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Post by hibernicus on Oct 12, 2017 22:13:57 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2017 23:27:43 GMT
This point may go here as well as anywhere else - this year (as last year) the Dublin City Marathon is being held on Sunday morning, instead of Bank Holiday Monday as previously, causing great trouble and disruption to people who come in from the suburbs to attend city centre churches - there will certainly be problems at St Kevin's. There will also presumably be problems for the mainstream Protestant churches, given that not only the congregations but the clergy serving city centre churches live in the suburbs (whereas Catholic priests tend to live in parochial houses next to the church). This came up when the city centre was locked down for the 1916 centenary celebrations in Easter 2016. The assumption behind this change is that people who go to church on Sunday are a benighted backward minority and no thought need be given to their convenience or sensibility. I remember when I was a postgraduate student in the 1980s academic conferences used not to have Sunday morning panels, so those who wished could go to church. Now they have Sunday morning panels, on the assumption that getting it over and getting home outweighs any inconvenience to the troglodytes. This is the new environment which we have to get used to.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2017 23:35:11 GMT
An interesting Rod Dreher piece on how even in many traditionally religious parts of America, it is increasingly common for parents to skip church on Sunday to take their kids to Sunday morning sports, and its full implications - not only are they missing Church, but the children are being taught faith's not that big a deal. I've heard similar complaints in Ireland. The contrast with Roger Liddell, the Scots Presbyterian memorialised in the film CHARIOTS OF FIRE, who turned down an Olympic appearance because he would have to race on Sunday, is indeed noteworthy (even though Catholic sabbatarianism has never been quite that strict - though I have heard of problems with GAA fans missing Mass to travel for matches, starting surprisingly early in the C20). Dreher is right in pointing out that this emphasises the need to be countercultural when necessary to serve God. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/sunday-sports-church-chariots-of-fire-minivans-apathy-benedict-option/
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Post by Account Deleted on Oct 26, 2017 23:51:02 GMT
An interesting Rod Dreher piece on how even in many traditionally religious parts of America, it is increasingly common for parents to skip church on Sunday to take their kids to Sunday morning sports, and its full implications - not only are they missing Church, but the children are being taught faith's not that big a deal. I've heard similar complaints in Ireland. Yes, its the case here too. My own Godchild has been directed into that Sunday habit by parent. "It's our Sunday ritual." If parents only consider it a ritual, then there's nothing they conceive of their child getting out of it. The underlying thinking is that the social aspect of sports is more important to them in future life than anything they could gain through Mass. How such a social support network - trained by a culture of competitive engagement - will treat each other in hard times in later life remains to be seen. I'd rather be around Christian teammates in such times, with the foundation of God's rock beneath me. They will discover, alas.
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jaykay
Junior Member
Posts: 65
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Post by jaykay on Oct 27, 2017 2:12:13 GMT
Hibernicus says: "The assumption behind this change is that people who go to church on Sunday are a benighted backward minority and no thought need be given to their convenience or sensibility."
I honestly don't think there's such a seemingly malevolent assumption. I think that "people who go to church on Sunday" aren't even on their mental landscape. I don't think there's any such active antipathy, really. I think it's more like those who "see" things like the crowns and unicorns etc. on the Custom House, or the former Parliament House a.k.a. Bank of Ireland, and just take it as something past, not of any relevance to our current "reality" - as they define it - and thus not to be taken into account. O.k., maybe not a great analogy but nevertheless I would say that our hereditary Christian past is now no more to them than a Sacred Heart picture in Granny's - horrible, daaahling - 1950's house, in the background and shuddered about (until it becomes valuable- heh!). In short, I really wouldn't credit them with the active will to discombobulate churchgoers... those "people" are not on their planet. Such as it is.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 31, 2017 9:44:49 GMT
There's a huge amount of sporting and other kids'activities on Sunday morning and it is a factor in making recruiting altar boys very difficult. But one factor that oriented things on this path was Saturday evening Mass.
With regard to academic conferences, I've been at a few where Sunday Mass was incorporated into the conference and the sermon was like an additional paper. That's probably long dead.
