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Post by hibernicus on Mar 2, 2016 20:57:53 GMT
Visited Paris recently and went to the church of St Joseph des Carmes on the Rue Vaugirad, where Bl. Frederic Ozanam is buried in the crypt. What I didn't realise until I got there was that it was also the scene of a massacre of priests in the French Revolutionary era (September 1793); after being imprisoned in the church for days, each in turn was hauled into the sacristy and asked to take an oath which implicitly renounced Papal authority; those who refused were marched down a passageway and killed as they came out of the building. The skulls and bones of many of these martyrs are displayed in the crypt. If anyone wants to know why so many C19 French Catholics saw the Republic as the work of the devil, and why it took such courage for some Catholics such as Bl. Frederic to seek reconciliation with it, look no further. It is a handsome Baroque church painted with Carmelite themes (and a window showing Dominican saints in honour of Lacordaire's having preached regularly in the church). Bl Frederic's tomb has a mural of the Good Samaritan on the facing wall, and his portrait is placed beside it. There are also monuments in the church to two Archbishops of Paris connected with Bl. Frederic - Archbishop Quelen who encouraged the Conferences of St Vincent in their early days, and Archbishop Affre who at Bl. Frederic's suggestion went to the barricades during the fighting of July 1848 (between radical and conservative republicans), tried to mediate a peace, and was shot dead. The inscription hails him as the good shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 7, 2016 20:11:10 GMT
Rod Dreher discusses the extent to which a sort of cultural Catholicism survives in certain parts of French society even after belief has been marginalised. Worth a read. BTW the picture of pro-marriage demonstrators made up as zombies and demanding POSTHUMOUS MARRIAGE FOR ALL is an example of something Irish pro-life and pro-family demonstrations could do with - wit www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/zombie-catholics-of-france/
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 7, 2016 20:15:13 GMT
I was a Francophobe all my life, but when I began to practice my faith I realised I am very drawn to many French saints and to French spirituality (if there is such a thing). It's as though the whole culture makes more sense when you see it through a Catholic lens.
Recently EWTN had a regular broadcast of a French priest reciting the Rosary for the Lourdes grotto-- the Rosary seems to sound better in French, more florid and more itself. (I've tried reciting it in German-- not the same. I usually recite it in Irish, which is neither good nor bad.)
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Post by hibernicus on May 14, 2017 21:18:15 GMT
This CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT comment piece on Rod Dreher's Benedict Option has an interesting discussion of Jacques Maritain. I know Maritain is a big name and I have picked up some bits and pieces of information about him, but I find it hard to get a "fix" on him as I have never studied him systematically and I'm not a philosopher. This article's outline of his main thesis - that he believed that official Constantinian Christendom was dead but that Catholics/Christians could and should participate in the wider currents of society, provided they began with individual spiritual renewal as the sine qua non - could provide an interesting starting point for exploring his thought. (I was grasping for something similar when I used to make remarks about a "culture first" approach; perhaps I need to read more Maritain.) Two points come to mind: The views expressed by Maritain are pretty clearly a reaction against the Action Francaise, whose essential position was the opposite - favouring the re-creation of Constantiniam Christendom on grounds of expediency while maintaining that it was not necessary for those running the show to be actual believers. Any assessment of Maritain (as of Christopher Dawson) has to incorporate an explanation of why the post-war European order they favoured turned out to be less receptive to the Faith than they hoped. The author suggests that secular liberalism turns out to be much more deeply committed to the concept of self-remaking on the basis of the unrestrained human will than Maritain, Dawson and their sympathisers realised: www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/5629/christian_politics_iisi_the_benedict_option_now.aspxwww.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/maritain-the-benedict-option/
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Post by annie on May 15, 2017 11:15:40 GMT
There was a piece on BBC radio 4 this morning which lauded post-modernism and the "rive gauche" ideas which arose in the post World War II erase and which led to the opposition to every aspect of Judeo-Christan civilisation. This war is an ongoing one.
In the May 2017 issue of Alive newspaper it is stated that Jean Paul Sartre found faith in a Creator God at the end of his life. Let us not become despairing or despondent.
