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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 27, 2013 8:43:40 GMT
The celeb culture has been in place for a very long time, though it is becoming more pervasive. It goes hand in hand with consumerism.
Our PP was talking about the names of children he had to baptise and told us that the most unusual he came across as a curate in the midlands was "Jayer". He asked the family how it was pronounced, and they answered "You know, Jay Orr". He answered "You mean J.R.?" They affirmed this. (This had to be over twenty years ago while Dallas was still on the televisions). He asked them did they know J.R. were actually initials which stood for John Ross and then asked them would they like to think about it.
There is a saying which was common in south county Dublin about something being more to be pitied than laughed at, and I think this is a case like this here.
The same point comes in regard to Khaleesi. In a few years time, the HBO series in question will be forgotten as it will be replaced by something worse. But at some time, several little girls will be asked where their name came from. There are worse things in the world than being named Mary.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 29, 2013 20:23:58 GMT
Interesting piece from one of the McCamley blogs about a number of Columban Fathers (five of them Irish-born) killed by communists during the Korean War, whose Causes for canonisation have been introduced among a larger group of Modern MArtyrs of Korea. HAd anyone on this board heard of them before? I hadn't. Just another example of how our modern missionary heritage - the heirs of St Columbanus and St Aidan - is overlooked these days. Ask their intercession for our country. fatherdirector.blogspot.ie/2013/08/new-irish-martyrs-cause-just-opened.html
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 29, 2013 20:32:20 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 30, 2013 11:01:29 GMT
It amazes me what dioceses and religious congregations promote. The Dominicans are happy to retain Gerard Dunne as a full time vocations director. He's been doing it a long time and gets results (but I know at least one candidate who thought him amateurish). Many dioceses don't have that luxury - they need men in parishes and most diocesan clergy I know are over-worked. The religious orders don't deploy the men to do this - so it might be said that one element in Fr Dunne's success is that he doesn't have a lot of competition from other religious orders at present - you might say that the choice is either the Dominicans or nothing at all. So I wonder if everything is as cut and dried as he presents here.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 30, 2013 20:53:29 GMT
One point that he does get spot on, though, is that there is a definite reluctance to promote vocations to the priesthood and religious life per se, lest this be seen as implying they are somehow "superior". Hence vocations promotion events often give equal prominence to the vocations to married life, lay singledom, etc, - a tactic which obscures the distinctive call to the priesthood and religious life. What does strike me as impressive about Fr Dunne is that he is prepared to make criticisms like these in public fora. Apart from the liberal/radical malcontents, there is a reluctance to discuss church affairs in public or to admit that not everything in the garden is rosy. Perhaps it is because we are a small and clubbable country where everyone knows everyone else, perhaps it is just because we seem uncomfortable with real intellectual disagreement/debate.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 30, 2013 22:19:45 GMT
The funny thing is, I remember a Director of Vocations who had been very successful- I don't remember whether it was in England or America-- saying that part of his success stemmed from taking this more "holistic" approach to vocations-- that is, that young people attending a vocations event would not feel they were being pushed towards the priesthood but that they were being encouraged to discern their vocation whatever it might be. I think it was in England, actually.
