|
Post by loughcrew on Nov 19, 2012 15:23:27 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Nov 21, 2012 21:55:53 GMT
I will offer some thoughts on the Savita case and developments over the last fortnight within a few days
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Nov 29, 2012 22:53:12 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2012 12:56:49 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2012 23:37:00 GMT
James Hitchcock sums it up very simply: www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=25-06-003-eEXTRACT From time to time, some orthodox Christians wonder aloud whether the pro-life movement, the struggle to defend the integrity of marriage, and other "social issues" implicate believers in an overly political activity that is a distortion of their faith. It would be best, they argue, for Christians simply to bear witness to their beliefs—even more in their lives than in their words—and not to politicize religion. The dangers in such politicization are real enough. Christians can indeed become so involved in causes as to define their faith exclusively in those terms, to lose sight of why they are involved, and to push into the background everything that does not relate directly to those causes—a mirror image of what liberal religion has become.... Believers are also routinely condemned by secularists for "intruding" their beliefs into the public square, a charge that assumes something uniquely sinister about religion; citizens may form their principles in any way they choose (astrology, throwing dice) except religion. The obvious response is that Christians have as much right to be in the public square as anyone else, but it is a response that is less than satisfactory. Is Christian morality to enjoy only the formal tolerance accorded all other schools of thought? But those Christians are doomed to fail who insist that their beliefs must prevail because they carry divine sanction. In the public square, such a claim merely provides ammunition to those who warn that religious believers are dangerous, that believers can offer no argument except that of authority. Given this reality, some Christians choose to withdraw from a public square where the truth of the faith is not recognized, a position similar to that of those who reject political action as a distortion of the gospel. Holders of both viewpoints seek to keep the faith uncontaminated by involvement in the secular sphere. But those who seek such purity often do not seem to understand the logic of their position, or how radical it is—the action of "dropping out," the claim that being a citizen is incompatible with being a ChristiaN The moral basis of the pro-life movement is a simple one. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that the fetus is a human being—a living member of the species Homo sapiens, and, however limited one thinks the power of government ought to be, the state's most fundamental obligation is to protect the lives of the innocent (and even, up to a point, the lives of the guilty). Conscientious citizens cannot debate whether or not to oppose abortion—they are obliged to do so. Their effort may often seem quixotic, but it is an effort from which no one is excused. Similarly, from undeniable empirical evidence it is indubitably clear that the family is indeed the basis of a good society. Same-sex "marriage" radically redefines the family; thus, the ultimate good of everyone requires opposing it. The nature of modern democracy is such that everyone who has an idea of the good society is expected (indeed, required) to enter the political arena to fight for it. The secularist attempt to exclude religion from this arena is an outrageous violation of the very nature of the democracy that secularists claim to cherish. Christians active in the public square have learned never to lose sight of the truth of the gospel even as they must present that truth in ways that are accessible even to unbelievers. Those Christians who, for whatever reason, choose to remain aloof from these struggles surrender their rights (indeed, their obligations) as citizens, a renunciation that can be defended only on radical theological grounds that few of the renouncers seem to understand, something like the classical Anabaptist position that the world is irredeemably evil and so the godly must simply withdraw. It is a theology that has its place in Christian history but that very few Christians have in fact ever embraced. Those who today remain aloof from the public square are not likely to adopt the way of life of the Amish. More commonly, they have simply found a way of fitting into society more comfortably, of minimizing the tension between themselves and an often hostile world. Read more: www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=25-06-003-e#ixzz2EJlJKjBSEND I might add that this mindset is also picked up by liberal Christians who teach a form of gnosticism - that religion is simply a matter of the individual spiritual quest and can never be embodied in the material world. In the Irish context, I have noticed this (for instance) in people who regard John McGahern as a model writer for Catholics.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 7, 2012 22:40:54 GMT
There are some interesting comments on this CATHOLIC HERALD article on the current secularisation of Ireland www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/12/07/despite-secularisation-ireland-remains-repulsed-by-legalised-abortion/EXTRACTS paulpriest Now is the time to hit hard and fast with a massive anti-abortion Campaign using every available resource. I lived among the maniacally obsessed modernist heterodox professional Catholic clergy and laity in Ireland - and they make Call to Action look like the LMS [LATIN MASS SOCIETY - HIB]...ideas which one would have thought would only emanate from extremist 1970s San Francisco were endemic amongst them [e.g. when they said at Vatican VI the Pope will bring her wives - They meant it!] I taught in Irish schools and the kids had absolutely no idea what abortion entails and saw it as an idealised progressive form of liberalisation from the yoke of Ecclesial tyranny [THIS IDEA OF LIBERATION FROM ECCLESIASTICAL TYRANNY AS A CENTRAL THEME OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH HISTORY HAS BEEN VERY STRONG IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM FOR SOME DECADES NOW AND WE ARE SEEING THE RESULTS] ...these kids are now the chattering classes in their 30s and on social networks they equivocate divorce and homosexual recognition with abortion rights and 'social justice' Francis you may very well be right that the groundswell of the population may be against abortion but the 'academic/professional' elite are the 'movers and shakers' formulating 'accepted public opinion' via shanghaiing the media and misrepresenting what the real population want...
