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Post by hibernicus on Jun 3, 2009 15:20:22 GMT
Here is a link to an entry on Melancholicus' INFELIX EGO blog discussing Fr. Edward Flanagan of Boys' Town's criticisms of the industrial shools on a 1946 visit to Ireland. infelixego.blogspot.com/2009/06/witness-of-true-hero-of-charity.html Two minor points. First, I seem to remember some correspondence in the IRISH TIMES (or perhaps in HISTORY IRELAND) some time back in which Daire Keogh, who is writing the official history of the Irish Christian Brothers, claimed Fr. Flanagan's condemnation was not as clearcut as is often stated - in particular that he did not adequately distinguish between conditions in prisons and reform schools (where the inmates had been convicted of criminal offences) and industrial schools (where the inmates had committed no crime but, as we now know, were treated as if they had). Second, Gerald Boland, the Minister for Justice who denounced Fr. Flanagan, was in fact the most anti-clerical member of de Valera's government. For most of his adult life he did not practice Catholicism, more for political reasons (i.e. the "Fenian" view that the Church had opposed republicanism/nationalism); he was reconciled just before his death. In 1937 he threatened to resign from the Cabinet and leave Ireland if de Valera incorporated a "one true Church" clause in the Constitution. Thus, we are not dealing with a "raving Catholic" out to defend the church's good name. So why did he react the way he did? I suspect the answers are as follows: (1) The point that the state dumped responsibility onto the Church to save money is overdone - since the church claimed Catholic institutions were per se preferable to state ones and would have opposed any attempt to have the state take them over - but it probably has some validity here. (There was one state-run industrial school, located in Dublin; conditions there were actually worse than in the church institutions, difficult though this is to believe. My source is an article on the industrial schools in a recent issue of RADHARC, a New York-based journal of Irish studies. I cannot remember the author's name but it makes truly horrendous reading. Desmond O'Malley - credit where credit was due - began the reform process when he was Minister for Justice in the early 1970s.) (2) It reflects the generally authoritarian political culture of the period - the view that to question authority was wrong per se. This was not solely Catholic in inspiration; Gerry Boland came out of the old conspiratorial IRB tradition (he was a brother of Harry Boland, whom you may have heard of in connection with Michael Collins) and the fact that he had just presided over the repression of the IRA during the Second World War (involving several executions and large-scale internment, and the deaths on hunger strike of IRA men who were revealed to have been kept in horrendous conditions) may also have disposed him to treat all criticism of prison conditions as subversive.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jun 12, 2009 22:54:52 GMT
Here are my thoughts, for what they are worth. I'm 52 and can remember the late 60s and the 70s.
Orders like the Christian Brothers and the Mercy Sisters were founded by middle-class people whose attitudes to poverty and the care of the poor were advanced for their time. But by the 20th century these orders tended to be populated by people from much farther down the social scale, often with little or no education. (The scene with the Christian Brothers walking across the bridge in Portrait of the Artist is striking in its contempt for their peasant origins and appearance.) And I think Fr Vincent Twomey's analysis is pretty persuasive when he talks about people being induced to commit themselves to the religious life in their early teens, often because of family pressures, when they had no vocation.
Attitudes to the poor in society generally, up to about thirty years ago, were what would be considered shocking today. It was taken for granted that they deserved second-best in everything; hand-me-down clothes, poor food and little comfort. And corporal punishment was more or less unquestioned as a form of discipline. I remember being slapped and beaten - in moderation - both at home and in school and thinking nothing of it.
What happened in the institutions has to be seen against this background. However the point of course is that in hundreds of cases the behaviour of nuns and brothers was outrageous and grotesque even by the standards of the time. Corporal punishment went far beyond moderation and became vicious and systematic brutality. Second-best for the children turned out to be something far worse: hunger, cold and neglect of their health. And some of the Brothers who never should have been Brothers took advantage of power and secrecy to rape children (showing, as many Germans had done during the Reich, that where there is no law and no accountability ordinary people are capable of being monsters).
It is infinitely frustrating to see the religious orders fumbling with their responses to what has come out, as if we had learned nothing from the incompetence of Cardinal Daly and Archbishop Connell ten years ago. These are people imbued with the so-called "Spirit of Vatican II", deferential to every popular fad and with not a cassock or a habit between them; yet they are as secretive and defensive as their predecessors when the cruelties in Letterfrack and Artane were at their worst. Perhaps they are trying to limit their financial exposure to keep their resources for the various charitable and almost entirely God-free activities they carry on nowadays. Who knows?
