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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 10, 2012 11:16:43 GMT
I thought it time to reflect on the serious development in vocations and its connexion with the Second Vatican Council.
On the face of it, the sharp decline in vocations across the west is an indictment of the Council. Of course there are other factors at play. It’s also true that the earlier period could possibly termed as over-supply. I’ll explain. In continental Europe a newly ordained diocesan priest was typically 25 and could look forward to six or seven year’s curacy prior to becoming a parish priest in his early to mid thirties. In Ireland, a diocesan priest was likely to still be a curate when in his mid-fifties or older, and could be near pension age at the time he became parish priest.
It has been pointed out before that in the pre-conciliar period, it was often the brightest who put themselves forward for priesthood. There was also tight competition. Diocesan colleges often had a quota system in place and students competed. Other options were Clonliffe for Dublin, All Hallows’, the missions or religious orders. Orders could be selective too. To take a religious order not noted for producing academics, the Irish Augustinian province sent virtually all its clerical students to Rome and most of these were put through the Gregorian University, which is the most prestigious of Roman universities.
This has turned around now. On common observation, the dullest seem to put themselves forward for priesthood and this is seen as a virtue. In Maynooth prior to the 1950s, honours NUI or QUB graduates could not always expect to be admitted to the Bachelor of Divinity programme for which it was a requirement to have enough Greek and Hebrew to read the bible unaided, and also to study physiology/anatomy to the standard of a pre-medical year. Now things are rather different in Maynooth and the academic standards in the Miltown and Kimmage Institutes cannot be lauded to the rooftops.
In addition to the theological dumbing down, very little seems to be known in relation to the general culture. The decrease in the tendency for school leavers to enter seminary also means few clerical students sit B.A.s or B.Sc.s as in the past. There is a certain loss in that respect. The trouble with this is that the emerging profile of a Catholic priest is going to be very low-brow – harmless at best.
I wonder if this is the dream world which the ACPI envisage – when lay people in their own image and likeness take over everything. First of all, they expect these lay people to do all the things they have mapped out. Secondly, they don’t seem to see that the direction they have set will be static. Indeed they don’t seem to have a huge appreciation of the direction the world is going – including the possibility that people will wake up to the madness and folly and initiate a blame game against those who should have spoke out but didn’t.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 10, 2012 15:59:52 GMT
Does this thread refer to Ireland or to the West as a whole? One point that might be borne in mind is that there were widespread predictions at the time of the Council that it would lead to an increase in vocations (this is why for example the Scottish bishops opened a brand new seminary in the late 60s and had to sell it off a few years later). Given the level of Irish vocations at the time, I suspect this was not expected in Ireland, but I doubt very much of anyone expected the collapse. I don't think the Council is entirely to blame for the drop in vocations. The expansion of secondary and higher education and of economic opportunities generally(which meant, on the least cynical supposition, that candidates were less willing to commit themselves at an early age and more open to distractions) the breakup of Catholic local/ethnic subcultures (which affected parents' attitudes towards encouraging vocations; it was noticeable for much of the C19/C20 that Francophone priests were disproportionately recruited from the peasantry) and the changing nature of popular culture in terms of sexual display, attitudes towards authority etc would have happened pretty much the same if (hypothetically, to take a certain type of trad's dearest wish) Cardinal Siri had become Pope in 1958 and there had been no Council. Perhaps there are two separate questions here - why have fewer candidates come forward and why have so many who came forward dropped out before or after ordination?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 11, 2012 15:11:35 GMT
I would put forward the case for the entire west, but obviously Ireland is the place we are best informed on.
I agree that the trad narrative that it all would have been better if Cardinal Siri became pope and there was no council is fantasy, but that doesn’t mean things would be as bad as they are now. But it was crass naïveté to think the Council would produce huge numbers of vocations. I suppose the current liberal narrative was that the vocations shortage was providential, enabling the laity take ownership of the Church.
