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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 10, 2009 11:14:22 GMT
I must apologise for straying from the point.
The Galway priest in question was Fr Olan Rynne.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 11, 2009 10:06:55 GMT
Let's go back to the point of discussion. Ecumenism isn't dead. From the point of view of the Catholic Church it has re-focussed itself on the Orthodox churches. To even the theologically illiterate, this is more than logical, but as Hibernicus has pointed out, the Council wish of returning to patristic sources from scholasticism guided the Church this way.
This shows the divergence between official ecumenism (patient dialogue) and the pop ecumenism which is so close to Fr Lyng's heart, which has it intellectual roots in the encounter with modernity and which is driven by the Peace Process mentality here in Ireland. I believe that good old fashioned snobbery is an important aspect too - as they say in the US: Orthodoxy is the right religion professed by the wrong people, but Episcopalianism is the wrong religion professed by THE RIGHT PEOPLE.
By the way, the Father David O'Hanlon excoriated by Father Lyng is a patristic scholar.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 11, 2009 12:39:31 GMT
Ok - this seems to be the point of departure. Dialogue with the East, the Orthodox, is real ecumenism, fueled by the Second Vatican Council's mandate to return to patristics and Benedict's liturgical policy seems guided by this. Whether or not it is a lost cause depends very much on your expecations re: the outcome - but unification of Rome with Moscow or Constantinople is a long way off. Unity between Moscow and Constantinople is very fragile.
Then there is phoney or superficial ecumenism which is between, in particular, the Catholic and Anglican Churches. It is going nowhere. It is popular to blame Roman intransigance, but the Anglicans don't have much of a consensus among themselves and they have also moved away from the Catholic position of women in holy orders and homosexuals in the ministry. But the preference for this above the former is related to 'engagement with modernity' if not snobbery.
There are other Catholic-Protestant dialogues, notably Catholic-Lutheran dialogue which seems relatively more productive. But this version of ecumenism does seem to be a dead duck.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Aug 11, 2009 23:05:13 GMT
Then there is phoney or superficial ecumenism which is between, in particular, the Catholic and Anglican Churches. It is going nowhere. It is popular to blame Roman intransigance, but the Anglicans don't have much of a consensus among themselves and they have also moved away from the Catholic position of women in holy orders and homosexuals in the ministry. But the preference for this above the former is related to 'engagement with modernity' if not snobbery. There are other Catholic-Protestant dialogues, notably Catholic-Lutheran dialogue which seems relatively more productive. But this version of ecumenism does seem to be a dead duck. Yes but if you believe the Irish Times, Tablet etc it is the only game in town. Only "ecumenism" with white first-world sects matters.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 12, 2009 11:40:42 GMT
Quite right, Michael, the liberal clique don't have the self-awareness to see how first world and bourgeois their remedies are. With the discussion of liturgy, if you crossed out Latin in an attack on the Extraordinary form, you could insert any of the Sacral Tongues of the Orthodox Churches, or Hebrew (Judaism) or Classical Arabic (Islam) or Sanskrit (Hinduism) or a host of other sacred languages and the piece would look both sectarian and racist, but it is done in relation to the trad Mass with impunity because the only point of reference most people have is the Protestant service in the vernacular and facing the people.
Likewise with ecumenism - for most people here in Ireland and in the west in general, ecumenism means well-heeled Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians with good table manners rather than your unwashed Ukrainian who is very serious about his/her Orthodoxy or Eastern Catholicism. It is like taking the 'white man's burden' into a new millennium.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Aug 12, 2009 15:41:15 GMT
One might ask how relevant is ecumenism?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 13, 2009 13:38:12 GMT
It is relevant and important. There is much common cause among all the religious groups.
But if one were to look at the Islamic initiative in Christian Islamic dialogue, Prince Ghazi (of Jordan's) Common Word project - it is addressed to the Pope and an impressive list of Orthodox patriarchs and metropolitans, but the Protestant churches hardly get a look-in.
Does this tell us something?
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 17, 2009 10:59:23 GMT
They don't much care for unwashed evangelicals either (unless sometimes black churches, which can be patronised as ethnic expressions without any suggestion that the patroniser might have to consider joining them). A very striking example of the "white man's burden" occurred at the Anglicans' Lambeth conference some years ago, when American liberal bishops who normally advocate diluting the bits of Christianity they don't like when this can be presented as making it more accessible to the Third World, dismissed African bishops' opposition to sodomy by declaring that the Africans were only recently and superficially civilised. (I paraphrase freely).
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 17, 2009 13:59:07 GMT
I think I recall the Bishop Emeritus of New Jersey, Jack Spong, more or less refer to his Anglican brother bishops of the African provinces as witch doctors in respect of their attitudes to sodomy. Looks like white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism par excellence to me.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 19, 2009 12:14:39 GMT
IT was Bishop Spong I had in mind. The idea of ecumenism with Evangelicals and Pentecostals is not confined to liberals - there is a lot of it in America because on certain issues we have far more in common with them than with "mainline" protestants. The big problems are : They don't believe in the Church as a corporate body as distinct from a congregation of believers, so negotiating with them is like picking up mercury with a fork; they are very often anti-intellectual (e.g. young-earth creationism, pentecostal emphasis on direct divine inspiration to such an extent that scripture becomes secondary); they may agree with us on Trinitarianism and sexual morality, but their underlying mindset is very Protestant and they can easily lead the unwary down that path - I have heard of quite a few Marian-focused Catholic charismatics who become Protestant pentecostalists through their search for signs and wonders.
We do have to take them into account because they are the fstest-growing branch of Christianity, especially in the third World. Quite a few African Pentecostalist sects have arrived in Ireland with the new immigrant communities.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Aug 20, 2009 8:38:18 GMT
Yes, there is quite a lot of evidence of pentecostalism among African emigrants. But I have also noticed some working class Dublin people gravitating toward evangelicalism too. Has anybody else?
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 20, 2009 10:47:36 GMT
Yes, and not just in Dublin. THis has been visible since the 1970s - I suspect the influence of Anglo-American popular culture and the weakening of the "faith and fatherland" idea that Protestantism is somehow inherently alien to being Irish.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 24, 2009 11:32:20 GMT
I have to say I was canvassed once a few years ago by working class Drogheda people to go to the town's Presbyterian church and thought to myself, this is not the image of Presbyterianism one is used to the 26 counties, whatever about the North.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 3, 2009 10:03:24 GMT
It's a bit surprising in the North as well. Presbyterianism does have a working-class element but it has tended since the nineteenth century to become a middle-class denomination, with the working-classes being attracted to smaller denominations or independent gospel halls.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 3, 2009 10:09:18 GMT
Another question which might be borne in mind is the doctrinal basis on which ecumenism is undertaken, whatever the denomination. One of the big impulses for Catholic-Protestant ecumenism in the West was the impact of Nazism and Communism and the subsequent realisation that despite Catholic-Protestant differences we have a great deal in common as compared with atheists. (One significant influence on the Rhine countries was the retrospective feeling that the churches had been more concerned to guard their denominational interests separately by ill-considered deals than to bear witness to the fundamentals of the faith under dictatorships.) Something like Evangelicals and Catholics Together in America which tries to emphasise those elements of the Christian Faith which we share is a legitimate enterprise. The IRISH TIMES version of ecumenism on the other hand seems to me to very often rest on the implicit or implicit assumption that the churches should abandon any claim to possess doctrinal truth or teaching authority, should dismiss transcendence and supernaturalism as an illusion, and should become the focus for a sort of ethical pantheism which does not require any sort of sacrifice or self-denial and serves the same sort of role as the cult of the emperor in ancient Rome.
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