But I recall during one EU presidency conference in Dublin in the 1990s, it greatly surprised the organisers (presumably the bright boys and girls in the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs,if you excuse my sarcasm) were surprised to find a lot of French, German and Dutch officials asking about Sunday Mass times and other services which they overlooked including in the information packs.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 31, 2017 14:01:42 GMT
There's a huge amount of sporting and other kids'activities on Sunday morning and it is a factor in making recruiting altar boys very difficult. But one factor that oriented things on this path was Saturday evening Mass. With regard to academic conferences, I've been at a few where Sunday Mass was incorporated into the conference and the sermon was like an additional paper. That's probably long dead. But I recall during one EU presidency conference in Dublin in the 1990s, it greatly surprised the organisers (presumably the bright boys and girls in the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs,if you excuse my sarcasm) were surprised to find a lot of French, German and Dutch officials asking about Sunday Mass times and other services which they overlooked including in the information packs. When I was on honeymoon in Innsbruck, I was surprised that there was a church five minutes walk from our hotel and that it was quite full. We hear so much about the secularisation of Europe, I'd imagined it would be five or six old ladies in a "heruntergekommen" church almost impossible to get to.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 31, 2017 19:37:22 GMT
I've been at academic conferences in the UK where I had to make special inquiries about Mass times and they were surprised I bothered. As regards jaykay, I don't think people who go to church on Sundays are so rare as to be completely off these people's mental radar (though the Easter 2016 security measures which made it difficult for Protestants to get to church were just thoughtlessness IMHO). I think there is a fairly widespread assumption that going to church is a disreputable eccentricity for which no particular allowances need be made. Anyone else remember how the now defunct Progressive Democrats in the late 80s got themselves into a kerfuffle when they voted at a national conference to remove all references to God from the Constitution, and it turned out that the debate had been held on Sunday morning when most of those likely to oppose it had gone to Mass?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 7, 2017 9:45:13 GMT
I remember the Dean of Christ Church cathedral (in the 1990s, might have been Dr Patterson) and other Protestant clergy raised questions about how timing and routing of the St Patrick's Day parade would affect their congregations. A compromise was reached, but the director of the festival more or less derided the clergy as petty begrudgers on air at the time. If memory serves me right this director was the recently retired artistic director of the Gate Theatre who is so much in the news just now.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 16, 2018 23:10:15 GMT
Phil Lawler discusses the passage in Deuteronomy where God declares that to serve him leads to life, and he who hates Him loves death. That last is a very succinct saying and it never really struck me before (probably because I don't read the Bible as I ought, though I often resolve to do so). www.catholicculture.org/commentary/the-city-gates.cfm?id=1557Two illustrations of this saying come to mind: The first is the vile Italian occultist Julius Evola, whose name has come up in the thread on the Alt-Right. He was basically a satanist; he claimed that most of humanity are mud creatures whose souls are reabsorbed into the cosmos after death but that an elite of warrior heroes by achieving a fixity of the will through occult practices and merciless "heroic" deeds (preferably at the moment of death) can attain godhood. One of his exemplars was the SS, which gives an idea of where this can lead - I've also seen it suggested that there is an Evolesque influence on the modern cult of the Islamic suicide bomber, though this may be an exaggeration. As the late John J Reilly put it at the conclusion of a summary and assessment of Evola's ideology (archive link below) "The fixity of the will for which Evola evangelised has often served as a definition of damnation". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evolaarchive.org/stream/RevewOfJuliusEvolasrevoltAgainstTheModernWorld/RevewOfJuliusEvolasRevoltAgainstTheModernWorld#page/n13/mode/2up(2) As part of his exaltation of aristocratic warrior tyranny, Evola was an all-round misogynist and advocate of sadomasochism. Quite recently I noticed a roadside billboard advertising the third atrocity in the FIFTY SHADES film series, complete with smutty double entendre. (In the 1960s John D Sheridan expressed worry that the relaxation of literary censorship might lead to de Sade being sold openly in Ireland as was already the case in late 60s Britain. He was quite correct - it has - but he didn't know the half of it.) One of the comments on Rod Dreher's blog expressed the view that the FIFTY SHADES atrocity didn't give the real nature of the practices involved and that a certain well-known modern French novel on the same subject (whose name I won't give; it was written by a woman) was much more revealing, in that it showed the first-person narrator describing herself being progressively brainwashed and dehumanised without realising what was being done to her. This struck me as somewhat different from what I had heard of the novel, so I checked the plot summary on Wikipedia (I would not touch the original with a 40-foot pole any more than I would set fire to myself or drink poison). The impression this gives is that while the novel does indeed describe the progressive dehumanisation and degradation of the narrator by a club of sadists, she is presented as doing this freely and with her eyes open and treated as heroic in knowingly pursuing and embracing self-destruction. It will be noted that this strongly resembles Evola's eulogies over the achievement of power through the pursuit of cruelty for its own sake, culminating in self-destruction. This mindset appears also to reflect a French tradition of libertine literature going back to the Enlightenment (perhaps earlier) which seems to be written as a demonic parody of the French tradition of spiritual literature - where the spiritual writers (such as St Francis de Sales) seek to lead the soul to embrace the goodness of Being and come at last to union with God, the libertines seek to crush out any such thing and to reduce humanity to bodies in arbitrary motion, guided only by the will. One begins to see why so many Catholic commentators attributed the circulation of pornography to a deliberate conspiracy against the faith. This is not the whole of the story (the McGaherns and Banvilles are also created by the crimes and failings of those who profess to serve God) but it's a significant part of it - and in it we see that the serpent's promise "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" and the words of Deuteronomy "He who hates Me loves death" refer to the same phenomenon. I feel afraid.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 24, 2018 20:58:02 GMT
An Australian conservative commentator argues that the hope of university expansion - that technological advance and enlightened citizenship would go together - hasn't worked out as intended and instead has produced a bureaucracy founded on the Machiavellian pursuit of power and inimical to actual creativity. The author may have his own axes to grind but a lot of this sounds terribly familiar. quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/01-02/machiavellian-takeover-australian-universities/
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 6, 2018 19:53:42 GMT
Alasdair MacIntyre discusses (inter alia) the Irish situation www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/alasdair-macintyre-at-notre-dames-cec-conference/Some points that come to mind: (1) He compresses changes which took place over 50-60 years into a decade (2) Ho overstates the prominence of the bishops in opposing the legalisation of abortion. With a few honourable exceptions "when danger reared its ugly head they boldly ran away and fled".