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 15, 2017 12:37:36 GMT
The Sartre story is fascinating. I've encountered it in a few places. It's hard to tell if it's true or not.
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Post by hibernicus on May 15, 2017 20:52:09 GMT
It's possible - Sartre's secretary who was a major influence in his later years was (or later became) an Orthodox Jew and was held by critics to have influenced some late remarks which Sartre made praising the Jewish ethical and spiritual tradition. Praising the God of Abraham (without the Incarnation) might be a logical development.
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Post by hibernicus on May 27, 2018 21:19:07 GMT
These discussions of les evenements of 1968 are quite relevant to Ireland's own slower cultural revolution. Note the following points: Theodore Dalrymple discusses the extent to which the older generation in 60s France wanted to preserve Christian morality (especially for women) on the basis of social utility when the underlying faith had eroded, and how the young rebels picked up on genuine awareness of all sorts of dirty deeds in the recent past which were not spoken about: www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/france-soixante-huitards-1968-sex-drugs-and-lame-poster-art/Some thoughts on the radical antinomian individualism of the protestors and its long-term cultural impact: www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/revolutionary-psychodrama-in-france-1968/Another discussion which notes the protestors, however flawed, were responding to a real element of spiritual bankruptcy in the old order: www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/youth-68-and-intimations-of-the-transcendent/Anyone interested in the way in which soixante-huitard attitudes were leaking into Ireland should see the contemporary documentary THE ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN by Peter Lennon - who had been living in France for several ears when he made it, and went on to participate in les evenements. The assumption that the forces of cultural conservatism are self-evidently contemptible and indefensible is shared with the French protestors
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Post by assisi on May 28, 2018 11:38:02 GMT
These discussions of les evenements of 1968 are quite relevant to Ireland's own slower cultural revolution. Note the following points: Theodore Dalrymple discusses the extent to which the older generation in 60s France wanted to preserve Christian morality (especially for women) on the basis of social utility when the underlying faith had eroded, and how the young rebels picked up on genuine awareness of all sorts of dirty deeds in the recent past which were not spoken about: www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/france-soixante-huitards-1968-sex-drugs-and-lame-poster-art/Some thoughts on the radical antinomian individualism of the protestors and its long-term cultural impact: www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/revolutionary-psychodrama-in-france-1968/Another discussion which notes the protestors, however flawed, were responding to a real element of spiritual bankruptcy in the old order: www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/youth-68-and-intimations-of-the-transcendent/Anyone interested in the way in which soixante-huitard attitudes were leaking into Ireland should see the contemporary documentary THE ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN by Peter Lennon - who had been living in France for several ears when he made it, and went on to participate in les evenements. The assumption that the forces of cultural conservatism are self-evidently contemptible and indefensible is shared with the French protestors Growing up in Derry during the early troubles there was a trend called 'recreational rioting'. I remember viewing one such occasion on the edge of the Bogside, although at that time no-one called it recreational rioting. It consisted of British soldiers, situated behind an end-gable wall with a near perfect round hole, out of which stuck a hose for spraying the crowd of about 40 or 50 very young teenagers. The teenagers threw stones at the hole in the wall, and the soldiers aimed the hose at those teenagers that got close. There was little chance of the soldiers getting hit. It was a warm summer day and everyone was having a fun time as long as they stuck to the unspoken rules. I am sure I enjoyed the danger of it all, also knowing there was little chance I would be hit by a rubber bullet or a live round. It was like the images of the serious riots we had seen on TV, and we all thought we were rebels until we had to go home to our mammy's house for our tea. I've no doubt whatsoever that many of the 68ers would have enjoyed the drama and danger of their actions and would have had revelled in the idea of being a rebel in a city like Paris where historical revolutions had occurred before. The fact that they were probably comfortably well off and not short of food, leisure or accommodation, meant that their actions had to be justified by some situations such as Theodore Dalrymple alludes to (Colonial past, fast growth of consumerism post war). The reason the slogans and art were so vague and generic is because there was no pressing reason behind the events other than the turbulent times and zeitgeist of the 60s in general. I think some parallels can be drawn with the Arab Spring 'revolts'. The documentary maker Adam Curtis makes the point that the young people involved in those protests were able to bring thousands on to the street, but once they had got them there, and had faced down authority, they didn't know what to do next, they had no viable alternatives, other than vague ideas of freedom and equality. They petered out.
