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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jul 3, 2009 9:37:16 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 6, 2009 17:21:47 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 16, 2009 12:13:16 GMT
In connection with the conviction of Simon McGinley (the rapist in the C case, who has now been jailed for raping an 83-year-old woman) the IRISH DAILY MAIL today has an interview with Miss C in which she regrets her abortion and wishes she had had the baby and put it up for adoption. I saw this in the print edition - don't have a link.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jul 31, 2009 14:04:34 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 31, 2009 14:43:24 GMT
I think Myers as usual takes a good point and muddies it by not making enough distinctions. He also treats an international post-Vatican II lunacy as if it was specifically Irish - there are plenty of similar churches is US suburbs. The Taj Mahoney in Los Angeles has attracted many of the same criticisms he voices.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 13, 2009 13:30:23 GMT
Myers is a very erratic journalist and this is but one more example. He also should know better - he was educated in England, which is not dissimilar and his brother is a priest.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 17, 2009 10:50:54 GMT
Lest anyone take the IRISH TIMES' credentials as "paper of record" seriously, a contrast between their coverage of the March for Life (practically non-existent) and the 10 August (last Monday) issue's coverage of the march by the organisation LGBT Noise demanding gay marriage legislation (large photo on p.1 with slogan prominently displayed, sizable report with another big photo on p.4) is instructive.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 17, 2009 13:51:16 GMT
There is a profile of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in the Phoenix this fortnight which makes interesting reading. I'll post it when it comes online.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 2, 2009 21:14:32 GMT
An interesting and characteristically well-balanced column by David Quinn on Diarmuid Ferriter's new book on sex in C20 Ireland. I wish Quinn would collect some of his columns in a book - it would be very useful. www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/our-delusions-about-sex-are-as-powerful-as-ever-1890154.htmlEXTRACTS We've always been deluded about sex. In the past we thought we were sexually pure and happy. Today we think we're sexually liberated and happy. In his new book, 'Occasions of Sin', historian Diarmuid Ferriter uses liberal Ireland's favourite pantomime villain, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, to show just how deluded we were about sex. In an unpublished writing in 1965 Archbishop McQuaid said this on the subject: "There is probably a saner attitude to sex in this country than almost anywhere else." Even then that would have seemed fairly deluded. With the benefit of hindsight it seems utterly insane. There were, of course, the terrible abuses taking place in residential institutions that we now know about, but Ferriter also catalogues the sexual crimes that were coming before the courts at the time, and the reality of sex outside marriage. But sex outside marriage wasn't widespread. If it was, there would have been a very high rate of births outside marriage, and there wasn't, even allowing for cover-ups. Therefore a very great many of those unmarried people were celibate. In the liberal telling of the story the blame for all this can be laid almost exclusively at the feet of the Church. In fact, two other completely unavoidable factors were mostly to blame: biology and economics. ......... At the same time, however, no one can deny that a lot of Catholic preaching about sex was appallingly and inexcusably anti-body. But then, the Victorians were pretty bad about this as well. In the liberal telling of the story we've left behind all that sexual repression and are now happily living in the sunny uplands of sexual liberation. This only shows we're as delusional as ever. Ferriter, to give him his due, acknowledges the all-too-modern problem of the early sexualisation of teenagers, and the huge growth in sexually transmitted diseases. But the real problem is that we've not only separated sex from marriage, we're now so wedded to personal autonomy that we have separated sex from commitment and from having children until we're often well into our thirties and even beyond. So while we're no longer prudish about sex itself, we're 'prudish' about commitment and we're 'prudish' about children. Therefore we delay and delay making commitments until it is sometimes too late. Or, in a panic, we settle for someone who's a lot less than ideal. Or someone we hoped would commit to us but breaks our heart instead. Or we're left literally holding the baby. Or we decide not to have the baby and opt to abort it instead. Or we delay having children until we've had all our fun and then discover we're 40 and infertile. On top of this, the sexual revolution has done nothing to reduce sex crimes and has almost certainly increased them to judge from rape figures. Is it any wonder that surveys of men and women show ever-growing mutual mistrust between the sexes, and especially that women distrust men more and more? A recent American study showed that women are unhappier now than they were 40 years ago, on both sides of the Atlantic. John Charles McQuaid may have decided back in 1965 that there is "probably a saner attitude to sex in this country than anywhere else". But today, liberals believe exactly that about 2009, and they're just as wrong as Archbishop McQuaid was back then -- but for entirely opposite reasons. The sexual revolution has created multiple, as yet unacknowledged problems of its own. On this score, it really is time for liberals to display a little more maturity and a little less self-congratulation.