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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 25, 2016 23:06:19 GMT
The Provos were not fighting on behalf of Catholicism in a doctrinal sense, obviously; the argument is that they were doing so in a Durkheimian sense, with religious observance as marking membership of the tribe. (One function of religious dietary/fasting laws, for example, is that they make it difficult to socialise with nonbelievers and thus enhance group loyalty. Obviously this is more true of kashrut and halal than Friday fish or total abstinence from alcohol as a matter of obligation - Free Presbyterians are obliged to be teetotallers as a condition of membership, for example - but the general principle applies.) The argument is that separate schooling and bans on mixed marriages discourage socialisation and thus breed ignorance, fear and suspicion. There is, I should say, something in this; but the hidden implication is that the subcultures possess nothing of value in themselves and should be encouraged to disappear (except for a few external markers which don't deeply influence the personality, with Twelfth parades turning into the equivalent of morris dancing). In fairness, I would also say that the blame was not entirely with the PRovos and their supporters - the treatment of Ian Paisley as a figure of fun and sentimentalisation of him as a peacemaker in his old age ignores the extent to which he and others like him appealed to sheer savagery and laid the fuse for the Troubles. Brendan Hughes' recollections in VOICES FROM THE GRAVE are a major text in terms of understanding the mindset. Some of it is quite horrifying (he was in "internal security" - in other words, a torturer as well as a murderer, and I really find the former more repulsive than the latter, that's one of the first things that turned me off George W Bush) but you do really get a sense of how in the early days of the Troubles he and those like him saw themselves as fighting to defend the people of their communities from the loyalists and the Brits, and how they were driven by a combination of loyalty to the neighbourhood and the street (since I got to know Belfast I've always been uneasy about THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL's admiration for the sort of society where you are really willing to die and kill for your own street against people who live a few streets away) with a wider sense of being part of a community of the oppressed. Hughes' generation mainly saw that in terms of working-class socialism, whereas his father's generation saw themselves as Catholics born to suffer; Hughes was an atheist but he revered his pious father who made vast sacrifices for his children. I met Hughes once and he was a very quiet man who would hardly say a word; what the book shows is that behind that lay a man eaten up by despair who believed all the loyalties which gave his life meaning, all the suffering he inflicted as well as enduring, had been exploited to bring a few to power and wealth - that it had all been for nothing. That really haunts me. I have devoted a good deal of my life to trying to understand and do justice to the IRish (especially the Ulster) Protestant people and their tradition. I don't regret that in the slightest, but I do often feel that in the endeavour, and in my horror at the crimes of the Republican paramilitaries, I was less than just to the grievances of Northern Catholics/nationalists. Someone should write a decent life of Fr Denis Faul - it would be a good way of coming to terms with all that. I agree with what you have said here Hibernicus, though I think that the Troubles could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if the Nationalist leaders from the 20s to the 50s tried working inside Stormont rather than seeing it as illegitimate and focusing on ending partition. The latter only made the Unionists even more intransigent than they might otherwise have been and allowed them to justify discrimination on the grounds of self-defence against an aggressive minority. To be fair, by the 1960s, most Nationalists had come to realise that an error had been made and the Civil Rights movement was an attempt to rectify this,but at that stage it was too late, Unionist attitudes had hardened too much, and therefore when it was challenged, they turned to violence with all that entailed. (I know that the Unionists would have had a majority in any case, butwhat I am saying the Nationalist stance only gave them an excuse to justify discriminating against them on the grounds that they would endanger the North's existence.)
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Post by pugio on Jan 26, 2016 10:21:13 GMT
That is hardly a fair characterisation of nationalism in the North prior to the Troubles, Young Ireland. Stormont was indeed illegitimate, in my view at least, but that did not stop the Nationalist Party from sitting in it and performing their scripted role as permanent opposition party.
A lot of people don't realise that republicans were actually few and far between among Northern nationalists until quite late in the day. One of the reasons Gerry Adams' electoral victory in West Belfast in 1983 was so significant was that it was very much a left-wing labour constituency in which republicans would previously have been thought to never stand a chance.