But I think everyone would have to agree that there just is not a focus on vocations. We wish for more vocations in an abstract way but it never occurs to us that THIS young man or young woman might be encouraged to think of becoming a priest or a nun or a brother.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 30, 2013 22:20:43 GMT
I have been wondering if the lack of enthusiasm about vocations comes from an expectation that married clergy will be introduced soon and we will be into a whole new ballgame then.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 31, 2013 18:01:59 GMT
I can see the point of the vocations director you mentioned. In the pre-Vatican II era there was a strong tendency for secondary schools run by religious orders to take a hard-sell approach in encouraging pupils who thought they had vocations (indeed this was a principal reason why orders ran schools), and in the long run this tended to produce resentment (especially among some of those who took up the offer and a couple of decades down the line wondered if they had really decided for themselves or simply succumbed to pressure). There may be a distinction between the approach to take AT a vocations event (which is supposed to be about discernment, not about "selling" vocations) and the approach to take in persuading people to attend a vocations event in the first place - if someone is not going to seriously consider the possibility of a vocation to priesthood or religious life, why go at all? I was very impressed by an article I saw about 2002 - unfortunately I can't find it on the Web - in which Archbishop Charles Chaput (then of Denver, now of Philadelphia) said that his success in promoting vocations simply came down to his willingness to ask likely candidates directly whether they would consider a vocation to the priesthood. MAny of them had never even considered/been asked to consider such an option, and many of these decided to follow it up. The expectation of married clergy might work in the other direction - there are certainly instances of people like the writer Michael Hrding getting ordained in the expectation that celibacy would soon be abolished and then feeling betrayed when it wasn't (such people should have been seriously asked to consider this possibility at some point when they were in seminary.) I actually think the lack of enthusiasm in promoting vocations come in some instances from something deeper - hostility to the whole concept of priesthood and religious life as they have traditionally existed, and a view that priests and religious ought not to be differentiated from the laity because this promotes clericalism and authoritarianism - certainly some of the posters on the ACP blog, both lay and clerical, seem to have adopted something very close to the classical Protestant view of sacramental priesthood as an unscriptural usurpation derived from greed for power. Both Fr Dunne and Br. Andrew O'Connell, the Presentation Brothers vocations director who also writes extensively about his work, have mentioned meeting vocations directors for other religious orders who responded to American evidence that orders which are most successful in attracting vocations are those which revive certain traditional features of religious life (living in common, wearing habits, sharing a common apostolate etc) by saying that they would rather their order died out than that it should go back to such practices. That does suggest a very worrying attitude (I suspect it is based on the view that religious life should be about self-fulfilment and that traditional concepts of asceticism and death to the self are positively harmful and unhealthy.) One point that might be made is that pre-Vatican II religious and priestly life was much more demanding on individuals (sometimes in very unhealthy ways, it must be remembered) and from various scraps of comment I have picked up, I suspect that one driving force of the changes was a desire from priests themselves to take things easier (e.g. relaxing the requirement for a yearly retreat)and relax the traditional disciplines. (One source of this attitude IMHO was that the disciplines were not examined and updated from time to time, so such concepts as priests never going to the theatre and forbidding seminarians to read newspapers were put on a pedestal along with the rest - then when some things were rejected everything else went with them, whereas if there had been gradual change and adaptation to circumstances there might not have been such a violent reaction.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 25, 2014 21:46:14 GMT
Supertradmum has a very odd post saying that the undermining of Irish Catholicism goes back about 70 years - Pre-Vatican II - and that it was due to "the influence of socialism and marxism on the new Republican government". I wonder what exactly she - or this priest - has in mind? Remember that Supertradmom has a very expansive definition of socialism and marxism (to put it mildly). If the 70 years is meant to be taken more or less literally, it could be a reference to Dr Noel Browne and the Mother and Child Scheme. If it is meant more vaguely, "the republican government" could refer to the De Valera government which came to power in 1932, or even to the independence struggle. (If you took a really rigorist view, it could refer to the post-1879 Land LEague, which was described as communist at the time by conservatives because it restricted the property rights of landlords.) All these were much more about economic populism (with both good and bad results) than marxism or socialism per se. What really strikes me about this is the blanket denunciation of "marxism or socialism" and the failure to ask why a poor peasant-dominated society would be disenchanted with purist laissez-faire economics, or why there was a demand for state-funded healthcare in the first place. Assuming the problem didn't exist is the high road to nowhere. supertradmum-etheldredasplace.blogspot.ie/2014/01/lies-about-ireland.html