With regard to vocations, though, it may be the case that the crisis need not have been as bad as it became. I’ll give you a few points:
1. Catechetics – the breakdown in catechesis across the Church surely contributed to both reduced numbers putting themselves forward and increased numbers of candidates leaving. The current catechesis regime is likely to fill children with misconceptions about church and priesthood. 2. The ‘Good bye, good men’ phenomenon. How many good candidates are filtered out of the whole seminary picture before entrance? How many are afterward, before ordination? 3. Are seminary programmes such to affirm vocation? In the 1970s, many clerical students were led to believe that celibacy would soon be dropped. This meant that students had expectations which would never be realised.
I laugh at what you said about Scottish vocations. In the 1990s, they built a much smaller seminary which was supposed to be a model seminary for the 21st century. As it happens, many Irish seminaries were building extensions in the 1960s. I recall the statistic from the Irish Augustinian Province in 1968-69 where there were 32 clerical novices and 6 non-clerical novices (that’s just one year). Other Irish orders had similar booms – the Irish Dominicans filled Tallaght, San Clemente in Rome and their house in Lisbon at the time. This changed drastically and very quickly, before the effect of all the social changes Hibernicus mentioned could completely register.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 11, 2012 22:28:06 GMT
The expectation that the Council would lead to a rise in vocations reflected the belief that the post-1945 upsurge in vocations in Britain and America (which were never self-sustaining in terms of vocations, which is why they imported so many Irish priests), the simultaneous increase in conversions, and the rising intellectual and other prestige of Catholicism represented a permanent upward trend, rather than a one-off resulting from such factors as large numbers of people searching for meaning (in institutional form) after the chaos of WWII, Catholic populations which were more affluent and educated than ever before but still heavily influenced by old-style "ghetto" Catholicism and hence not assimilated to prevailing Protestant-secular norms as occurred from the late 60s onward, etc. I am less familiar with the Continent but I imagine some of the same factors existed there (in terms of the strength of Christian Democrat parties, etc - certainly I know German Catholics in the 50s used to claim with great exaggeration that their country was undergoing a general religious revival in reaction against Nazism; Pius XII used to present Rome as a sort of Holy City and the "dolce vita" scandals of the late 1950s were seen as damaging this view etc). Vatican II was part of a late-50s early-60s upsurge of optimism which didn't anticipate the massive upheavals which came in the late 1960s. (The early 50s, like the late 40s, were overshadowed by expectations of another war in the near future; the idea that the big break comes in 1960 is partly retrospective and partly an illusion caused by the habit of dividing history into decades.) James Hitchcock's THE DECLINE AND FALL OF LIBERAL CATHOLICISM is extremely good on this whole period. Hitchcock''s basic thesis is that in the 1950s there was already a divide between liberals and conservatives in the US Church, in which the conservatives were the old-style authoritarian bishops, ghetto Catholics with their popular devotions, McCarthy fan-club types etc. The liberals tended to see themselves not in the post-Humanae Vitae, quasi-Protestant or secularist terms with which we are familiar; instead they presented themselves as more Catholic than thou - were into Thomism, Gregorian chant, the liturgical movement, etc. Their analysis was that if only their type of Catholic revivalism was given free rein - Cardinal Newman instead of Cardinal Spellman, Maritain instead of the manuals, Thomas Merton instead of St Philomena etc - the Church would advance even faster than it was doing already. Hitchcock bought into this analysis in the 1950s, and he still believed there had been a great deal of truth in it when he was writing in the 1970s; but he realised that subsequent developments - the speed with which the same people who had been all for Gregorian chant went in for guitars within a few years, the number of progressive clerics who went from advocacy for social justice from within the Church's teaching, to advocating social justice in secular terms, to breaking with the Church in the name of more perfect social-justice life in poverty communes, to getting married and settling down to quite ordinary suburban-professional life - showed that the hard-shell conservatives of the 50s had been right about the liberals in one respect. They realised that