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Post by hibernicus on Feb 17, 2010 13:06:37 GMT
A little point in connection with this, which is not often realised. General Jack D. Ripper in the film DOCTOR STRANGELOVE is acting perfectly rationally within the limits of his own knowledge (i.e. he does not know that in the world of the film the Soviets have invented a doomsday machine). His reasoning is that (a) While bombers are the only nuclear delivery system, the Americans have the ability to incinerate the USSR while suffering only survivable damage themselves (b) Once the ICBMs on both sides become fully operational the US will lose this advantage; both sides will face Mutually Assured Destruction (c) It is therefore reasonable for the US to launch a first-strike against the USSR while they still possess this advantage.
Part of the film's satire on what were then the current debates about nuclear strategy is precisely that this argument is perfectly rational in its own terms but is nonetheless morally repugnant (since it involves deliberately choosing to incinerate millions of Russian civilians). In this it is an interesting comment on the limits of "values clarification" versions of moral philosophy and ethical education, since these (whose inception in America dates from the technocratic Fifties rather than the radical sixties - indeed, part of the Sixties youth revolt was a reaction against precisely this sort of mindset, though the results had their own problems) start from the presumption that the essence of morality lies in unhindered utilitarian rational choice unconstrained by unexamined presuppositions.
The rival view is that there are certain moral insights which cannot be dispensed with without monstrous results, and to treat these as open to debate is to create nihilism and moral anarchy, and that moral education lies in inculcating these insights in the young so firmly that they observe them instinctively.
The other aspect of the satire, of course, is that General Ripper's plan is based on hubris and leads to disaster precisely because he is not aware of all the relevant factors (including the human capacity for making blunders and acting unforeseeably).
Perhaps this has its own relevance for our friends on another part of the board.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Apr 14, 2010 14:01:36 GMT
Looked through the last few posts on this thread. Eccles' contributions were surprisingly good - very valuable information for someone who came on the forum to be thrown off. But the Vatican Council II can not be separated from the historical context into which it came. One powerful aspect was the threat of nuclear annihilation which fueled the nihilism which went hand and hand with the sexual revolution.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 14, 2010 16:48:02 GMT
I don't think it was just the nuclear threat - rather this was seen as the end-process of the brutalisation that had gone on in the two World Wars and the Depression. The sense that the nineteenth-century liberal order had been entirely discredited, that traditional social and religious hierarchies had been tried and found wanting, that all that mattered was survival - staying out of the abyss that had opened up beneath western bourgeois civilisation - and that anything was justifiable to achieve it is a very marked feature of the period. The germs of the sixties can be found in the twenties (indeed I have even heard people argue that without the Depression the twenties would have produced something like the 1960s, and that the US New Deal combined with its technocratic arrogance elements of a culturally conservative provincial revolt against the metropolitan decadence and excess of te Roaring Twenties.) It goes without saying that Stalin, Mao and Hitler with their willingness to commit any crime and justify it as the price of a new and better civilisation reflect this sort of nihilism, but there is a discernable process of moral corruption visible on the Allied side during WW2 in terms of the conduct of war by such means as indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
The Powell and Pressburger film THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, c.1944, is a good example of this. In David Low's original cartoons Colonel Blimp is a vicious and selfish reactionary bully; in the film he is a sweet old codger who is foolish enough to believe in chivalry and doesn't realise that it is not only necessary but morally imperative to copy all the atrocities of the Nazis in order to defeat them; the film puts those very words into the mouth of an anti-nazi German refugee, and for good measure the film also justifies British reprisals against civilians during the Boer war and the torture of prisoners to obtain information, in its First World war sequence.
Part of the Sixties revolt was based on the idea that the cultural and religious conservatism of the 50s did not, as its adherents saw it, represent a moral revival after these horrors but an attempt to pretend they never happened (and I think the post-Civil War wave of Catholic enthusiasm here in Ireland suffered from the same flaw).
