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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Oct 4, 2021 13:45:55 GMT
I understand a 5th candidate was refused entry because he refused to accept one of the vaccines against COVID-19. I don't know how the Trustees of Maynooth square this with the constitutional right to bodily integrity, but there you go.
Referring to Fr Zuhlsdorf's guess that the two students from the Neocatechumenal Way are not Irish - maybe they are, maybe not, but the 20 existing Neocat students certainly aren't all Irish and this distorts the numbers. Take these out and you are left with precious few.
Now, I do believe that most of the recent episcopal appointments (note the most - I definitely would not say all) have been as good as expected, this has come after a succession of weak appointments due to the tendency to appoint Nuncios here who wanted a less challenging appointment at the end of their careers. A lot was due to the very ineffective efforts by Cardinal Conway to modernise the Irish episcopate. This has resulted in the sort of culture we have had: bad catechetics (there is no special charism that exempts candidates from the priesthood from this), bad formation, questionable spirituality, disproportionate influence of female religious on priestly formation in both religious and diocesan seminaries (God, can we call these institutions seminaries given their size), lack of endowment of the Pontifical University in Maynooth (it's a joke), tolerance of the grumpy old men of the misnamed ACP and their hobby horses - this is all so deeply entrenched that it is impossible to sort out. Just think, it is not a coincidence that the generation of the explosion of sex abuse cases are the same and it took much effort to turn this around. The stuff I am complaining about, unfortunately, is not against the criminal law and does not shock most Catholics.
I know many people see the Dominican Order as the great black and white hope out there, but unfortunately the Dominicans have a high leakage rate.
It also needs to be said openly that the traditional orders have not been successful in recruiting Irish candidates. I reluctantly include the SSPX as many people do so, but you could count the amount of Irish SSPX ordinations on one hand. The one Irish priest in the FSSP was already ordained when he joined. There are no Irish priests in the Institute of Christ the King. Yes, you heard me right - that's zero. All of these bodies have had a considerable number of Irish men over the years - all. But we should not be deluded about how effective this alternative is.
For all that, I agree that something new needs to be tried and I believe Father Zuhlsdorf's suggestions are good. Because to encourage new priests and religious, we need to start out from a position of love of the faith and not hatred of the faith. And if you want to know what the latter is, no matter how nicely expressed, go up to an elderly nun you know in mufti and innocently bring something into the conversation like 'extraordinary form', 'Friday penance', even communion on the tongue or genuflection should do it. This is the downside of obedience - these girls were taught and ordered to hate the past.
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Post by assisi on Oct 4, 2021 20:26:00 GMT
I understand a 5th candidate was refused entry because he refused to accept one of the vaccines against COVID-19. I don't know how the Trustees of Maynooth square this with the constitutional right to bodily integrity, but there you go. Referring to Fr Zuhlsdorf's guess that the two students from the Neocatechumenal Way are not Irish - maybe they are, maybe not, but the 20 existing Neocat students certainly aren't all Irish and this distorts the numbers. Take these out and you are left with precious few. Now, I do believe that most of the recent episcopal appointments (note the most - I definitely would not say all) have been as good as expected, this has come after a succession of weak appointments due to the tendency to appoint Nuncios here who wanted a less challenging appointment at the end of their careers. A lot was due to the very ineffective efforts by Cardinal Conway to modernise the Irish episcopate. This has resulted in the sort of culture we have had: bad catechetics (there is no special charism that exempts candidates from the priesthood from this), bad formation, questionable spirituality, disproportionate influence of female religious on priestly formation in both religious and diocesan seminaries (God, can we call these institutions seminaries given their size), lack of endowment of the Pontifical University in Maynooth (it's a joke), tolerance of the grumpy old men of the misnamed ACP and their hobby horses - this is all so deeply entrenched that it is impossible to sort out. Just think, it is not a coincidence that the generation of the explosion of sex abuse cases are the same and it took much effort to turn this around. The stuff I am complaining about, unfortunately, is not against the criminal law and does not shock most Catholics. I know many people see the Dominican Order as the great black and white hope out there, but unfortunately the Dominicans have a high leakage rate. It also needs to be said openly that the traditional orders have not been successful in recruiting Irish candidates. I reluctantly include the SSPX as many people do so, but you could count the amount of Irish SSPX ordinations on one hand. The one Irish priest in the FSSP was already ordained when he joined. There are no Irish priests in the Institute of Christ the King. Yes, you heard me right - that's zero. All of these bodies have had a considerable number of Irish men over the years - all. But we should not be deluded about how effective this alternative is. For all that, I agree that something new needs to be tried and I believe Father Zuhlsdorf's suggestions are good. Because to encourage new priests and religious, we need to start out from a position of love of the faith and hatred of the faith. And if you want to know what the latter is, no matter how nicely expressed, go up to an elderly nun you know in mufti and innocently bring something into the conversation like 'extraordinary form', 'Friday penance', even communion on the tongue or genuflection should do it. This is the downside of obedience - these girls were taught and ordered to hate the past. The generation of the crotchety ACP priest and the mufti nuns are often referred to as 'Boomers' by the younger politically aware generations. This post war Baby Boom generation get a bad press from young ones who see the current degenerate West partly as a consequence of the Boomer attitude that they were somehow a special or anointed generation born of the 60s revolution. There is some truth in this. In a Catholic context this all seems to have have tied in with the spirit of Vatican 2 and movements like Liberation Theology. I have just re-read Piers Paul Read's 'Hell and other Destinations' and it is a good overview of the post Vatican 2 effects in England. He relates a story of his parish church in Notting Hill getting a young new Irish priest Fr Oliver McTernan who set about getting rid of statues, instituting tea and coffee after Mass for a slightly bemused multi ethnic congregation, arranging ecumenical meetings, and telling his parishioners that first world people were pretty much damned after he came back from a trip to the poorer parts of Brazil. He relates how a nun that Fr McTernan had brought in to teach pre-Communion kids told some of the parents not to infect their children with old pre-Conciliar beliefs. The priest himself was a good man in that he was aware of the poor and lonely in his parish and tended to them as best he could. He eventually left the priesthood, got married and worked at a high level in conflict revolution in places like Bosnia. I think that the Irish, and indeed global, Catholic Church have laboured under this attitude for the past 50 years or so. The idea of a Church aimed at saving souls through Christ got side-tracked for the belief that social and political activism aimed at the poor and unfortunate was more important. As Boomers get older it does seem that few are able to see that their activism appears to have failed and has certainly not rejuvenated the Church. Rather than be honest there seems to be a tendency to stick to the script doggedly, dig in, and never admit that there could have been some good in the older ways. It's all quite sad, but entirely predictable if one reads the Bible carefully.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Oct 5, 2021 16:42:15 GMT