many/most liberals, consciously or unconsciously, were not just dissatisfied with the Church's shortcomings - they were dissatisfied with Catholicism itself, fundamentally assumed it was only acceptable if remade in their image, and when they were given - or thought they had been given - carte blanche, they reacted in ways which involved dismantling Catholicism altogether and conforming to the American mainstream when that mainstream itself was in unprecedented flux. We didn't have the same phenomenon to the same extent in Ireland because we were a much poorer and more conservative society, and the bishops kept a tighter rein on "liberalism" - but anyone who notes the speed with which Sean O Faolain went from preaching a "Europeanised" Catholicism in the 1950s to advocating bourgeois secular hedonism in the 60s (the protagonists of his later stories are irresistibly reminiscent of the characters who attend dinner parties in Bunuel films) or the speed with which Benedict Kiely went from having his novels chosen as Catholic Book-of-the-Month in 50s America, and writing respectfully of religious life in THERE IS AN ANCIENT HOUSE even if the protagonist decides it is not for him, to something like DOGS ENJOY THE MORNING in which celibacy, and indeed chastity, are ridiculed and scorned, will realise that John Charles McQuaid had more sense than is commonly realised when he refused to believe a word of those gentlemen's former professions of liberal Catholicism.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 12, 2012 10:04:47 GMT
This is a very complex area, but one that needs to be investigated. I am interested that the choice for Papal Legate at the Eucharistic Congress was Cardinal Oullet. Of course, he is a significant personality in his right as Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, but the reason he was chosen was due to his previous position as Archbishop of Quebec City where the 49th IEC took place. We have observed on this forum that Quebec represents a model of how bad things can get. This is the first story in the May-June Brandsma Review out now. But it seems that Quebec is being held up as the sort of thing for Ireland to avoid - the Papal Legate said as much and matters regarding Quebec have been highlight in the Irish Catholic over the past couple of weeks.
The reason I think of Quebec in relation to this is due to Hibernicus' reference to Hitchcock's work on liberal Catholicism (mainly in the US) and Hibernicus' concrete examples in the writers Seán Ó Faoileán and Benedict Kiely. Paul Fournier gives two examples of the same phenomenon in the Brandsma Review piece - politicians Pierre Trudeau and René Levesque who began life as liberal Catholics and ended up as secular liberals, with Levesque becoming separatist into the bargain. It must be recalled that Quebec looked culturally to France rather than Anglo Canada, Britain or America (so bright Quebecois wanted to go to Paris to study, not Oxbridge or Ivy League). But then, Hitchcock is resident in Missouri and one of the biggest concentrations of Catholics in southern states is in Louisiana, which still looks to Quebec and France to a certain degree. On the point of the thread, vocations in Quebec have dipped disastrously.
However, the point is that Conciliar era was fuelled by post-war optimism. This was the case on the continent as well as in the anglosphere. Many of the continental peritii drew from their wartime experiences and had much reason to hope given what they emerged from.
Given what happened since, it is hard to believe what happened. But happen it did and this is the point in which we analyse it.
The pre-disposition of the liberal certainly was a factor and continued to be the case in this country until well into the 1990s, at least. One example I can quote is a diocese in Ireland which adopted a spiritual year programme for its students prior to Maynooth/Rome. At first, the candidates did the Kiltegan Fathers' spiritual year in Wicklow (missionary societies have spiritual years rather than novitiate), but then they set up their own programme in Roscommon (I'm talking about Elphin). What Elphin got was a higher drop-out rate than any other Irish diocese. In the end, both the director of the programme and the spiritual director left the priesthood. I'm not sure what Elphin does now, but it is hard to know how two priests with an ambivalent committment to priesthood could help those thinking about.
The self-loathing liberal clergy were perhaps less evident in larger seminaries, but they did exist. One of the biggest impacts on 1970s Maynooth were a succession of clerical professors who left and got laicised - Seán Freyne, Cathal Ó hÁinle, PJ McGrath come to mind. This sort of thing again had a negative impact. I say this without drawing on the careers of those who remained - Enda McDonagh comes to mind.