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 27, 2014 23:19:03 GMT
Now HERE is what strikes me as a very problematic and misguided article from CRISIS on vocations promotion, in which the author (whose previous post, I think I may have linked for discussion in another thread) declares that religious life is superior to every other state of life, that since it's supernatural there is no such thing as a natural attraction to it, and therefore the candidate's own feelings about it are completely irrelevant. This seems to me suspiciously like a recipe for mother's vocations, hard-sell to vulnerable adolescents (on the grounds that if religious life is the highest state, steering or even manipulating them towards it is the best thing that could be done for them and their feelings don't matter) and the like. Some people seem completely incurious about why so many pre-conciliar vocations went haywire. www.crisismagazine.com/2014/sacrificing-religious-life-a-reply-to-criticsDoes anyone else out there think this passage is as dodgy as it seems to me? (If you think I am quoting it out of context, check the link above: EXTRACT ...Although this logic preserves desire as a necessary precondition for choosing the evangelical counsels, it does not support searching one’s desires as a method of vocational discernment. In fact, it does the opposite. According to the above logic of desire, if the good obtained by giving up earthly things is greater than the good of keeping them, then we should desire to give up earthly things. The Church teaches unequivocally that the spiritual good obtained by giving up property, marriage, and one’s will is greater than the good of keeping these earthly things (Council of Trent, Session 24; Vita Consecrata, 32; Summa contra Gentiles, 130.3). Therefore, we should all have a strong desire to give up property, marriage, and our wills, in order to live the religious life. This spells trouble for any method of discernment that focuses on desire. If properly ordered desire is the guide to vocational discernment, then it looks like everyone ends up being called to the religious life. But not everyone is called. Thus, it seems that desire should not be the deciding factor in vocational discernment. This leads to a final objection. Because my article edges out desire-introspection from the process of discernment, it seems that I leave young Catholics without a viable method of discernment. In response to this objection, I would like to propose—to reintroduce—a very old method for discernment that has been pilloried and subsequently forgotten over past half-century. Here is the method: if you are able to live religious life, then do it... END ADDENDUM - And in a clarification on the comments thread the author states that celibate religious life is superior to married life because it frees from concupiscence and quotes St Thomas to that effect. Does the author really think that religious life automatically frees one from concupiscence - even the reluctant and pressurised? He can't have studied much history. Does he really think that married life is necessarily ordered towards sin (concupiscence is a sinful inclination)? Welcome to the Manichees.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 28, 2014 21:34:48 GMT
I agree Hibernicus.
And apparently, the rise in vocations in Britain have apparently come from the very opposite of the "hard sell"-- that is, having vocations events where young people are NOT being pushed towards the priesthood, or even feel they are being pushed, but are simply invited to discern their vocations whatever it might be.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 28, 2014 22:05:34 GMT
It's difficult to judge because descriptions of that sort are subjective, but the CRISIS writer has certainly gone too far in his reaction. Pressurised and prematurely-asserted vocations were a major problem of the pre-Vatican II Church, and his view contains no safeguards at all against such things, and indeed could be used to justify them. The comboxer who points out there are also temptations in the clerical/religious life (such as selfishness in those who don't have the obligation to support a family) is picking up on a very big hole in the Brother's position.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 29, 2014 13:17:25 GMT
Give up our will and marriage? I suppose they mean to put God's will first, though they probably could have phrased it better. As for marriage, I always liked this quote: ‘Come, come, Father, I have always heard that Jesus established seven sacraments. Now you come along and change everything. You tell me that he established six sacraments, and a trap!' - Pope Pius IX.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 29, 2014 22:54:27 GMT
Good point. I have since found out that the Brother's view that marriage inherently involves concupiscence and is thus flawed was actually held by many of the Fathers and is not Manichaean as I suggested. I do think, however, that there is something iffy about it and that Pius IX's comment is very much to the point. "Give up our will and marriage" was my, rather awkward, attempt to summarise the writer's view so he is not responsible for the phrasing.
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luke
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Post by luke on Jan 30, 2014 12:30:55 GMT
Tuam is reporting the highest interest in vocations to the priesthood than at any time in the last 20 years. They changed their approach to encouraging vocations in the last year or so and it appears to be bearing fruit.
They've been holding a series of meetings throughout the diocese and then invited those expressing curiousoty to dinners with priests who then give a positive (and honest) account of life in the priesthood.
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