Vatican II I think got the worst of both the fifties and sixties mindset, technocratic arrogance driving the more misconceived changes and feeding into the antinomianism of the sixties revolt as they were actually implemented. (Let's be honest, too; the technocratic arrogance chimed with some nasty forms of traditional authoritarianism within the church and the antinomian revolt was partly fuelled by an antirely justified reaction against real evils.)
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Apr 15, 2010 11:02:45 GMT
I never tire of telling people that the 1960s sexual revolution was pre-figured by something on a much smaller scale in the 1920s, but Hibernicus' analysis is very interesting.
I also like his approach to the Second Vatican Council - traditional authoritarianism + technocratic arrogance, though I can't help feeling these - like Worlock and Dearden - allied with the antinomian nihilists to gang up on the rest of us.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 15, 2010 11:55:41 GMT
And part of my argument is that the antinomians often had a point, though they overdid it. BTW one point that can be made about John Charles McQuaid is that he and many Catholic activists of his generation were reacting against the social changes of the 1920s; we tend to forget how shocking these were for those who lived through them because they were dwarfed by subsequent changes, but such changes as the replacement of ankle-length by knee-length skirts, or the replacement of pre-1910-style swimsuits (which were made of wool and deliberately made baggy to conceal the contours of the body) by the tight-fitting one-piece variety were really startling at the time.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Apr 29, 2010 21:54:31 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 8, 2010 14:49:17 GMT
Here's another thought. Archbishop Martin is now declaring that too much reliance was placed on the schools as seedbed of faith formation and more attention ought to be given to catechesis within families. I seem to remember that back in the 70s schools were informing parents that they ought not to try to teach their children the faith themselves drawing on older catechetic methods or their own memories of what they were taught in school, because everything was different now - they ought to leave this task to the real experts in the schools and their new catechetical methods. I think the results of this experiment are now pretty clear. Somehow, however, I doubt if Archbishop Martin will criticise it as blatant clericalism - which it was - or if it will be picked up on by IRISH TIMES commentators. Any thoughts?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 27, 2010 15:18:30 GMT
When browsing through a months-old CHRISTIAN ORDER recently I found that Anne Roche Muggeridge, author of a well-known account of the post-Vatican II debacle, THE DESOLATE CITY, has died (on 14 september, after long suffering with alzheimer's). Here are some tributes, focussing on her work for the Church and the pro-life movement. Her husband John Mugeridge (d.2005) was the son of Malcolm Muggeridge. Your prayers are requested for her, and for them all. mrterryc.blogspot.com/2010/09/rip-anne-roche-muggeridge.htmlmrterryc.blogspot.com/The dead go into the darkness, in one way, so very much alone. But that is only the way it seems. The Church Militant here on earth, the Church suffering in Purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in heaven is all one Church. Around this altar we are still with Anne, and she is with us. And what we are going to do in a few minutes at the altar matters. It matters to us, surely, but more importantly, in faith, we know it matters to Anne. www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2010/sep/10091711"These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.Therefore, "they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them.Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat.For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." Pray for them all the same.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 1, 2011 15:13:37 GMT
Fabio Barbieri offers some thoughts on the current crisis of the Church fpb.livejournal.com/534114.htmlEXTRACT ...What is, in fact, unusual and worth considering, is the immensity of the apparatus as it reached that fateful year 1960. From the fifteen to the eighteen hundreds, church property across Europe and America had been consistently pruned, repossessed, taken over with or without form of law, with or without episcopal and papal consent. The Protestant revolt, the Enlightenment, the French revolution, the nineteenth-century conflicts of church and state, had been nothing but stages in one long and immense story of plunder and looting, sometimes for the good of the state, often for less deserving causes. And yet the Church had come into the twentieth century not only stronger, but possibly richer than she had ever been. In countries like Britain and the Netherlands, where it had been barely tolerated and almost invisible in 1800, in 1900 - let alone 1960 - it was a power. In Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, the state had taken over her