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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 26, 2016 11:01:28 GMT
That is hardly a fair characterisation of nationalism in the North prior to the Troubles, Young Ireland. Stormont was indeed illegitimate, in my view at least, but that did not stop the Nationalist Party from sitting in it and performing their scripted role as permanent opposition party. A lot of people don't realise that republicans were actually few and far between among Northern nationalists until quite late in the day. One of the reasons Gerry Adams' electoral victory in West Belfast in 1983 was so significant was that it was very much a left-wing labour constituency in which republicans would previously have been thought to never stand a chance. OK Pugio, fair enough, the Nationalist party did sit in Stormont from 1924 on, sorry about that. And of course,I didn't include the Labour party, who did take their seats as well. The former did refuse the role of opposition though up until 1965, which if they had, would have destroyed any credibility the Unionist position might have had.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 27, 2016 21:30:28 GMT
There's a chicken and egg situation; the nationalist party was actually semi-abstentionist in Stormont from the 1930s (though less so in later years) because the unionists were never willing to make concessions to them. (Another reason was that there was a significant republican vote which would have produced vote-splitting candidates if the nationalists were seen as too close to the unionists; for much of the time there was a tacit understanding that the republicans would not contest Stormont seats if the nationalists would leave Westminster contests to the republicans, who generally would not take their seats even if they won.) The Unionist strategy was constructed on reducing every election to a contest over the border, so they actually tolerated the nationalist party on a sort of reservation and concentrated their hostility on Labour and other parties which were seen as blurring the issue. Part of the significance of the civil rights movement was that they actually (at least at first) tried to keep the border out of the question and campaign on the basis that since they were British citizens they ought to have the same rights as other Britons. (The 1940s anti-partition campaign actually used many of the same arguments as NICRA, but because it made partition its central issue the unionists were able to dismiss it as a trojan horse.) The unionist response was all too revealing - not that there weren't liberal unionists, but they weren't numerous, strong or confident enough to keep Paisleyism and other hardline forces from destabilising the whole system.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 31, 2016 22:20:38 GMT
The 1916 celebrations included a cantata at Collin Barracks with words by the well-known poet Paul Muldoon. Amongst other things Mr Muldoon informed his audience that we threw off the British yoke only to succumb to "the choke-hold of the Holy Romans" whereas now "We're sick of censors and the rest/Those parish parasites/ We've said their Ite Missa Est/ And read them their last rites". Now this is par for the course for Mr Muldoon, who I should say is a genuinely talented poet with the sort of worldview which sees art as a purely artificial creation in the face of the void. (One of his best-known poems, THE AMATHEMATA, a lament for his former lover who died of cancer, includes denunciations of her belief that her suffering served some sort of higher divine purpose and insistence that it was purely blind and meaningless.) But does anyone think that a poem including (for example) a similarly ringing denunciation of Presbyterianism or endorsement of the IRA would have been treated as suitable for such an occasion? Nice sign of where our official culture is heading.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 6, 2016 20:02:10 GMT
This review of John Cornwell's memoir of his time in a minor seminary in the 1950s may be of interest. I picked up a cheap second-hand copy of the book some time ago but have not got round to reading it yet. The reviewer's point that Cornwell takes for granted his abandonment of Catholic orthodoxy rather than adducing any reasoned analysis is pretty much what I would expect from Cornwell, who has a very nasty way of cutting corners and making assumptions that suit himself in such writings of his as I have read (though I must say his book on the death of Pope John Paul I has some very clearsighted analysis of the clericalist mentality). www.quadrapheme.com/john-cornwell-seminary-boy/
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Post by hibernicus on May 11, 2016 21:04:12 GMT
Regular readers of the IRISH TIMES will have come across the former health administrator Jackie Jones, a fairly militant secularist and pro-choicer who often writes a column in the health supplement on Tuesdays. Her column of 29 April, denouncing Laetitia Amoris as retrograde, calling for religion to be removed from schools and denouncing the view that religion is indispensable as the basis for morality, is pretty much what you'd expect from her: www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/masturbation-is-out-contraception-is-out-why-don-t-we-ignore-the-latest-vatican-exhortation-1.2617390but it contains this very interesting passage: EXTRACT Although Ireland is a secular society the vast majority of schools and teachers are Catholic. Teachers are obliged to follow the Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) programmes set down by the Department of Education for both primary and second level pupils. These programmes contain modules on most of the themes contained in The Joy of Love such as the family, sexual and reproductive health and sexual orientation. Whether we like it or not, Catholic teachers and school principals may now feel a level of cognitive dissonance when they are teaching SPHE. “Myself and My Family” is a core unit of the SPHE primary school curriculum. Last year the Irish National Teacher’s Organisation (INTO) developed a resource to help teachers discuss different family formations including those of LGBT couples. “Different Families, Same Love” consists of lesson ideas for all children from