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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 21, 2014 20:27:33 GMT
And that one would think that the Dominican habit is one of the most recognisable makes the ignorance even more glaring.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 21, 2014 21:22:38 GMT
To be fair, I have mistaken Canons Regular for Dominicans in the past - their habits are very similar [since St Dominic was originally an Augustinian Canon and adapted the Rule and HAbit for his own purposes]- but since the couple seemed to be fairly familiar with the locality it is odd they didn't connect them with the Dominican Priory up the road. But then again, until a few years ago I didn't realise that the Carmelites in Whitefriar Street and Clarendon Street represent two different branches of the Order...
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 31, 2014 23:26:55 GMT
Most of the examples of ignorance on this thread represent liberal-Catholic or secular viewpoints, so here is a "conservative" example - the small group of trads who go around proclaiming that Catholics are obliged to be geocentrists. We had one of them on this board a few years ago. Apparently some of these people are now making a film on the Wonders of Geocentrism, and Michael Voris has been asinine enough to give them interviews on "Real Catholic TV" or whatever it calls itself nowadays. redcardigan.blogspot.ie/2014/01/the-movie-theater-inquisitors-need-to.html www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/01/the-mark-of-the-crackpot.htmland here is a resource for debunking geocentrism: www.geocentrismdebunked.org/ Bear in mind that this form of geocentrism is not just an eccentric pseudoscience. It is based on the central tenet that anyone who believes in geocentrism is either (a) a naive idiot or (b) deliberately engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the Faith by deliberate falsification of the truth about the universe, which is revealed to the geocentrists (usually along with the NASA Hoax, the PRotocols of the Elders of Zion, and suchlike). These people are not interested in reason at all. (The same is true of the young-earth creationists BTW.) These people claim to be fighting atheism, but turning themselves into exact copies of Dawkins' idea of a believer is a funny way of doing it.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 14, 2014 20:10:42 GMT
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Post by Young Ireland on Feb 14, 2014 20:27:05 GMT
It just shows how much some people have it in for the Church that they can freely throw about accustions of deliberate faith just like that. (Note that I am not downplaying the very serious gravity of the abuse scandals in any way, or indeed, the many problems which riddled Irish Catholicism in the past.)
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 14, 2014 20:35:56 GMT
I am not sure if Cornwell is making accusations of deliberate bad faith in this particular context, rather than of reckless arrogance. Cornwell actually is not the worst - he is capable of reasoned argumentation and his book on the death of John Paul I is pretty solid and makes some valid criticisms - but he has a lot of issues with his pre-Vatican II upbringing (he had some pretty nasty experiences in minor seminary) and when he takes a dislike to someone or falls in love with some bright idea of his own he loses his critical faculties.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 23, 2014 17:43:08 GMT
Here is an interesting piece on how and why both liberal and fundamentalist Christians in the US have very little sense of the depths of the Faith; the fundamentalists assume all Christians have shared their nostrums (some are in fact of very recent origin) while the liberals avoid confronting the darker side of the human condition and talk as if suffering, challenges etc could just be wished away a la Tinkerbell. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/moralistic-therapeutic-deism-failure-church-leadership/#post-commentsEXTRACT In all my years as a Catholic, it was always so puzzling to me why so many American Catholic parishes denied the spiritual and intellectual riches of the faith. It’s not that everybody is capable of fully appreciating Aquinas or John of the Cross, but the general profundity of Catholic thinking and worship, the rightful inheritance of all Catholics, is typically kept away from the people. I don’t think they’re doing that on purpose, necessarily; it’s just what they think people want, and can handle. It’s like priests and DREs have decided that the people can’t handle eating on silver and fine china, so they’re only going to give them plastic forks and paper plates — and the people decide that’s all there is to the faith. It really is true what the reader says about the Church Fathers. I lack the training, the intellect, and the patience to grasp Aquinas, but the early Church Fathers — who are equally the heritage of Catholics and Protestants as Orthodox — are generally much more accessible. I never bothered with them until Orthodoxy. They are so deep and lucid. I wonder how many teenagers or young adults who have left Christianity really understand what they have left. Kyriacos Markides wrote The Mountain Of Silence, an introduction to Orthodox spirituality, in part because he wondered how many Western Christians fed up with the cerebral dryness of Western Christianity and who have turned to Eastern religion because of it would have done so had they realized the mystical depths of the Eastern Christian tradition. I love that book. It made me also think about other Western Christians who have become involved with charismatic forms of Western Christianity. I’ve felt a strong sympathy for charismatic Christians and their hunger for a greater mystical element in the Christian life, but have never felt the slightest inclination to draw close to them. I find their forms of worship deeply alienating to me, personally. For me, Orthodoxy is perfect, combining profound reverence and ancient form with deep mysticism. It can be as emotional as a Pentecostal service, but the emotion is contained within a strong traditional form. Is there a Roman Catholic analogue to The Mountain of Silence, I wonder. Catholics, what do you say? Anybody with the slightest knowledge of Catholic history knows that mysticism has deep roots in the Roman church, but it’s so much harder to find it today, versus in contemporary Orthodoxy. END
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 21, 2015 0:06:16 GMT
