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Post by irishconfederate on Nov 8, 2016 23:24:31 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 9, 2016 21:51:06 GMT
He seems to be an example of a chaotic drifter and criminal who finds structure and meaning through rigorist religion (he converted to Islam in jail). There are Catholic trads and Protestant fundamentalists who have similar mindsets. (BTW he spent his last months in Ireland living in rural Longford, which also has a small colony of Williamsonite trad fanatics - I wonder if they had any contact?) People who came into contact with him spoke of an impression of deep coldness and hatred. "God save us all from such a death/ On such a wintry sea".
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 9, 2016 21:54:15 GMT
Not to take this thread off point, but it's interesting you say he converted in jail. Apparently many jihadists find recruits within jails, and I've even heard entire prisons in Britain are basically run by jihadists, with the guards too afraid to do anything for fear of being accused of something or another.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 9, 2016 22:24:39 GMT
The jail was somewhere in the Middle East where he had gone as a construction worker.
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Post by irishconfederate on Dec 12, 2016 21:12:00 GMT
Just read recently that the new leader of UKIP is a Catholic, is pro-life and a member of Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. I think The Universe covered it on their front page.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 14, 2016 20:29:46 GMT
That's correct - he wants them to appeal to working-class northerners and social conservatives rather than being uber-Thatcherite like Farage. We'll see how that works out.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 18, 2017 18:31:04 GMT
The film THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS (1978) directed by Enrico Olmi, which describes the life of a group of small sharecropping tenant farmers in the Bergamo area of Lombardy in Northern Italy. (It may be relevant that Olmi's previous film was a biopic of John XXIII, who came from a similar background in Bergamo and was brought up is a poor tenant farming family.) It has just been rereleased in a new digital restoration and is well worth seeing if you get the chance. Noticeable features include - it is neither sentimental (there are scenes of actual animal slaughter) nor miserabilist (there are scenes of happiness combined with an omnipresent awareness of how fragile their situation is). It is made clear how circumscribed their world is (there isn't even a railroad and when the priest advises one of the families that their child is bright and should go to school, the need to provide him with wooden clogs for the long walk leads to disaster) while at the same time there are various signs of social change (the appearance of a left-wing speaker at the fair, the landlord has a gramophone). It is made clear that their lives are permeated by Catholicism (they seemed to say the Pater and Ave in Latin, BTW) even though they have a touch of superstition mixed in with it (I shuddered when one of the characters tried to cure a sick cow, whose death would be economically disastrous, by getting it to drink holy water). The portrayal of the local PP and of the nuns in a convent/orphanage were remarkably sympathetic, and in both instances the (amateur) actors gave a real sense of warmth and goodnenss. (I know the director is a left-wing Catholic, but that would not be incompatible with portraying instances - which certainly did happen - of clerics misusing their position.) www.decentfilms.com/reviews/treeofthewoodenclogs
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 30, 2017 23:32:10 GMT
Maisie Ward's 1963 autobiography UNFINISHED BUSINESS. An interesting document on many levels, one being how an orthodox "liberal Catholic" in the 1910s, 1930s, or 1950s sense could take the view that Vatican II was going to be a continuation of what went before and everything would be fine and dandy, just before the post-conciliar crisis exploded. She is very clear that there always was a real distinction between Modernism and the form of theological "liberalism" represented by her father - indeed her recognition that Modernism was a real phenomenon rather than something cooked up by hysterical witch-hunters in itself sets her off from modernism and its latter-day apologists - but at the same time she is very proud that Sheed and Ward is publishing such great and well-balanced theologians as Kung(!) Schillebecx and Rahner. Reading this in awareness of her son Wilfrid's autobiography (which describes how within a few years the publishing firm went into meltdown through a combination of bad business decisions and the evaporation of the Catholic milieu it previously serviced, and how her son and daughter got divorced and at least in the son's case virtually apostasised) is a very sad experience. So is the description of how they founded and worked in the Catholic Housing Association to try to deal with the problems faced by young families in Britain in the post-war housing crisis. In this context she has some deserved words of praise - in this context - for a certain Fr Eamon Casey. It makes sad reading given our present housing crisis and helps to provide a context for the later reaction against HUMANAE VITAE. The "social Catholicism" connection is very strong - she describes their early attempts to run a small farm a la Chestertonian Distributism (and incidentally brings out how little GKC actually knew about the practicalities of small farming) and moves on from there to work with Dorothy Day. (Some very interesting comments on her developing awareness of racial justice towards blacks.) She started out as a paternalist Tory like her family and moved to very strong"social conscience" work, especially in the aftermath of the devastation of WWII. At the same time she was not an advocate of state socialism (she was constantly frustrated by bureaucratic insensitivity); she wanted co-ops and thought (for example) that the nationalised industries should have been run as co-ops by the unions instead of as state corporations. The contrast with the "all socialism is evil and anything other than pure free-marketism is socialism" attitude of American "conservative Catholic" commentators is very marked - though there are reasons why the workers co-op ideal has by and large collapsed. She also describes becoming aware of how Belloc and Chesterton romanticised the Latin countries and how much there was actually wrong with this (there is quite a balanced account of the French worker-priest experiment and the real problems it developed). There is quite a nice chapter on Belloc which brings out some of his better personal qualities as well as the extent to which his pose as a French revolutionist reflected resentment at his frustrated desire to be accepted into the British upper classes. (She mentions BTW an explanation for why he wrote too much - he was so much in demand as a commentator on WWI that he got used to living an expensive lifestyle funded by payment for his war writings, and could never thereafter adjust his spending to post-war reduced circumstances.) I could say a lot more about this book had I time and space - read it in conjunction with James Hitchcock's DECLINE AND FALL OF LIBERAL CATHOLICISM.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 31, 2017 10:18:49 GMT
She is, in my view, still far and away the best biographer of Chesterton.
