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Post by hibernicus on Mar 11, 2010 17:00:31 GMT
John Waters has just got a new book from Continuum - BEYOND CONSOLATION: HOW WE BECAME TOO "CLEVER" FOR GOD - AND FOR OUR OWN GOOD - £12.99 if you're in the UK, link to the publisher below. www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=134014&SubjectId=1046&Subject2Id=914This is actually quite good - Waters is usually strong when he is talking about his own experiences or dissecting other people's assumptions (when he engages in cultural theorising he tends to sink into blather) and this one is quite searingly honest because he is talking about his own growing sense of mortality as he ages (something which I have noticed a lot myself as I advance into middle age). He takes as a starting point the famous last radio interview with Nuala O Faolain in which she talked about her approaching death, how she felt that nothing awaited her but extinction and how with that knowledge all the pleasure went out of life - and how this interview was praised as "honest" and "profound" without ever addressing the questions it raised. In a later chapter, Waters discusses a radio interview in which Seamus Heaney declared that he did not believe in God or an afterlife and suggested that no-one who thought about the subject could really do so, before going on to express regret at the decline of traditional Irish Christian values during the boom and hoping that some of them might soon revive. Waters suggests that the interviewer's failure to press Heaney on the questions of how you can regret the decline of such values, or hope for their maintenance, while at the same time believing they were founded on a lie, and how Christianity can be so self-evidently false while at the same time still being believed by a majority of the people in the country, many/most of whom are not self-evidently devoid of intelligence, reflects the fact that our culture, or at least the dominant part of it, tacitly holds the assumption that Christianity/Catholicism can be tolerated as a sort of eccentricity, but is merely a "belief" subjectively held by a dwindling minority of eccentrics, whereas unbelief is how things really are even if we are reluctant to express it in so many words - hence to do so is to be "honest". He suggests that in this reaction against our past, this redefinition of religion as simply an external controlling force (though he accepts that this view of how it has been used is not altogether untrue) means that we have cut ourselves off from a source of hope and a means of coming to terms with our own mortality, and we cling to a perpetually adolescent cult of youth and a refusal to recognise that we are now, or are rapidly becoming old people - whom in our youth we saw as almost a different species, assuming we ourselves would never be old. (This is a characteristic Waters preoccupation.) Even when we see ourselves face to face with death, Waters suggests, so many refuse to reconsider the existence of God, because they see this as submission to an external tyrant rather than the source of the hope deeply implanted in our nature for which we yearn as for water in the desert. (There is I might say a worse state - I can think of one very distinguished novelist now dead whose oeuvre is dominated by a hatred of Catholicism not so much because he sees it as tyrannical, though he believes it to be so, but because it offers this hope and the writer believes the hope to be illusory.) Waters notes how the dominant Irish media, without identifying it perhaps even to themselves, present Catholicism as a mere relic of a dying past, surviving temporarily among the old and uneducated. He notes how a certain newspaper, which he does not name but whose title we can guess, published on its front page when reporting on an Assumption pilgrimage to Knock a photo of two elderly ushers kneeling to pray with their faces sunk in their hands, although inside there was a photo of two young pilgrims laughing; and a few days after the Ryan report the same paper published in the same front-page position a photo of the Pope kissing a child at a public event. In both cases, Waters suggests, the innuendo (Catholicism as a thing of the past found only among the old and abject; the hint that the Pope's love of children is unhealthy) did not need to be articulated; it was tolerated and promoted by a sort of groupthink. It is important to say this, because it is true, and Waters deserves our thanks for saying it even if we may not agree with everything he says. Traditionalists who tend to attack the turn from Thomism towards personalism might note that he operates from his personal experience, his sense of loss and neediness and he finds that Pope Benedict's writings speak to this with remarkable strength (he quotes extensively from SPES SALVI) - I doubt if he could have been reached by the Thomist manual approach. I would also note that he is quite honest about the extent to which he is still a seeker; he says he is searching for a personal relationship with Jesus, he speaks of how impressed he is by His Personality, but he says also that he has not yet met Him, though he yearns to and knows trustworthy people who say they have. He also seems to me to have relatively little that is specifically Catholic about him, other than that it is Ireland's traditional religion - it seems to me that his outlook might to some extent fit just as well with Pentecostalism though I may be mistaken on that. He says he dislikes the