I think the Boomers are a general problem. The secular boomers as much as the religious. If not actually the soixantehuitards in France (or the analogous achtundsechsiger in Germany, of which Pope Benedict had a lot to say), they were the generation that admired them and strove to emulate them. As this generation reacted to the Europe of the Second World War, in their minds the Europe (and western world) that created the conditions which brought about the two world wars (not implausibly), and they wanted change. The Second Vatican Council and its interpretation and implementation is very much part of this battle ground. Many traditional writers (especially among the French and those influenced by them) emphasise, not always convincingly, the impact of the French Revolution on the Council. French Revolution and Enlightenment certainly did make an impact, but not necessarily a decisive influence. Apologists admired by traditionalists today such as Chesterton and Belloc were at the very least ambivalent about the Revolution. The War and its aftermath were different - these were a decisive influence. One consequence, which perhaps came to the fore in the 1960s rather than from 1945, was hatred of the past. A belief that one could rebuild everything from the year dot. And the past was denigrated. From an Irish point of view this came late, and when it came, it came with a bang. Germany was going through a crisis as the nation was on trial. German Catholicism, though not of itself responsible for National Socialism (if anything the Nazi vote was uniformly at it's lowest in the Catholic regions of Germany), saw a new culture emerge were both religion and nationality were subject to intense questioning. I would probably agree with Hibernicus to a large extent about how Irish nationalism was celebrated up to and including 1966, but from the onset of the troubles in 1969, Ireland like Germany beforehand was initiated into a culture where both religion and patriotism were suddenly subject to a lot of introspective self-flagellation. Of particular relevance is the new catechesis in the schools, which is at least a half a century old these days. I won't for a second say the old system was always best practice, but at least the older generation knew their faith. As Assisi says, parents were dissuaded from 'confusing' the children with what they learned. And as Benedict said in a manner pertinent to this thread, the candidates for the priesthood weren't miraculously exempt from the appalling catechesis - they actually began in seminary with a lower level of knowledge than their predecessors. I once heard two clerical students, well advanced in their theological studies struggling to name the ten commandments. As it happens these were Dominicans (in the 1980s). This wouldn't have happened in the less academic seminaries twenty years before this. Dr Éanna Johnson has highlighted this deficit time and time again and if you spoke to him personally, he would pull no punches in naming names responsible. Anne-Louise Gilligan and Catherine Zappone are two. But among the less well known are many of those who have left the priesthood, religious life and even the Church herself. In terms of practice, Father Zuhlsdorf mentions Friday penance. We are still supposed to keep it to some degree, in case you don't know (most people don't). Abstinence from flesh meat is not required, but it is the ordinary form of doing penance. You may substitute an extraordinary form on your own, like attending Mass, saying the rosary, abstaining from alcohol or doing the stations of the cross, even giving alms. The point is the onus is on you to know what you are doing if you are not abstaining from fleshmeat. Most Catholics, even most Church-going Catholics, are going to greet this with a "Whhaaa...?" (excuse the Dublin accent; it's the one I know best). It is unknown. But how did Friday penance make an exit in the first place? It was rumoured, plausibly, that a lot of well-heeled US Catholics petitioned Paul VI as they were embarrassed on front of their non-Catholic friends (interestingly, if you were a guest in a non-Catholic household, you are dispensated from the obligation to abstain). The fact is that this relaxation of rules hit the Catholic identity more strongly than the dropping of Latin in the Mass as it came right into the Catholic kitchen. And the fact it happened around 1968 meant it generated the expectation that the Catholic norms on artificial contraception would be changed, which didn't happen. I once spoke about the Friday penance of a former diocesan clerical student (Maynooth), who was surprised and said that this was not marked in Maynooth. I doubt if it was in the menus in many seminaries world wide. Since I mention Paul VI, I must bring another area up, not just the liturgy but the artistic expression of Catholicism. Paul was impressed by a group of French and Italian intellectuals who were highly cultured and sought philosophical and aesthetic departure very much in the context of the times. These people were themselves very tasteful and reacted greatly against some of the kitsch of the past. Of course, modern art has its own interesting twists and turns: Empty Frames The trouble was that the dynamics of exaggerated ultramontanism plus universal careerism added to a type of clericalism kicked in. This meant that rather than having a modern aesthetic taking shape, you had a lot of material of genuine artistic value destroyed to be replaced by modernist kitsch largely to clerics either climbing the career ladder or who wanted to show they were in charge. To most of the ACP, clericalism was something that was associated with the pre-conciliar generation and the young fogeys who admire them. It can't possibly apply to them, can it? These people never try to look in the mirror and evaluate who they might have repelled. Some people might say that Pope Francis needs to do. We can also look at the condition of the seminaries themselves, which have operated on a scale of self-destruction somewhere between 1 and 10 over the years. The problem with the publication Good Bye, Good Men! was that it was almost obsessively concerned with offences against chastity, when there was so much more going on. Let me begin by saying what shocked me the most. Two students in Maynooth in the 1980s told me that many clerical students in their days in junior house were routinely playing with ouija boards and indulging in other occultic activity. When the first commandment is gone, the other nine wear thin. But rather than focus on commission, we can look at ommission. Institutions strongly favour time servers, people who professionally keep out of trouble without achieving anything worthwhile. Within the Augustinians, a trio of class mates ordained in the 1990s have been likened to Fathers Ted Crilly, Jack Hackett and Dougal Maguire, with some justification. Now, folks, we need to talk about Rome. There is nothing in the air of the Eternal City which keeps it pure from heresy and another host of clerical failings. Priests who have come through Rome are not necessarily any better than others. Next time, you here the German hierarchy being slated as progressive, remember most of them have been through that powerhouse called the Germanicum, the German-Hungarian College in Rome. The Irish Augustinian and Franciscan provinces are almost entirely made up of Gregorian University graduates. And a disproportionately number of bishops and senior administrators in Ireland have come through the Pontifical Irish College. So take note, take stock and use this as a foundation for any discussion.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 5, 2021 18:39:35 GMT
One continuity between pre and post-conciliar Irish Catholicism that comes to mind is a lack of self-reflection. In the 50s it was quite common for Irish commentators (notably bishops) to say that Ireland had developed a form of Catholicism that was immune to modern secularisation, so that we need not pay attention to problems elsewhere - but, as was pointed out in some clerical reminiscences, during the Council the bishops made no attempt to articulate what was supposedly superior about Irish Catholicism or what other countries could learn from it. At the same time, a lot of commentary in Anglophone countries on the legacy of Irish "ghetto" Catholicism was uniformly dismissive and maintained that there was nothing to be learned from it - this was related to the discomfort of middle-class Catholics who were starting to break into management and the professions and retained a sense of Catholic identity but wanted to shake off some of what they saw as unnecessary baggage - and some of it was such. We have seen the same process in Ireland, and its successor as the descendants of that generation move to hatred or indifference towards Catholicism. I sometimes think academics analysing the history of Irish Catholicism as if they were dealing with some remote tribe are even more depressing than the purveyors of the black legend (which is not all a legend - don't get me wrong).