...and they need to be countered and thwarted hard and fast.
The last thing the Irish Pro-Life movement needs is to adopt the counter-productive futile strategies of our professional activists with their 'sensitive -broadly secularising de-spiritualising softly-softly incrementalist - don't rock the boat strategy' At present the Irish branch of the Good Counsel Network has the highest 'conversion from abortion' rate in the world and the reason they have it is because they centralise on prayer/fasting and the sacraments and see this as a spiritual battle - it works! Ironically in Latin countries they saw havng a room devoted to prayer and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as ludicrous and not part of their 'secularised social justice pro-Life' remit and thereby their success rate in counselling against abortion is a mere fraction of Irish and UK figures...
Good Counsel Network here is strongly opposed to a secularised umbrella 'all faiths and none' Pro-Life movement because they realise the dearth within it of what is truly required to fight the culture of death...admittedly they wil work with anyone and everyone in the fight but they will not be diverted from their predominantly spiritual warfare against this malevolent evil... [THIS SEEMS T ME TO BE OVERSELL QUITE FRANKLY - I THINK IT'S A RECIPE FOR WINNING SMALL BATTLES AND LOSING THE WAR] Ireland needs the same.
Which is why the Church there and here needs to recognise its abrogation of responsibility and dereliction of duty when it comes to the Pro-Life cause and come out fighting - with every available financial and administrative and spiritual resource.
Catholic politicians need to be truly informed of Colin Harte's Solidaritist position and be made historically aware of Incrementalism's strategic failure [as exemplified in Nellie Gray's speeches denouncing their misguided approach]
..and the schools and churches need to be engaging with the shock and awe tactics of the likes of Greg Cunningham...for we know by our own experience that the softly-softly approach has failed here and made the culture of death endemic over the past 45 years.
Like Reply 9 hours ago 3 Likes jaykay "the kids had absolutely no idea what abortion entails and saw it as an idealised progressive form of liberalisation from the yoke of Ecclesial tyranny.."
Yes, paulpriest, I agree. This view was of course sold to them by people in my age group and older - I'm 52 - in (deliberate small c) catholic schools, where the priests and nuns and brothers have long since departed and badly-catechised teachers - or indeed those with an actively hostile agenda - are in the majority. The UK and US are of course seen as the acme of sophistication and Ireland's Catholic heritage something to be got rid of, as redolent of the bad aul' days, backwardness, poor-Paddy-at-the-plough blahdy blahdy blah. [THIS IS EXTREMELY TRUE - THAT'S JUST HOW THEY DESCRIBE US, BACK TO SEAN O'LEARY CALLING PRO-LIFE DEMONSTRATORS OUTSIDE THE DAIL "A HORDE OF MARAUDING REDNECKS" IN 1983 - WHICH IS WHY DORIS MANLY CALLED HER BALLINTRILLICK REVIEW "THE THINKING REDNECK'S JOURNAL", THOUGH SHE LATER DROPPED THE TITLE] Cultural cringe, as the Australians used to call it before they got a good dose of national self-confidence.