tendency of the pious subculture to see itself as a sort of club and to talk about religion only in terms of piety and doctrine (he regards this as part of the legalism and moralism that got the Irish Church into its current mess) rather than talking about all subjects through religion (once again we see a nice parallel with my image of the BEAL BOCHT Gaelgeoir who proclaimed that in order to be truly Irish it is not enough to talk Irish and only Irish, you must talk about nothing except Irish). I might say it is a pity that he does not seem to have access to some Irish spiritual writers who expressed similar concerns in the past (such as Frank Duff, who promoted devotion to Mary as a way of developing relations with her Son, or Fr. James Leen, who liked to tell novice nuns on retreat that however pious they might think themselves, they were really - like many Irish Catholics semi-pagan, and must be converted to vital faith themselves before they went out to convert Africans) but they are neglected nowadays, and I suppose their idiom is not immediately accessible to him. All the more credit to Communion and Liberation for addressing his concerns in a manner that has intrigued and aroused him so much. He does however have a nice description of a debate at a Cork literary festival with a priest who was trying to distance himself from the Church while proclaiming his attachment to "spirituality" (very vaguely defined) and whom Waters felt was trying to ingratiate himself with the audience). Waters had not come across the type before - he says the priest came from the locality, had spent some time overseas, and was a poet. Sounds a bit like the Mark Patrick Hederman type but not I think Hederman himself. Waters responded by very specifically asking the audience whether they were Catholics or if they wanted their children to be Catholics, and reading out some of Rodney Stark's suggestions about how much different (and worse) Western civilisation would have been if the followers of Jesus had remained an obscure sect; he then got accused of offering an apologia for the institutional church, with which he said he had no concern.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Mar 11, 2010 19:29:09 GMT
In the 80s we were still being run by people (in the judiciary, politics etc) whose worldview had been formed in the 1950s and 1960s, who had some sense of what it is to be an adult believer and of the Church's intellectual underpinning and who while they might have come to disagree with the Church on some point still by and large identified with it and felt a certain basic respect for it (often linked to the assumption that whatever faults it had would be "put right", as they saw it, in time). This mindset might be called liberal Catholic. What we ahve seen emerging into the public eye since 1990 or thereabouts is what I call the HOT PRESS worldview expressed by journalists (and to a lesser extent politicians) from a younger generation who take it that Catholicism is self-evidently false and harmful, that it deserves only contempt and that it shoudl be completely excluded from the public sphere. What you say about people in the older generation having "some sense of what it is to be an adult believer and of the Church's intellectual underpinning" is important. The younger generation of anti-Catholics tend to be well educated and well read, but will have grown up at a time when the "teaching" of religion, in schools and through homilies at Mass, was intellectually vacuous and invited the scorn of intelligent young people like them. It is now difficult even to get them to accept that Catholic beliefs and thinking might be something that is worth engaging with.
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Post by Harris on Mar 12, 2010 11:06:02 GMT
What you say about people in the older generation having "some sense of what it is to be an adult believer and of the Church's intellectual underpinning" is important. The younger generation of anti-Catholics tend to be well educated and well read, but will have grown up at a time when the "teaching" of religion, in schools and through homilies at Mass, was intellectually vacuous and invited the scorn of intelligent young people like them. It is now difficult even to get them to accept that Catholic beliefs and thinking might be something that is worth engaging with. I am not convinced many of the young people described should be termed "Anti-Catholic". In fact some people might find the term offensive akin to being termed an anti-Semite. A non-theist, is not necessarily anti-catholic. I am a Catholic but I am not an anti-Semite because I don’t subscribe to that particular faith. An agnostic may be just unsure about the existence of God and have many questions to pose about why Catholics’ believe what they do, but this does not make them anti-catholic. Young people posing intelligent questions regarding why someone follows a particular faith is not questioning the faith itself. I think we have to be less paranoid (for want of a better term) when people ask us about the finer points regarding the faith we follow. So many times when someone poses a question regarding faith (particularly if the person posing the question is a non-theist), we become defensive. We think that we are under attack or being called "silly" for believing what we do. It’s our duty to be well-read also and have answers for these young people. If we don’t offer them answers, can you blame them for turning their backs on us and looking for answers elsewhere?