junior infants to sixth class and a teaching aid poster depicting many different types of families including: single male and female parents, two women with children, two men with children, multi- ethnic family groups, older and younger couples with no children and so on. The INTO developed the resource because of widespread homophobic bullying in Irish schools. ‘Ending their own life’ The preamble to the lesson ideas notes that “over 50 per cent of LGBT people (under 25) have seriously thought of ending their own lives because of homophobia”. And that “it is vitally important for all children to see their families represented during (SPHE) lessons”. The Joy of Love portrays the ideal family as being a married different sex couple with children, preferably as many as possible – “large families are a joy for the church”. SPHE at second level includes lessons on contraception, and protection against sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy. To what extent will teachers now be able to use resources like “Different Families, Same Love” effectively? Will they be able to teach about contraception without bias? The only solution is to remove religion from schools altogether. Human beings do not need religion to calibrate their moral compass. It is possible to be a decent citizen by adopting a human rights approach to life and relationships with others... END OF EXTRACT So in other words we now have a compulsory schools unit teaching that the family based on marriage between one man and one woman is in no way preferable to other family models, and this has been imposed on all schools - including those theoretically committed to a religious ethos which specifically precludes this view - without anyone except specialists noticing. As Edward Carson said when he was asked whether he really believed anti-Protestant legislation would be passed under Home Rule: "It's not legislation I'm afraid of - it's administration". Whatever about the validity of his particular concern, that's a principle that we should always bear in mind.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 9, 2016 22:50:41 GMT
In the IRISH TIMES over the last few days there have been quite a few letters commenting on Archbishop Dermot MArtin's recent lamentation about the absence of Irish Catholic intellectuals. What is interesting is that several of these are written from the perspective of smug Dawkinsites declaring that religious faith is unlikely to produce intellectuals because it requires people to believe incredible things. In other words, they believe not only that there are no religious intellectuals, but there never have been and never can be - a proposition which can be refuted by a little historical knowledge. Once again, we see the wells being poisoned - these people are so confident in their own ignorance and lack of self-consciousness (i.e. they do not realise that positivism is not self-evident) that they are completely incurious. How do we address that sort of complacency? I might add that Archbishop Martin should ask himself whether the Irish church's abandonment in recent decades of the sort of educational and journalistic infrastructure which sustains Catholic intellectuals has had something to do with the problem he mentions. (Whether the infrastructure in question did such a good job when we had it is another matter.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 28, 2016 21:17:54 GMT
I have noticed lately that a lot of commentators on education seem to be more and more open about the fact that when they talk about promoting integrated education their real motive is to secularise the education system as a whole on the grounds that religion belongs purely in the private sphere, or that it is an undesirable imposition on children who should be shielded from it until they are old enough to decide for themselves (this I might add is logically an argument against any sort of education at all). I have noticed remarks such as "Is it desirable for children to be "imprinted" with religion at such a young age?", complaints that the existence of different religions is socially divisive, implicit or explicit equation of denominational education with racial segregation, etc. Given that this is precisely what the church has been afraid of, I wonder why the present generation of church leaders are paying so little attention to the way in which this discourse is becoming normative. It's as if there was a bout of amnesia in the 70s and 80s.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 16, 2016 23:05:46 GMT
I wish to express my absolute condemnation of the attacks currently being made on Anthony MURphY of the CATHOLIC VOICE and his family. For those of you who have not heard of this yet (I was out of the country when it happened and I took some time to catch up on events when I got back), Mr Murphy objected to his parish in Athy having as choir members two women who recently entered into a same-sex pseudo-marriage. As a result, Mr Murphy has been subjected to an organised campaign against "bigotry" led by a SF councillor and LGBT activists; he has received threats and been warned by one of the curates that it is unsafe for him to attend Sunday Mass, and a Mass was turned into a demonstration of support for these women by activists who filmed it and placed the film on Youtube. This Politics.ie thread will supply a lot of relevant links, if you have the patience to wade through it: www.politics.ie/forum/culture-community/250956-gay-couple-step-down-catholic-church-role.htmlNote that the initial poster on the thread is demanding that the state should intervene on behalf of these women to prevent the Church from enforcing its teachings and proclaiming the truth to its own congregation, and the involvement of an elected representative in this campaign for the same purpose. We now see what these people mean by separation of church and state - the state is to be omnipotent and the church to be told what to say and believe. Would that our church leaders would recognise the full scale of this threat! CATHOLIC VOICE site here; www.catholicvoice.ie/I have haD some difference with the CATHOLIC VOICE in the past, but I must also compliment Mr Murphy on his willingness to bell the cat when it comes to problems at Maynooth which have been swept under the carpet for far too long.
