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Post by hibernicus on Jun 26, 2011 19:25:16 GMT
One of the favourite themes of the IRISH TIMES is the columnist recounting how they "found salvation" contrasting their unenlightened Catholic childhood and education with their present-day adult atheism/agnosticism/ Buddhism etc. On Thursday 23 June it had a classic of the genre with Rosita Boland sneering at some old Christian doctrine worksheets from her 1970s schooldays. In particular, she objects to a statement that "God loves everything he made. But he loves some things more than others. He gives them more gifts" and asks the pupil to decide whether God loves most plants, animals, unbaptised babies, baptised babies". Boland concludes by proclaiming her own agnosticism and that "I'm relieved to now live in a society where unbaptised babies are not discriminated against in a children's textbook by using them in some odious moral ranking against plants, animals, and baptised babies." Now the statement that God loves baptised babies more than unbaptised may indeed be somewhat unfortunate (even though it is clearly qualified and aimed at children in elementary school) but it should be noted (a) the ranking is clearly meant to assist the teacher in explaining that unbaptised babies rank ahead of plants and animals, rather than being on the same level as Boland suggests (b) Boland's view that it is discriminatory to suggest that baptised babies are more fortunate than unbaptised amounts to the view that a central Catholic/ Christian doctrine is wrong and should be excluded from education. Roll on the penal Laws...
ADDENDUM Ms Boland cites the fact that the answers on the workbook show her childhood self had only the foggiest idea of what constitutes a sin and had naive ideas about the portrayal of good and evil angels to insinuate that these concepts are inherently ridiculous. I remember that when I was a small child at school I had great difficulty understanding the concept of numbers as abstract entities (e.g "three" in general as distinct from "Three apples" etc) and because I saw language as simply a store of information I had some difficulty grasping the concept of foreign languages. My difficulty in grasping these concepts at the age of six or thereabouts does not mean mathematics is all mystification or foreign languages are nonsensical - but this is how Ms Boland and her ilk deploy their childhood misunderstandings to ridicule the very idea of adult faith.
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Post by humphrey on Jul 6, 2011 8:17:08 GMT
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Post by shane on Jul 6, 2011 14:00:04 GMT
I didn't read Finola Kennedy's book yet but John Paul McCarthy's review is absolutely dire. The man shows no knowledge whatsoever about his subject. I found it amusing that he thinks Frank Duff lacked self-awareness.
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Post by losleandros on Jul 7, 2011 10:56:08 GMT
Yeah, McCarthy's review was abysmal. Totally lacking in insight, intellectual content. See he obtained a degree from Oxford Univ., - they're degrees are obviously not worth the paper they're written on !. To think, this was once one of the great Catholic Universities of Western Europe. What a drastic decline in intellectual standards.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 9, 2011 21:45:46 GMT
Yes, quite remarkably arrogant. The reference to Turner's biography of Newman which starts from the assumption that Newman's beliefs are self-evidently absurd and must therefore have pathological causes is very revealing. Likewise McCarthy's assumption that no good Declan Costello might have done can ever offset his belief that children should not be killed just for being conceived through rape. Incidentally, the Protestant ministers whom Duff picketed were not giving free breakfasts to the poor out of the kindness of their hearts - they demanded that the poor as the price of accepting them should engage in acts of Protestant worship incompatible with Catholicism - in other words, they were bribing starving people to change their religion by refusing to relieve them unless they did so. Nor does he mention that, as well as picketing, Duff set up a rival free breakfast scheme....
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 9, 2011 22:20:25 GMT
Three points that should be borne in mind about McCarthy - First - he is rebutting the argument that Catholicism does good things and is therefore a good thing by maintaining that serious Catholic belief is such a bad thing that the mere fact that such good is inspired by Catholicism is a harm which more than cancels out the good involved. Second - he is arguing for a "naked public square" model in which policy arguments based on religious belief MUST be ruled out of politics because they are religiously-motivated and therefore irrational. His ideal Catholic public figure is the late Justice Brennan of the US supreme court who inter alia supported the legalisation of abortion. Thirdly, he uses Gladstone's abandonment of his earlier belief in the necessity of a state church in support of his own arguments, when in fact Gladstone believed that though the state might not support the Church the Statesman could and should appeal to the basic moral sense of the people, which he assumed would continue to be founded on Christian morality. Anyone who has read Newman's reply to Gladstone on Papal infallibility will know how he points out that Gladstone ignores the existence and spread of views, such as those put forward by John Stuart Mill in ON LIBERTY, which explicitly reject Christian morality, and the implications of such views becoming generally accepted. Subsequent history shows Newman was right on this as a simple matter of fact, and the fact that McCarthy can treat his rejection of Christianity as a moral evidence as so self-evident that it need not be justified by argument is one more proof that Newman saw more clearly than Gladstone. BTW I can think of quite a few eminent mathematicians and scientists who were celibate, neurotic and of eccentric personal habits. If McCarthy' view of Frank Duff were generally accepted, their work and their lives could have no value either.