I don't know if it's in Chesterton's biography that she admits how, at a certain point, the question for liberal Catholics was: "How far can I go towards socialism and still be Catholic"?, rather than developing a distinctively Catholic social and economic philosophy.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 1, 2017 20:07:21 GMT
Agreed - she had the advantage of actually knowing and conversing with Chesterton as a friend for much of her young adult life. The autobiography makes a similar point - she says that the French "worker priests" were a valuable experiment, growing out of the experience of the wartime underground, but that they broke down because many of the priests - partly because they came from middle-class backgrounds and were naive as well as rightly shocked about social injustice - swallowed the Party Line hook, line and sinker to the extent of ceasing to think for themselves. (She even mentions one example who, having left the priesthood and married, promptly gravitated to a white-collar job and dismissed his previous concern for the workers as merely a phase he had gone through. James Hitchcock records exactly the same development among US radical priests - not all of them, of course - in the late 60s and early 70s). She admits the hierarchy had legitimate concerns, just as she admits Modernism was a real problem.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 30, 2017 23:50:30 GMT
The tabloid journalist Jim McDowell, former editor of the Belfast edition of the SUNDAY WORLD, has just published a memoir, THE GOOD FIGHT. On the first page we find the following statement: "At six on the dot there was the ringing of bells on the radio; before the news, the Angelus. The daily morning prayer call for Catholics. It is a thing of beauty, meant to convey goodwill to all, and it offers a warm and welcoming embrace of belonging - not just to members of the Catholic faith, but to all. I fall into that 'all' category. A Protestant from the Black North. Normally, I would bend an ear and listen - the chimes of the bells can be gently calming in themselves..."
This is a nice quote to remember the next time Atheist Snowflakes United claim the Angelus Bell is the moral equivalent of the Inquisition.
In many ways Jim McDowell is not my sort of guy, and THE SUNDAY WORLD is certainly not my sort of paper - but fair play to him and his team for standing up to some really, really vicious people.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 18, 2017 22:01:10 GMT
Currently reading THE PILLAR OF FIRE by Karl Stern (1951) a memoir by a Jewish psychologist and neurologist from Bavaria about his youth, his experiences in 1930s Germany, and his conversion to Catholicism while living in Quebec. I read about Stern in this article www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/08/28/the-forgotten-witness-of-karl-stern/and when I happened to see a copy of PILLAR OF FIRE in a secondhand bookshop shortly afterwards I bought it. A remarkably, searingly honest account of his early life and his alternations between secular and Orthodox Judaism,and his accounts of friends and acquaintances and of the small-town Bavaria where he grew up. Some things that struck me: (1) The depth and clarity with which he brings out the beauty of Orthodox Jewish devotion and its relationship to what outsiders might see as externals (he is much more sympathetic to Orthodoxy than to liberal assimilationism, which he regards as basically bourgeois conformity). At the same time he can be quite startlingly critical of aspects of Judaism (e.g. he suggests that Jewish particularism is a model for racialism). This is really only a criticism that can be made from within or on the basis of extensive knowledge, so I don't intend to comment on it. He is quite direct in saying that Christianity is the fulfilment of Judaism and in relating the prophetic tradition. (He also remarks, incidentally, that for a Jew the derivation of Marx from the prophetic condemnation of injustice is much more obvious than to Gentile readers. Stern was a Marxist for a time; he sees the problem with Marx as deriving from the fact that his desire for justice, not being grounded in the transcendent, can be used to justify almost any atrocity.) (2) He gives a very striking description of how his Jewish acquaintances reacted as the walls closed in on them, and how difficult it was to realise the full dimensions of what was happening. I felt like crying at his descriptions of some of his acquaintances who died - including his grandmother. It is noteworthy that he gives much more attention to those Christians he met who helped and bore witness than to the collaborators and perpetrators. Indeed, he remarked at the horror he and many other Jewish refugees felt when, having been assisted however