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 6, 2021 8:33:55 GMT
One continuity between pre and post-conciliar Irish Catholicism that comes to mind is a lack of self-reflection. In the 50s it was quite common for Irish commentators (notably bishops) to say that Ireland had developed a form of Catholicism that was immune to modern secularisation, so that we need not pay attention to problems elsewhere - but, as was pointed out in some clerical reminiscences, during the Council the bishops made no attempt to articulate what was supposedly superior about Irish Catholicism or what other countries could learn from it. Who said this? I've never been able to find evidence of this triumphalist Church myself. Anything I've read dating from pre-Conciliar era Catholicism in Ireland seems highly aware of the secular onslaught in other countries, and laments at the secularization of Ireland itself seem very common already.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 6, 2021 10:50:08 GMT
The point about lack of self-reflection is well taken and it is true that the Irish bishops had little to say at the Second Vatican Council - Cardinal Browne's intervention being celebrated by Mgr LeFebvre (this is Cardinal Browne OP, Master Emeritus of the Dominican Order and brother of Mgr Pádraig de Brún) and it took no more than a few minutes.
But to return to the original point, there is a serious problem with vocations, as with other areas in Irish Church life. I know it's an international problem, but there are places where things are very different. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Irish Church is stuck in a rut and seems quite determined to stay there indefinitely.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 7, 2021 10:08:52 GMT
We can also look at the condition of the seminaries themselves, which have operated on a scale of self-destruction somewhere between 1 and 10 over the years. The problem with the publication Good Bye, Good Men! was that it was almost obsessively concerned with offences against chastity, when there was so much more going on. Let me begin by saying what shocked me the most. Two students in Maynooth in the 1980s told me that many clerical students in their days in junior house were routinely playing with ouija boards and indulging in other occultic activity. When the first commandment is gone, the other nine wear thin. But rather than focus on commission, we can look at ommission. Institutions strongly favour time servers, people who professionally keep out of trouble without achieving anything worthwhile. Within the Augustinians, a trio of class mates ordained in the 1990s have been likened to Fathers Ted Crilly, Jack Hackett and Dougal Maguire, with some justification. Now, folks, we need to talk about Rome. There is nothing in the air of the Eternal City which keeps it pure from heresy and another host of clerical failings. Priests who have come through Rome are not necessarily any better than others. Next time, you here the German hierarchy being slated as progressive, remember most of them have been through that powerhouse called the Germanicum, the German-Hungarian College in Rome. The Irish Augustinian and Franciscan provinces are almost entirely made up of Gregorian University graduates. And a disproportionately number of bishops and senior administrators in Ireland have come through the Pontifical Irish College. So take note, take stock and use this as a foundation for any discussion. This focuses on the issue rather than generality, so I'll throw in a couple of points: - It is one thing to get candidates to the seminary or house of formation. It is another thing to keep them there. When they are there they need support as a culture has built up of keeping the wrong people.
- I don't want to say good people don't get through or that bad people do. Some good people are getting ordained and most of the worst are leaving of their own accord. But it is the nature of institutional life that it favours those who keep their heads down, stay out of trouble. Those who are lukewarm. Not manifestly bad but certainly not on fire, people who will bring an indifferent approach to an indifferent laity. People who are not likely to challenge aspects of formation, teaching heresy for example, that are manifestly wrong.
- To give an example, I remember a clerical student telling me he had left the seminary which didn't surprise as much as the fact he said it as if he had just won the sweep. No one was surprised in this fellow's case. He was nice, but clearly a square peg in a round hole. I thought little of it at the time until I spoke to another friend of mine years later who was in the same year and had been ordained, despite serious obstacles thrown his way. He told me there were a number of students in his year who were constantly called into the dean for private meetings, and whatever he thought of the students, he was somehow supportive of them in their situation (another student in this boat had already told me he valued this student's support). He said the fellow I am talking about here never seemed grateful, unlike the others and that it took him a long time to find out that the reason the dean called him in was not to put him under pressure to leave, but that he wanted him to stay, though the student had honestly came to the conclusion that the priesthood was not for him a long time before he left.
- I remember talking to a young priest years later (different year in the seminary above) and I asked him had anyone of his year left the priesthood (this was maybe five years after ordination) and he mentioned one who was on his way out. The name he mentioned was one that surprised nobody. The priest talking about him said he was a nice fellow, but he didn't know right from wrong. This is an extraordinary commentary of someone who spent seven years in seminary and around five in active ministry as a priest. He also told me that he was the 'golden boy' in the eyes of a particular dean, the same dean I refer to in the last point.
- Finally, the leakage rate is something else. I heard that the present Bishop of Killaloe, Fintan Monahan had a visitor in Tuam (he was secretary of the Archbishop of Tuam before being made a bishop) who admired his 'class piece', the photograph of all the newly ordained in any given years which most Maynooth-ordained priests keep afterwards. He said half of them were gone already. There is a huge leakage rate in the priesthood too that we may not be aware of.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 7, 2021 10:40:43 GMT
When discussing Rome, there is a division between the universities where the students study: Pontifical Universities in Rome, mainly the Gregorian, Angelicum and Lateran though post-graduate priests attend any of the specialist institutes listed and seminaries where they live : Roman Colleges, though most Irish students are in the Pontifical Irish College, I have known Irish priests to live in the Teutonic, French and Portuguese Colleges. The list doesn't include the Beda College, which caters for convert clergymen and late vocations in the English-speaking world, nor colleges of the various religious orders: the Irish provinces of the Augustinians, Dominicans and Franciscans historically ran St Patrick's College, St Clement's College and St Isidore's College respectively. St Patrick's has been handed over to the US Paulists, San Clemente only has Irish Dominican post graduates and I don't believe that St Isidore's has any students at present. If the Irish Augustinians had students, they would send them to St Monica's International College which like the Teutonic College is on Vatican territory. This is connected with the Augustinianum. The trouble here is that the Augustinianum is a specialist institute for patristics, so that is a disadvantage for general theology. Other religious houses have similar problems, for example the Teresianum, where Discalced Carmelite students may go specialising in spirituality. So, in summary, Rome is a very complex place.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 22, 2021 21:38:31 GMT