Now if the vicissitudes in priestly/religious life formation can be put down to self-loathing Catholics in charge as per Hitchcock's analysis, then a lot can be explained. But this thread should tease it out.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 12, 2012 16:59:02 GMT
There is an aspect of the Quebec case which I think Fournier's article understates, and it can be summed up in two words - Maurice Duplessis. Duplessis was the dominant Quebec politician from the 1930s until his death in the late 1950s. He created a regionalist party - the Union Nationale - out of the Quebec Conservatives and defectors from the Liberals, and served as Premier of Quebec for over two decades. Duplessis made highly public profession of Catholicism (one of his big issues was getting a crucifix put up in the Quebec legislative chamber), presented himself as the guardian of French culture, and generally received the support of the bishops; at the same time it was quite well-known that his own private life was not a model of Catholic virtue (to put it mildly) and that he used the threat of communism to justify cracking down on perfectly legitimate trade union and oppositional activity and to make the province safe for the business elite. That is the context of the Archbishop of Montreal's removal from office for supporting the asbestos miners' strike (which Fournier does mention) and the sense among Catholic intellectuals that traditional folk-Catholicism fostered an authoritarian culture which was wide open to abuse and exploitation by figures like Duplessis. The crisis of catechesis I think does have one of its roots in a wider crisis of authority. Catholic faith depends on a sense that it is ultimately reasonable - that you may not understand why a certain teaching is there, but you trust there is good reason for it. Radical Catholicism (in the sense of a Catholicism which denies the authority of the Magisterium altogether) rests very strongly on the stereotypical belief that the actions of Church authorities are ultimately and entirely arbitrary and reflect nothing beyond self-seeking or delusional attitudes from those giving the orders, upheld by the blind obedience of their subordinates. The Council encouraged this mindset by making it seem that everything was open to change at the will of the authorities. but it would not have had such an impact if too many authorities had not already been acting as if their own preferences and assumptions (or alternatively the "party line" which they never thought through but accepted from their superiors) was equivalent to the will of God. It's a crisis of authority resulting BOTH from the seductions of the world and the abuse of authority leading to a loss of faith in authority per se. Liberals overlook the former and conservatives the latter, and that is why we have a crisis of confidence in the faith leading to the breakdown of catechetics and the loss of vocations. ADDENDUM - here is Wikipedia on Duplessis. I should add that his record was not all bad - he was a competent administrator and developed the province's infrastructure - but it is quite clear why his self-presentation as a Catholic statesman provoked the view that if so the Church needed to re-examine its conscience. Duplessis was not unique in this - the widespread view of Franco not just as the lesser of two evils but as a Catholic crusader chosen by God, the links of the US Church with machine politicians like Mayor Daley and Frank Hague of New Jersey, the corruptions and abuses of the Italian Christian Democrats at a time when they were being adulated as a bulwark against communism, etc all contributed to the liberal reaction of the Vatican II era (defining liberal in the very broadest sense). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_DuplessisEXTRACT Duplessis's legacy has been the subject of repeated criticism in the decades since his death. Quebec nationalists dislike his anti-separatist stance, liberals denounce his social conservatism. Some minorities resent the privileges granted the Catholic church as other religious groups were actively or passively discouraged[citation needed] His critics hold that Duplessis's inherently-corrupt patronage politics, his reactionary conservatism, his emphasis on traditional family and religious values, his anachronistic anti-union stance, rural focus and his preservation and promotion of Catholic Church institutions over the development of a secular social infrastructure akin to that underway in most of the postwar West, stunted Quebec's social and economic development by at least a decade. [THIS IS COMPARABLE WITH THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY TOM GARVIN, SAY, ON 1940S AND 1950S IRELAND WHICH