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jun 16, 2009 18:16:43 GMT
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Jun 17, 2009 10:30:32 GMT
Thanks for the link, Michael, but I don't think I'll be joining that discussion group. It strikes me that there are ways other traditionalists look at the scandals and this comes across on the board. Some trads see the problem as a fruit of modernism, a point Hibernicus debunks elsewhere. Others focus on the predominance of same-sex abuse which brushes aside cases of heterosexual abuse and ignores the incredibly harsh physical abuse which were a feature of these institutions.
To be honest, I think a lot of trads (not necessarily the contributors to the Fish eaters discussion) are having a nice, long gloat about it. I hope I'm wrong. But trads are not exempt from this problem. The conditions, for example, which pertained or children raised communely in Father Feeney's compound in Massachusetts, while I have heard no reports of sexual abuse, were comparable to concentration camp routines - it was not corporal punishment, it was torture. Feeneyism is an obscure movement. To have mainstream orders within the Church practicing torture, as they were, was totally unacceptable and saying our only problem was the presence of homosexuals in the priesthood and religious life is a cop out.
On another note, how frequently do trads apply the adjective 'saintly' to Catholic prelates they admire? I think Mgr McQuaid a good man, but would never call him 'saintly' and I am much less inclined to apply it to Mgr LeFebvre. I know Hibernicus mentions canonisation in 'Truth or Superstition' threads. Leave this to the Church, not to individuals. Trad opinion makers who constantly dish out the term 'the saintly Archbishop LeFebvre' do neither him nor his supporters any favours - if they believe this let them seek miracles through his intercession, but leave the adjective 'saintly' out until the Church declare him so - and ditto re: Archbishop McQuaid or anyone else. Off the point, I know, but I saw it in the Fisheaters discussion.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 17, 2009 16:52:07 GMT
On Askel's point: I think "saintly" in this context is often used to close down discussion - the implication being that if he was saintly he must have been right about everything and no-one is entitled to question him. This is not true even of canonised saints - at least two Doctors of the Church formally denied the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception some centuries before it was formally defined, for example. In terms of private devotion I would say Askel is going a bit far; "saintly" does not necessarily equate with formal canonisation and private devotion necessarily pre-dates the establishement of a formal Cause for canonisation. What is objectionable is the attempt to impose private devotions on everyone else as a matter of obligation.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 17, 2009 17:07:01 GMT
In relation to Michael (not Michael G's) point - psychologists were involved in assessing seminary candidates well before Vatican II. The big problem I think came when secular psychology was treated as neutral and to be applied unproblematically (in contrast to earlier attempts to establish a distinctively Catholic psychology, for example). This creates problems when you are dealing with schools of psychology which (for example) believe that religious belief is a form of neurosis (as Freud did), that sexual activity is necessary for mental health, that evil impulses must be embraced and affirmed (a la Jung's theory of the Shadow). Michael Rose has some horror stories in GOODBYE, GOOD MEN from an American context (though it should be borne in mind that he is often writing on the basis of what rejected seminarians told him without getting the seminary authorities' version of events). I don't know if anyone has studied this issue as it developed in Ireland. I am not really sure that Michael's point is relevant to the discussion here because we are often talking about abuses which existed in Ireland well before the major wave of psychologisation in seminaries.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 17, 2009 17:19:00 GMT
In relation to the Christian Brothers' social origins - it was always inherent in the constitutions of orders based on the Calasanctius/de la Salle model that they would attract people from poorer and less well-educated backgrounds (for one thing they were not orders of priests, which has implications for their educational standards). This is partly because of the nature of the apostolate - providing basic education to the very poor with little prospect of advancement and under a vow of poverty - implied they would attract recruits who themselves were used to such poverty. I believe that in the early C20 there was tension between the American De La Salle brothers and their French superiors because the Americans wanted to move into higher education and the French, mostly from peasant backgrounds, were suspicious of this & resented it. Cf James T Burtchaell's book on the secularisation of Christian universities, THE DYING OF THE LIGHT.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 19, 2009 17:18:59 GMT