I think the Boomers are a general problem. The secular boomers as much as the religious. If not actually the soixantehuitards in France (or the analogous achtundsechsiger in Germany, of which Pope Benedict had a lot to say), they were the generation that admired them and strove to emulate them. As this generation reacted to the Europe of the Second World War, in their minds the Europe (and western world) that created the conditions which brought about the two world wars (not implausibly), and they wanted change. The Second Vatican Council and its interpretation and implementation is very much part of this battle ground. Many traditional writers (especially among the French and those influenced by them) emphasise, not always convincingly, the impact of the French Revolution on the Council. French Revolution and Enlightenment certainly did make an impact, but not necessarily a decisive influence. Apologists admired by traditionalists today such as Chesterton and Belloc were at the very least ambivalent about the Revolution. The War and its aftermath were different - these were a decisive influence. Chesterton and Belloc actively praised the Revolution while glossing over its impact on the Church. This reflected their view of contemporary British society as corrupt and complacent, not to mention their romanticisation of ideologically-motivated war. One reason why post-1945 produced a more serious crisis was that post-Revolution there was still a significant reservoir of popular piety to mobilise - when Napoleon brought Pius VII to Paris to participate in the imperial coronation, he was taken by surprise at the popular enthusiasm for the Pope - which was drained by the social and political upheavals of the C19 and first half of the C20. Eric Hobsbawn was a Marxist, but his observation that the late C20 crisis of European Catholicism was linked to the final demise of the European peasantry had considerable substance - including in the Irish case. As regards the soixante-huitards, the imperial conflicts of post-1945 France, the demise of the concept of the imperial mission civilisatrice - which had both Catholic and Republican aspects - and the sense that France had shown herself brutal and hypocritical was significant.One consequence, which perhaps came to the fore in the 1960s rather than from 1945, was hatred of the past. A belief that one could rebuild everything from the year dot. And the past was denigrated. From an Irish point of view this came late, and when it came, it came with a bang. Germany was going through a crisis as the nation was on trial. German Catholicism, though not of itself responsible for National Socialism (if anything the Nazi vote was uniformly at it's lowest in the Catholic regions of Germany), saw a new culture emerge were both religion and nationality were subject to intense questioning. I would probably agree with Hibernicus to a large extent about how Irish nationalism was celebrated up to and including 1966, but from the onset of the troubles in 1969, Ireland like Germany beforehand was initiated into a culture where both religion and patriotism were suddenly subject to a lot of introspective self-flagellation. I think the Irish self-flagellation started well before the Troubles. It was certainly visible, at least in some circles, as a response to the 1956-62 IRA border campaign, which was seen as futile and as reflecting official hypocrisy with politicians calling for unity and then suppressing the IRA when they tried to put those calls into practice. The demise of economic protectionism and of the "cultural protectionism" of literary censorship in the 1960s were much bigger changes than they appear in hindsight, and contributed to a sense that the post-independence order had shown itself to be myopic, provincial and incapable of meeting the people's needs. Of particular relevance is the new catechesis in the schools, which is at least a half a century old these days. I won't for a second say the old system was always best practice, but at least the older generation knew their faith. As Assisi says, parents were dissuaded from 'confusing' the children with what they learned. And as Benedict said in a manner pertinent to this thread, the candidates for the priesthood weren't miraculously exempt from the appalling catechesis - they actually began in seminary with a lower level of knowledge than their predecessors. I once heard two clerical students, well advanced in their theological studies struggling to name the ten commandments. As it happens these were Dominicans (in the 1980s). This wouldn't have happened in the less academic seminaries twenty years before this. Dr Éanna Johnson has highlighted this deficit time and time again and if you spoke to him personally, he would pull no punches in naming names responsible. Anne-Louise Gilligan and Catherine Zappone are two. But among the less well known are many of those who have left the priesthood, religious life and even the Church herself. In terms of practice, Father Zuhlsdorf mentions Friday penance. We are still supposed to keep it to some degree, in case you don't know (most people don't). Abstinence from flesh meat is not required, but it is the ordinary form of doing penance. You may substitute an extraordinary form on your own, like attending Mass, saying the rosary, abstaining from alcohol or doing the stations of the cross, even giving alms. The point is the onus is on you to know what you are doing if you are not abstaining from fleshmeat. Most Catholics, even most Church-going Catholics, are going to greet this with a "Whhaaa...?" (excuse the Dublin accent; it's the one I know best). It is unknown. But how did Friday penance make an exit in the first place? It was rumoured, plausibly, that a lot of well-heeled US Catholics petitioned Paul VI as they were embarrassed on front of their non-Catholic friends (interestingly, if you were a guest in a non-Catholic household, you are dispensated from the obligation to abstain). The fact is that this relaxation of rules hit the Catholic identity more strongly than the dropping of Latin in the Mass as it came right into the Catholic kitchen. And the fact it happened around 1968 meant it generated the expectation that the Catholic norms on artificial contraception would be changed, which didn't happen. I once spoke about the Friday penance of a former diocesan clerical student (Maynooth), who was surprised and said that this was not marked in Maynooth. I doubt if it was in the menus in many seminaries world wide. Since I mention Paul VI, I must bring another area up, not just the liturgy but the artistic expression of Catholicism. Paul was impressed by a group of French and Italian intellectuals who were highly cultured and sought philosophical and aesthetic departure very much in the context of the times. These people were themselves very tasteful and reacted greatly against some of the kitsch of the past. Of course, modern art has its own interesting twists and turns: Empty Frames The trouble was that the dynamics of exaggerated ultramontanism plus universal careerism added to a type of clericalism kicked in. This meant that rather than having a modern aesthetic taking shape, you had a lot of material of genuine artistic value destroyed to be replaced by modernist kitsch largely to clerics either climbing the career ladder or who wanted to show they were in charge. To most of the ACP, clericalism was something that was associated with the pre-conciliar generation and the young fogeys who admire them. It can't possibly apply to them, can it? These people never try to look in the mirror and evaluate who they might have repelled. Some people might say that Pope Francis needs to do. We can also look at the condition of the seminaries themselves, which have operated on a scale of self-destruction somewhere between 1 and 10 over the years. The problem with the publication Good Bye, Good Men! was that it was almost obsessively concerned with offences against chastity, when there was so much more going on. Let me begin by saying what shocked me the most. Two students in Maynooth in the 1980s told me that many clerical students in their days in junior house were routinely playing with ouija boards and indulging in other occultic activity. When the first commandment is gone, the other nine wear thin. But rather than focus on commission, we can look at ommission. Institutions strongly favour time servers, people who professionally keep out of trouble without achieving anything worthwhile. Within the Augustinians, a trio of class mates ordained in the 1990s have been likened to Fathers Ted Crilly, Jack Hackett and Dougal Maguire, with some justification. One problem may be that curiosity about religion/the supernatural can easily shade into pantheism and the occult, especially given the popularity of occult themes in popular culture and assisted by cathechetical ignorance which keeps dabblers - and genuine religious seekers - from realising in time the full implications of what they are getting into. Occultists, including far-rightists, can be very clever at using Catholic symbolism and language to cover a radically different meaning. This is not a new thing; you can find it in WB Yeats for example.Now, folks, we need to talk about Rome. There is nothing in the air of the Eternal City which keeps it pure from heresy and another host of clerical failings. Priests who have come through Rome are not necessarily any better than others. Next time, you here the German hierarchy being slated as progressive, remember most of them have been through that powerhouse called the Germanicum, the German-Hungarian College in Rome. The Irish Augustinian and Franciscan provinces are almost entirely made up of Gregorian University graduates. And a disproportionately number of bishops and senior administrators in Ireland have come through the Pontifical Irish College. So take note, take stock and use this as a foundation for any discussion.