WERE ALSO BEHINDHAND IN DEVELOPING SOCIAL SERVICES AND ECONOMIC PLANNING] In response, it has been argued that the notion of the Duplessis "black years" is a myth propagated by all subsequent major political actors in Quebec due to a fundamental aversion to Catholic church-oriented traditionalist patterns of development, with dominant intellectual movements combining various elements of this dislike. [AGAIN THIS MIGHT BE SAID OF THE DE VALERA ERA, WHICH WAS LESS ANTI-MODERN THAN ITS RHETORIC MIGHT SUGGEST] However, the counter-argument, that this is an over-simplification which fails to capture the complexities of Quebec politics, society and its economy, has consistently prevailed in public and academic discourse for some time. Aside from occasional defenders of his anti-Communist and socially conservative views [4][5], defence of the Duplessis regime today comes primarily from traditionalist conservatives (paleoconservatives in North American definition) who view his regime as an essential reaffirmation of traditional values, and as an assertion by democratic means of the basics of church and family life with low social spending and suppression of labour unions.[citation needed] Duplessis is thereby held to have prevented "subversion" without the massive use of force and police repression that characterized the dictatorial policies of the Franco regime in Spain (which he supported).[citation needed] The Canadian Historical Association in a booklet on file with Collections Canada puts it this way: "The Duplessis regime may well have endured for too long, the Union Nationale leader's traditionalist policies may well have been anachronistic when compared with the relatively modern society that, in many respects, the Quebec of the 1950s had already become.[6]" For better or worse, Duplessis lent stability to Quebec through turbulent times. For this he is praised by some and reviled by many. Few Quebecois view him favourably in public discourse today, but he devoted much of his life to public office and was sufficiently popular with the Quebec electorate of the period to spend almost two decades as Premier, a position he held until his death. Ironically, it could be argued that Duplessis' greatest legacy was to lend impetus, after his death, to the societal changes he opposed throughout his political life. That his suppression of modernizing elements in Quebec produced a sense of urgency among the non-traditional populace and political elites which amplified the speed and scope of the social, political and economic transformation of Quebec under subsequent governments. In short, that the failure of the Duplessis regime to accommodate the demands of an increasingly cosmopolitan populace acted as both trigger and catalyst for the Quiet Revolution. [THIS I THINK MIGHT BE APPLIED BOTH TO THE LEMASS ERA AND - TO A MUCH GREATER EXTENT - TO THE SOCIAL CHANGES OF THE 1990S, WHEN A PREVIOUSLY SUBORDINATED SECULARIST CULTURE, ESPECIALLY AMONG THE YOUNG, BECAME MUCH MORE VISIBLE AND INFLUENTIAL] END
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Jul 19, 2012 11:27:31 GMT
Hibernicus last point is very interesting and shows much scope to discussion on mid-century church-state relations in Catholic jurisdictions. Development of the relationship with Mayor Daley and similar figures in urban US would be interesting.
But I think the point is the replacement of self-consciously Catholic politicians, Duplessis in Quebec, de Valera here, de Gaulle in France, Adenauer in West Germany, Franco in Spain, by a more secular spirit (not that Seán Lemass, whatever his personal beliefs - I gather he wasn't personally religious, was a seculariser). The question is that there isn't more at play.
I have seen Jim Lothian's famous Mass attendance statistics. I gather he has comparative figures for Ireland, Scotland, England & Wales, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. I wonder if figures are available for Spain, Portugal and Italy, and if comparative figures can be given for Quebec and the rest of Canada - I think this might be interesting. One thing is clear, for whatever reason, each of these named countries have a downward vocations trend too.
Spain and Portugal are politically very different and perhaps more comparable to Greece; however I would like to hear more about Italy in all this. To cast out other reasons for the delay in the collapse of Mass attendance in Ireland until the late 1970s - could the pattern of dominance by older parish priests form at earlier times have been a factor? Remember it took more time before vocations went through the floor here and in the late 1980s, Ireland still had senior curates in their late 50s who had been through seminary before the council.