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 5, 2019 23:26:33 GMT
Rod Dreher (who is giving a talk in University Church in St Stephen's Green on the evening of Monday 21 January, for anyone who's interested) gives some thoughts on the contrast between the Ireland of the 1979 papal visit and of our current abortion atrocity. A few thoughts: (1) He post-dates both the damage and the loss of faith. The latter was already advancing by the late 60s, the former was in place as early as the late C19. (2) Neither trads nor liberals can be absolved of blame for the debacle,and neither can be dismissed as entirely worthless. Irish Catholicism of the early/mid C20 produced quite a few figures of evident sanctity, and I have talked to many older people who have a firm and vivid sense of the spiritual world - so the society that produced them can't be dismissed as purely conformist; at the same time it produced many horrible examples of brutality, authoritarianism (i.e. "don't think,just do as you are told") and worldliness and complacency, lay and clerical. (Examples on request). The liberals (in which I include figures like Cardinal Day and Michael Adams as well as the more "obvious suspects") did have a sense that much was wrong and had some legit ideas on what needed to be put right, but they underestimated the pressure to conform to the world (the old guard on the other hand were well aware of that pressure but the social alternatives they tried to construct turned out not to be sustainable). Neither "side" was able to assess what was good and bad about old and new, the liberals would not even acknowledge there was a real danger, the trads were reactive and leaderless, and so we are where we are. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ireland-catholic-collapse-abortion/
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 7, 2019 10:31:33 GMT
Rod Dreher (who is giving a talk in University Church in St Stephen's Green on the evening of Monday 21 January, for anyone who's interested) gives some thoughts on the contrast between the Ireland of the 1979 papal visit and of our current abortion atrocity. A few thoughts: (1) He post-dates both the damage and the loss of faith. The latter was already advancing by the late 60s, the former was in place as early as the late C19. (2) Neither trads nor liberals can be absolved of blame for the debacle,and neither can be dismissed as entirely worthless. Irish Catholicism of the early/mid C20 produced quite a few figures of evident sanctity, and I have talked to many older people who have a firm and vivid sense of the spiritual world - so the society that produced them can't be dismissed as purely conformist; at the same time it produced many horrible examples of brutality, authoritarianism (i.e. "don't think,just do as you are told") and worldliness and complacency, lay and clerical. (Examples on request). The liberals (in which I include figures like Cardinal Day and Michael Adams as well as the more "obvious suspects") did have a sense that much was wrong and had some legit ideas on what needed to be put right, but they underestimated the pressure to conform to the world (the old guard on the other hand were well aware of that pressure but the social alternatives they tried to construct turned out not to be sustainable). Neither "side" was able to assess what was good and bad about old and new, the liberals would not even acknowledge there was a real danger, the trads were reactive and leaderless, and so we are where we are. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ireland-catholic-collapse-abortion/He seems to take Howlin's thesis on faith. Personally I reject it. I'm increasingly sceptical of the "long decline" thesis. I think it happened very quickly and almost out of nowhere. The image of clerics too busy running the Church to attend to the spiritual might sound clever, but what does it actually mean? Does he really think those priests were not celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, giving homilies, etc. etc.?
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2019 18:44:25 GMT
I would say that there were two steep periods of decline (late 60s/early 70s; mid-90s/present) with a period of (apparent) quiescence in between. What he is putting forward is the "sacrament factory" thesis: that reception of the sacraments, mass attendance, external devotions were seen as sufficient in themselves whereas they require deeper interior spiritual understanding/sanctification. In secular terms, this is like the argument that bureaucrats become so fixated on measuring what can be measured that they cease to understand/register what isn't measured (or measurable) so that you get such phenomena as education based on "teaching to the test".
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