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Post by shane on Mar 24, 2015 17:55:21 GMT
I have posted this before but I think it ought to be better known. This is Hamish Fraser's dossier on The Scandal of Maynooth from 1973: lxoa.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/the-scandal-of-maynooth-1973/The dossier is essential reading, both for understanding the collapse of clerical formation in the post-conciliar era and the pitiful state of Irish Catholicism today. The media often talk about the crisis in Irish Catholicism as dating from the 1990s (resulting from the abuse scandals) so I think it's vital for Catholics to understand that it goes right back to the 1960s.
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Post by Young Ireland on Mar 24, 2015 18:33:24 GMT
I have posted this before but I think it ought to be better known. This is Hamish Fraser's dossier on The Scandal of Maynooth from 1973: lxoa.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/the-scandal-of-maynooth-1973/The dossier is essential reading, both for understanding the collapse of clerical formation in the post-conciliar era and the pitiful state of Irish Catholicism today. The media often talk about the crisis in Irish Catholicism as dating from the 1990s (resulting from the abuse scandals) so I think it's vital for Catholics to understand that it goes right back to the 1960s. It's amazing how prescient Mr. Fraser was regarding the media and the collapse of the Church even then. One quibble I would have though is his assertion that all opposition to the Vietnam War is Communistic. Yes, the Viet Cong did atrocious things and I do think that some indiviuals in the anti-war movement went too far by supporting it, but that doesn't mean that everyone who opposed the intervention was automatically a Communist.
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Post by shane on Mar 24, 2015 18:46:29 GMT
I agree; Fr Sean Coyle made the same point in the comments.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 25, 2015 23:15:29 GMT
My own view is that (a) there was for much of the century an underground subculture of disbelief to be found among bohemians, sections of the working-class Left especially in Dublin, and sections of the outwardly-conforming professional middle classes. (b) There was also an overlapping liberal-Catholic milieu, loosely defined, ranging from crypto-unbelievers to people who were interested in liturgy and who thought (with a good deal of evidence) that the bishops and the church apparatus were excessively narrow-minded (c) During the 60s this milieu achieved critical mass - the unbelievers came out into the open, many liberal Catholics became less Catholic and more liberal in the process described in America by James Hitchcock. HUMANAE VITAE was the point at which the battle was openly joined. The trouble in assessing Frazer's claim is that we don't really have a clear picture of how the post-McQuaid generation got to be the way they were; Fraser just praises John Charles and denounces the critics and has very little interest in how they got that way (BTW Cahal Daly was defending natural law morality in the years before HV came out). I would suspect from talking to older relatives that there was to some extent a natural reaction against "just obey orders" and certain types of complacency (one interesting suggestion being that one effect of the Legion of Mary's attempt to promote lay participation was that they were used by a certain type of lazy priest to do much of his work for him). In relation to Fraser' view on Communism and Vietnam; bear in mind that he was a former Communist - indeed a former secret policeman - and that such are inclined to keep their conspiratorial mindset when they convert to other political/religious faiths - and that it is hard in retrospect to realise how deeply perceptions from the late 40s to the late 80s were shaped by the Cold War framework. Indeed, quite a few people on the Right believed at the time when Fraser was writing that the cultural crisis of the Sixties and the appearance of new Marxist regimes in former colonies indicated that the West was losing the Cold War. (Don't forget that at the same time myriads of Western idiots were hailing the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution as the great new hope for humanity.)
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Post by shane on Mar 25, 2015 23:32:31 GMT
Hibernicus, I don't think anyone would claim that there were no dissenters from Catholicism before the 1960s. (Clearly there were, as indeed in every Catholic society that has ever existed.) But I'm amazed that you can talk about widespread clerical rebellion as if it was entirely unconnected with the Second Vatican Council. Two crucial things happened with that council that inspired dissent. Firstly, several theologians who were previously condemned or suppressed by church authorities (whether rightly or wrongly) were rehabilitated by the Pope and went on to play a leading role at that Council. Secondly the Council was perceived (rightly or wrongly) as overturning Catholic doctrine in some areas (like religious liberty or modernism). This fed into the notion that Church doctrine and authority were arbitrary and could be overturned. ALL the dissenting theologians in Ireland in the 1960s legitimised their dissent by pointing to the Vatican Council's rehabilitation of what had previously been condemned.