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Post by assisi on Oct 26, 2021 19:01:34 GMT
I think the Boomers are a general problem. The secular boomers as much as the religious. If not actually the soixantehuitards in France (or the analogous achtundsechsiger in Germany, of which Pope Benedict had a lot to say), they were the generation that admired them and strove to emulate them. As this generation reacted to the Europe of the Second World War, in their minds the Europe (and western world) that created the conditions which brought about the two world wars (not implausibly), and they wanted change. The Second Vatican Council and its interpretation and implementation is very much part of this battle ground. Many traditional writers (especially among the French and those influenced by them) emphasise, not always convincingly, the impact of the French Revolution on the Council. French Revolution and Enlightenment certainly did make an impact, but not necessarily a decisive influence. Apologists admired by traditionalists today such as Chesterton and Belloc were at the very least ambivalent about the Revolution. The War and its aftermath were different - these were a decisive influence. One consequence, which perhaps came to the fore in the 1960s rather than from 1945, was hatred of the past. A belief that one could rebuild everything from the year dot. And the past was denigrated. From an Irish point of view this came late, and when it came, it came with a bang. Germany was going through a crisis as the nation was on trial. German Catholicism, though not of itself responsible for National Socialism (if anything the Nazi vote was uniformly at it's lowest in the Catholic regions of Germany), saw a new culture emerge were both religion and nationality were subject to intense questioning. I would probably agree with Hibernicus to a large extent about how Irish nationalism was celebrated up to and including 1966, but from the onset of the troubles in 1969, Ireland like Germany beforehand was initiated into a culture where both religion and patriotism were suddenly subject to a lot of introspective self-flagellation. Of particular relevance is the new catechesis in the schools, which is at least a half a century old these days. I won't for a second say the old system was always best practice, but at least the older generation knew their faith. As Assisi says, parents were dissuaded from 'confusing' the children with what they learned. And as Benedict said in a manner pertinent to this thread, the candidates for the priesthood weren't miraculously exempt from the appalling catechesis - they actually began in seminary with a lower level of knowledge than their predecessors. I once heard two clerical students, well advanced in their theological studies struggling to name the ten commandments. As it happens these were Dominicans (in the 1980s). This wouldn't have happened in the less academic seminaries twenty years before this. Dr Éanna Johnson has highlighted this deficit time and time again and if you spoke to him personally, he would pull no punches in naming names responsible. Anne-Louise Gilligan and Catherine Zappone are two. But among the less well known are many of those who have left the priesthood, religious life and even the Church herself. In terms of practice, Father Zuhlsdorf mentions Friday penance. We are still supposed to keep it to some degree, in case you don't know (most people don't). Abstinence from flesh meat is not required, but it is the ordinary form of doing penance. You may substitute an extraordinary form on your own, like attending Mass, saying the rosary, abstaining from alcohol or doing the stations of the cross, even giving alms. The point is the onus is on you to know what you are doing if you are not abstaining from fleshmeat. Most Catholics, even most Church-going Catholics, are going to greet this with a "Whhaaa...?" (excuse the Dublin accent; it's the one I know best). It is unknown. But how did Friday penance make an exit in the first place? It was rumoured, plausibly, that a lot of well-heeled US Catholics petitioned Paul VI as they were embarrassed on front of their non-Catholic friends (interestingly, if you were a guest in a non-Catholic household, you are dispensated from the obligation to abstain). The fact is that this relaxation of rules hit the Catholic identity more strongly than the dropping of Latin in the Mass as it came right into the Catholic kitchen. And the fact it happened around 1968 meant it generated the expectation that the Catholic norms on artificial contraception would be changed, which didn't happen. I once spoke about the Friday penance of a former diocesan clerical student (Maynooth), who was surprised and said that this was not marked in Maynooth. I doubt if it was in the menus in many seminaries world wide. Since I mention Paul VI, I must bring another area up, not just the liturgy but the artistic expression of Catholicism. Paul was impressed by a group of French and Italian intellectuals who were highly cultured and sought philosophical and aesthetic departure very much in the context of the times. These people were themselves very tasteful and reacted greatly against some of the kitsch of the past. Of course, modern art has its own interesting twists and turns: Empty Frames The trouble was that the dynamics of exaggerated ultramontanism plus universal careerism added to a type of clericalism kicked in. This meant that rather than having a modern aesthetic taking shape, you had a lot of material of genuine artistic value destroyed to be replaced by modernist kitsch largely to clerics either climbing the career ladder or who wanted to show they were in charge. To most of the ACP, clericalism was something that was associated with the pre-conciliar generation and the young fogeys who admire them. It can't possibly apply to them, can it? These people never try to look in the mirror and evaluate who they might have repelled. Some people might say that Pope Francis needs to do. We can also look at the condition of the seminaries themselves, which have operated on a scale of self-destruction somewhere between 1 and 10 over the years. The problem with the publication Good Bye, Good Men! was that it was almost obsessively concerned with offences against chastity, when there was so much more going on. Let me begin by saying what shocked me the most. Two students in Maynooth in the 1980s told me that many clerical students in their days in junior house were routinely playing with ouija boards and indulging in other occultic activity. When the first commandment is gone, the other nine wear thin. But rather than focus on commission, we can look at ommission. Institutions strongly favour time servers, people who professionally keep out of trouble without achieving anything worthwhile. Within the Augustinians, a trio of class mates ordained in the 1990s have been likened to Fathers Ted Crilly, Jack Hackett and Dougal Maguire, with some justification. Now, folks, we need to talk about Rome. There is nothing in the air of the Eternal City which keeps it pure from heresy and another host of clerical failings. Priests who have come through Rome are not necessarily any better than others. Next time, you here the German hierarchy being slated as progressive, remember most of them have been through that powerhouse called the Germanicum, the German-Hungarian College in Rome. The Irish Augustinian and Franciscan provinces are almost entirely made up of Gregorian University graduates. And a disproportionately number of bishops and senior administrators in Ireland have come through the Pontifical Irish College. So take note, take stock and use this as a foundation for any discussion. Undoubtedly the two world wars had an effect in pushing people and governments away from ideological ideas and movements towards a kind of generic, non-particular mode of existence exemplified by bureaucratic globalist organisations like the United Nations. That said , there does seem to be something else going on. There does seem to be an undercurrent of rebellion from young people in the West that theoretically should not have happened. It shouldn’t have happened because, for example in the America of the 1950s this was a time of stability, of suburban comfort, picket fences and apple pie. This type of settled lifestyle should have been an antidote to the trauma of the world wars. Similarly in the bigger countries of Europe the worst hardships of the second world war were over and a new comfortable normality was emerging, especially for the middle classes. Post war America is often quoted as the exemplar of the settled family lifestyle. James Hitchcock, writing in Crisis Magazine 1992, of the 1950s American popular sitcom ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ (Nelson) noted that ‘ there was no sin in the Nelsons’s world, merely misunderstandings, an endearing cowardice in a few small things, and some innocent conflicts of ego. Everyone was basically good, which was the reason no one needed to attend church. Redemption was far too harsh and portentous a word to describe the need of the Nelsons to extricate themselves from the mild dilemmas they were caught in each week’. So while 50s suburbia brought a material and neighbourly prosperity, the more personally challenging tenets of Christianity, such as sin and judgement, were beginning to be discarded and a type of spiritual indifference was setting in. There was less and less spiritual or moral backbone to this idyll. In Europe something similar was happening. A journalist Guy Sorman looking back to when he was a student at the time of the 1968 riots in Paris described the prevalent feeling : ‘The ennui was oppressive. The spirit of the times had been grasped with prophetic insight by an editorialist from Le Monde, which was then our Bible. The title was: “France is bored” ‘. For the young students De Gaulle ‘ had established a sense of comfort based on economic prosperity, peaceful borders, and a conformist sensibility.’ In contrast to this comfort and conformity the French students were excited by the protests from elsewhere such as civil rights in the US, protests against the Vietnam war and the attraction of communism in China. Peter Hitchens recalls his youth in England at the time of 1968 riots in France. He felt seduced by the music, the psychedelic colours, the revolt against the greyness and restraint of English life but notes ‘And we were so safe. These who we blamed for repressing us had brought us up in a world so secure and insulated from sad and violent events, that it never occurred to us that our behaviour would have any worse consequences than a mild bruise, or a headache, or some brief tears, or the occasional broken window.’ Indeed one of the main catalysts of the 1968 student riots in Paris arose from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a left wing student activist, heckling a Gaullist Minister for Youth because he, Cohn-Bendit, was against sex segregation in the dormitories of the Nanterrre campus in Paris and he wished for easier access. This type of demand seems more the action of an entitled individual rather than a man protesting some serious civil rights issues. Interestingly, Cohn-Bendit would later be credibly accused of defending paedophilia in some of his writings in the 1970s and 1980s. Post World War 2 it seems that comfort and security were not enough to placate the children of the baby boom era as they grew up. They had almost all their material needs catered for but still felt restless and bored. They were looking for some sort of utopia where there was no restraint placed upon their pursuit of pleasure and freedom. This pursuit was doomed to failure since they had grounded their actions in the material and secular world. The lack of God and a higher realm meant that their utopia quickly became a purely physical combination of ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’, and could never address the spiritual and moral longings of man. As St Augustine said ‘ You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.’ No material or self-centred initiative will ever remove this restlessness we all experience, even at those times when we feel we should be most fulfilled and happy. Self-actualisation, self-realisation, self-discovery, personal wellness, or whatever current fad may be in vogue, such pursuits may temporarily provide some satisfaction but they will never be the answer. Restlessness is to be expected in our mortal lives, but we can cope with this better knowing that there exists a higher realm where we will no longer feel restless. As the world becomes more materially affluent, particularly in the West, this restlessness will become more acute since we will have achieved maximum wealth and leisure but will still be feeling spiritually empty and unfulfilled. It will hit us as a frustrating paradox that will cause pain, frustration and anger. The restlessness of the people, particularly the young, will look for outlets and causes to vent their frustration. This will be exploited by the powerful and nefarious and the young will be mistakenly told that political and social solutions will fix everything. Unless each individual understands the source of their restlessness, in a longing for the afterlife, there will be many who will be led astray and end up as cannon fodder for those who want to incite chaos for their own purposes.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 27, 2021 8:30:40 GMT
I think the Boomers are a general problem. The secular boomers as much as the religious. If not actually the soixantehuitards in France (or the analogous achtundsechsiger in Germany, of which Pope Benedict had a lot to say), they were the generation that admired them and strove to emulate them. As this generation reacted to the Europe of the Second World War, in their minds the Europe (and western world) that created the conditions which brought about the two world wars (not implausibly), and they wanted change. The Second Vatican Council and its interpretation and implementation is very much part of this battle ground. Many traditional writers (especially among the French and those influenced by them) emphasise, not always convincingly, the impact of the French Revolution on the Council. French Revolution and Enlightenment certainly did make an impact, but not necessarily a decisive influence. Apologists admired by traditionalists today such as Chesterton and Belloc were at the very least ambivalent about the Revolution. The War and its aftermath were different - these were a decisive influence. One consequence, which perhaps came to the fore in the 1960s rather than from 1945, was hatred of the past. A belief that one could rebuild everything from the year dot. And the past was denigrated. From an Irish point of view this came late, and when it came, it came with a bang. Germany was going through a crisis as the nation was on trial. German Catholicism, though not of itself responsible for National Socialism (if anything the Nazi vote was uniformly at it's lowest in the Catholic regions of Germany), saw a new culture emerge were both religion and nationality were subject to intense questioning. I would probably agree with Hibernicus to a large extent about how Irish nationalism was celebrated up to and including 1966, but from the onset of the troubles in 1969, Ireland like Germany beforehand was initiated into a culture where both religion and patriotism were suddenly subject to a lot of introspective self-flagellation. Of particular relevance is the new catechesis in the schools, which is at least a half a century old these days. I won't for a second say the old system was always best practice, but at least the older generation knew their faith. As Assisi says, parents were dissuaded from 'confusing' the children with what they learned. And as Benedict said in a manner pertinent to this thread, the candidates for the priesthood weren't miraculously exempt from the appalling catechesis - they actually began in seminary with a lower level of knowledge than their predecessors. I once heard two clerical students, well advanced in their theological studies struggling to name the ten commandments. As it happens these were Dominicans (in the 1980s). This wouldn't have happened in the less academic seminaries twenty years before this. Dr Éanna Johnson has highlighted this deficit time and time again and if you spoke to him personally, he would pull no punches in naming names responsible. Anne-Louise Gilligan and Catherine Zappone are two. But among the less well known are many of those who have left the priesthood, religious life and even the Church herself. In terms of practice, Father Zuhlsdorf mentions Friday penance. We are still supposed to keep it to some degree, in case you don't know (most people don't). Abstinence from flesh meat is not required, but it is the ordinary form of doing penance. You may substitute an extraordinary form on your own, like attending Mass, saying the rosary, abstaining from alcohol or doing the stations of the cross, even giving alms. The point is the onus is on you to know what you are doing if you are not abstaining from fleshmeat. Most Catholics, even most Church-going Catholics, are going to greet this with a "Whhaaa...?" (excuse the Dublin accent; it's the one I know best). It is unknown. But how did Friday penance make an exit in the first place? It was rumoured, plausibly, that a lot of well-heeled US Catholics petitioned Paul VI as they were embarrassed on front of their non-Catholic friends (interestingly, if you were a guest in a non-Catholic household, you are dispensated from the obligation to abstain). The fact is that this relaxation of rules hit the Catholic identity more strongly than the dropping of Latin in the Mass as it came right into the Catholic kitchen. And the fact it happened around 1968 meant it generated the expectation that the Catholic norms on artificial contraception