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Post by hibernicus on Jun 28, 2020 0:03:56 GMT
Recently some of the more assiduous bigots on Politics.ie started calling for Marian statues to be taken down on the grounds that they are relics of oppression which make Ireland look like - the horror! - a Catholic country. politics.ie/threads/taking-down-statues-in-ireland.276710/Now an IRISH TIMES columnist, Jennifer O'Connell, has taken up the call, saying that sooner or later we should have a discussion about taking down Marian statues as they are mementoes of "an Irish form of slavery" - i.e., she is blaming the belief in chastity, of which Our Lady is the model, for the Magdalen Laundries (which were not in fact specifically Irish, or specifically Catholic, though they lasted longer here than elsewhere). www.irishtimes.com/opinion/defacing-statues-is-not-all-mindless-but-it-s-all-still-vandalism-1.4289443Don't be surprised when this view starts to become more widely expressed, or when vandals start taking it into action.
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Post by assisi on Sept 5, 2020 14:07:26 GMT
I casually perused a recent article by Ruth Dudley Edwards about a new book by Ray Bassett arguing that Ireland should have been less antagonistic to Brexit, as a good deal, mediated by Ireland, would have been more helpful to Ireland. The book sounds worth a read.
However it isn't the main argument of the article that stood out for me. It was the 3 references by Dudley Edwards to 'authoritarian' Catholic Ireland, and her leaving Ireland for England as soon as she could.
Now this is an old chestnut, backward Ireland, progressive 'somewhere else'. We see and hear it often and it is so pervasive that it is rarely questioned and, as such, is taken for granted. However I think we should always pull people up immediately we hear this. It is lazy journalism and lazy commentary that must be challenged.
The first thing I would say is the Ireland of the 50s and 60s (around the time Dudley Edwards was growing up doing her degree) compared to what? Surely the USSR AND Eastern Europe would have dramatically less freedom than Ireland. So too would have been the Moslem countries of the world. How would she have fared as a women in those countries in the 50s and 60s. Ireland would have been a shining beacon compared to the treatment she would have endured in those countries. South America, Asia and Africa would have a plethora of different cultures but many would have been poor and would perhaps have many less opportunities for a woman (or man) educating and bettering themselves.
So presumably it is the countries of Europe or America that she sees as an escape from authoritarian Catholic Ireland. But is the England that she went to some great authority free utopia? Well it was pretty well documented in literature and politics that there was a strong class division among the people of England. Irish and Blacks weren't acceptable to many landlords and this was made abundantly clear. America too, at that time had deep cultural and racial divisions too.
Many poorer Irish moved to England at that time as navvies and as nurses or nannies. Many of the navvies as they grew older led very isolated and miserable lives in places like North London and ended up lonely and dying in grotty flats almost unknown. Many of the girls were exploited or got into bad relationships through their loneliness. One of the saddest sights I ever saw was entering a pub in Kensal Green, North London in the late 1980s, and seeing all these older navvies, in their donkey jackets, all sitting alone at separate tables, crouched over a pint of Guinness, in a pub with showband music on the Jukebox and a yellowing picture of a Kerry GAA team. Not a word of conversation between them. In the end the great utopia of anywhere outside Catholic Ireland turned out to be more soul destroying than anyone could have imagined.
In reality Dudley Edwards had a better chance than most as she came from a relatively well to do middle class family and her entry to England would have been more easy having already completed a degree and had a father who was a university lecturer at UCD.
Now, if Dudley Edwards had been more honest and perhaps said something along the lines that she left Ireland to go to an England that was glitzier than Ireland, or that she wanted the adventure and glamour of bigger cities or the anonymity that that brought, then I think that would be more acceptable. In Ireland itself many people moved to Dublin for a mixture of reasons, to get a job and for the adventure of a bigger city with more cinemas, theatres, restaurants etc. But to constantly cite an escape from an authoritarian Catholic Ireland is lazy. It's also as if she wants to present herself as some oppressed being flourishing in some freedom based land. But in reality every other land has its own variety of problems. In England this was the class system and the predatory and dehumanising big cities.
But the likes of Dudley Edwards haven't got the magnanimity to be fair to Ireland. I'm sure that many of the navvies in England, had they stayed at home in Ireland, might have married and had a good life.
Anyone issuing the cliche about authoritarian Catholic Ireland should always be challenged to think about all the flaws of the other outside destinations they implicitly admire, and see that Ireland is being unfairly tarnished by comparison.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 10, 2020 20:29:02 GMT
I thinkyou're slightly hard on Ruh Dudley Edwards here. First of all, those who do not share a society's beliefs will see that society as more authoritarian than those who do share those beliefs. (RDE - whom I have met a few times - became an atheist fairly early on, and has written that she and Patrick Cosgrave were the only two students in UCD at her time who refused to stand for the Angelus. Her brother Owen is a sincere Catholic though somewhat heterodox.)