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Post by Ranger on Mar 26, 2015 10:46:14 GMT
You're right in saying that Vatican II was a catalyst for this kind of dissent Shane, as was the false expectations built up before Humane Vitae, as Fraser mentions in the document. However the document itself seems to me to be more cataloguing the actual incidents of dissent in this period rather than looking at the actual causes. This information is certainly very useful and interesting (the part where a document stating that a number of sexual sins were now okay with the Church got an Imprimatur by tricking a Censor with failing eyesight into signing the wrong document is shockingly Machiavellian) but I'm not certain that it addresses the root causes of this dissent. There had to be an issue before Vatican II for this rot to bubble up in the Post-Conciliar period. The question is, can we find the root causes? Archbishop McQuaid's statements to the effect that 'nothing would change' seem to indicate that he was unaware of these problems.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 26, 2015 18:19:41 GMT
I didn't mean to say that this clerical rebellion (and not just clerical; the willingness of mainstream newspapers to print statements openly dissenting from Catholicism - not just dissenting from Catholicism but regarding it as self-evidently contemptible - really took off in the late 60s. The transformation of HIBERNIA from a lay Catholic magazine into one which openly advocated secularism is an example of what I am talking about) was unconnected with Vatican II. What I am suggesting is that it was not exclusively CAUSED by Vatican II - in the same way that the post-Vatican II liturgical changes, whatever we may think of them, did not come out of nowhere but had significant antecedents in the decades before Vatican II. (Whether they were the only conceivable outcome is another matter.) I think John Charles McQuaid was aware of the problems I described to some extent (the amount of effort he spent spying on leftist and anti-clerical groups, artistic circles etc is evidence of that) - the problem was that he didn't really know how to address them, partly because he treated all criticism of the way the Church was being run as malign by definition. (A good example of this was mentioned in the Ryan Report on industrial schools. A play about industrial schools was staged in Dublin, and John Charles sent an observer along to report on it. The observer made a long and detailed report of the play and its criticisms of industrial schools run by religious, but neither the observer nor the Archbishop seem to consider the possibility that these criticisms might have had any substance; they treated the mere fact of church-run institutions being criticised as scandalous in itself. It is hardly unprecedented for theologians to be subjected to some degree of censure and later rehabilitated - the question is whether the original censures were justified or not; censures are not infallible any more than rehabilitations. The way the Council was spun by the media is another matter, but would you like to suggest how it could have been avoided and -given that it was not avoided - what we can do now?
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Post by shane on Mar 26, 2015 19:19:22 GMT
I certainly don't believe that Vatican II and its aftermath came out of nowhere, my apologies if I gave that impression. The reason I recommended reading Fraser's dossier is not because I believe he gives a comprehensive analysis of the Irish Church's disintegration - that was beyond the scope of his dossier (which was mainly intended to alert bishops and laity to the fact that there was a problem at Maynooth). I recommended it because I think it gives an invaluable snapshot into Maynooth at a very crucial time - it's rare to get material like that on Irish Catholicism from that era which comes from a traditionalist viewpoint.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 26, 2015 23:10:56 GMT
It's a snapshot (and a very distressing one) rather than a comprehensive analysis. It analyses how things were at that point but not how they got that way (other than the suggestion that if only all the bishops had been like John Charles it could have been nipped in the bud).
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Post by Ranger on Mar 27, 2015 14:09:22 GMT
I'm sorry Shane, I might have misinterpreted you there then.
I guess I wonder if there is any source now which could demonstrate how these factors arose in a way more detailed than a simple 'snapshot' that would cover the period before and after VII? I suppose this might be asking a bit much since there seems to have been a lack of awareness of the changes that were coming.
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Post by shane on Mar 27, 2015 15:24:56 GMT
Ranger, I'd love to see someone write a historical analysis of 20th century Irish Catholicism from a conservative/traditionalist perspective. The lack of understanding about what really happened (and why it happened) on our part is a great handicap and allows our adversaries to set the narrative without challenge.