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 12, 2010 12:36:51 GMT
Someone who maintains that Catholicism is self-evidently ridiculous and that all its adherents are idiots or hypocrites, who deliberately desecrates sacred things to make themselves feel powerful and to offend others, who calls for civil penalties to be imposed on the expression of certain Catholic doctrines, I would say was anti-Catholic.
To take Harris's example of anti-semitism. Firstly, it CAN be argued that the mere existence of Christianity is anti-semitic since it necessarily implies that Judaism is mistaken in rejecting the claims of Jesus as the Messiah, and given the long history of Christian persecution of Jews. I would say this confuses the issue but I can understand why a Jew might say it.
Secondly, there are types of Christian criticism of Jews which can legitimately be called anti-semitic, because they deliberately offend Jews for the sake of giving offence, rather than merely as statements of an opinion Jews may find unpalatable; because they attribute personal evil to all Jews as Jews; because they are based on falsehoods such as the blood libel (an instance of which I have just been discussing on the "Catholicism and anti-semitism" threads) or the protocols; because they call openly or covertly for Jews to be denied their civic or human rights to which they are entitled as human beings.
Let's take a few examples: It's not anti-semitic to say Bernard Madoff is a crook; it is anti-semitic to say he is a crook because he is a Jew, or that he robbed his victims (who included many Jews BTW) as part of a wider Jewish conspiracy.
It is not anti-semitic to say Rabbi X is mistaken in believing Jesus was not the Messiah and that the Mosaic Law is still fully binding; it is anti-semitic to ridicule his dress and religious observances since this denies his human dignity and insults him, or to call for him to be prohibited from reading the Talmud because of its anti-Christian passages or to be forbidden from having animals ritually slaughtered by the kashrut regulations or from circumcising his children (since either of these would amount to prohibiting the practice of his religion) or to say that he is not allowed to exclude from his congregation a member who defies the Law and blasphemes it while continuing to insist that he is a Jew.
Now much of what I am concerned with on this thread is IMHO anti-Catholic in the way that the examples I give of true anti-semitism are anti-semitism. The people involved do not merely disbelieve; they do not merely state their disbelief; they do not merely state unpalatable truths; they wish to force their disbelief on believers, often using state power to do so (as in Michael Nugent's suggestion - which Hazelireland endorsed - that priests should be prosecuted for accepting Mass offerings even though they actually perform the service requested on the basis of a belief shared by them and by the person making the offering).
In other instances, they make statements which can be shown to be false (albeit presumably in good faith) and we are entitled to point out this falsehood. Harris IMHO is muddying the waters. What have I said on this thread that is not reasoned criticism?
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2010 21:47:50 GMT
The current (8 April) issue of THE PHOENIX has a snarky review of Waters' book. It is pretty superficial as one might expect. Two points spring out: (1) It accuses Waters of denouncing Nuala O Faolain and Seamus Heaney for saying they don't believe in God and in an afterlife - but Waters' actual criticism is not merely that they say this but that they are utterly dismissive towards the possibility - they assume that it is unthinkable and unworthy of being taken seriously, and that no sensible person can possibly think it worthy of serious consideration - and that their interviewers and the bulk of the chattering classes do not take them up on this, but tacitly assume the truth of what they are saying without admitting (in many cases perhaps not even to themselves) the full implications of what they are espousing. (2) The PHOENIX also accuses Waters of being ego-driven. I think there is a certain amount of truth in this, but it is also the case that what he is offering is a personal testimony - a meditation on his own experience - of exactly the sort which Nuala O Faolain's admirers praise her for offering, and which is capable of interrogation through our own experiences of ageing, bereavement, and belief/unbelief. Perhaps he does overgeneralise, but there is a hard kernel of experience there that can be drawn on on whether you agree with him or not. (The same of course is true of Nuala O Faolain and John McGahern, whom I would certainly disagree with about many things, including the most important of all.)