properties again and again; and yet every episode of looting was followed by a new wave of foundations, endowments, building. Already in 1840, Macaulay was drawing attention to the essential failure of all attempts to break the Church; not with any pleasure, because he disliked it. But even by then, it was clear that the long plunder of the Church had been a total political failure. The power of the Church not just to survive but to conquer had come from below. It had been the result of millions of parish communities, as often as not made up of poor and ignorant immigrants, to build and endow their own churches, their own schools, their hospitals and missions. While the Italian state was busy confiscating the estates built up by saints three or ten centuries before - at the same time, barely noticed by the authorities, living saints such as St.John Bosco and Mother Cabrini and Bishop Scalabrini and my own ancestor Clelia Barbieri were establishing new communities, new ministries, and, inevitably, new endowments. The Church, in fact, was catching the tremendous wave of Western growth that changed the face of the world between 1800 and 1950, spreading the European race across the face of two continents and multiplying its numbers from six to tenfold even in Europe. The first thing we think of, of course, in terms of growth, was the famous Victorian family - father, mother and ten or twenty children. But the importance of those families lies not just in sheer numbers, but in the fact that, from the end of the Napoleonic wars on, health and life duration were constantly growing. Europeans had long had large families; but until 1820 or even later, it was in the expectation that many of the children, even in the most rich and comfortable families, would die young. From the 1820s on, that began to be less and less the case. Without an equally enormous set of opportunities, of course, this growth would have resulted in nothing but what Malthus had forecast - a growing competition for scarce resources, resulting in mass death. But as it happens, the nineteenth century was a period of unbelievably increasing opportunities. Several continents were suddenly opened to exploitation and settlement, while at home the swift advance of technology produced a stream of new economic opportunities, from workers in the new plants to journalists in the suddely popular press to nurses in the new hospitals. A family could have any amount of children without any great fear that any of them would risk starving; if nothing else, any child who did not find an opportunity at home could be sent to try his luck in America or Australia. In this world of multiplying opportunities and enomrous unleashed energies, the Church too had a nearly infinite array of posts. It was far from merely restoring the holes left by various waves of state and private plunder; vast arrays of new tasks awaited. Every new village in the new colonies would require a church and a school; and at home there were all sorts of new ministries - hospitals, the vast Catholic press, the new phenomenon of Catholic universities, schools in general, political parties, banks, cooperative societies, even trades unions. Any family one of whose children showed any kind of piety or interest in sacred matters had every reason to encourage him or her to follow a vocation; the vast growth that surrounded them on every side was itself enough to impress on everyone the prestige and merit of a Church career. The Church of 1960, the enormous apparatus spread over five continents and dominant even in countries where it had been illegal almost within living memory, was the result of this long wave. But the long wave had exhausted itself; and at the same time it had began to show all the flaws that are inevitable even in the holiest enterprise this side of the veil. The practical and building spirit that had quietly dominated church enterprise over 150 years, allowing great figures such as Newman and Chesterton and their likes to draw attention while, away from the limelight, the umpteenth parish church, private hospital or local bank was being set up, was giving way to a silent unhappiness, a sense of being behind the world at large, of being provincial and secondary. Consciously or not, the Church in its growth had adopted the attitudes and to some extent the goals of the world, and of course had not managed to beat the world on its own ground. The Church had grown, but not grown far enough to outrace its enemy the world. The Church could build a great and impressive university at Notre Dame, but it would never be as great and impressive as Harvard; the Church could build magnificent hospitals, but the state or state-directed national health services could build many, many more, just as good. Beneath the cassock and the habit, religious felt, more and more, the cultural and ethical draw of the world. The colossal endeavour put forth in the last two centuries to survive the greedy attentions of the world at large had turned into an increasing insertion in that same world - but in a perceivedly backward and provincial position. In a sense, it was worse than in the days of Pius VII and Pius IX, when the powers of the state and