). He remarks that when he taught at Carysfort in the 70s there was a notable difference between some of the older and younger staff in this regard and he was actually more Catholic than quite a few of the others though he was no longer a believer. IMHO what we have seen in Ireland since the 1970s has been to a considerable extent a working out of this generational change. BTW I recently came across a quite remarkably blasphemous poem by Denis O'Driscoll (from the 1970s, I think) which is prefaced with a quotation about the medical risks of the contraceptive pill. The poem compares women taking the Pill to martyrs receiving the Host, and exhorts its male readers to admire such women as martyrs offering up their bleeding bodies for their (the men's) sake. I attended St. Columbs 20 years after Heaney and I probably wouldn't use the term Catholic subculture as an apt descriptor. St Columbs was the big Catholic boys grammar school in Derry. It was so big it was just called 'The College'. In my time, and I'm sure there were strong similarities with Heaney's time, the ethos was hard work and strict discipline. As Catholics in the North there was a feeling that we needed to be producing a better qualified Catholic as we had to be better to counteract anti-Catholic sectarianism. Education was seen as an important equaliser. Heaney was from a rural Co. Derry and was a boarder, living at the College away from home. We used to feel sorry for boarders as it looked a sad existence away from the family home. St. Columbs would have left him toughened up in some ways, and would have given him a classical type education with Latin one of the main subjects. Rather than imbued with a Catholic subculture it would have more of a disciplined and tough academic subculture with little colour and a spartan lifestyle. Jumping ahead to one of Heaney's last interviews on RTE, John Waters dissects the interview in his book 'Beyond Consolation'. He particularly homes in on Heaney's description of life after death as 'extinction', a strange choice of word by the poet. Indeed much of the Heaney interview touching on religion and God is quite rambling. Waters asserts that the poet, normally gifted with great imagination and insight, restricts himself to the material and emotional world and basically asserts that this is all there is. Funny enough the nearest religious definition of 'extinction' is the Buddhist 'Nirvana', which translates as 'extinguished'.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 10, 2018 21:02:51 GMT
Oddly enough, it reminded me of an article by Fr Paul Crane I read back in the early 80s in which he recalled a conversation with a nun-headmistress in which she described the sacramental/devotional life of her girls' boarding school and then wondered why the girls went wild as soon as they left. Fr Crane thought it was because the school operated as a secluded enclave set apart from everyday life, so the girls saw no connection with "real" life outside once they left. What Heaney describes was a Catholic subculture in the sense of including collective devotions, Mass etc. How far it had a Catholic intellectual content might be another matter, though he does talk of acquiring a love of Latin poetry.
Maolseachlainn, I think you're a little harsh on Heaney. I read his poetry in the late 80s and it certainly leaves an impression. Perhaps it is overrated, but I'd like to go back over it again sometime with my acquired life experience and see how it stands up. Oddly enough, Heaney mentions Fennell's attack at one point, and his central retort is that Fennell claims an authority over poetry that he doesn't have and displays a contempt and condescension which he hasn't earned. That is true of a lot of things Fennell says -my beef with him is not just that I disagree with him but that he doesn't know how to think, and I would say that even if I agreed with him.
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Post by assisi on Oct 11, 2018 13:56:45 GMT
Oddly enough, it reminded me of an article by Fr Paul Crane I read back in the early 80s in which he recalled a conversation with a nun-headmistress in which she described the sacramental/devotional life of her girls' boarding school and then wondered why the girls went wild as soon as they left. Fr Crane thought it was because the school operated as a secluded enclave set apart from everyday life, so the girls saw no connection with "real" life outside once they left. What Heaney describes was a Catholic subculture in the sense of including collective devotions, Mass etc. How far it had a Catholic intellectual content might be another matter, though he does talk of acquiring a love of Latin poetry. Maolseachlainn, I think you're a little harsh on Heaney. I read his poetry in the late 80s and it certainly leaves an impression. Perhaps it is overrated, but I'd like to go back over it again sometime with my acquired life experience and see how it stands up. Oddly enough, Heaney mentions Fennell's attack at one point, and his central retort is that Fennell claims an authority over poetry that he doesn't have and displays a contempt and condescension which he hasn't earned. That is true of a lot of things Fennell says -my beef with him is not just that I disagree with him but that he doesn't know how to think, and I would say that even if I agreed with him. I deleted my post where I said I thought Seamus Heany is a very minor talent, and saluted Desmond Fennell for calling him out-- to anyone who's wondering what Hibernicus is responding to. I felt a little bad about it, but I actually do hold to it. I wonder if the impression he made upon you might have anything to do with his reputation? I may just be missing it but I cannot see any great merit in his work. He seems to have been a nice fellow, though. When it comes to poetry, I agree with Matthew Arnold that its greatness should be obvious in isolated quotations. So you can take a line form Macneice such as: "The drunkenness of things being various", or