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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 13, 2009 13:24:46 GMT
I read through this thread. It is a tragedy in itself that we have to discuss this situation. The Irish Catholic is in a position that it is now independent - but it is quite obviously rudderless. In previous comments, I have said I do not regard Mary Kenny as a great assett to the newspaper. Neither do I think is Fr Martin Tierney. I tend to ignore both Fathers Rolheiser and Murphy O'Connor. I can appreciate why an IC editor would not want to go down a traditionalist or even conservative route, given the amount of parish priests and religious who have an influence over the sales of the paper.
Gary O'Sullivan, however, is failing. First in his assumption he is on the middle ground, which he is not. There is too much coming from the National Catholic Reporter for this to be the case. Secondly, he is losing sight of the fact the IC is an advocacy paper. The mainstream media are horrendous in their attitude to the Church. Gary is either unable to see this or if he dose, he is pretty pathetic in his response. The Ryan Report is a case in point. Gary could have condemned the wrong done, and attacked some of the conclusions drawn in the secular press. Instead he went out on his own sidetrack of re-imagining what Christ wanted. Some of his grasp on the faith seems to be seriously lacking.
Simply, we need better in this capacity. The IC has pretty pages, but very little content. David Quinn or Michael Kelly may hit the nail on the head sometimes, but one has to read a lot of thrash. I know Ronan Mullen features. However, though the senator's heart is in the right place, he has a history of missing the point a bit too much for me to have any great confidence in him.
Having said all that - with the exception of David Quinn's tenure, the Irish Catholic leaves little room for confidence. I recall Hermann Kelly turning it into a traddie tabloid and the nonsensical meanderings of Briget Anne Ryan and some of the people working with her. Simon Rowe's period wasn't among the most fruitful either.
I wonder if there is even a ghost of a chance a really professional journalist like Kieron Wood would get the top job in the IC?
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jul 16, 2009 21:28:30 GMT
But who buys it or reads it now, apart from the gracefully ageing sons and daughters of Vatican II as they plod towards the dustbin of history?
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 18, 2009 11:06:11 GMT
With all due respect to our moderator, so long as the IRISH CATHOLIC exists in tis current form its problems are significant - we can't just write off its readers as of no account. It may be plodding towards the dustbin of history, but if we do not act like watchmen on the towers of Zion and cry out to expose its errors and try to find new media whereby to counteract them, we shall find ourselves in the dustbin too, and perhaps in a much worse dustbin like the one in a certain valley outside Jerusalem.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 21, 2009 14:42:20 GMT
If the letters page in the Irish Catholic is anything to go by, they have a good number of readers whose needs are not being served by the current editorial line.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 15, 2009 14:23:45 GMT
This thread on the IRISH CATHOLIC may be the best palce to note (for those who have not seen the paper) that their columnist Fr. Tierney has announced he has widespread cancer and only a year to live. He will be writing on this in future columns. Please remember him in your prayers.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 15, 2009 12:46:33 GMT
The IRISH CATHOLIC has now set up a blog page, with blogs by Fr. Tierney, Michael Kelly and David Quinn. Here's the link. www.irishcatholic.ie/d5/content/irish-catholic-blogs-0For a while I have been buying the IC but not getting round to reading it. I went through a few months' issues yesterday and hope to offer some general comments on this thread soon.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 20, 2009 10:59:32 GMT
As above, some general comments on several months' dosage of the IRISH CATHOLIC. Again, I would have to say a mixed bag. They have now got some very solid and orthodox catechesis by an Italian priest which offsets the ALIVE-O vagueness, and some of the commentary on current events and book reviews are good. I was pleased to see a piece (from August) by Gary O'Sullivan discussing the text "Lord, where shall we go - you have the message of eternal life" which does show him reacting against the tendency in some of his earlier columns to talk as if Christ could be separated from the Church. There were some very fine interviews with missionaries and religous communities (such as the Cistercian nuns in Tipperary or the Poor Clares in college Road, Cork) and some interesting reminiscences of Pope John Paul's visit. Brendan O'Regan's television column is very good (he makes shrewd comments about current affairs programmes). I am not quite so hard on Mary Kenny and Fr. Tierney as alasdair - the former is a bit ditzy but her comments on her own life and memories are often very interesting indeed. Fr. Tierney can also sometimes say useful things when he is reflecting on his own experiences, particularly now when he is writing about his terminal cancer, though he can also put forward some views of outrageous heterodoxy (he indicated pretty clearly that he thought the Church should allow divorce in the full sense of the term - that is remarriage after a valid marriage breaks down) or give vent to the most outrageous expressions of liberal bigotry. In the latter category I wish to give particular discredit to a piece denouncing the current visitation of female religious orders in the USA, which he denounced as an inquisition by elderly male celibates, claimed that they thought nuns should confine themselves to serving Father his full Irish breakfast, and concluded by predicting enthusiastically that if any attempt was made to revive religious life by the Vatican many nuns would leave their orders and pursue their interests unhindered. He seems to have lost any conception of the value of obedience in religious life. This last outburst I think reflects what is wrong with the IRISH CATHOLIC and this is a romance with the idea of historical inevitability; an assumption that at any given time there is one "spirit of the age", that we can't really learn from previous ages, that any new development can be assumed to be good and any old one to be obsolete. Thus articles and commentators on religious life often make condescending remarks about orders which retain or revive classical forms of devotion and communal life, implying or stating directly that while no doubt worth these people are a backwater. The most obvious signs of decay and deliquescence among progressive religious orders, on the other hand, are explained away