John Waters has an interesting column in today's IRISH TIMES about Dr. Cyril Daly and his 1960s-1970s campaign against corporal punishment in schools. www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0619/1224249119768.html HE doesn't mention one interesting point, of which regular visitors to this board may well be aware - Dr. Daly is an adherent of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St. Pius X. This is interesting, given that I know of some traditionalists who advocate corporal punishment as divinely mandated (as some Protestant fundamentalists do). I suspect that both Dr. Daly's stances reflect an underlying non-conformism and independence of mind.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 22, 2009 10:38:29 GMT
Here is an example of badly-argued liberal exploitation of the scandal to push their own agenda. I supply a direct link to the story -fisking follows www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0620/1224249169562.html?via[MY COMMENTS - AS A GENERAL POINT, NOTE THAT MCGARRY ASSUMES THAT CELIBACY, ASCETICISM AND SELF-DENIAL ARE ALWAYS WRONG AND HARMFUL] Why is it that child sex abuse was more prevalent in Irish Catholicism than elsewhere? To answer that question it is necessary to go back to the Famine and examine how sex became a taboo, writes PATSY McGARRY YOU MIGHT have seen that report on the RTÉ TV news last Monday from Charlie Bird in Mendham, New Jersey. There, they erected the first monument in the world to victims of clerical child sex abuse. It is a 180kg basalt stone, in the shape of a millstone, with a chain running through it. An inscription attached reads, in those unequivocal words of Jesus from Matthew’s gospel, concerning those who would harm the young: “It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea”. The monument was inspired by a suicide, in October 12th, 2003, of 37-year-old James Kelly, who had been sexually abused as a child by a priest in Mendham. His abuser was Fr James Hanley, who had served at St Joseph’s parish in Mendham. It is not surprising that the first monument to clerical child sex abuse victims worldwide should have been made necessary by the crimes of a priest with an Irish name. Irish names are prominent wherever in the English-speaking world clerical child sex abuse has been spoken of. Even allowing for the uniquely high number of Irish men among Catholic priests and religious worldwide, this phenomenon is striking. Nowhere else in the Roman Catholic world has another nationality been as dominant among clerical child sex abusers. What was so different about Irish Catholicism that it gave rise to this? In spring 2002, I was commissioned by the editor of an English publication to write about clerical child sex abuse from an Irish perspective. I pondered whether it was an Irish disease. On receipt of the article the editor said he couldn’t print it. His publication had spent decades trying to escape an anti-Irish perception and were he to carry the article it would undo all their success in finally escaping that, he said. The article was published in The Irish Times on May 4th, 2002. It noted all those Irish names among clerical child sex abusers. In Australia, they included Butler, Claffey, Cleary, Coffey, Connolly, Cox, Farrell, Fitzmaurice, Flynn, Gannon, Jordan, Keating, McGrath, McNamara, Murphy, Nestor, O’Brien, O’Donnell, O’Regan, O’Rourke, Riley, Ryan, Shea, Sullivan, Sweeney, Taylor, Treacy. In Canada: Brown, Corrigan, Hickey, Kelley, O’Connor, Kenney, Maher. In the US: Geoghan, Birmingham, Brown, Brett, Conway, Dunn, Hanley, Hughes, Lenehan, McEnany, O’Connor, O’Grady, O’Shea, Riley, Ryan, Shanley. In the UK: Dooley, Flahive, Jordan, Murphy, O’Brien. And, of course, all those in Ireland itself. [ HE DOPESN'T GIVE ANY STATISTICAL BASIS - THIS IS JUST IMPRESSIONISTIC. HAS HE LOOKED AT THE CHURCH OUTSIDE THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD/ FOR THAT MATTER, HAS HE LOOKED AT THE VARIOUS STATISTICAL BREAKDOWNS AVAILABLE OF US OFFENDERS, TO COMPARE IRISH AND OTHER ETHNIC GROUPS?] WHY IS CLERICAL child sex abuse more prevalent in Irish Catholicism? To answer that, it is necessary to go back. Until 1845 the Irish were a happily sexually active people. With an abundance of cheap food, the population grew. Patches of ground were subdivided with ever-decreasing acreage, producing a sufficient supply of potatoes. In 1841, the island of Ireland had a population of 8.1 million. By 1961, the country having gone through the Famine and emigration, it was 4.2 million. Another effect was an end to subdivision of holdings and diversification away from the potato to other crops, cattle and dairying. This wrench in land use had a defining effect on Irish sexuality. An economic imperative dictated vigorous sexual restraint as, regardless of family size, just one son would inherit. Others – sons and daughters – emigrated or entered the church. This late 19th-century pattern persisted into the 1960s.