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Post by humphrey on Jul 17, 2011 12:16:07 GMT
One issus that is regularly thrown out in an effort to attack the Church is the Churching of Women. It is implied that the church hates sex so it had to purify women after child birth. The rite itself focus' on thanksgiving but if women were excluded from communion until they had been churched it would lend credence to their arguments? Is there truth to the liberal argument?
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Post by shane on Jul 17, 2011 16:56:40 GMT
humphrey, the Churching ceremony was a blessing, not a rite of purification. I remember coming across an article (I think it was the Irish Messenger) from the 40s explaining it in detail and stressing that it was optional and was just as a blessing. This is from my 1962 Missal: lxoa.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/rm1.jpg?w=700&h=600[/img]
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Post by humphrey on Jul 17, 2011 17:36:45 GMT
Thanks for that Shane. Is there any record of women being barred from communion until they had the Churching?
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Post by shane on Jul 17, 2011 17:55:49 GMT
humphrey, perhaps it may have happened in some places but I haven't come across any record of it.
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Post by annie on Jul 17, 2011 19:04:27 GMT
Thank you Shane for this. My mother told me that that indeed this prayer was in thanksgiving. We are lost with no missals for the last 40 years as well as no catechisms.
There was a purification ceremony for women who had given birth under the laws of the Old Testament and until then the woman remained at home. According to a priest I heard speak in Medjugorje, it would have been carried out 40 days after the birth of a boy and 80 days after the birth of a girl. The Jews put much stress on being ritually clean.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 17, 2011 20:31:16 GMT
I think there was a difference between the "official" perception of the churching service as one of thanksgiving and "popular" perceptions of it as ritual purification a la the Old Testament. I have certainly heard of women not entering church until after the service. It should of course be borne in mind that childbirth for most of history involved serious risk of death for both mother and infant, so thanksgiving would seem more of an imperative than nowadays when we assume everything will go well. The OT concept of ritual uncleanness is related to liminal states between life and death - it could be incurred by sex at certain times but also by touching corpses. (Priests were not supposed to come into contact with corpses, which is why depictions of the Crucifixion which show Caiaphas present at Calvary are very iffy.) One reason why Jewish groups which wish to reconstruct the Temple ceremonies have never actually done so is that trainee priests were not supposed to come into contact with the earth (since it contains dead things) and they could only be purified by a ritual involving the ashes of a red heifer of a type no longer found in the region (though I understand some American Christian fundamentalists have now undertaken a red heifer breeding programme).
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Post by loughcrew on Jul 22, 2011 7:57:49 GMT
I am now reduced to purchasing the Daily Express newspaper each day as it is the only daily without it's quotient of anti Catholic bile masquerading as journalism available in Ireland.
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Post by losleandros on Jul 22, 2011 15:18:13 GMT
I empathise loughcrew. It's actually very funny though reading the Irish media's reaction to Inda's speech in the last few days. Talk about grovelling sychophancy ; & they accuse society of being in thrall to the Church !. There's loads of juvenile nonsense about Inda's childish petulance being the sign of a " mature republic ", whatever that is. Grown adults actually believe this stuff. Who wrote that inane speech anyway. I really despair for this country.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 22, 2011 17:43:48 GMT
Given that the EXPRESS is owned by a pornographer I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Quite right, Losleandros. There is a particular ranting article in the INDEPENDENT (unsigned but in the style of John Cooney) which in hailing Enda's speech as the final separation of church and state assumes that the state and its administrators in doing the Church's will ALWAYS acted from fear rather than from genuine belief that this was the right thing to do - Liam Cosgrave's vote against contraception is explained in this way). It's as if the author cannot comprehend the idea that anyone might really believe in orthodox Catholicism or seek to practice it of their own free will. This didn't happen overnight BTW - the dissipation of the Catholic instincts of the Irish people took time, a lot of soft-porn on the media and bad catechesis in the schools - as well as the heinous and scandalous abuses by certain modern Pharisees. The depressing thing is that the Indaites have a point when they say that if the Irish people had not to a considerable extent lost their faith, this would still have been covered up in the belief that anything that damaged the church must do more harm than good.
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