Actually in a way we've been here before, in the 50s to 80s, when great parts of Dublin's Georgian heritage were deliberately destroyed in officially-sanctioned vandalism. [GOOD COMPARISON BUT QUITE AN UNCOMFORTABLE ONE, BECAUSE THE CONTEMPT FOR GEORGIAN DUBLIN DERIVED TO SOME EXTENT FROM A FAITH AND FATHERLAND MINDSET WHICH THOUGHT THE BRITISH/PROTESTANT ROLE IN IRISH HISTORY WAS SIMPLY AN ALIEN EXCRESCENCE WHICH COULD BE IGNORED WITHOUT LOSING ANYTHING OF VALUE. THAT'S PRECISELY THE CHATTERING CLASS ATTITUDE TO OUR CATHOLIC HERITAGE THESE DAYS- HIB]It's the same sort of mindset, really. When people are not taught the true worth of their heritage (and the Faith is of course so much more than just a heritage!) then passing fads and trends take over from true values and the good gets jettisoned, usually with a "good riddance to all that". We have of course seen the same with the liturgy, but let's not go there just now
While things are bad right now, I actually have faith that this current wave of secularist activism will pass, in that it will be seen for what it is - the leftist agenda so consistently rejected by the people in election after election. They do tend to overstretch - or oversell - themselves and people get tired of the constant manufactured "crises", anger and whinging. Already there has been outrage over our national broadcaster's outrageous conduct on two occasions in the space of one year. For better or worse there is a deep strain of cynicism in Ireland, but when it comes to a very clear view of the pretensions of our "betters" then I'm all for it. Because a lot of our soi-disant intellectuals are basically pretentious second-raters, taking their cues (and money in the case of the pro-aborts) from abroad, with barely an original thought among the lot of them. [TOO OPTIMISTIC I THINK - THEY MAY NOT GET ALL THEY WANT NOW, BUT EVERY TIME THEY RETREAT THE TIDEMARK IS HIGHER - HIB] So I think they're going to over-reach themselves in their gaderene rush for abortion "rights" but we've got to make sure that our side is put across fairly. Personally I support "Family and Life" - their latest campaign has just been launched.
www.familyandlife.org/c...
Like Reply 5 hours ago in reply to paulpriest Cestius I get the impression talking to older Irish Catholics that something went horribly wrong with Irish Catholicism and the Irish Church long before its present troubles. It was both strict and authoritarian, yet not faithful to the true values of the Gospel. It's not surprising things went so badly wrong, and yet I am heartened by the news that Irish people are still willing to put up a fight against the abortionists and their agenda. There is still hope for Ireland. As Jesus Himself said "on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will never prevail against it."
Like Reply 6 hours ago 1 Like paulpriest The Church went trendy and chaotically self-destructive here in the late 60s/70s but over there it happened later and with much greater unrestrained ideological intensity among the - as jaykay says - 'soi disants'...and secularism and atheism snowballed overnight [and you really do not want to know what the secular and religious clergy think and believe these days - their rebelliousness has become despondency has become negligent resigned indifference and desolation and replaced wth a sartre-esque 'well let's just make the best of a bad lot till the roof caves in']
Like Reply 4 hours ago in reply to Cestius 1 Like .... rjt1 I think you are right, Francis: while living there, I got the impression that even secularised Irish people have the right instincts about abortion but this is an unrecognised heritage from the Catholic past or at least it will not endure without the backbone provided by the teaching authority of the Church. The only long-term solution is the reconversion of Ireland to the faith.
Like Reply 2 hours ago chiaramonti Notice, please, how the future royal offspring is universally described in the media as a "baby". Not for Kate and Wills a mere group of chemicals ready to be aborted on a whim [OBVIOUSLY THIS POSTER HAS READ PATSY MCGARRY'S APOLOGIA FOR 'CHOICE' AS NOT CONTRADICTING CATHOLIC TEACHING, WHICH REFERRED TO A NEWLY-CONCEIVED BABY AS A COMBINATION OF CHEMICALS, WHICH OF COURSE CAN ALSO BE SAID OF YOU AND I AND PATSY MCGARRY - HIB] - this is a baby! What greater example can there be of the gross unfairness applied to potential human beings. It all depends on who your parents are whether you survive to be born!
Like Reply 5 hours ago Rizzo The Bear
|
|
|
Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 8, 2012 11:51:12 GMT
I always think of Yeats's lines:
Out of Ireland have we come great hatred, little room Maimed us from the start. I carry from my mother's womb A fanatic heart.
There is something fanatical in the Irish psyche and when the reaction to Catholicism came it was always going to be vicious.
I agree that the comparison between a supposed "real Ireland" a "well-heeled elite" is a pointless one. Plenty of ordinary people share the views of that well-heeled elite. To use a comparison, we have gone past the stage of a few Cambridge theologians forcing a Reformed Church on a reluctant populace, to the mob mentality of the No-Popery riots.
|
|
|
Post by annie on Dec 8, 2012 15:36:51 GMT
I always think of Yeats's lines: Out of Ireland have we come great hatred, little room Maimed us from the start. I carry from my mother's womb A fanatic heart. There is something fanatical in the Irish psyche and when the reaction to Catholicism came it was always going to be vicious. I agree that the comparison between a supposed "real Ireland" a "well-heeled elite" is a pointless one. Plenty of ordinary people share the views of that well-heeled elite. To use a comparison, we have gone past the stage of a few Cambridge theologians forcing a Reformed Church on a reluctant populace, to the mob mentality of the No-Popery riots. I recommend you read the entry 'remember, remember' on Thirsty Gargoyle's blog. .