Sex became taboo. Allied to prudery and a Catholic Church fixated on sex as sin, sensuality was pushed under. A celibate elite became the noblest caste. They had unparalleled influence through their dominance of an emerging middle class, the fact that they were educated when most were not, and the control they had over what there was of an education system and healthcare.
In tandem, Rome was experiencing one of its most dogmatic papacies under Pius IX. The longest serving pope (1846-1878), he lost the Papal States and eventually Rome itself to Italian reunification. As his temporal power decreased, he increasingly emphasised the eternal, and compounded a trend – extant in Catholicism since the French revolution – of alienation from this vale of tears.
Life became a test, a preparation for death and eternal life under the eye of what Archbishop Diarmuid Martin described last weekend in another context as “a punitive, judgmental God; a God whose love was the love of harsh parents, where punishment became the primary instrument of love”.
Pius asserted himself in Ireland through the doughty Cardinal Paul Cullen of Dublin, the first Irish cardinal. He received the red hat from Pius in 1866. Cullen shaped the traditional Irish Catholicism with its emphasis on devotional practice, which dominated at home and abroad into the latter part of the 20th century.
As well as preaching absolute loyalty to Rome (Pius promulgated the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in 1870) the Vatican’s celibate foot soldiers preached chastity as the greatest virtue. Irish women were expected to emulate the Virgin Mary. In 1854, Pius IX promulgated the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – that Mary was born without original sin – embedding still further in the popular Irish Catholic mind a profound association between sex and sin.
The clergy preached that celibate life was superior to married life; that sexual activity outside marriage was evil and even within where the intention was not procreation. Sexual pleasure was taboo, powerful evidence of an inferior animal nature that constantly threatened what was divine in the human.
The sermons of Irish Catholic clergy for most of the 120 years between 1850 and 1970 seemed dominated by sex. This railing, allied to a world view that saw the economic business of this earth as inferior activity in the eternal scheme of things, had inevitable consequences. Poverty and chastity saw to it that the marriage rate plummeted.
By 1926, for instance, the percentage of unmarried females in each age cohort was 50 per cent higher than in England and Wales and nearly three times as great as in the US. By 1961 the population of the Republic had dropped to 2.8 million.
The bachelor had become as integral a part of Irish life as the husband. So too had the spinster, with her penchant for overwrought piety. The Irish mother was totally dependent on her husband economically. It ensured an appalling time for some Irish women, as the absolute power of the husband was liberally abused in many homes. It drove many Irish mothers to seek solace in a higher purpose.
This often translated into a son becoming a priest. Nothing could bring such consolation to the devout Irish Catholic mother – whether in Ireland or abroad – as seeing her son with a Roman collar around his neck. It was said of Ireland’s seminaries during the middle decades of the last century that they were full of young men whose mothers had vocations to the priesthood. It helped that becoming a priest brought with it great power and status.
In 1954, a book, The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World , by John A O’Brien, was published in London. It questioned Ireland’s dramatic depopulation. Simultaneously the number of Irish Catholic clergy reached its highest level ever. In 1956, there were 5,489 priests in Ireland (diocesan and members of religious orders) – one for every 593 Catholics. There were also 18,300 nuns and Christian Brothers. Vocations were so high that between a third and a half of clergy went on the missions.
The Vatican was suitably impressed. In 1961, Pope John XXIII said: “Any Christian country will produce a greater or lesser number of priests. But Ireland, that beloved country, is the most fruitful of mothers in this respect.”
BUT CLEARLY THERE was something deeply dysfunctional in that society.
The Ryan report has lifted a lid on what was going on behind the closed doors of the religious-run institutions. The 2005 Ferns report revealed more of its legacy in later decades. The forthcoming Dublin report and, most likely, the Cloyne report will disclose still more from those years.
The problem, however, is not just within “the cloth”. In April 2002 the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre published a report titled Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland . It found that 30 per cent of Irish women and 24 per cent of Irish men had been sexually abused as children. In the rest of Europe, corresponding figures are 17 per cent for women and 5 per cent for men. In the US, they are 29 per cent for women and 7 per cent for men.