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 15, 2009 11:38:54 GMT
On second thoughts I don't think Quinn's take on Ferriter is completely satisfactory. He is right in discussing how the practice of Catholic teaching on this point in Ireland was influenced by social factors, but he doesn't face up to the fact that Catholicism unequivocally teaches that sexual intercourse should only take place between a man and woman married to one another for life, that it should always be open to the transmission of life, that consecrated virginity deserves the highest honour and respect, and that society should be so organised as to promote and propagate this view. Ferriter's book pretty clearly rejects this and takes the view that a youthful period of casual sexual exploration, leading to a long-term union bounded only by personal attachment and the loosest social constraints, and dissoluble at the will of either party, is self-evidently better both for the individual and society - that sex is essentially a social skill like conversation, whose primary purpose is mutual gratification. There's a much deeper dissonance there than Quinn acknowledges.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2009 18:41:27 GMT
Diarmuid Doyle in the SUNDAY TRIBUNE complains bitterly about the Legion of Mary calling round to his door and trying to encourage him to go to Mass. He complains this is an intrusion on his privacy and cites the forthcoming Dublin archdiocese report to insinuate that anyone who still believes in the importance of the Church and Mass is turning a blind eye to clerical misrule and sexual abuse: EXTRACT The woman who called to my door seems like one of those. I don't mean that she knew of abuse or approved of abuse – that would be a wrong thing to suggest. But her manner of expressing herself, the hectoring certainty in her voice, suggests that the scandals of the last 20 years have had no effect on her belief in the Catholic church, in priests and in the importance of mass. She blithely goes about her smug business without even a smidgin of humility or self awareness, a true champion of the Catholic church in all its tainted glory. I hope not to see her again. reporthttp://www.tribune.ie/news/editorial-opinion/article/2009/oct/25/diarmuid-doyle-it-is-clear-there-are-many-follower/ In one way it is an encouraging sign to see the Legion reverting to door-to-door evangelisation in Dublin (there is a thread complaining about it in Politics.ie as well with reference to NE Dublin). OTOH, this shows the problems it faces. This model of evengelisation was devised for people who had drifted under presure but retained a basic faith in the Church and a sense that religious observance was good. When dealing with this sort of explicit hostility it can be counterproductive. Still, it's worth doing to bear witness and if it brings back even a few lost sheep.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2009 18:46:01 GMT
Both the TRIBUNE (last Sunday) and the IRISH TIMES a day or two previously have been using the Gately funeral as a pretext to call for the repeal of the provision which exempts from anti-discrimination legislation religious institutions acting to preserve their ethos. the repeal of this conscience clause would IMHO be a significant step towards religious persecution and the denial that there is any right to have specfifically religious associations. The tendency is to treat religious opposition to homosexual activity as equivalent to racism, to be rooted out by state power. It's already happening in some parts of America and in Sweden; don't think it won't happen here, or that there will not be aggressive zealots who put pressure on the orthodox to conform or face persecution.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 30, 2009 17:33:33 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 5, 2010 14:59:16 GMT
The IRISH TIMES today has an interesting interview with three priests about how they feel the scandal has affected them. Fr. Lyng - mentioned in another thread on this site - is the oldest. His comments are quite interesting and not obviously heterodox. He does hint that if he had his time again he might not choose to be a priest. The youngest, a 34-year-old ordained last year, seems to have factored it in. The really alarming one is the 40-year-old who feels he went into the seminary aged 18 because he thought of it as a career option and without knowing what he knows now. His remarks on how every priest must feel contaminated by this are true, but he seems to have no sense at all of the necessity for the church and to see religion in terms of a very individualistic "spirituality" without much in the way of referent outside the individual's quest as an end in itself. Perhaps I do him an injustice, but that is the impression he made on me.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 13, 2010 13:06:07 GMT