as producing a new form of religious life, defined so vaguely that the traditional Third Orders seem like Carthusians by comparison. This mindset tends to treat hope as always good in itself and fear as always bad, because it believes the Spirit of the age is leading us on. To take a reductio ad absurdum of this mindset, buying Anglo-Irish Bank shares in 2007, or Neville Chamberlain's signing the Munich Agreement would be laudatory expressions of hope, while anyone who criticised these actions would be shunned for showing fear. There is a distinction between hope and wishful thinking and between prudence and paranoia, and the IRISH CATHOLIC editorial line, like that of many other liberal Catholics, seems as blind to this distinction as the SSPX is in the other direction. This I think underlies their attitude to Lisbon. If I were living in the Republic I would have voted Yes myself because I believe it was in the country's best interests; I admit there are dangers but under present circumstances these have to be faced. Ireland cannot stand alone economically and if to do so was necessary to keep the EU from imposing abortion on us then the battle is already lost. We should fight on ground we have some hope of defending. I may add that I am not a nationalist in the usual sense; I would be in favour of a federal European superstate (i.e. a single sovereign power with Ireland becoming the equivalent of a Canadian province) if it were a real federation - that is, with a clear differentiation between the powers of the federation and of its members, rather than the current sitation in which central decision-making is treated as being good in itself and left as vague as possible so that it can be expanded indefinitely. I might add that anyone who has read Giles MacDonogh's account of the state of postwar Germany 1945-48 (including the horrors of the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Third Reich and by the Eastern Europeans when boundaries were re-drawn after the war) will know very clearly why a generation who had lived through the European wars came to believe that the nation-state was the seedbed of war and the only hope for Europe lay in a new Carolingian empire. We didn't really share this experience because Britain is between us and the Continent, and it is necessary to remember this in order to know why nationalism is a dirty word in so much of continental Europe and to realsie that Europhiles are not driven by mere lust for aggrandisement. My big problem with the IRISH CATHOLIC's line is that it refused to acknowledge that there was any legitimate cause for concern at all, and proclaimed that those who were not prepared to argue the Catholic case at European level were merely lacking in faith and self-confidence. Of course there is a danger (ask Rocco Buttiglione) and unreasoning optimism will not make it go away. Neither will unreasoning pessimism.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2009 18:22:17 GMT
Some comments on recent issues: 15 October - very good. Gary O'Sullivan has much on a conference in Gdansk which declares solidarity the answer ot the continent's problems, though a great deal more on how this might be implemented in practice is required IMHO. A very strong interview with the Catholic philosopher Professor John haldane (St. andrews' University0 on the need to articulate the intellectual basis of faith in the modern world and te difficulties involved in doing so. There is a moving piece on a nun based at Medugorje who works with the destitue elderly - this deserves all the more attention gien the dodgy overall nature of the Medj phenomenon. David Quinn has a good dissection of the implications of the new programme for Government, which shows FF subservient to the Greens on matters of political correctness. A very good speech by Dr Martinwarning that if one generation are 9-5 atheists (excluding faith from public life) their children will be 24-hour atheists. Much good stuff on missionaries, including Fr. Tierney musing on how well off he and we are compared with people in Calcutta and Kenya. On the dark side, a brief notice of the play MAY I BE STRAIGHT WITH YOU on the sufferings of gays as a result of religious condemnation is inclined to take too much at face value the claim that it is not anti-religious but merely anti-homophobic, without asking whether all opposition to or criticism of active homosexuality is being implicitly defined as homophobic.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2009 18:33:29 GMT
22 October. Again I would say pretty good overall. Fr Cremin the president of mary Immacualte talks of joining the Catholic colleges to form a Catholic university rather than letting them be absorbed by the nearest secular institution as is tending to happen; I suspect this might create problems with the govenrment and the institutions in question have such an amorphous view of Catholic identity it might not make much difference. Good background material on the proposed Anglican reconciliation. Good expose of continued sale of pre-signed mass cards and the abuses involved. Breda O'Brien on difficulties of recession and making sacrifices for the common good when there's little sense of what this means. JOhn waters has a surprisinglyinsightful piece on the spreading concept of freedom as the right to act on whim nad how this is incompatble with beleif in truth. A ood letter by a witness of the Knock "miracle" who seems to think in retrospect it is demonic. I don't know - I don't think the devil needs to intervene directly when so many are ready of their own accord to neglect the ordinary means of salvation to chase sings and wonders. Alas, on the next page we have a puff for a book on near-death experiences Good discusion by Mgr Fisichella of Catholic attitude to other religions. sensitive discussions by Brendan O'Regan and Mary Kenny on the Gately funeral and the distinction between tolerance, compassion and approval.
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Post by monkeyman on Feb 16, 2010 21:54:21 GMT
But who buys it or reads it now, apart from the gracefully ageing sons and daughters of Vatican II as they plod towards the dustbin of history? haha ;D I have to say I laughed a bit when you said that Michael.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 4, 2010 13:54:13 GMT
Credit where credit is due; a couple of weeks ago (I think 18 February) the IRISH CATHOLIC had a nice piece on demand for the traditional Mass, written by one Pat O'Leary. Due to supply problems I only see the paper intermittemtly now, or I'd have mentioned this sooner.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 4, 2010 13:56:24 GMT
Keep up the prayers for Fr. Tierney, by the way. He has announced he is discontinuing his IRISH CATHOLIC column as he is now too ill to write it (he's dying of cancer). I disagree with much of what he writes, but everyone who is in his position needs prayers.
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