a line from Yeats like: "man is in love, and love what vanishes". But what similar lines can be quoted from Heaney? If Heaney criticized Fennell for claiming an authority over poetry, well, that to me is a symptom of what has been wrong with poetry for a long time-- the idea that it belongs to a clique. Desmond Fennell, in an essay dating back to 1999, looked briefly at 3 Irish poets, FR Higgins, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. The essay was entitled ‘Three Views of Reality/: the Poetry of Higgins, Kavanagh and Heaney’. For Fennell, FR Higgins, whose poetry was in the style of the Celtic Twilight movement, reflected a reality that was ‘ethereal’, giving the material world a certain wispy, misty dreamlike unreality. Kavanagh, on the other hand, rejected this ethereal ambience, his view of reality Fennell calls ‘matter transcendent’. He can write a poem about a particular garden, reflecting the reality of the garden, the apples, the old buckets lying in the garden, yet also connect to God or the divine, by actual mention of God or by implication. Last, Fennell quotes Heaney’s Blackberry-Picking. Like Kavanagh Heaney is gifted and adept at describing the reality of the material world in the portrayal of the colours and texture of the blackberries. But, unlike Kavanagh, there is no hint of transcendence. The material world is all there is. Fennell calls this ‘matter unalloyed’. For Fennell we have moved from ‘immaterialism’ (Higgins) through a ‘material-immaterial’ dualism (Kavanagh) to ‘pure materialism’ (Heaney). As poets have been previously labelled as belonging to particular ages, such as Victorian age, modernist age, Heaney could be said to be of the ‘consumerist’ age. And while he is undoubtedly talented, for Fennell , Heaney has been deemed a great poet and honoured as such because the powers that be, in the consumerist world, see in his materialist stance a view that they share, hold to and are comfortable with. I think it is fair to say that Fennell probably sympathises with the Kavanagh view, although he doesn’t directly state this. It is an interesting essay and would probably explain why Fennell does seem to have some antipathy towards the poetry of Heaney and the reputation and honours he has gained through the years. I admit that I enjoyed the essay and sympathise with Fennell’s analysis. However, one of my worries about an analysis such as this is with definitions such as material and transcendent. For example, if a poem invokes nostalgia, is nostalgia in the realm of the material (sensual) world, or is it in some way transcendent? Or a bit of both? I haven’t read enough of the poetry of the three poets to agree outright with Fennell or not. However I would say that poetry that is wholly materialist could indeed be deemed clever and even beautiful, but may never reach the heights of poetry that touches upon the transcendent or supernatural. That would be my opinion.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 11, 2018 21:20:40 GMT
I think Heaney is more like a pantheist (that being said, it is harder to distinguish pantheism from atheism than certain purveyors of "alternative spirituality" think). Heaney's certainly very Wordsworthian, and for most of his adult life Wordsworth was basically a pantheist. He becomes more explicitly Christian towards the end. The problem about poetry as made up of "great lines" is that there are styles of poetry which have a cumulative effect, so that the "punchline" in fact sums up all the preceding lines, but if quoted in isolation seems banal and boring. One example would be the line "And never lifted up a single stone" towards the end of Wordsworth's "Michael", which is absolutely heartbreaking when you come to it in the poem: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(poem)Similarly,when Heaney ends his early poem on his brother's death in a road accident "No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear/ A four-foot box, a foot for every year" that's heartbreaking. Then there is the power of images; the poem where Heaney describes hearing of the breakout of the Northern Troubles while he is visiting Madrid for the first time, and when he sees Goya's Black Paintings he is struck by one which portrays two men fighting with cudgels while unaware that they are both sinking into a bog. That really bites the more I think of the Troubles over the years: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Francisco_de_Goya_y_Lucientes_-_Duelo_a_garrotazos.jpgas does Heaney's poem comparing the "bog body" of a prehistoric woman executed for adultery with contemporary NI women tarred and feathered for consorting with British soldiers: allpoetry.com/poem/11645373-Punishment-by-Seamus-HeaneyEven that poem of the peace process as "a time/ when hope and history rhyme" which seemed hackneyed to me when everyone was quoting it then, impresses itself more and more on me as I look back. Incidentally, Heaney is by no means apolitical - what is really striking and crops up repeatedly in the interviews is that he sees himself as expressing a west-of-the-Bann Catholic/nationalist experience previously overshadowed by a liberal-unionist east-of-the-Bann provincial literary establishment (he applies this even to John Hewitt). Furthermore, the self-supporting poet has always been a rare bird; most poets throughout history have written to please patrons or audiences and were in that sense writing for consumers. Heaney's complaint about Fennell's condescension to poetry is not that Heaney thinks poetry is for a clique - it's because Fennell does not write poetry himself yet sits in judgment on those who do without hesitation. If Patrick Kavanagh is to be a touchstone, then Kavanagh's blazing contempt for this sort of critic - frequently expressed in prose and verse - should be remembered.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 15, 2018 23:08:09 GMT