David Quinn has an article in the INDEPENDENT on 8 January spelling out the full implications of some of the "church reform" proposals being put forward in the wake of the scandals. I add the link below. I think there is a slight problem in his emphasis on numbers; if, for the sake of argument refusal to compromise on essentials inevitably led to the Church shrinking to the current dimensions of the Church of Ireland it would still be the right thing to do; if liberal Catholicism/Protestantism were trueit should be embraced as truth irrespective of consequences. The piece is basically sound, however, and Quinn is characteristically forthright about the dreadful state of catechesis and the widespread heresy in Irish theological institutes. EXTRACT BEGINS Apparently, the best way for the Catholic Church to renew itself is to become less Catholic. That is the clear implication of the demands that the church's critics have been making of it since the publication of the Murphy report. The Church must allow married clergy, they insist. It must allow women clergy. It must radically change its teaching on sexuality. It must allow inter-communion. It must allow divorced and remarried people to receive the sacraments. It must give the laity a say in deciding doctrine. National panels of lay people, appointed by the State, must approve the appointment of bishops. It must even approve of women's "right" to abortion. Short of declaring itself independent of Rome, not one item in the above list can or will be introduced by the Church in Ireland because none are within its power to introduce. Only by leaving the Catholic Church, by declaring itself to be no longer part of the "One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church", in union with the Pope, can the Church in Ireland accede to any of these demands. Therefore, what is being demanded is, in effect, that it become another Protestant Church, and a very liberal one at that. EXTRACT ENDS - LINK BELOW www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/ignore-critics--church-must-be-true-to-teachings-2004600.htmlQuinn's piece seems to have been inspired by another column in the same paper, by John Cooney, which appeared on 6 January. This spells out very clearly what Cooney has in mind for Catholicism. Note the following:(a) the assertion that the hierarchical structure of the church and the leadership role of the ordained only dates back to Vatican I, which would have come as news to St. Irenaeus in the second century, to go no further back. (b) The sweeping statement that Papal infallibility is "unverifiable" (what sort of verifiability does he have in mind?) and that Catholic sexual morality is "unscientific" without further explanation. EXTRACT BEGINS Observing the procession of aged men in their ceremonial robes, chatting among themselves as if at a clerical old boys' reunion, I had an acute sense that the Catholic laity, be they of pious disposition or a la carte-minded, must mobilise to take control away from the ordained ministers who betrayed them and chart a new reform path for their Church. The People of God, as the Church was defined by the Second Vatican Council, need to dismantle the clericalist pyramid of command structures that have dominated the mind-set since the First Vatican Council in 1870. That council lum- bered the centralised system from Rome with the unverifiable dogma of papal infallibility and embedded a culture of unquestioning loyalty by a docile laity to a command system from the top down of Pope, cardinals, archbishops and bishops, not forgetting the Irish tradition of the infallibility of the parish priest. The laity in Ireland must speak out now and demand a more democratic rather than medievalist church. Otherwise they will be expected to follow the paternalistic route which Pope Benedict plans to anno-unce in his pre-Lenten pastoral letter to the Irish that will be interpreted as the mandate for church governance that is to be implemented by the two principal leaders of the Irish Church, Cardinal Brady and the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin. Both Brady and Martin are fine leaders -- and they undoubtedly have a central role to play -- but they operate within the limited parameters of Rome's refusal to redefine its outmoded and unscientific code of sexual morality that still demands a celibate male clergy and bans the use of condoms, the admission to the sacraments to divorced Catholics, the right of women to choose abortion and the admission to the ministry of married men and of women, whether single or married. EXTRACT ENDS - LINK BELOW www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/scandals-must-kickstart-new-era-for-church-2000698.html
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