the people were openly turned against the Church, the Church had something to fight, to endure, to work towards; now the world had more or less accepted it on its own terms, as a minor figure in its landscape, even a bit of a sentimental indulgence. The history of modern culture was taught - and never mind how many major figures, from Chesterton to Bernanos, from Stravinsky to Johnny Cash, were Christians - as though Christianity did not exist, and I have met many children of the sixties (like my genius friend kennahijja) who literally have no notion whatever what the Church is, teaches or does. No wonder that every lie about her, from Hochhuth to Dan Brown, sells so well. The explosion of self-indulgence in the sixties, from which the collapse of the religious orders and the crisis in vocations are often said to proceed, comes from this underlying crisis, which is a crisis of vocation in a much deeper way. The Church has survived, triumphantly survived, one of the most severe series of attacks ever witnessed. Though her position is still here and there - most notably in China - under threat, the issue is no longer in doubt. But in surviving, it has adopted too much of the world's way of looking at things. Too many churchmen felt not like successful priests or nuns, but like second-rate schoolteachers, office managers, or journalists. Another reason for the crisis is that the dynamic resource of population growth that had powered the growth in the number of Church and Church-related institutions was also clearly running out. The Victorian family of ten or twenty children was no longer the norm and never would be again. And here we have to deal with one of the great lies of our time. Women do not have children because they don't know how to avoid it; they don't have children out of ignorance. Women, or rather families - with the mother, of course, as a driving force - have children because they see it as a practical thing to do. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, they had children because many of them would die, and they wanted at least a few to live; in the nineteenth, increasingly, because many children could get gainful employment and enrich the family, including looking after the older generation. IN the twentieth century, these reasons progressively ceased to matter. Unprecedented understanding of hygiene made sure that nearly every child survived to become an adult; unexploited resources diminished in number and importance, so that the threat of unemployment became increasingly a feature of the landscape even of the richest countries. In this situation, women would have been certain to have less children, whether or not contraception and abortion had been available. Far from being so pathetically ignorant as to find themselves pregnant without knowing why or how to stop it, women at all times have had their ways to control the issue. In Greek myth, no less, fear of female refusal to comply with the demand for babies is frequently found under the symbolic disguise of tales about women toasting the seed grain before it was sowed, thus making the land infertile. However, the demand for legalized contraception and abortion has always been presented under this guise - as a battle against ignorance. Third World women, it was said, bring children into the world by the dozen and then watch them starve to death because there is not enough food to feed them. (Of course, all the great African famines are really the result of war, but let's not say that too loud - it might spoil the picture.) This racist assumption - the poor ignorant blacks need us enlightened whites to look after their own best interests - gained hold across the West, not only because of its flattering racism, but above all because it had a real correspondence with what was seen as direct, local experience. In the year of the Lord 1960 the whole West was peopled by a generation who had seen their parents in the case of Catholics, their grandparents in the case of agnostics and Protestants, bring up families of ten or twenty children, and who instinctively knew that they would never in their lives consider any such effort or sacrifice. They could not but regard their parents or grandparents with a kind of affectionate contempt; people who had lived in so much more restricted a world, a world of ignorance and poverty. Emotionally, it was very easy to connect the large families of the European near past and the African present with the ignorance and backwardness of the past. Ultimately, the racist assumption that a Kenyan woman with ten children was too stupid to know the difference depended on an unspoken assumption that one's own mother or grandmother - so backward, so set in her ways, so closely associated with a provincial past - was equally stupid and ignorant. To those who were 20 in 1960, it never occurred that their parents, in their own day and in their own way, had been just as much rational, far-sighted and up-to-date as they were - only that conditions were different and made different requirements. It was on the spur of this propaganda that the world-wards drift of so many priests and laymen was brutally broken. No wonder that it took years of thought and