In last Sunday's SUNDAY INDEPENDENT Niamh Horan informs us that she has held onto her Catholicism by realising that it's OK what you do so long as you do it from love. In the course of the article she informs us that she thinks it self-evident that Jesus was not God but just a nice guy who got killed for antagonising the powerful, that the RC Church is a later fabrication, and that she personally has committed all the Seven Deadly Sins and broken all the Commandments except "Thou Shalt not Kill" and thinks this is a giggle and she's, like, totally cool with that? How does one begin to address such cluelessness? Doesn't she realise that Catholicism is not just a label, but describes a set of substantive beliefs and the actions that arise therefrom, and that to expressly reject those beliefs and actions makes it nonsensical to call oneself a Catholic, just as it would be nonsensical for me to call myself a Free Presbyterian while believing the Pope is Christ's Vicar on Earth, rejecting the Protestant-fundamentalist form of Biblical literalism, and holding that the use of alcohol is a matter of private prudential judgement? Actually, it would be somewhat less nonsensical for me to call myself a Free Presbyterian, because as a Catholic I am fairly sure I have more in common with a Free Presbyterian than I have with Ms Horan. At least Aleister Crowley didn't call himself a Christian, and had more sense of the logical implications of his actions... Maybe Micheal Martin should describe himself as an a la carte Fine Gaeler, or Gerry Adams as an a la carte Unionist; that would be just as sensible as Ms Horan's claim. www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/a-la-carte-catholicism-is-fine-as-long-as-love-is-the-essence-31153669.html
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 21, 2015 7:36:28 GMT
To be honest, this is a tragedy. Appalling catechesis, appalling pastoral practice (by clueless priests), lack of third level faith formation. For all that, Ms Horan is a person with spirituality and values - she just was never taught right from wrong.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 21, 2015 15:51:11 GMT
Sounds like most Catholics really. Well, most people might just say good person as opposed to good Catholic. How to deal with such stupidity/dishonesty? I'd suggest making the person feel stupid for holding such corrupt beliefs without being completely insulting about it. Not for all cases, but cases like this. Most people probably don't even realise what they're supposed to do, but I imagine that she must have some idea of what's expected of her and just doesn't care.
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Post by Ranger on Apr 22, 2015 11:31:51 GMT
Charity in truth is important though. Being condescending and belittling can easily drive people away. Who wants to join a religion or come back to it if it treats them as if they're stupid?
I think a large proportion of it is honest rather than dishonest ignorance, although there is a certain degree of plain apathy which I have less time for. Most of the fault lies at the feet of those charged with educating Catholics, to be honest.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 22, 2015 13:29:42 GMT
I agree entirely with Ranger here. There is an apocryphal story in Maynooth about the late Mgr Cremin confronting a group of young clerics who were behaving in an innocent, but silly manner. He said he didn't blame them, he blamed the system. This case applies here.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 22, 2015 22:38:47 GMT
At this stage I don't think it's just a failure of formal catechetics, though that is part of it. It's a wider failure to present/live the faith as something that must be taken seriously even by people who don't agree with it. I doubt very much if she is or ever has been personally acquainted with a single priest or religious, for example. She did give the impression of being completely clueless, and a very widespread aspect of modernity seems to be having no sense of sin and seeing guilt merely as something people use to manipulate you - she's certainly got that in spades. She gives the impression of taking the SUNDAY INDEPENDENT worldview as self-evident, not even considering the possibility it might be false.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 21, 2016 12:08:25 GMT
The current TABLET is salivating over its hopes tHat Pope Francis may give local episcopal conferences the right to suspend the Ten Commandments if they think they are too onerous. (I exaggerate, but not by much.) It is also preaching unqualified obedience to the Pope in a manner reminiscent of the days around 1870 when it was accusing John Henry Newman of heresy for not thinking the Pope infallible in his ordinary utterances. This isn't the most shocking thing in it, however. That's an Advent reflection by a nun in which she contrasts St John the Baptist's preaching of a punitive God with Our Lord's preaching of a merciful and forgiving God, and declares we must choose between them. (Any of Jesus' statements which do not fit this description are ascribed to His early ministry, when He was influenced by John and didn't know any better!!!) The letters column seems to indicate that in a previous reflection she dismissed accounts of miracles as excrescences unnecessary to faith. I might add that it never seems to occur to her that the day of the Lord's judgment, however unpleasant a prospect to Herod et al, might actually represent deliverance and vindication for the unjustly oppressed. Really, I don't think the TABLET has ever been quite this bad - though perhaps I wasn't paying attention.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 21, 2016 12:21:04 GMT
While I'm on this thread, a little note. In his book NEWMAN'S UNQUIET GRAVE John Cornwell denounces Pope Benedict for associating Bl. John Henry Newman with the Cure d'Ars, whom he regards as a demented barbarian who had nothing in common with JHN. I have just been reading Meriol Trevor's account of Newman's later years, THE PILLAR OF THE CLOUD. She mentions that Newman in fact had a profound admiration for St Jean Vianney, and in one of his last illnesses asked for that saint's life to be read to him and responded to it with the greatest enthusiasm. (BTW she also notes he was mucH less impressed by a life of Don Bosco, so this is not just pious formality.) If John Cornwell meets the Beatus hereafter, he will have some uncomfortable moments.
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