little by heroic Christians in Germany, they encountered Christian anti-semites in their places of exile. There are also some chilling little glimpses of the mindsets of individual nazis (including one Strasserite who claimed Hitler had let the side down by resulting to vulgar Jew-baiting when the real problem was with monotheism and the sense of individual guilt it inculcated, in contrast to Germanic paganism. I happen to have been reading some polemics against the evil effects of the Sacrament of Confession on the Catholic psyche by an early C20 Irish Catholic turned Protestant, and I was really startled by the resemblance between the two.) (3) His sympathy for Dorothy Day (he was also pals with Maritain) rested on his attachment to the prophetic tradition, and his belief that the long-term tendency of civilisation was towards a soulless technocracy. This in turn I think reflected his experience of the disintegration of the complacent bourgeois civilisation of Wilhelmine Germany; someone who experienced what he experienced could not take a comfortable society for granted in quite the same way. His fears of a long-term "bourgeois captivity" of the church in North America sound uncomfortably prescient, as does his remark that a German scientist with whom he was acquainted and who went nazi in quite a big way genuinely believed that wholesale euthanasia of the mentally ill - which this man had advocated long before the nazis - was the humanitarian and compassionate thing to do, and that once the Judeo-Christian belief in the value of individual life is abandoned it's very hard to resist that mindset. Once again, this is a remarkable book and these comments have only scratched the surface. Read it if you get the chance. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Stern
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 22, 2017 18:58:43 GMT
AT THE SIGN OF THE CLENCHED FIST by Fionn MacColla (Thomas Douglas McDonald, 1906-75). Mac Colla was brought up as a member of the ultra-puritanical Brethren sect in Montrose in the Scottish Lowlands and in the interwar period he converted to Catholicism and became a Scottish Nationalist. (Although most Scots and Welsh in this period were nonconformist Protestants and often fiercely anti-Catholic, it was not unknown for nationalist intellectuals to be attracted to Catholicism because of the belief that the Reformation turned their societies away from the Continent and from their mediaeval high cultures, and encouraged Anglicisation and provincialism; the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru was also founded by a Catholic convert.) His best known novel is AND THE COCK CREW, about a Highland Calvinist clergyman in the eighteenth century who attacks his congregation's traditional Gaelic folk-culture and discourages them from resisting the Highland Clearances. AT THE SIGN OF THE CLENCHED FIST was written in the late 1960s; it consists of extracts from, and commentary on, his then unpublished novel of the Scottish Reformation MOVE UP, JOHN (a full version of the novel was published after its author's death). Essentially his thesis is that the Reformation was an expression of a perennial heresy based on the unconscious desire for unlimited self-assertion, and that it led directly to totalitarianism. It is very forcefully stated, and strikes me as half mad (if Napoleon had won, he says, we would have had a more humane modernity not based on the power of money; Napoleon was a great legislator and administrator but humane he wasn't; in fact he is a classic example of the sort of deification MacColla is talking about). A great deal of what MacColla says about the Reformers' separation of God from Man applies almost uncannily to a certain strain of present-day "liberal Catholic"; I was startled by how much. At the same time, he seems rather soft on the mediaeval church and rather hard on its critics (though it should be borne in mind that he says that only someone brought up as he had been as a hard-shell puritanical Calvinist can realise the horrific nature of Reformed doctrine when it is put into practice and taken to its logical conclusion.) The problem is IMHO that what he describes is as he says a perennial heresy and not confined to Protestantism. I can think of some forms of authoritarian "conservative" Catholicism which go off the rails in exactly the same way. The sedevacantists who pop up on this board from time to time declaring that nobody is Catholic except themselves are a glaring example. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fionn_MacColla
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 26, 2018 20:55:14 GMT
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Post by annie on Feb 16, 2018 10:41:07 GMT
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