It is clear that, due to massive repression, Irish male sexuality in particular became, for some, redirected into areas where its expression was least likely to be discovered. For many Irish men, it seems, the combined weight of mother and church ensured that women became a no-no.
Some then turned to children. They were accessible to clergy, particularly. With boys it was even easier. No one suspected anything untoward in seeing a man, especially a cleric, with a boy, not least in single-sex institutions.
As we learn more and more of our past it becomes clear we were a deeply dysfunctional people – particularly our men – at home and abroad. That this dysfunction persisted is all too painfully clear, as the 2002 Royal College of Surgeons research makes clear.
But, equally, it is as clear that our attitudes to sex have relaxed greatly in recent times. An indicator of this is that births outside marriage in Ireland today number one in three. Our population has grown to 4.42 million, immigrants included. It is probable that our younger generation is the most normal, sexually, in Ireland since 1845.
We must hope so.
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 22, 2009 10:59:06 GMT
Accidentally posted before I finished the fisking, so I will add my other points here. (1) McGarry seems to assume there were no priests in Ireland before the Famine, and/or that they were not concerned with sexual morality, or that economic pressure had no effect on the people, or that non-Catholics were not interested in sexual morality. (I would recommend him some of the extensive literature produced by evengelical clerics denouncing Catholicism as excessively lax!) (2) He talks as if Popes and clerics before Pius IX were not interested in sexual morality. If he thinks asceticism was invented in response to the French Revolution he should try St. Jerome and his contemporaries. (3) He never tries to compare Irish Catholic priests with similar groups (e.g. the numerous priests recruited from the French and Belgian peasantry in the same period, who appear to have had a similar ethos). This fits in with a general tendency of liberal commentators to see pre-1959 Ireland not just as a society with a variety of characteristics and problems but as a sort of open-air madhouse resembling nothing else on earth. (4) By treating the whole scandal in terms of individual sexual psychopathology he misses one of the most disturbing aspects of the whole outrage - the fact that abusers were so regularly and frequently tolerated and covered up for by those who were not abusers themselves. (5) McGarry treats births outside marriage as an indicator of social health, the more the merrier. He encourages a present-centred complacency; the world of Ross O'Carroll Kelly is the best of all possible worlds, and if you think there is anything wrong with the late-night scene in Temple Bar, or the number of persons who spend their leisure activity masturbating in front of computer porn, or the growing number of Irish men who apparently think it acceptable to join in the sexual enslavement of immigrant women, or the ways in which much popular culture encourages young women to define themselves by sexual display and to bring children into a society without fathers, you must want to bring back the Magdalen asylums. Isn't it nice to see the high standards of commentary maintained at our Paper of Record, and the calm and unhysterical approach taken by that paper's chosen religious correspondent?
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 22, 2009 11:01:08 GMT
And in addition to St. Jerome and his contemporaries, perhaps he could try the Rule of St. Columbanus. Of course he is so obsessed with the idea that Irish Catholicism can be entirely explained by the social arrangements of nineteenth-century Ireland, even with the idea that it did not exist before the Famine, that he pays no attention to the possibility that it might have trans-cultural elements.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jun 22, 2009 21:15:28 GMT
You are right; that is an exceptionally badly-written bit of journalism that could be easily taken apart sentence by sentence. But there may be some truth in the suggestion that the Irish Church in the late 19th and 20th centuries was preoccupied in an unhealthy way with sexual sin. I have wondered elsewhere whether it could be argued that two things complemented each other in a malignant way to contribute to this: - an inherited Jansenistic influence from the formation of priests trained in France and Belgium during penal times, and
- the influence on what McGarry so originally calls the "emerging middle class" in the 19th century of contemporary attitudes to sex among their English counterparts from whom they took their lead.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 23, 2009 12:33:21 GMT
There may be some truth in what he says, but the overall framework of his analysis is so radically wrong that he has nothing useful to say.
I think the claim about the influence of Jansenism on modern Irish Catholicism is overdone. The original claim of Jansenist influence referred to the first generation of Maynooth teachers; the claim that they were Jansenists has been disputed and those who originally made it referred to their alleged willingness to accept the subordination of Church to State (i.e. Gallicanism) rather than to sexual rigorism which was a much more widespread phenomenon.