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2013 20:16:27 GMT
Thirsty Gargoyle offers some thoughts on how it might be possible to legislate for X without permitting abortion. Note a couple of points (a) the 1967 British Abortion Act does not formally legalise abortion (hence it does not repeal the 1860s Offences Against the Person Act), which may shed some light on the call in certain quarters for that act to be repealed in Ireland (b) the British restriction is in practice generally flouted and barely policed at all, which is exactly what I suspect would happen if the government's "restrictive" form of legalisation were enacted. thethirstygargoyle.blogspot.ie/2013/01/legislating-for-x-unorthodox-view.html
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2013 20:54:17 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jan 13, 2013 17:58:07 GMT
John Bruton is currently receiving dog's abuse on Politics.ie for having said the Supreme Court decision in the X Case was wrong. What a pity he didn't do anything about it when he was Taoiseach.... Note the claim made by some of the posters that it is undemocratic to say that a Supreme Court decision is wrong. No doubt they would apply the same criticism to David Norris (for saying that the Supreme Court was wrong to rule that the then-existing homosexuality law was not unconstitutional) or Ivana Bacik (after the Supreme Court in the 1980s upheld the ban on abortion information) or anyone who has criticised the McKenna and Crotty judgements (whether you agree with them or not)... How can it be undemocratic to criticise a Supreme COurt decision? If the Supreme Court are beyond criticism then we don't have a democracy - we have a five-member oligarchy ruling by decree. www.politics.ie/forum/justice/204210-john-bruton-former-taoiseach-says-we-should-ignore-supreme-court.html
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jan 13, 2013 19:46:25 GMT
I'm wondering did anybody else's priest follow the bishop's request and discuss abortion at Mass? For the first time ever I heard a priest give a homily on Humanae Vitae. He didn't just discuss that but put it in terms of Church teaching but also Natural Law, and a little bit on abortion and a lot on contraception, the morning after pill, its side effects, the fact that it is an abortifacient, extra-marital sex, the damage done to society that was spotted by the Pope decades ago by that awful domino effect, which he outlined and brought it right up to the present day. He pointed out the irony of the the Save the Whale campaign in the States where you can terminate your baby's life unhindered and pointed out contradiction in laws there ( he's American).
He also discussed the overpopulation nonsense and the disgusting policy of some countries not to give aid to poor countries unless they contracept and abort as policy. He also mentioned the Vigil on the 19th and there are posters fixed outside local churches in my area. Is that happening in your areas too?
I was well aware of all of this teaching so it was nothing new. I'm not a fan of clapping at Mass but really wanted to start a Mexican wave when he was finished! He ended by quoting a pretty dire poem to God which ended well, with the person asking God to give them a second chance to change things, one final chance to make things better before everything was ruined. There was utter silence at the end. A few stonefaced women leaving the pews after Mass and a lot of bewildered elderly ladies too. There was a real atmosphere after that Mass, it was the first challenging homily I heard there and I go often. I hope and pray that the Holy Spirit works on all of us who heard Mass this weekend. I thanked him for his homily of course, he's a good man. I was just struck by how little I've heard on something so fundamental at Mass.
Anyway, did any other priests preach fire and brimstone this weekend?!
I wonder if this will be the start of some teaching moments for congregations, the more praise they get for giving us meat the more they will realise how much the sheep need feeding here! Hopefully more priests will get that response and run with it now.
Hibernicus I was touched by the sincerity of Bruton at the Eucharistic Congress and he also gave a talk a while back, I put it in events. He clearly could have done something back then but I am interested to see him speaking out now, especially since law is his expertise. I am sure he regrets how things have turned out. I have a feeling that we will see more of him as time goes on, not only on this issue but on matters of faith too.
|
|
|
Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 13, 2013 20:05:15 GMT
The priest only mentioned the vigil in my parish. Nothing in the homily as far as I can remember.
|
|
|
Post by annie on Jan 13, 2013 20:16:32 GMT
The vigil was mentioned in our church newsletter and in the local notes of the newspaper. We had a funeral Mass this morning and I'm not sure if our priest got a chance to mention it.
Buses are being organised and there is a great buzz about. Thanks Hibernian for the note about the prayers in Westland Row beforehand. It is good to see people standing up for what they believe in.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jan 13, 2013 20:21:27 GMT
The priest mentioned the vigil & rally at Mass in St Kevin's this morning.
|
|