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2010 21:52:32 GMT
BTW I have noticed two themes cropping up in certain commentary on the scandals which seem to me to go beyond what is decent and reasonable. These are as follows: (1) Anyone who continues to attend Mass is making themselves complicit in child abuse and its cover-up. This has come from some abuse victims (whose feelings are understandable) but is being stoked by certain circles of the media (cf the IRISH TIMES letters page). This amounts to saying that there is no moral difference between Granny Pewsitter saying her rosary and Fr. Brendan Smyth raping a seven-year old girl and telling her he was doing Christ's work to cleanse her of her sins. (2) No expression of repentance can be taken seriously unless the person in question repudiates the bishops and the Pope, publicly and in principle as much as for their individual actions/inactions. I suspect these will run and run and will be used to loosen many stones from the temple. Keep an eye out for them in future coverage.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 16, 2010 11:58:11 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on May 25, 2010 14:22:57 GMT
Print Article | Email Article | Write To Us Blogs » Mark Shea Here we see Mark Shea commenting on the Alejandro Amenabar film AGORA (about the philosopher Hypatia and her murder by Christians) and providing a link to an article by Fr. Robert Barron both about its historical flaws and about the implications of its demonisation of Christians. Bear in mind that one characteristic of much New Atheist propaganda is insistence not merely that religion is false, not even that it is self-evidently false (a view of which we have seen certain examples on this board) but that it has never contributed anything worthwhile whatsoever to humanity and is a purely destructive and purposeless mutation. I have just been looking at a chapter which discusses this point in a new book by Ferdinand Mount called FULL CIRCLE, which argues that modern civilisation has to a considerable extent reverted to the mindset of the pre-Christian classical world. This chapter is worth reading, and Mr Mount's testimony about the limitations of the New Atheism is particularly valuable in that he appears to be a cultured sceptic (perhaps a nominal Anglican) who thinks the return to the classical outlook is on the whole a good thing. (This is based on a superficial impression and should not be taken on my word - but read it for yourself.) EXTRACT FROM MARK SHEA'S COMMENT ON AGORA MarkSheaFr. Robert Barron on "Agora" Share by Mark Shea Thursday, May 20, 2010 9:37 AM Comments (9) Here is a textbook example of how a lie get popularized and becomes pseudoknowledge. Our Manufacturers of Culture, under the influence of powers and principalities, are slowly and surely preparing our culture to undertake a pogrom. Again and again, outright lies about Christians and their history get promulgated while we are told that it is “impeccable research” as, incredibly, the Da Vinci Code was described by one reviewer. Or, we get the ill-informed tracts by New Atheists that would embarrass any real atheist. But, above all, we begin to get the toxicity making its way into popular visual media like Agora. The reason this matters is that visual media tend to bypass the critical intellect, and we live increasingly in a post-textual age. People get less and less of what they “know” about the world from reading books and processing arguments through critical faculties. Propaganda, prettily presented by the cinematographers art, can do wonders in transforming a culture. The image bypasses the rational faculties and people somehow find themselves agreeing around the water cooler that, as “everybody” knows, Christians are the enemies of learning who destroyed the Library at Alexandria. The irony in all this, of course, is that the Christians are the ones who preserved the writings of antiquity—and these writing are precisely what no postmodern can be bothered to read. Who wants to read all those dusty books?...To paraphrase Malibu Barbie, “Reading and thinking is hard!” So say the postmodern defenders of ancient learning against the swarming Christian hordes of antiquity, bent on destroying reason with their ignorant faith. Which brings me to my last point. As Fr. Barron points out, there is a visual grammar at work in film which we all understand and yet which works subliminally. The visual message of Agora is that Christians are pestilential insects who need to be exterminated. Knead that message into a culture deeply enough and long enough and it is just a matter of time before somebody acts on it. END EXTRACT www.ncregister.com/blog/fr._robert_barron_on_agorawww.catholiceducation.org/articles/persecution/pch0251.htmEXTRACT FROM FR. BARRON ON AGORA But none of this gets to the heart of why I object to Agora. In one of the most visually arresting scenes in the film, Amenabar brings his camera up to a very high point of vantage overlooking the Alexandria library while it is being ransacked by the Christian mob. From this perspective, the Christians look for all the world like scurrying cockroaches. In another memorable scene, the director shows a group of Christian thugs carting away the mangled corpses of Jews whom they have just put to death, and he composes the shot in such a way that the piled bodies vividly call to mind the bodies of the dead in photographs of Dachau and Auschwitz. The not so subtle implication of all of this is that Christians are dangerous types, threats to civilization, and that they should, like pests, be eliminated. I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenabar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians, and that precisely his manner of critique was used by some of the most vicious persecutors of Christianity in the last century. My very real fear is that the meanness, half-truths, and outright slanders in such books as Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion have begun to work their way into the popular culture. EXTRACT ENDS We Christians have to resist – and keep setting the record straight.