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Post by Ranger on Mar 27, 2015 16:56:38 GMT
On that note, Shane, I was talking about just that subject with a good friend heavily involved in the Church recently. He suggested that such an analysis, if it was to be done in great detail and professionally, would probably be best organised under the auspices of the Bishop's Conference or of an Archdiocese that would have funding and access to materials and would be able to appoint a person or persons to do so.
Unfortunately, as he pointed out (and I agree) this is all well and good in theory, but in practice the Bishop's Conference might not see any value in the project and it risks falling foul of partisan interests within the Church.
But I think his point was that the time and effort involved would require funding and help from a body with the resources to do so; I'm not sure if there's another body apart from the local hierarchy itself that would consider this part of their remit or would dedicate funding to it.
Perhaps Hibernicus, being a historian, could shed light on what this might require? Would it be possible to do so without institutional support of one kind or another? I imagine that it would be a full-time job.
This is, of course, assuming that with funding and staffing such an initiative is enough; there is the problem of being able to find the right kind of documentation and knowing enough to be able to contextualise and interpret it. I think the interviews you have done with older Irish priests that you have on your blog are a very good idea Shane; of course there's the problem of not being able to recall every detail accurately over time, but there's not much we can do about that.
I think I should add that a 'conservative/traditionalist' narrative must seek to be truthful over seeking to be useful. We need to overcome the biases of either ignoring the good in the Irish Church or overlooking the bad. In other words, we shouldn't be looking to replace one partisan narrative with another one, but rather seeking the true narrative. (I know that this is not what you're advocating at all, I guess I just feel that it's a good idea to state it explicitly)
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 28, 2015 16:34:07 GMT
I think it would be a major work, and it would require someone with training and either institutional support or private means (I know of a few examples of wealthy professionals devoting their leisure, or their retirement, to research projects). The problem with historical academia is that it is increasingly run on a central-planning basis which drives scholars towards the sort of research projects which are favoured by the funding bodies (one of the criteria of academic performance is success in obtaining grants). The Americans and to a lesser extent the British are the obvious comparisons (I am not sufficiently familiar with the Continent to judge, though I know there is a cadre of traditionalist/polemicist church historians in France and Italy). What comes to mind from this comparison is that Ireland does not have the sort of culture of debate/documentation either of these might have; it would be necessary to sift a great number of newspapers and ephemeral publications to look for relevant material, and I suspect it would also require a certain amount of oral history research (I suspect a lot of relevant events took place on a face-to-face personal level and weren't documented) which by its nature is a dying resource. Of course truth has to take precedence - any traditionalist/conservative narrative has to face up to the flaws of the traditional Irish Church and not seek to ignore them or brush them under the carpet as a lot of old-style "official" history did. This is one problem with hoping an American might produce such a history - they might have the skills and know many of the right questions, but they have a very strong tendency to romanticise Catholic Ireland of yore. For myself, my own work allows me to produce a few small case studies which I hope may one day be useful to someone undertaking such a project; of course I work to the same professional standards as I would on any other subject.
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Post by shane on Mar 31, 2015 13:49:38 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 12, 2019 22:01:00 GMT
I tend to avoid linking to Rorate Caeli because it strikes me as somewhat dotty, but this is an interesting analysis of the problems created for the Church by the traditional Jesuit interpretation of obedience and its wider implications. Even though it is probably a surreptitious jab at Pope Francis and as such should be handled with due caution, it strikes me as well researched and well argued. Unlike other attempts to differentiate Jesuit obedience from the Legion of Christ version, it does not simply present Jesuit obedience in terms of St Ignatius's own practice but also refers to authors such as Rodriguez (who was extremely influential right through to the mid-C20). Note also that the Jesuit practice of requiring the subordinate to open his mind regularly to the superior and allowing the superior to use information thus gained in governance was copied by the LC and has been widely criticised as abusive. Oddly enough, it does not address the suggestion that Jesuit obedience was interpreted more rigidly after the Suppression and Revival, but the analysis of how a faith founded on sheer authority can disintegrate in crisis or can actually prepare the way for antinomianism has a lot of force, not least for the Irish situation. rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2018/10/tyranny-and-sexual-abuse-in-catholic.html
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