But again, as Hibernicus has already indicated, there is a prima facie case that the liturgical reforms might have had an impact.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 20, 2012 21:37:50 GMT
Did you mean "the late 1970s", Askel? My impression is that the big collapse came in the late 80s or early to-mid 90s; there was a decline earlier in some of the newer working-class districts (e.g. in the outer suburbs of West Dublin) and among some younger middle-class people. Admittedly I grew up in a provincial city; it may have been earlier in Dublin. One point that might be looked at is the much higher rate of defections from the priesthood and religious life, which I think began in the late 60s or early 70s. Previously there was always a trickle of those who left, but they weren't publicised and tended to be isolated; from the late 60s/early 70s they became much more common and accepted. Bishop Edward Daly's first volume of members, MISTER, ARE YOU A PRIEST? has a description of the devastating effect this had on the morale of those who remained (constantly wondering who will go next, asking themselves every time whether perhaps they made a mistake and should think again while they're still young enough to leave) and remember he is talking about Derry city, where a certain sense of communal solidarity inhibited criticism of the Church - it must have been worse elsewhere in Ireland. I think there was a certain loss of morale, varying with place and age, probably strongest in certain seminaries and religious orders - a loss of faith in the rationale of the Church and its institutions, a feeling that everything needed to be reinvented without a clear sense of what should replace it or what was its rationale, change without thinking through change. (For example, one point about Mgr Cremin's articles on Maynooth, put up elsewhere on the forum, is that the opening-up of Maynooth to lay students was done abruptly and at random, without planning or thinking through the likely consequences, so that it went from a highly rigid discipline with such features as the students not being allowed to real secular newspapers, to mixing socially with secular students on a completely free-and-easy basis.) Who's going to give up their lives for an uncertainty that may itself be changed in a few years? Who's going to encourage their sons and daughters to give up their lives to an unknown, to make a sacrifice that a few years might show to be futile? One argument that is often put forward about the impact of Pope John Paul is that under Paul VI there was a sense that, whatever the Pope himself might say, everything was up for grabs - that the next Pope might reinvent everything in line with the most radical interpretations of Vatican II. (The novel and movie CATHOLICS in which a few decades down the line the Magisterium and the Mass have effectively been abolished seemed a lot more plausible at the time.) According to this argument, what the reigns of John Paull II and Benedict XVI have established is that there is not going to be a complete rupture - the Church may be smaller and marginalised, it may change on the peripheries, but it will essentially be recognisable as a continuation of the same church rather than a totally new creation. The overhang of older clergy from the historically high level of vocations before the decline means it has taken time for the full implications of the crisis to sink in. This is a bit disjointed but I'll post it as is and see if anyone likes to take up some of the points.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 23, 2012 9:13:56 GMT
Yes - the downward trend in Mass attendance began in the later than Askel indicated, though there was already a fall off early, which was more dramatic in the newer working class suburbs and some middle class areas. It's amazing how quick the transition was between almost full Mass attendance to the present. However the trend was downward even before the news of the scandals broke.
The wave of defections from the priesthood and religious life in the late 1960s and early 1970s was perhaps the most significant indicator after the Council. In Maynooth, through the 1960s (and even before), the speculation largely centred around which student would leave next. In the early 1970s, the speculation was in regard to the professors, many of whom did leave. I can imagine similar situations could be seen in other seminaries and in religious orders and I heard similar stories about priests in parishes and religious houses. The huge numbers of departures of ordained priests and finally professed religious levelled off but continued (though some orders were absolutely decimated - mainly brothers and sisters - many of these are on the point of extinction). I have heard of priests ordained in the 1990s who have sought laicisation (and less we think trads are immune, one of these was on the fringes of the trad movement in the late 1990s).
Hibernicus is right about the change in atmosphere following JP II's election - this is not necessarily a slight on Paul VI personally (though he did make mistakes - the point is he was ignored), but rather because the expected ultra-liberal pope never materialised, JPII lived longer than people reckoned and was himself replaced by an even more conservative pope (I'm half-talking tongue-in-cheek in the liberal mode right now) with no hope of a liberal pope anytime soon. There is more stability in the Church now, but it will take a lot of hard work to address the current malaise.