agonized debate before the unhappy Paul VI could bring himself to lay down the gauntlet of Humanae Vitae - not on the matter of abortion, but on the far more insidious and less attractive one of contraception. It was all too clear to anyone that the world had changed. Nobody could seriously imagine a Church whose average family had a dozen children; if nothing else, the idea of further crowding an already choked Western Europe was enough to make anyone's head spin. Population growth was dreaded, not altogether without reason: everyone could see the natural and artistic heritage of the richest countries being squeezed and concreted over. Families were shrinking, and at the time that seemed an almost unmitigated good. The only issue (nobody then publicly imagined that the Church would have tolerated abortion) was whether the Church was disposed to slacken the ban on artificial means of contraception. Well. We know what happened. Surrounded by every kind of suggestion and hidden menace, flattered and pushed in one direction and one only, the Pope nevertheless steeled himself to do his duty; and the earth shook, and the heavens opened. From one day to the next, Catholics who had been cradling themselves in the unbroken if tepid acceptance of the modern world found that world drawn up against them in a ferocious, unbroken phalanx, backed by mountains of dollars and the wrath of all the mass media. Most of them, especially the more "prominent" - those on whom the worldly media had poured more attention in the recent past - broke and went over to the enemy. To live by the values of the world, to accept its views and its reprehensions, had become such a second nature to them that when the time came to show to whom they were loyal - they showed it. It is this generation that is now dying out, and it is the religious institutions that harboured them that are shrinking. That consummation was forecast, though for the wrong reasons, more than half a century ago; people have been talking about a crisis of vocations for two or three generations. What had to happen was a real reorientation of the Church and its institutions, in a more purely religious direction, away from purely worldly success. And it is happening: all across the Church, there are religious orders whose numbers and influence are growing - and they are, without exception, reformed versions of the traditional forms of monastic life and charisma. There is even a swiftly-growing order of blue-dressed nuns! Monasticism will not die so long as there is a Catholic Church. It is connaturate to it. Think of the Trappist Fathers, the silent monks, so strangely and impressively brought to the public attention by the movie The Great silence. Can you conceive of anything that suggests more strongly the high Middle Ages, the "age of faith" as it is sometimes called? But while the other ultra-rigorist order, the Carthusians, is indeed a product of the twelfth century, the Trappists come from the Age of Reason, and, of all countries, from France, from the strange and heartfelt vocation of a French nobleman. That's right: when the whole of Christendom, and France in particular, had been falling in love with rationalism for its own sake, France, the cultural centre of Europe, produced an order that declined to argue; as France and the world were growing intoxicated with the most brilliant, if not necessarily most sound, style of talk ever devised, from the aristocratic heart of that culture came men who made an offer to the Church and to God, not of their talk, but of their silence. And unlike most other orders, the Trappists (and the Carthusians) have never lacked for novices. END OF EXTRACT Read the whole thing. The remark about how it suits the "enlightened" to see their parents and grandparents as provincial ignoramuses is alas sadly reminiscent of a great deal of blather in present-day Ireland.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 30, 2011 10:05:07 GMT
George Weigel offers his thoughts on Inda Kenny's speech, and suggests the source of our problems (and those of Quebec, Spain and Portugal) lies in inadequate preparation for Vatican II. Incidentally, Weigel's suggestion that American bishops should be parachuted in to Irish dioceses WOULD be a way of getting round the paucity of talent among Irish priests, but I don't think it would work. His statement that if natives of Ireland could become bishops in nineteenth-century American dioceses, why can't Americans be given Irish dioceses today, ignores the fact that those nineteenth-century Irish appointees had by and large already gone to America and committed themselves to working in the American church, rather than being brought straight in from Ireland as bishops (though there were quite a few examples of Irish priests or bishops being sent straight out to Australian dioceses). The second problem is that where such appointments were made they involved a missionary church where large numbers of the clergy and laity were immigrants themselves, not one where there was an established native Catholic population. (The history of sending foreign priests to Latin america because the natives don't produce enough vocations might be a parallel to Weigel's