John Waters' new memoir/reflection BRING BACK THE BAD ROADS. I wouldn't previously have thought of Waters as more intellectually substantive than Fennell (he has some serious problems, including therapeutic self-absorption and an overdose of nostalgia) but this book leaves me in no doubt that this is the case. Here's why: (1) Waters has an interest in how things actually work, which he probably picked up in Vincent Browne's MAGILL, which is why so many of his analyses of (say) how the IRISH TIMES operates, the tactics of his opponents, etc are needle-accurate. - Fennell has a schematic view of how things should be and his only response when he finds things don't work out as he wanted is to blame the decrees of the "Correctorate". In this Fennell sadly resembles many pro-lifers,trads etc who don't reflect on their own experience, try to understand where the other side is coming from, try to articulate their/our viewpoints, and are rapidly reduced to vast vague conspiracy theories. (2) Waters reflects on his own past views and actions and how he has changed over the years. Fennell basically operates on the basis that he was always right and if you don't agree with him you're not normal, not human etc.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 16, 2018 11:09:24 GMT
John Waters' new memoir/reflection BRING BACK THE BAD ROADS. I wouldn't previously have thought of Waters as more intellectually substantive than Fennell (he has some serious problems, including therapeutic self-absorption and an overdose of nostalgia) but this book leaves me in no doubt that this is the case. Here's why: (1) Waters has an interest in how things actually work, which he probably picked up in Vincent Browne's MAGILL, which is why so many of his analyses of (say) how the IRISH TIMES operates, the tactics of his opponents, etc are needle-accurate. - Fennell has a schematic view of how things should be and his only response when he finds things don't work out as he wanted is to blame the decrees of the "Correctorate". In this Fennell sadly resembles many pro-lifers,trads etc who don't reflect on their own experience, try to understand where the other side is coming from, try to articulate their/our viewpoints, and are rapidly reduced to vast vague conspiracy theories. (2) Waters reflects on his own past views and actions and how he has changed over the years. Fennell basically operates on the basis that he was always right and if you don't agree with him you're not normal, not human etc. Hibernicus, you've made these criticisms of Fennell exhaustively at this stage. I'm not disagreeing with them-- I haven't read enough Fennell to comment, but I rather suspect you're right-- but aren't you over-egging the pudding? I agree Fennell is very influential in certain Catholic circles-- quite a few people seem to look to him as The Philosopher, even if it's only a small following-- but you've surely made the point by now. It would be interesting to hear more about your views on the Waters book.
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Post by assisi on Nov 16, 2018 13:19:57 GMT
John Waters' new memoir/reflection BRING BACK THE BAD ROADS. I wouldn't previously have thought of Waters as more intellectually substantive than Fennell (he has some serious problems, including therapeutic self-absorption and an overdose of nostalgia) but this book leaves me in no doubt that this is the case. Here's why: (1) Waters has an interest in how things actually work, which he probably picked up in Vincent Browne's MAGILL, which is why so many of his analyses of (say) how the IRISH TIMES operates, the tactics of his opponents, etc are needle-accurate. - Fennell has a schematic view of how things should be and his only response when he finds things don't work out as he wanted is to blame the decrees of the "Correctorate". In this Fennell sadly resembles many pro-lifers,trads etc who don't reflect on their own experience, try to understand where the other side is coming from, try to articulate their/our viewpoints, and are rapidly reduced to vast vague conspiracy theories. (2) Waters reflects on his own past views and actions and how he has changed over the years. Fennell basically operates on the basis that he was always right and if you don't agree with him you're not normal, not human etc. Anyone from a Catholic or conservative viewpoint knows now when we try to "understand where the other side is coming from" the effort is not reciprocal. Look at where we are now, the other side, the left liberals, secularists and globalists don't want to hear an alternative, they are ideological zealots. They bully and close down. Being understanding is necessary, but so is having the conviction to fight it out on the public arena when you are being shouted down or marginalised by the establishment's hold on mainstream media. What we need are men and women with strong conviction. The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland is woefully passive. Fennell isn't better or worse than Waters, just different. I wish the likes of Fennell were 40 years younger and around now to prod the secular beast where it hurts most. I don't think I've ever heard Fennell say you are 'not human' if you disagree with him.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 16, 2018 22:29:01 GMT
When I say "understand where the other side is coming from" I don't mean in terms of "dialogue", at least not by itself; I quite agree that it is useless trying to argue bullies out of being bullies. I mean understanding their thought-processes so as to get a sense of what is wrong with them and what they're likely to do/say next. When the IRA held political education classes in the Maze one of their first objectives was to make the students understand what could be said for unionism in its own terms before rebutting it (on the grounds that if the case for unionism was simply ignored it might occur to them under circumstances which would shake their political commitment). Conviction without understanding gets you the Charge of the Light Brigade and the like, and one source of conviction is being able to understand the other side and see how they are wrong. When I was seven I thought I was an atheist, but I grew out of it when I discovered Catholic apologetics. (That's not the whole story but it's an important part of it.) I agree about the hierarchy, by and large. American Catholics often joke that episcopal ordination involves having your spine removed. Fennell doesn't use the words "not human"; he says that his view of how society should be is "normal", "fully human" etc, which implies that those who don't want to live like that or doubt if it is possible are abnormal, less than fully human etc. The point of my Waters/Fennell comparison is to bring out their different characteristics by comparing them.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 21, 2018 22:58:04 GMT