Second, I suspect that precisely because she came from the professional classes in that era, she saw a good deal of hypocrisy in the sense of people pretending to be more pious than they were for reasons of career advancement. (Her father is said to have been an example.) I remember an old professor telling me of a college president who because he believed himself to be always right surrounded himself with toadies and flatterers, because they were the only people who would tell him he was always right. When the president retired, the toadies and flatterers immediately rushed off to suck up to his successor - to the great dismay of the president, who had thought they were real friends. Quite a few senior Irish churchmen, and the church on earth in this country, had a similar experience oveer the last half-century. (I'm not saying there were no true believers - I've known quite a few, including the old professor. But there were strong incentives to hypocrisy.)
Third, some of the commentators mentioned would argue that the plight of the navvies was partly caused by the fact that Church and State until the 1960s had an education system which was geared more to preserving a particular view of culture and religion than to teaching marketable skills, and which assumed a static society where the majority would always be unskilled labourers and need not - even should not - be educated beyond their station. This isn't the whole story but there's an awful lot of truth in it. Part of the problem was not just authoritarianism but complacency and incompetence, as JJ Lee argues.
Fourth, because we're a smaller society there is a stronger sense that everyone knows everyone else and there is pressure to be conformist - there still is, although there's a different set of pieties to which we're expected to conform (or else).
It is of course quite true that Britain and indeed the western world was more socially conservative than might be thought looking back after the upheavals of the 1960s.
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Post by assisi on Sept 11, 2020 14:57:27 GMT
I thinkyou're slightly hard on Ruh Dudley Edwards here. First of all, those who do not share a society's beliefs will see that society as more authoritarian than those who do share those beliefs. (RDE - whom I have met a few times - became an atheist fairly early on, and has written that she and Patrick Cosgrave were the only two students in UCD at her time who refused to stand for the Angelus. Her brother Owen is a sincere Catholic though somewhat heterodox.) Second, I suspect that precisely because she came from the professional classes in that era, she saw a good deal of hypocrisy in the sense of people pretending to be more pious than they were for reasons of career advancement. (Her father is said to have been an example.) I remember an old professor telling me of a college president who because he believed himself to be always right surrounded himself with toadies and flatterers, because they were the only people who would tell him he was always right. When the president retired, the toadies and flatterers immediately rushed off to suck up to his successor - to the great dismay of the president, who had thought they were real friends. Quite a few senior Irish churchmen, and the church on earth in this country, had a similar experience over the last half-century. (I'm not saying there were no true believers - I've known quite a few, including the old professor. But there were strong incentives to hypocrisy.) Third, some of the commentators mentioned would argue that the plight of the navvies was partly caused by the fact that Church and State until the 1960s had an education system which was geared more to preserving a particular view of culture and religion than to teaching marketable skills, and which assumed a static society where the majority would always be unskilled labourers and need not - even should not - be educated beyond their station. This isn't the whole story but there's an awful lot of truth in it. Part of the problem was not just authoritarianism but complacency and incompetence, as JJ Lee argues. Fourth, because we're a smaller society there is a stronger sense that everyone knows everyone else and there is pressure to be conformist - there still is, although there's a different set of pieties to which we're expected to conform (or else). It is of course quite true that Britain and indeed the western world was more socially conservative than might be thought looking back after the upheavals of the 1960s. Again the crux of the matter is 'Ireland compared to what?'. I mean that Ruth Dudley Edwards (RDE) went to Cambridge from Ireland. Presumably she attended formal dinners at that University where the habit was to toast Royalty or maybe some crusty old ex-Cambridge notables. Or stood for God Save The Queen at the end of a cinema or theatre show. For RDE as a declared feminist in her youth, surely these sorts of episodes would have been as noteworthy and 'authoritarian' as the Angelus. Similarly with the 2nd point that type of hypocrisy and toadying is, as far as I can see, a universal trait that is found everywhere, in all walks in life. On the 3rd point, I suspect that much education in the 50s, anywhere in the world, was not blessed with the foresight to provide 'marketable' skills. But even allowing for that point the other thing I meant to convey with the navvies is that the cities they went to were, like all big cities, pretty soulless entities, and Ireland, for all its rurality, at least had a community spirit. I only picked RDE out as I had just read an article by her. There are hundreds of other Irish I could have picked to make the same. I prefer that they are honest and not disparaging in a cliched way of Ireland. Sometime now, or in the near future, casual remarks about authoritarian Catholic Ireland will sound laughable to what could be coming around the corner. Indeed old Ireland even be viewed as a golden age of a simpler life. If you see what the non-Catholic version of authoritarian can be in our current liberal age, then a reassessment might be needed. See below BLM supporters try to coerce a female diner to do a BLM raised fist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSnTTND0UcM
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 15, 2020 23:22:10 GMT