proposal, and it's one whose results have not always been fortunate.) The third is that it is not enough to change the bishop without introducing massive changes in diocesan structures/administration, and I doubt if Americans would have the knowledge to make these sort of changes in the short time before the diocesan bureaucracy reassserts tiself. (One reason why a lot of John Paul II's 'conservative' appointments to american dioceses went native was because they kept existing "liberal" bureaucracy in place and this led to their proposals being stalled or sabotaged. www.nationalreview.com/arti021/erin-go-bonkers-george-weigelcles/273EXTRACT Sixty years into the 20th century, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Quebec were among the most intensely Catholic nations on the planet. Fifty years later, Quebec is the most religiously arid space between Point Barrow and Tierra del Fuego; Portuguese Catholicism, outside the pilgrimage shrine of Fatima, is hardly robust; Spain has the most self-consciously secularist government in Europe; and Ireland has now become the epicenter of European anti-Catholicism. What happened? Perhaps some comparative history and sociology suggest an answer. In each of these cases, the state, through the agency of an authoritarian government, deliberately delayed the nation’s confrontation with modernity. In each of these cases, the Catholic Church was closely allied to state power (or, in the case of Quebec, to the power of the dominant Liberal party). In each of these cases, Catholic intellectual life withered, largely untouched by the mid-20th-century Catholic renaissance in biblical, historical, philosophical, and theological studies that paved the way toward the Second Vatican Council. And in each of these cases, the local Catholicism was highly clerical, with ordination to the priesthood and the episcopate being understood by everyone, clergy and laity alike, as conferring membership in a higher caste. Then came le déluge: the deluge of Vatican II, the deluge that Europeans refer to as “1968,” and the deluge of the “Quiet Revolution” in la Belle Province. Once breached, the fortifications of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Spain, Portugal, Quebec, and Ireland quickly crumbled. And absent the intellectual resources to resist the flood-tides of secularism, these four once-hyper-Catholic nations flipped, undergoing an accelerated course of radical secularization that has now, in each case, given birth to a serious problem of Christophobia: not mere indifference to the Church, but active hostility to it, not infrequently manifested through coercive state power. This, then, is the blunt fact that must be faced by bishops, priests, and lay Catholics who want to build the Church of Vatican II, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI — the Church of a New Evangelization — out of the wreckage of the recent Irish past: In Ireland, as in the other three cases, the Church’s close relationship with secular power reinforced internal patterns of clericalism and irresponsibility that put young people at risk, that impeded the proclamation of the Gospel, and that made the Church in these places easy prey for the secularist cultural (and political) wolves, once they emerged on the scene. And that is why the leadership that Catholic Ireland needs may have to be imported, at least in part. Men of indisputable integrity and evangelical passion who have no linkage to this sad, and in some instances tawdry, history are needed to lead the Irish Catholic reform for which Benedict XVI has called. I know no serious observer of the Irish Catholic scene, anywhere, who disputes the necessity of clearing the current bench of bishops; I also know no one who thinks that a reconfigured Irish episcopate, even one leading fewer dioceses, can be drawn entirely from the resident clergy of Ireland today. This may be one factor leading to the current languid pace in reforming the Irish hierarchy; and that lassitude is what gave Taoiseach Kenny the opening for his latest rabid attack on the Church, the Holy See, and the Pope. All the more reason, then, to make the reform of the Church in Ireland truly radical by looking outside Ireland for men capable of helping lead this once-great Church back to evangelical health. END OF EXTRACT The traditionalist site RORATE CAELI criticises Weigel for ignoring the possibility that Vatican II was itself a cause of the subsequent disaster EXTRACT Now, it is quite good to see walking (and writing) contradictions such as Weigel admit that the Second Vatican Council was a "deluge". It is ridiculous to pretend that the situation in most nations is any better than they are in the aforementioned lands. We can surely speak of great Catholic nations that were "prepared" for the Council (that is, their intellectual Catholic "elites" were, in Weigel's words, marked "by the mid-20th-century Catholic renaissance in biblical, historical, philosophical, and theological studies that paved the way toward the Second Vatican Council" - by the way, the ignorance this shows of the intense development of Catholic studies in Spain, for instance, perfectly traditional but innovative and deep, as