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Post by annie on Oct 13, 2016 0:29:32 GMT
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Post by Young Ireland on Oct 13, 2016 18:58:57 GMT
He makes some good points though I noticed that he left out the consecration of the world to Our Lady in 1984, itself 100 years after Pope Leo XIII's vision. Given this, it's quite clear that the 100 years specifically refers to Communism, especially since after the consecration, Gorbachev gained power in Russia, which eventually led to Communism's collapse. He does not appear to be a follower of Fr. Gruner, so perhaps he forgot to mention that,even though there is a strong implication (probably unintentional) that Our Lady's wishes have not been acted upon (see his reference to the refusal of the French kings to consecrate their country 100 years before the French Revolution). Otherwise, it is an interesting article.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 27, 2016 22:35:19 GMT
The response to the recent Vatican document on cremation is sadly revealing in many respects. The reason why cremation was banned before Vatican II (as is still the case with JuDAism, eastern Orthodoxy and many individuals) is that buRial is seen as more reverent to the body, as the temple of the Holy Spirit, and symbolises the hope of resurrection. Scattering the ashes implicitly suggests that the dead person is being dissolved into the cosmos (though this is not, of course, necessarily the intention of those doing the scattering). When the total ban was lifted, it still remained the case that Catholics were not supposed to scatter the ashes but place them in an identifiable burial site (see this review of the 2011 film THE WAY which makes this point in its last paragraph): www.decentfilms.com/reviews/waybut this was emphasised so little that only the extremely well-informed were even aware of it. The result is that when the teaching is reiterated it appears to many people as an arbitrary innovation and an empty formality - and this has happened with many points of teaching given the decay of catechesis. Brendan Butler has a letter in the IRISH TIMES today accusing the CDF of seeking to return to a past when the laity were enslaved by empty ritualism. I have some respect for MR Butler, who is one of the few "peace" campaigners who pickets the Russian embassy as well as its American counterpart, but if that is all he sees in the historic Catholic tradition, why does he continue to call himself a Catholic? I certainly wouldn't if I saw matters that way.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2019 19:19:51 GMT
Rod Dreher discusses a "reality TV" show in which the female lead makes a great deal of fuss about her Christian commitment, while at the same time taking it for granted that her extensive fornication is perfectly harmless and that anyone who calls it sinful is a "hater" who is trying to "shame" her. While this show is semi-scripted (i.e. this situation is staged, at least to some extent) commenters in the combox say they have come across quite a few real-life examples of this mindset (the male variety being even more common than the female). This seems to reflect a culture permeated by a certain type of psychologism (exalting self-fulfilment and transgression while denouncing self-restraint and commitment) and a form of religiosity which "goes with the flow" and assumes that if certain attitudes are accepted by the wider culture they must be right. What strikes me is that a great deal of discussion of the scandals combines genuine exposure of horrors - which certainly were horrors, and need to be exposed and understood so they can be atoned and guarded against - with a subtextual implication that chastity is impossible and undesirable, a mere external arbitrary imposition intended to control people through guilt and shame, and that anyone who advocates it must be a malevolent hypocrite. Any thoughts? www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/moralistic-therapeutic-bachelorette-christianity-sex/
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 30, 2019 21:22:11 GMT
Edward Feser discusses why the sexual revolution gets more militant as it progresses, proclaiming "it's forbidden to forbid". (In case you think I made that one up,"c'est interdit a interdire" was indeed used as a slogan during the Paris "May events" of 1968). edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/07/psychoanalyzing-sexual-revolutionary.html#moreI want to register one clear disagreement with Feser: EXTRACT For another thing, those who would defend traditional sexual morality need to have a realistic understanding of the cultural situation. As I have said, some conservative religious believers lack this. For example, even contemporary Catholic churchmen, on the rare occasions when they talk about sexual morality at all, often do so only in the vaguest and most inoffensive way. They will bend over backwards to attribute good motives to their opponents and to concede the alleged injustice and insensitivity of past upholders of Christian morality, even though such courtesies are never reciprocated by the liberal side... END OF EXTRACT Now,there is a point at which the assumption of good faith has to be discarded - I haven't read the Platonic dialogues for many years, but I was recently looking at a book by Eric Vogelin and came across a description of how in one dialogue (I think PROTAGORAS) Socrates threatens to walk out unless his sophist opponent stops word-chopping and addresses the issues at stake. That makes me feel a whole lot better about the time I threw the atheist timewasters off the board. Nevertheless, what Feser misses is that we do need to discuss and acknowledge past instances of the distortion and misuse of traditional sexual morality, not to appease the darkside but simply and solely for the love of truth and from desire to prevent such things happening again. Because honesty is a virtue. That's one reason why I've been wanting to find out more about Bernanos after reading DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST and seeing the Bresson film adaptations. Because he's about facing and acknowledging the darkest forms of human evil, trying to face them with a pure heart and realising that even there God's mercy is with us. I fully acknowledge BTW that facing cruelty can lead to fascination by cruelty and to participation in it - it seems to me that Bresson succumbed to it in some of his films. But such things must still be faced and we mustn't pretend they don't exist.
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