The big problem with McGarry's article is that it is based on the assumption that any form of sexual restraint at all is necessarily harmful, and that sexual abuse is entirely due to sexual repression. His own newspaper has written elsewhere about how some eastern European and other women are brought to this country under false pretences and kept as slaves by their pimps, and how it is increasingly acceptable in certain circles for Irish men to make themselves complicit in the enslavement of these women; to have them paraded before them like cattle and to hire them for their own gratification, though they know and care nothing about these women, will never see them again, don't even know their language and must in many cases suspect that they are being forced to act as they do. The logical implication of Mr. McGarry's article (though he is probably too unthinking to realise this) is that these men are all perfectly normal - part of the most normal generation since the Famine - because at least they're not celibates, and that when religious celibacy is abolished and everyone pursues sexual gratification without restraint all our problems will go away. The fact is that sexual intercourse inevitably has consequences for the persons who engage in it and for the children who result from it, and herefore inevitably has moral implications and requires some form of regulation. Someone who thinks the wretchedly poor labourers and smallholders of pre-Famine Ireland lived in a sexual utopia, or who rejoices over the fact that a third of Irish births now take place outside marriage - which means, in many if not most cases, that the parents are unwilling to commit themselves to one another or to accept curbs on their desires for their own well-being and that of their children - cannot be taken seriously as a commentator on the subject, any more than someone who claims industrial schools were holiday resorts.
The central problem is not just that there were abusers but that the abusers were covered up for and allowed virtual impunity by others who were not themselves abusers. Mcgarry's prurient little piece has nothing to say about that.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 23, 2009 15:12:14 GMT
A couple of over simplications:
Celibacy is the root of the problem. Rubbish, all denominations have this problem with their clergy and a great number of offending ministers and virtually all offending rabbis are married men.
Sexual puritanism only became a feature of Irish Catholicism since the Famine. It is true that the Famine brought about a change in mores, but puritanical streak in the Irish goes back to the Golden Age of Irish Christianity and features in the Rule of St Columbanus and the movement of the Céile Dé in about 800.
McGarry doesn't believe in letter the truth get in the way of a good story.
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Post by hazelireland on Jun 24, 2009 9:49:16 GMT
I think there is a serious case of putting words and attitudes in the mouth of Patsy McGarry here. I will by no means defend it as the best written article in the world, for reasons of my own, but it is not as far off the mark as some here would claim, nor are the attitudes attributed to the author likely to match those actually held.
Hibernicus, you create a false Dichotomy here. Someone saying that sexual repression is wrong is in no way equivalent to saying they therefore support untempered sexual activity of any nature. Your suggestion the author’s position therefore somehow logically leads to the conclusion that sexual exploitation of women is “normal” is dishonest and inaccurate in the absolute extreme.
Maybe in your head free reign to explore one’s own consensual sexual nature somehow equates to the removal and domination of that consensual nature in others. Thankfully for the majority of us the contents of your head do not in any way reflect the reality of the real world, and I shudder to think what sexual desires and ideas you have been repressing in yourself all these years that leads you to think in this way. Whatever it’s roots however, I see no reason to attribute the attitudes or conclusions you wholesale invent to the Author who has not expressed any such thoughts.
I think most of the errors in the judgement of this article come from readers falsely conflating the ideas of “sexual repression” with that of “sexual abstinence”. We can see this above where users freely swap the words “Celibacy” and “Sexual Restraint” in one section with “Sexual repression” in the next. Were the readers to learn the difference between the two we may make some progress and reduce the number of errors.
Repression refers to making sex a taboo, to make people think that their sexual nature is somehow evil and wrong. The whole area of making it some anti social, furtive, dirty endeavour in the minds of those engaging in it. All such desires should be repressed, buried, ignored and repented without any exploration of non-harmful and perfectly moral ways of exploring and expressing them. Everything from sexual congress to masturbation is made to sound evil and wrong. Guilt and desire become a feed back loop for each other and this does indeed lead to psychological problems in the victims of this method of thinking. That people in our past have been falsely led to think they are somehow disgusting and guilty beings merely for experiencing what is a nature human urge is tragic.
To conflate all of this with the idea of Sexual abstinence, the personal and informed choice to actively abstain from the sexual act could not be more wrong. Upon learning the difference between the two and then re-reading the article above one might find a lot more truth in it than one did before and one might abstain from wholesale lying about what the authors actual moral and social positions actually are.
The contents of the article should not be wholly dismissed or underestimated. Especially when those who disagree with it can only do so by inventing a complete straw man of the authors actual position.
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