represented, for one small example, in the majestic first decades of the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos is breathtaking). But how did these nations fare any better? Belgium and the Catholic Netherlands? Austria? Catholic Germany, including Bavaria? Most of rural France? Catholic Switzerland? These were areas just as deeply and traditionally Catholic as the four regions mentioned by Weigel, and their "intellectual elites" (well, some of them) were certainly "paving the way" for the deluge - but they became as much of a wasteland as any of the others. What about "Catholic America"?! How is the national Church that brought child abuse to the grand stage an example of anything to anyone? It is incredible that 50 years after Vatican II we actually have to read that the solution to the Vatican II crisis is more "Church of Vatican II" (Weigel's own words, not ours). We would be willing to admit that a mild semi-detachment from blindingly following the hierarchy may have been essential to preserving Traditional liturgy and practices in France and in America (which would explain why there are more Traditional-minded Catholics in these two nations, historically characterized by independent thinking, than elsewhere), but only because the semi-detached stood still against the Vatican II tide, not because they followed it. The crisis everywhere was not caused by "too much Tradition", but by the whosesale abandonment of all that our forefathers in faith bequeathed to us, and by the enthusiastic reception of the teachings of Vatican II and the post-Conciliar reforms by hierarchs everywhere, including in Ireland, Quebec, Spain and Portugal (and their former colonies) - and Italy. END OF EXTRACT Read them both and decide for yourself. Read the comments as well, this is always an interesting exercise rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2011/07/ireland-quebec-portugal-spain-not.html
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 5, 2011 22:40:04 GMT
www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2011/08/04/sorry-mr-weigel-the-irish-church-has-problems-but-to-call-ireland-the-the-epicentre-of-european-anti-catholicism-is-simply-wrong/William Oddie criticises Weigel on Ireland This comment IMHO is on the button: kfca 8 hours ago While both George Weigel and William Oddie have made some valid points, please let’s not lose sight of what does remain fairly unrefutable: Standards of formation at Maynooth, and throughout many religious orders for the past 40 years have ensured that there are very few suitable home grown candidates for the Irish episcopy, so, please God, they can expect future terna's to reflect a more universal field. UK? America? Europe? Africa, perhaps? And, particularly given the current strength of feeling, the argument that the Irish would resent taking orders from an outsider can hold no water. Indeed, a two thousand year history of mission and evangelisation rather suggest that this approach has often been spectacularly successful. While few can doubt that the apostolic faith is, in the main, still an integral part of Irish self-identity, at least in those over 40, it should be made more explicit that the fall in Mass attendance is also an acutely generational phenomenon. The older generations, who have had a solid foundation in the Faith, have largely continued to attend Mass, whatever scandals have rocked the Church; yes they have been shocked, yes, many are outraged, but it can largely be assumed that they will not abandon the Church, and so do not need to be pandered to and appeased. It is the younger generation in Ireland that need to be evangelised, and this won’t happen through gimmicks or the new age ‘spiritual’ approaches favoured by so many religious priests, but through a solid knowledge of the catechism, through apologetics, and reverent liturgy celebrated in strict accordance with the GIRM, with universal provision made for the celebration of the Usus Antiquior, especially for those of a more contemplative leaning, at least at one of the 3 or 4+ Sunday Masses many parishes still have. Faith is still there, amongst pockets of the young, but it is very malformed and therefore highly unlikely to thrive. Secular culture and materialistic aspirations continue to erode the institution of marriage and the traditional family, commonplace acceptance of contraception, co-habitation, divorce, extra-marital relationships following separation/divorce, and far worse still, is more widespread, and will continue to erode away the Mass-going population. Ireland also has its own fairly unique mix of social problems too which has, arguably, left them as one of the coarsest nations in Western Europe - (I’m Irish; I’m generalising) - they are largely a trusting and generous people, but with little of the intrinsic nobility evident in the cultural patrimony of other nations. Nor can any alliances be expected from the ‘Irish State’, as was; it has now spent the fruits of the surrender of its much boasted of independence and sovereignty, and is largely bankrupt. I think a ‘business as usual’ sign will just frustrate this process. It is for these younger generations that Rome need to act, and to be seen to act - by judiciously placing men loyal to Benedict XVI, those of solid faith and proven orthodoxy into key strategic positions of the Irish Church. As for a reduction in the number of sees, and redrawing of diocesan boundaries to reflect demographic shifts – this is overdue, not only in Ireland, but elsewhere too. May I be forgiven, if I have said anything untrue. END