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Post by hibernicus on May 27, 2010 10:22:53 GMT
Here's another straw in the wing - last week Patsy McGarry had a piece on the episcopate in which he quoted some expressions of love for the Church by Cardinal Brady and one of the new bishops (I think Killaloe) and gravely informed his readers that these people actually do love the Church as if such love was self-evidently harmful and delusional and could simply be equated with the institutional self-protection that has come to light in so many of the revelations about abuse. Of course the Church is so much more than that and we should all share the sentiments of the old hymn (though perhaps not the exact words): I am a little Catholic I love my holy faith. I will be true to Mother Church And faithful until death.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 9, 2010 11:28:11 GMT
The current BRANDSMA REVIEW has an interesting piece on what the author calls "Shinto Catholicism" - i.e. the tendency to treat Catholicism merely as a source of rites of passage (baptism, marriage, funeral) without requiring any deeper commitment to the faith by the persons involved, the willingness of many clergy to go along with this, and the hostility of many people when it is suggested that such a commitment should be required.
The article was inspired by an angry reponse by a reader to an earlier article in which he suggested that a Catholic funeral should not have been celebrated for an individual who had not merely declared himself an atheist but had gone through a formal process of canonical dissociation from the Church. The article points out, quite reasonably, that the Association of Irish Humanists celebrates non-religious funerals on request and that someone who went to so much trouble to declare himself an atheist might presumably have preferred such a funeral.
I think there is a point which the article overlooks. It seems to me that many of the advocates of such rites of passage are not merely indifferent or casual in this. It seems to me that some of them actively advocate such celebrations as an expression of hostility to the concept of Catholic orthodoxy. That is, they believe that the Church itself should disavow the idea that its doctrines are literally true and that its members are required to subscribe to them, and should see itself purely as a work of the human imagination which can be modified or discarded at will but has no objective reality apart from the human participants.
An interesting example of this mindset, BTW, in a somewhat different context, is the philosopher Richard Kearney's argument that the problem of how a good God can permit evil can be reconciled with the existence of God only by suggesting that God exists or not as we choose to believe in Him. This argument (unlike the straightforward atheist argument based on the same premises, which is logically consistent and worth arguing with) is self-evident rubbish. If God's existence is dependent on our will, then God is not God; either He is a mere figment of our imaginations, or we ourselves as His superiors/creators, are God. For this standard of thought UCD junked Neo-Thomism.
The reason why some of these "Shinto Catholics" denounce any proposal that those who have cast off the faith should not be entitled to its rites of passage is because the "Shinto Catholics" wish the Church itself to endorse the view that reality is non-sacramental and that the Faith is not literally true or derived in any sense from eternity; and they see any assertion of the faith's truth or timelessness as tantamount to tyranny because it implies a claim to their belief and obedience and that their choice of unbelief and disobedience is misguided at best, sinful at worst. Like Haman, it is not enough that they should have every worldly honour and recognition; they cannot be at ease so long as there is a Mordecai bearing silent witness to another way.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 19, 2010 12:24:56 GMT
Today the IRISH TIMES carried a report on the AGM of Atheism Ireland. There was much kvetching about blasphemy laws etc, and Senator Ivana Bacik gave a speech calling for the complete secularisation of the laws and constitution. This is pretty much par for the course from atheists, but there are two things which strike me as nasty: (1) Michael Nugent complained that in court proceedings those who choose to affirm rather than take a religious oath may be seen as less reliable by some members of the public. He therefore demanded that everyone should be made to affirm - in other words, that the possibility of making a solemn religious declaration under oath should be taken away from those who wish to do so.