There are two trends I will identify stemming from those clergy and religious schooled in liberal messianism in the period immediately after the Council - 1. They were ruthless in seminaries/religious formation on those who did not share the dream, and in Ireland this lasted at least into the mid-1990s - this certainly had a negative impact on vocations; and 2. They have been happily imposing their dreams in parishes since the late 1980s with questionable results which are not going to encourage vocations either.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 23, 2012 20:54:46 GMT
I've been looking at the book SISTERS IN CRISIS which has been referenced in regard to the controversy over the LCWR visitation in the USA. One of the early chapters discusses problems with pre-Vatican II religious life which contributed to the explosion - these are mostly about the US but I have heard some of them referenced in relation to Ireland. These included (1) Severe overemphasis on the value of obedience, to the extent of sisters being required to ask permission for every act including some connected to their duties. The rationale for this was that for a religious actions could not really be meritorious unless they represented acts of direct obedience. (2) Sisters (particularly those running parochial schools) being taken for granted as dogsbodies by the parish clergy, without any regard for their own needs and stresses - the assumption being that they were there to serve and serve they should no matter what the circumstances. (3) Neglect of spiritual formation - prayer periods involving the recitation of prayers by rote without attempt to form a deeper interior spirituality. In some instances orders dispensed novices from their year of spiritual formation so they could be thrown directly into the hospital ward or the classroom. (4) Assumption that the rule must be upheld en bloc and any suggested adaptations (e.g. lighter habits for sisters in sunny California than in Northern France (say) where the order was established; disciplinary structures and practices, such as kissing the hem of the superiors' habit, more suited to a monarchical society than to people brought up with the attitudes and expectations of mid-C20 Americans) constituted a betrayal. Exhortations by Pius XII to re-examine the rules and constitutions in the light of the current situation were widely ignored or resisted by superiors in place. This sort of resistance to all change helped to set the fuse for the free-for-all when the orders were told to re-examine and rewrite their practices and rules. One wonders whether this might provide material for the speculation that a Vatican II under Pius XII (who seriously considered calling a Council) might have been less explosive than under John XXIII and might have defused a few of the timebombs waiting to go off. I wonder if the "Look how many vocations we have - that means we're successful so we don't need to change anything" attitude which is quite well attested for the 50s Irish Church lay behind some of these Orders' attitudes.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 7, 2013 20:41:49 GMT
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Post by Ranger on Sept 28, 2015 16:36:19 GMT
A small anecdote from my day, this seemed to be the best place to put it.
I was in my old university today and I passed by a group of new, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed students getting to know each other after their class, a mix of Americans and Irish judging by their accents. I overhead a conversation that went something like this:
Girl (American): I went to a school run by nuns actually. Irish Lad A: In habits and all? Girl (American): No, they were New Age nuns, so no habits. I think they got rid of them after that thing the Church did... do you know what I'm talking about? Irish Lad A: Eh, no? Irish Lad B: Oh, do you mean Vatican Two? Girl (American): Yes, that's it, that was that thing where the Church said that nuns didn't have to wear habits. Irish Lad A: Oh yeah, Vatican Two, that was a thing alright.
I suppose that this level of knowledge about the Church and this impression of Vatican II is to be expected, but it struck me very forcibly as it was a reminder of how little people know and care about things we are very invested in and how Vatican II is viewed by people of my generation and younger, where they even know that it was a 'thing' as they said. A particular view of the Council and indeed the Church in the last 60 years has dominated and it strikes me as being very difficult to get around.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 28, 2015 16:49:30 GMT
On the bright side, at the very least she knew the nuns were "New Age". Unless she thinks Catholicism is compatible with New Age, in which case you have a bigger problem...
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 28, 2015 18:45:06 GMT
Ranger, I have had two different experiences. I am often surprised by the lack of religious knowledge, but I'm also often surprised by the depth of religious knowledge of agnostics and atheists, too.
I remember the time I asked my not-at-all-religious friend Deirdre, who is in her forties, if she knew what Gaudete Sunday was. She recited the first few lines of the hymn 'Gaudete', without difficulty. I've had quite a few similar experiences.
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Post by Ranger on Sept 28, 2015 22:00:03 GMT
It's interesting alright; I find that out-and-out atheists are often quite knowledgeable about Catholicism (not always, some are pig ignorant). It's those I think who are kind-of-but-not-really Catholic, or indeed in the US the growing number of so-called 'nones' who don't know very much about religion.
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