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Post by assisi on Oct 7, 2011 9:48:04 GMT
Desmond Fennell has an article on his website regarding Vatican II and his impressions on it over 40 years later: www.desmondfennell.com/essay-from-aggiornamento-recovery.htmA couple of paragraphs to give a flavour of it: The leading men involved in Vatican II and in the post-conciliar shaping of the Catholic Church belonged to the Catholic variety of western intellectual culture. More particularly they belonged to that segment of Catholic thought that was influenced by the West’s Myth of Progressive Modernity. Accordingly they respected the intellectual modernity of the time—‘the ‘ideology of the 60s’ with consumerist liberalism at its core—as the truest insight into human matters yet reached by the non-Christian human mind. While it repelled them by being Godless and by proposing a morality that deviated radically from the European and Christian one, they respected it in two ways: by not opposing it outright (as the Church had opposed Communism) and by trying to learn from it as much as their Christian vision allowed. and...... As to the Church learning from its Godless rival, this occurred in a manner that was partly positive, partly negative. In respect of increasing the active role of women in the Church, it was positive. In respect of what was a central secular doctrine of the 1960s, the Church’s learning from it was of mixed effect. That doctrine taught that people should be kind to others and to themselves. So rather than punishment for wrongdoing, rehabilitation was to be preferred; and self-punishment was a morbid practice. Learning from this the Church took a more humane view of unmarried mothers and homosexuals. It decided that imposed self-punishment by fasting and abstinence was not good and that punishment of sexually misbehaving clergy was not a good thing either. Recently we have been made aware how, much to their later cost, this latter change of mind influenced the Irish and other bishops in their handling of clerical paedophilia: rehabilitation by psychiatric treatment was preferred to punishment. I believe that the same prioritising of ‘kindness’ and rejection of punishment caused the virtual disappearance of hell, as the posthumous punishment for grievous sin, from Catholic preaching.
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Post by annie on Oct 7, 2011 17:52:57 GMT
Thanks for the link, Assisi. As one who lived through the period, I concur completely with his analysis. He didn't touch on the further complications in Irish society which arose as a result of the abandonment by the state of catholics north of the border to the tender mercies of a protestant sectarian state.
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Post by shane on Oct 16, 2011 18:41:12 GMT
I've been compiling a historical scrapbook on Vatican II/changes in the Church in Ireland. If anyone would like me to send it to them please email me at shanesemail2010atgmail.com (feel free to do so anonymously --- replace 'at' with @) and I'll send it as an attachment.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 17, 2011 19:43:31 GMT
My problem with Fennell's piece is that he really is not interested in why people who disagree with him believe what they do - he just assumes they are dupes. I don't buy his line that Western consumerist/secular liberalism was/is as bad as communism (in the 80s he used to describe Ireland as "the Poland of the Western bloc" - funny how I failed to notice the tanks on the street or the one-party elections) and he doesn't explain why the Council Fathers wanted to come to terms with modernity (loosely defined) or what sort of Catholic politics they were reacting against. Does he suggest we should go back to the ancien regime monarchies, or to Catholic dictatorships? (I remember quite a few trads - including Archbishop Lefebvre - hailing the Latin American dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s as Catholic bulwarks against Communism while they were murdering and torturing their citizens on an industrial scale.) The only social model Des Fennell has ever suggested was something called a "community of communities" back in the 80s - he only ever described it in the vaguest terms and never explained how, for example, the extreme political decentralisation he advocated could coexist with modern economic organisation - or how the latter could be abolished without a disastrous drop in living standards. As it happens, I do agree that the Council Fathers were excessively optimistic about modernity - but Fennell never really gets down to discussing how the bits of modernity and tradition he likes can be retained while discarding the bits he doesn't like. Ideas are connected and have consequences.
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