would be changed, which didn't happen. I once spoke about the Friday penance of a former diocesan clerical student (Maynooth), who was surprised and said that this was not marked in Maynooth. I doubt if it was in the menus in many seminaries world wide. Since I mention Paul VI, I must bring another area up, not just the liturgy but the artistic expression of Catholicism. Paul was impressed by a group of French and Italian intellectuals who were highly cultured and sought philosophical and aesthetic departure very much in the context of the times. These people were themselves very tasteful and reacted greatly against some of the kitsch of the past. Of course, modern art has its own interesting twists and turns: Empty Frames The trouble was that the dynamics of exaggerated ultramontanism plus universal careerism added to a type of clericalism kicked in. This meant that rather than having a modern aesthetic taking shape, you had a lot of material of genuine artistic value destroyed to be replaced by modernist kitsch largely to clerics either climbing the career ladder or who wanted to show they were in charge. To most of the ACP, clericalism was something that was associated with the pre-conciliar generation and the young fogeys who admire them. It can't possibly apply to them, can it? These people never try to look in the mirror and evaluate who they might have repelled. Some people might say that Pope Francis needs to do. We can also look at the condition of the seminaries themselves, which have operated on a scale of self-destruction somewhere between 1 and 10 over the years. The problem with the publication Good Bye, Good Men! was that it was almost obsessively concerned with offences against chastity, when there was so much more going on. Let me begin by saying what shocked me the most. Two students in Maynooth in the 1980s told me that many clerical students in their days in junior house were routinely playing with ouija boards and indulging in other occultic activity. When the first commandment is gone, the other nine wear thin. But rather than focus on commission, we can look at ommission. Institutions strongly favour time servers, people who professionally keep out of trouble without achieving anything worthwhile. Within the Augustinians, a trio of class mates ordained in the 1990s have been likened to Fathers Ted Crilly, Jack Hackett and Dougal Maguire, with some justification. Now, folks, we need to talk about Rome. There is nothing in the air of the Eternal City which keeps it pure from heresy and another host of clerical failings. Priests who have come through Rome are not necessarily any better than others. Next time, you here the German hierarchy being slated as progressive, remember most of them have been through that powerhouse called the Germanicum, the German-Hungarian College in Rome. The Irish Augustinian and Franciscan provinces are almost entirely made up of Gregorian University graduates. And a disproportionately number of bishops and senior administrators in Ireland have come through the Pontifical Irish College. So take note, take stock and use this as a foundation for any discussion. Undoubtedly the two world wars had an effect in pushing people and governments away from ideological ideas and movements towards a kind of generic, non-particular mode of existence exemplified by bureaucratic globalist organisations like the United Nations. That said , there does seem to be something else going on. There does seem to be an undercurrent of rebellion from young people in the West that theoretically should not have happened. It shouldn’t have happened because, for example in the America of the 1950s this was a time of stability, of suburban comfort, picket fences and apple pie. This type of settled lifestyle should have been an antidote to the trauma of the world wars. Similarly in the bigger countries of Europe the worst hardships of the second world war were over and a new comfortable normality was emerging, especially for the middle classes. Post war America is often quoted as the exemplar of the settled family lifestyle. James Hitchcock, writing in Crisis Magazine 1992, of the 1950s American popular sitcom ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ (Nelson) noted that ‘ there was no sin in the Nelsons’s world, merely misunderstandings, an endearing cowardice in a few small things, and some innocent conflicts of ego. Everyone was basically good, which was the reason no one needed to attend church. Redemption was far too harsh and portentous a word to describe the need of the Nelsons to extricate themselves from the mild dilemmas they were caught in each week’. So while 50s suburbia brought a material and neighbourly prosperity, the more personally challenging tenets of Christianity, such as sin and judgement, were beginning to be discarded and a type of spiritual indifference was setting in. There was less and less spiritual or moral backbone to this idyll. In Europe something similar was happening. A journalist Guy Sorman looking back to when he was a student at the time of the 1968 riots in Paris described the prevalent feeling : ‘The ennui was oppressive. The spirit of the times had been grasped with prophetic insight by an editorialist from Le Monde, which was then our Bible. The title was: “France is bored” ‘. For the young students De Gaulle ‘ had established a sense of comfort based on economic prosperity, peaceful borders, and a conformist sensibility.’ In contrast to this comfort and conformity the French students were excited by the protests from elsewhere such as civil rights in the US, protests against the Vietnam war and the attraction of communism in China. Peter Hitchens recalls his youth in England at the time of 1968 riots in France. He felt seduced by the music, the psychedelic colours, the revolt against the greyness and restraint of English life but notes ‘And we were so safe. These who we blamed for repressing us had brought us up in a world so secure and insulated from sad and violent events, that it never occurred to us that our behaviour would have any worse consequences than a mild bruise, or a headache, or some brief tears, or the occasional broken window.’ Indeed one of the main catalysts of the 1968 student riots in Paris arose from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a left wing student activist, heckling a Gaullist Minister for Youth because he, Cohn-Bendit, was against sex segregation in the dormitories of the Nanterrre campus in Paris and he wished for easier access. This type of demand seems more the action of an entitled individual rather than a man protesting some serious civil rights issues. Interestingly, Cohn-Bendit would later be credibly accused of defending paedophilia in some of his writings in the 1970s and 1980s. Post World War 2 it seems that comfort and security were not enough to placate the children of the baby boom era as they grew up. They had almost all their material needs catered for but still felt restless and bored. They were looking for some sort of utopia where there was no restraint placed upon their pursuit of pleasure and freedom. This pursuit was doomed to failure since they had grounded their actions in the material and secular world. The lack of God and a higher realm meant that their utopia quickly became a purely physical combination of ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’, and could never address the spiritual and moral longings of man. As St Augustine said ‘ You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.’ No material or self-centred initiative will ever remove this restlessness we all experience, even at those times when we feel we should be most fulfilled and happy. Self-actualisation, self-realisation, self-discovery, personal wellness, or whatever current fad may be in vogue, such pursuits may temporarily provide some satisfaction but they will never be the answer. Restlessness is to be expected in our mortal lives, but we can cope with this better knowing that there exists a higher realm where we will no longer feel restless. As the world becomes more materially affluent, particularly in the West, this restlessness will become more acute since we will have achieved maximum wealth and leisure but will still be feeling spiritually empty and unfulfilled. It will hit us as a frustrating paradox that will cause pain, frustration and anger. The restlessness of the people, particularly the young, will look for outlets and causes to vent their frustration. This will be exploited by the powerful and nefarious and the young will be mistakenly told that political and social solutions will fix everything. Unless each individual understands the source of their restlessness, in a longing for the afterlife, there will be many who will be led astray and end up as cannon fodder for those who want to incite chaos for their own purposes. But there was a revival of organized religion in America after World War Two, as opposed to Europe where the opposite happened.