One place where Waters is bang on the button is in his discussion of Fintan O'Toole's debating style - he notes that O'Toole likes to criticise views with which he disagrees in a very condescending tone without ever discussing or defending his own views, which are thus tacitly presented as self-evident. This is mentioned as part of a wider account of how the IRISH TIMES editors allowed other columnists to attack Waters in their column, after forbidding Waters to reply to criticisms by another columnist on the grounds that it was editorial policy not to allow columnists to attack each other in the paper. How characteristic of the Tara Street Ananias.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 2, 2018 21:06:57 GMT
The 1960 document on the assimilation of Irish immigrants in Britain - written by English Catholic social scientists, it was not published at the time because of objections by Irish Church representatives to whom it was submitted for comment, but it was brought out by the Irish Manuscripts Commission a couple of years ago (edited by Mary E Daly). At the time it came out, much of the comment noted how myopic the Irish church representatives were, and this is certainly the case (e.g. they are completely dismissive of the suggestion that near-universal religious observance in Ireland may hide a good deal of latent anti-clericalism, when subsequent writings and events make it clear that this was indeed the case; they object to any discussion at all of the "pregnant from Ireland" phenomenon of girls who got pregnant outside wedlock being given a one-way ticket to England and told never to come back). Now that I have actually read the report, the attitude of the Irish commentators become somewhat more understandable (though still mistaken) because some of the passages display the very worst sort of English Catholic contempt for the Irish embarrassment. There is never any suggestion that the Irish can make or have made any useful contribution to the English Church. There are repeated laments that the need to minister to the Irish, in the C19th and subsequently, has distracted English Catholic resources from the more important task of evangelising Britain. It would hardly be fair to say the reports' authors wished the Irish had all turned Methodist on arrival and spared them the trouble, but this might be a logical conclusion of their complaints. It is even suggested at one point that without the Irish influx the Oxford Movement might have led to the Church of England as a whole becoming reconciled to Rome, a view which anyone familiar with the actual history of C19 England will recognise as laughable. (Indeed, without the shock administered to the C of E by Irish Catholic agitators, there might never have been an Oxford Movement in the first place.) This attitude might be summed up as "what matter if a thousand Irish navvies go to Hell if in consequence one more epicene Anglican curate decides to play dressy-up in Latin instead of English". One understands better why Daniel O'Connell said of English Catholics "I repent that I ever emancipated them". The whole thing is strikingly reminiscent of the patronising attitude taken by present-day English church authorities to Polish immigrants and their devotional Catholicism, albeit that there was more excuse in the 50s as the English Catholic Church was much more thriving then than it is now. (Indeed, one striking thing that emerges from the document is the remarkable extent to which lay Catholic volunteers and organisations could be called on for social and evangelistic work; the Legion of Mary get repeated honourable mention, including the Columban priest Fr Aedan McGrath who within a few years of being expelled by the Chinese Communists is to be found working with emigrants in London.) What is much more striking about the limitations of the Irish church commentators (mainly big wheels in the administration of the Dublin Archdiocese - they repeatedly complain that the organising efforts of John Charles McQuaid are not given due recognition) is that they make no attempt to positively articulate how the English Church could learn from Ireland. This of course would have required them to think about the pros and cons of Catholicisme du type Irlandais rather than simply doing what they were told and repeating that everything in the garden was rosy. This does not seem to have been true of all the Irish Church - indeed quite a few of the English authors' criticisms are based on work produced by Irish clerical social sciences about potential problems lying ahead (at one point there is reference to a "ferment" in Irish Catholic academia since WW2). I suspect this gap between administrators and academic analysts in the 50s helps to explain much of what went wrong from the 60s onwards.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 4, 2018 9:16:39 GMT
I would like to read that report, but I can well understand both sets of faults. But it really seems the reluctance of the Irish Church to even a little self-criticism ignored the over-hanging crisis, one I believe will get worse. At some stage we are going to have advance solutions rather than discussing this.
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