(2) The principal speaker was an American [correction] author who has published a book called THE GOD VIRUS, which asserts that religious belief should be viewed as a disease which infects its victims when their defences are low - in childhood or at times of distress. This, I might add, makes explicit what is implicit in Richard Dawkins' theory of religious belief as a "meme" - and suffers from the same problem, that on the same principle any belief at all could be presented as an illness. (Atheism, for example, might be defined as a disorder of adolescence which attacks those inflamed by teenage sexual hormones; I know of religious believers who have attributed atheism to unresolved Oedipal conflict, just as classical Freudians attribute religious belief to the same cause).) This sort of intellectual trickery is an attempt to shortcut reasoned argument and open the way to persecution, whoever uses it. Once you define people who disagree with you as diseased you are opening the way to denying them the right to hold and transmit their beliefs and defining persecution as "curing" them or as "quarantine" keeping them from spreading their "disease" to others. The USSR was treating religious belief as a mental illness justifying forcible detention and torture disguised as therapy, when Catholic psychiatrists in Franco Spain were doing the same to atheists. Do Atheism Ireland really want to ad to this history of crime?
[Another nasty touch which I overlooked among the general atheist boilerplate - they demanded the removal of all religious symbols from hospitals. In other words, they are prepared to deny the consolation which such objects provide to believers in times of sickness and trouble - but of course such persecution is exactly what should be expected from people who see religious belief as a disease from which the sick and dying should be "protected" - against their will if necessary?]
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 30, 2010 15:38:07 GMT
Last Monday (July 26th) the IRISH TIMES ran a piece by Mary Condren in which she denounced the Vatican declaration that women cannot be legitimately ordained. In this, after expressing an ecclesiology which might be described as radical Protestant (she proclaims that Jesus ordained nobody and that ordination was not introduced until the alliance of church and empire 300 years after His death, she dismisses the argument from tradition by describing it as the view that "if something's done for 5 years it's mortal sin, if done for 10 years it's venial sin, if done for 2000 years it's God's will") she holds forth in praise of the ordination of women in Scandinavia without mentioning that this is done by the Lutheran, not the Catholic church. In conclusion, she proclaims that such views as those of the Vatican are misogynist and encourage violence against women worldwide - she therefore proclaims that religious exemptions for churches from anti-discrimination laws should be abolished. In other words, Ms Condren is demanding that religious groups which do not have women as clerics should not be allowed to exist, and that her understanding of Christianity is to be imposed by the power of the state and all other forms of Christianity treated as criminal and illegitimate. We have already seen something of this mindset in the refusal to include a conscience clause in the civil partnership legislation - we will see a lot more of it.
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Post by loughcrew on Jul 31, 2010 11:40:37 GMT
I think that the Evening Herald is even more desperate to show off an anti Catholic credo by having a number of ex religious who are now openly hostile to Catholicism as weekly columnists.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 16, 2010 10:16:08 GMT
Fr Zuhlsdorf comments on a letter denouncing the Pope's visit to Britain published in yesterday's GUARDIAN. (A few of the signatories have Irish connections - Dylan Evans teaches in University College Cork as Alfred O'Rahilly and James Hogan revolve in their graves, the SUNDAY TRIBUNE publishes Johann Hari's column regularly or did until recently, Ed Byrne is Irish, made an early appearance in FATHER TED (who'd have thought it?) and was in RTE's flopperoo comedy series THE CASSIDYS. Lord O'Neill, however, is a Scot rather than one of the Ulster Protestant aristocratic family.) In the spirit of pointing out the flaws of these gentry which Fr Zuhlsdorf suggests, I should note that one of Stephen Fry's blithering novels features an underage boy having sexual relations with a horse (played for laughs) and that when he played Oscar Wilde in a film he substituted his own witticisms for Wilde's in the mistaken belief that he could be as funny as Wilde. I ask once again for your prayers for the Pope as he begins his visit to Britain. wdtprs.com/blog/2010/09/the-guardian-humanist-letter-against-the-pope/
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 16, 2010 13:36:42 GMT
We should certainly pray for the Pope, on any occasion. But it occured to me that Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquess of Queensbury of the day may well be somewhere praying for Stephen Fry.
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