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Post by assisi on Oct 27, 2021 16:30:28 GMT
Undoubtedly the two world wars had an effect in pushing people and governments away from ideological ideas and movements towards a kind of generic, non-particular mode of existence exemplified by bureaucratic globalist organisations like the United Nations. That said , there does seem to be something else going on. There does seem to be an undercurrent of rebellion from young people in the West that theoretically should not have happened. It shouldn’t have happened because, for example in the America of the 1950s this was a time of stability, of suburban comfort, picket fences and apple pie. This type of settled lifestyle should have been an antidote to the trauma of the world wars. Similarly in the bigger countries of Europe the worst hardships of the second world war were over and a new comfortable normality was emerging, especially for the middle classes. Post war America is often quoted as the exemplar of the settled family lifestyle. James Hitchcock, writing in Crisis Magazine 1992, of the 1950s American popular sitcom ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ (Nelson) noted that ‘ there was no sin in the Nelsons’s world, merely misunderstandings, an endearing cowardice in a few small things, and some innocent conflicts of ego. Everyone was basically good, which was the reason no one needed to attend church. Redemption was far too harsh and portentous a word to describe the need of the Nelsons to extricate themselves from the mild dilemmas they were caught in each week’. So while 50s suburbia brought a material and neighbourly prosperity, the more personally challenging tenets of Christianity, such as sin and judgement, were beginning to be discarded and a type of spiritual indifference was setting in. There was less and less spiritual or moral backbone to this idyll. In Europe something similar was happening. A journalist Guy Sorman looking back to when he was a student at the time of the 1968 riots in Paris described the prevalent feeling : ‘The ennui was oppressive. The spirit of the times had been grasped with prophetic insight by an editorialist from Le Monde, which was then our Bible. The title was: “France is bored” ‘. For the young students De Gaulle ‘ had established a sense of comfort based on economic prosperity, peaceful borders, and a conformist sensibility.’ In contrast to this comfort and conformity the French students were excited by the protests from elsewhere such as civil rights in the US, protests against the Vietnam war and the attraction of communism in China. Peter Hitchens recalls his youth in England at the time of 1968 riots in France. He felt seduced by the music, the psychedelic colours, the revolt against the greyness and restraint of English life but notes ‘And we were so safe. These who we blamed for repressing us had brought us up in a world so secure and insulated from sad and violent events, that it never occurred to us that our behaviour would have any worse consequences than a mild bruise, or a headache, or some brief tears, or the occasional broken window.’ Indeed one of the main catalysts of the 1968 student riots in Paris arose from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a left wing student activist, heckling a Gaullist Minister for Youth because he, Cohn-Bendit, was against sex segregation in the dormitories of the Nanterrre campus in Paris and he wished for easier access. This type of demand seems more the action of an entitled individual rather than a man protesting some serious civil rights issues. Interestingly, Cohn-Bendit would later be credibly accused of defending paedophilia in some of his writings in the 1970s and 1980s. Post World War 2 it seems that comfort and security were not enough to placate the children of the baby boom era as they grew up. They had almost all their material needs catered for but still felt restless and bored. They were looking for some sort of utopia where there was no restraint placed upon their pursuit of pleasure and freedom. This pursuit was doomed to failure since they had grounded their actions in the material and secular world. The lack of God and a higher realm meant that their utopia quickly became a purely physical combination of ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’, and could never address the spiritual and moral longings of man. As St Augustine said ‘ You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.’ No material or self-centred initiative will ever remove this restlessness we all experience, even at those times when we feel we should be most fulfilled and happy. Self-actualisation, self-realisation, self-discovery, personal wellness, or whatever current fad may be in vogue, such pursuits may temporarily provide some satisfaction but they will never be the answer. Restlessness is to be expected in our mortal lives, but we can cope with this better knowing that there exists a higher realm where we will no longer feel restless. As the world becomes more materially affluent, particularly in the West, this restlessness will become more acute since we will have achieved maximum wealth and leisure but will still be feeling spiritually empty and unfulfilled. It will hit us as a frustrating paradox that will cause pain, frustration and anger. The restlessness of the people, particularly the young, will look for outlets and causes to vent their frustration. This will be exploited by the powerful and nefarious and the young will be mistakenly told that political and social solutions will fix everything. Unless each individual understands the source of their restlessness, in a longing for the afterlife, there will be many who will be led astray and end up as cannon fodder for those who want to incite chaos for their own purposes. But there was a revival of organized religion in America after World War Two, as opposed to Europe where the opposite happened. I suppose my emphasis was not on religious revival or not, rather that when (secular) middle class Europeans and Americans reached a certain level of affluence they ought to have cherished the peace but instead were still restless and looked for silly revolutions to cure the ennui. As regards revivals, the 1950s did indeed give rise to a revival in church attendance in the UK. I don't know about the rest of Europe.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Oct 27, 2021 17:55:02 GMT
There was a general religious revival in Europe after the Second World War which contributed to the spirit of optimism around the Second Vatican Council.
Secularism is working on different tracks in Europe/Commonwealth and the US and if the religious are not on the same wavelength in and out of the US, the secularists definitely are. A lot of our influence doesn't come from European secularists, but rather from the US Democrats, particularly those of Irish origin.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Oct 27, 2021 20:42:20 GMT
1968 is a case in point year. You had the student riots in Paris which are proverbial. You had similar riots in Chicago against the Vietnam War which cause chaos for the Democrats. You had the Prague Spring. And you had the reaction to Humanae Vitae. I am not sure if it was me or someone else that made the connection between the change in the Friday Abstinence rules prior to the encyclical, but dropping Friday fish very much gave the impression that the bar on artificial contraception was about to go. Oh, and this pressure on Pope Paul came from the United States rather than Europe. But the point is that this was the era of stuff like the "Summer of Love" and it was equally represented on both sides of the Atlantic and it has trickle down effects on this country to this day. In vocations loss too.
But let's concentrate on something immediate and home grown. The dilution of catechesis and vocations free fall. If kids don't know what they believe, how do you expect them to make a life long commitment to it, as a priest or religious?
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 31, 2021 22:46:12 GMT
Part of the reason for the post-war religious revival was a sense that what had just happened was so horrible that something good must come out of it in recompense, and that prayer and penitence were needed. (I have seen this applied to the growth of Opus Dei in Spain after the Civil War, and to the high-profile religiosity of Ireland in the decades immediately after independence, including the emergence of the Legion of Mary. In both Britain and the US, and probably elsewhere, part of the post-war vocations surge involved military veterans who were searching for meaning and used to institutional life through their military service.) There was also a reaction against Nazi hostility to Christianity, and against the atheism of the Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union.) Reasons for its eventual collapse would include (a) it tended to mobilise existing Catholic/Protestant populations rather than reconverting secularised ones. (b) The decline of the sense of imminent apocalypse and the spread of consumerism and suburbanisation (and the urbanisation of rural Europe) which undercut local religious identities. (c) The decline of the European empires = and the horrific violence involved in trying to hold onto them - undercut the sense that imperial power reflected divine favour. (This was found even in France where secular politicians had been quite willing to make use of Catholicism in the colonies to reinforce their rule - as one of them said, 'laicite is not an export commodity'.) (d) The widespread awareness of the sheer horror and destruction of war (note how many post-45 Hollywood movies have a subtext which appeals to war veterans but would not have been detected by non-veterans, and the frequent complaint by Vietnam veterans that the older generation kept them naive on this) and the consciousness that the appeal to religion was often a means to avoid coming to terms with what had been done under the fascist regimes or in subsequent conflicts. (d) The church apparatus, and the ostensibly Christian political leaders, turned out to be more worldly and cynical than their rhetoric implied. Part of the rationale for Vatican II and subsequent changes was that there was a sense that things had already gone wrong and there was a need to double down on internal church reform - this might not have been so strong if the Council had been held earlier when society was more subdued and conformist (as Pius XII considered doing) or later when the breakdown of the postwar consensus was more apparent and there might have been more awareness of ni h-e la na gaoithe la na scolb (you don't thatch the house on a windy day).
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