Oh, I agree on the last bit. I often think that some of our Trot cultists and apostles of political correctness would have fitted quite nicely into Maria Duce back in the day, and that the ruling "managers must be free to manage without debate or question" philosophy in many of our big corporations reminds me of John Charles McQuaid.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 1, 2020 22:50:37 GMT
Rod Dreher discusses a Californian professor who is denouncing Christianity as inherently white supremacist. I don't know how he would try to sell that to those members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church who normally worship in Synge Street CBS on Sundays. (I hope they are doing OK under present circumstances; it must be hard to handle the epidemic when poor and in exile, with so many opportunities for employment closed off.) Doubtless the resources of "critical race theory" are equal to the task. Coming soon to Irish academia and political correctness, if it hasn't already. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cal-state-fullerton-justin-huft-christianity-white-supremacists-at-prayer/BTW what assists the spread of this sort of garbage is that there are racists out there who cast their racism as "defence of Western Christian civilisation"; I've even seen calls for "a pro-Western Christianity" (i.e. for whites only). These are satanic counterfeits, like the "German Christian" movement of the 1930s. Bishop Shanahan, pray for us to the One God who is Father of All.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 20, 2020 18:37:10 GMT
Here we see a mediaevalist offering his thoughts on the latest computer game in the popular ASSASSIN'S CREED franchise which is set during the tenth-century Viking invasion of England. Although the mediaevalist is not a Christian believer himself, he points out that a variety of decisions by the game creators (some intentional, some inadvertent) have the combined effect of sanitising and even glamourising Norse pagan society while denigrating Christianity, in a way which at times resembles Nazism. (The latter is clearly unintentional, as other features of Norse society uncongenial to nazis, such as the presence of non-Europeans, are depicted.) This is part of a wider trend in a section of popular culture which it is easy to overlook. acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-assassins-creed-valhalla/
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 30, 2020 23:32:36 GMT
This is actually quite an insightful article, and anyone who has followed much of the pro-choice rhetoric in the Irish debates on abortion, or the calls for eradication of religious influence from RSE programmes in schools, will recognise the central point - that the devotees of the Sexual Revolution do not see themselves as advocates of lax morals, or of changes in standards of modesty, but of a new and superior morality in which the concepts of chastity and modesty are rejected as manipulative and repressive - which they wish everyone to be made to recognise as the norm, with nonconformists stigmatised: www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/12/the-origins-of-sexual-totalitarianismRod Dreher offers some thoughts, in connection with the Dionysiac scenes accompanying the recent legalisation of abortion in Argentina. WARNING some of the accompanying photos are possible occasions of sin: www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/del-noce-sexual-soft-totalitarianism-sexual-revolution/
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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 1, 2021 20:08:47 GMT
Meanwhile back here in Ireland, RTE has outdone itself in including a blasphemous "comedy" skit as part of its New Year's Eve programming, which implied that God raped Our Lady and was now being arrested for it. Not only is this patently false (indeed Our Lady is venerated BECAUSE she said Yes to God's will, consent which by definition is absent from rape), but I can imagine that if a similar skit was shown about Muhammad's marraige practices, there would be uproar and calls to boycott Ireland in the Middle East and the like. Not only that, but it trivialises the issue of sexual abuse by treating it as a laughing matter. Fortunately, this has not gone unnoticed and Archbishop Eamonn Martin has denounced the broadcast and caled for it to be removed from the RTE player: www.independent.ie/irish-news/archbishop-hits-out-at-rte-over-blasphemous-new-years-eve-skit-39922165.html
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 2, 2021 0:40:39 GMT
And I see from the INDEPENDENT story that that paper can't tell the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2021 0:45:28 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 7, 2023 22:06:03 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 22, 2023 19:24:39 GMT
Mark Dooley on Ireland as the European capital of wokeness. I think he overstates the abuse scandals as deciding factor, though God knows they were bad enough; there was a wider combination of forces including the Northern Troubles, the decline (or destruction) of traditional devotions, and social changes such as urbanisation also featured. BTW it is a sign of how far certain trads have set sail for cloud cuckoo land that the interviewer (one of the Kwasniewski clan) asked Dr Dooley whether the revival of interest in the Habsburg monarchy had any significance for Ireland! www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/08/21/on-culture-wars-and-the-woke-capital-of-europe-a-conversation-with-dr-mark-dooley/
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 17, 2023 22:42:51 GMT
The EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE should be handled with great care because some of its contributors are living in fantasyland and some have a nasty undercurrent of occultism, but the article linked below makes some interesting points. europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/irelands-return-to-paganism/A few thoughts - the remark that Irish Catholicism was hard to love equates Catholicism with the clergy. Back in the day it was quite possible to combine devotional zeal (often a bit overdone) with cynicism about the latter (again with many exceptions). - The remark that Irish Catholicism never produced literature was a bit overdone, especially for the C19. The trouble is that the literature it produced tended to be genteel, or amateurish, or unreally self-idealising (what I've called "Catholic Realism" on the model of socialist realism) in a way that bred cynicism (especially when the idealisation was enforced by discreet coercion).
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