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 28, 2018 11:59:37 GMT
I have never been able to understand the 1968 riots in particuar and the whole zeitgeist of the nineteen-sixties in general.
Youth has always craved excitement and novelty, but the wholescale rejection of the past and present which we see in 1968 is rare indeed-- perhaps the French Revolution is the only comparable occasion, but I understand the French revolutionaries looked back to ancient Rome as an inspiration. The soixante-huitards didn't seem to have any inspirations.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 15, 2018 21:06:06 GMT
Rod Dreher (from an Orthodox viewpoint and drawing on a French Orthodox commentator) discusses the decline of French Catholicism, and remarks that the post-Conciliar liturgical and devotional impositions in some respects made Western Catholicism LESS like Orthodoxy than before. This is an interesting point given that the patristic emphasis of the ressourcement theologians should in theory have brought Rome closer to the Orthodox. Some interesting remarks in the combox from various viewpoints, including some painful reminders of unsavoury political baggage attached to French traditionalism. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/french-catholicism-autopsy-orthodoxy/BTW I recently read Cardinal Manning's TEMPORAL MISSION OF THE HOLY GHOST, published soon after he became Archbishop of Westminster in the early 1860s. At one point he declares that the difference between Anglicanism and Catholicism is shown by the fact that while Anglicanism in England seems in irretrievable decline, French Catholicism responded to the damage wrought by the revolution with a revival which has produced a wave of new orders and new saints and which he expects will completely reCatholicise France. God's ways are not our ways.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2018 22:46:45 GMT
Rod Dreher discusses reports of the development of a new French Catholic Right subculture that emphasises self-sufficiency and ecology. His combox discusses whether this is a new phenomenon or an existing Far-Right strain with some unpleasant exponents. One interesting detail is that while under Jean Marie Le Pen the Front National advocated repeal of the Loi Weil (legalising abortion), since Marine took over it has become explicitly pro-abortion as part of her attempt to position the party as defender of French laicite against the Muslims. Her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen (seen by some people as more Catholic than Marine) has also explicitly stated that no-one is trying to criminalise abortion, and her marital arrangements suggest she is more a cultural Catholic than a croyant. Certain Irish people who see the Le Pens as Catholic crusaders defending Christendom against the Muslims should take note. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/new-french-right-mark-lilla-catholic/
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 7, 2020 20:47:22 GMT
Charles Peguy (killed in the first weeks of the First World War) was one of the most influential French Catholic writers/intellectuals of the first half of the C20 but is now mostly forgotten outside France. The link leads to a review of what sounds like an interesting new study of him. His point about many so-called political traditionists being a mirror-image of atheist modernists was bang on the button, as Fr Louis Bouyer points out in THE DECOMPOSITION OF CATHOLICISM. hedgehogreview.com/issues/questioning-the-quantified-life/articles/the-emaemmodernist
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2020 21:01:09 GMT
An interesting article about the significance of French church fires, written from what appears to be a sympathetic but basically secular or culturalist view treating Catholicism as part of French historic identity rather than as a living faith. The "everything begins in 1789" official view is interesting, given that in many respects French post-revolutionary regimes have been heirs of the ancien regime absolute monarchy and its cult of the enlightened bureaucrat and of national greatness, as much as of the revolutionary and purely republican traditions. thecritic.co.uk/seeing-france-through-the-ruin-of-her-past/
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 5, 2020 22:18:46 GMT
Lifesite reports President Macron announcing severe restrictions on homeschooling (just short of a total ban) and on private schooling, the idea being to protect the Republic from Islam by bringing up everyone's children as good little secularists. The quote from the late post-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac (repeated by Marine Le Pen) "No to a moral law that would supersede the civil law" indicates what French laicite means in practice these days. Wonder how long it will be before our mainstream parties openly endorse it, as they have other bad ideas advocated by Trots?
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