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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Oct 11, 2021 8:25:16 GMT
It's very rare we look at business, but back in the late 1970s, the Welsh businessman Albert Gubay made an impact on Ireland in the discount retail sector. I had no idea he was Catholic: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gubay
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 13, 2021 22:32:29 GMT
Florence Stoker (nee Balcombe) was never Wilde's fiancee but he did court her and she chose Bram Stoker over him. (This may not have been such a lucky escape as it seems; some of Stoker's later collateral descendants claimed that he contracted syphilis and the effects influenced his horror writing, though this is not and probably can't be proven.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 19, 2022 0:57:41 GMT
I recently saw a film about the late Victorian/Edwardian illustrator Louis Wain, well known for his humorous portrayal of cats. He suffered from mental problems, and had to support his mother and five unmarried sisters - it's a very sad story. (Those who see it should note that the film is quite consciously stylised; don't expect either an "everything in the garden is rosy" or a naturalistic treatment.) This includes some verbal anachronisms (I don't think the term "schizophrenia" was used in late Victorian Britain) as well as colour-blind casting (to a limited extent - the inclusion of black and Asian people in street scenes is quite plausible given that London was a big cosmopolitan city with worldwide commercial and imperial links, and there were Asian professionals in Britain at the time) but I wonder if some examples of this casting may give the impression that Britain and America were more racially enlightened at that time than was in fact the case. The film begins with the funeral procession of Wain's father, which is led by a grim-looking cleric wearing black vestments and a biretta. I thought at first on seeing this that the Wain family were high-church Anglicans, but it transpires that they were in fact Catholics; their religion is mentioned several times but not explored. (Given that Wain was obsessed with electricity, which he expected would cause cats to turn blue and learn how to talk, it seems unlikely though mot impossible that he was particularly religious. He's buried in a Catholic graveyard according to Wikipedia.)
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Feb 14, 2022 11:56:49 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 17, 2022 20:59:33 GMT
Volume 2 of Peter Seewald's biography of Benedict XVI says that Fidel Castro requested and received the Last Sacraments before his death.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 18, 2022 9:09:27 GMT
I wrote this review of "The Life of Gregory Zilboorg" by Caroline Zilboorg. Gregory Zilboorg was a Russian Jew who served in Kerensky's government and fled Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. He became a psychoanalyst and wrote about the compatibility of psychoanalysis and science. He was a friend of the future Paul VI and converted in 1954, five years before his death. irishpapist.blogspot.com/2022/07/book-review-life-of-gregory-zilboorg.html
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 11, 2022 15:59:48 GMT
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Jan 17, 2024 15:46:06 GMT
Michael Lonsdale, who portrayed Hugo Drax in the Bond film Moonraker, was a convert to Catholicism and a member of the Emmanuel Community: Michael Lonsdale
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 24, 2024 0:37:41 GMT
Interesting - perhaps his portrayal of a martyr-monk in OF GODS AND MEN represented personal affinity?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 24, 2024 10:06:38 GMT
I didn't make the connection, though I watched Of Gods and Men, but he probably did bring a lot of his spirituality into this.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Feb 8, 2024 14:44:50 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 9, 2024 1:34:56 GMT
He was originally a High Church Anglican (he wrote quite a funny trilogy of novels about that milieu, including a description of a ramshackle attempt to establish an Anglican Benedictine monastery and a moving fictional account of the work, and dismissal as a result of Protestant protests, of the Portsmouth slum cleric RR Dolling) but converted shortly before the First World War. There was a tendency for a certain type of bohemian aesthete in early to mid C20 Britain to be attracted to Catholicism as a way of self-distancing from Protestant bourgeois respectability. He lived with his second wife, who was a Catholic from the Hebridean island of Barra, before marrying her after his first wife died; though being a sinner is compatible with underlying belief.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 9, 2024 11:34:18 GMT
He was originally a High Church Anglican (he wrote quite a funny trilogy of novels about that milieu, including a description of a ramshackle attempt to establish an Anglican Benedictine monastery and a moving fictional account of the work, and dismissal as a result of Protestant protests, of the Portsmouth slum cleric RR Dolling) but converted shortly before the First World War. There was a tendency for a certain type of bohemian aesthete in early to mid C20 Britain to be attracted to Catholicism as a way of self-distancing from Protestant bourgeois respectability. He lived with his second wife, who was a Catholic from the Hebridean island of Barra, before marrying her after his first wife died; though being a sinner is compatible with underlying belief. Carnival by Compton Mackenzie was one of my favourite books as a teen. I read it several times, in whole and in part. It's the story of a Cockney ballet dancer. I never hear it mentioned but it must have been very popular back in the day, three films having been made of it by 1946. I did some research into Mackenzie's Catholicism recently. I couldn't find a whole lot out about it, but he seems to have been rather on the liberal Catholic side. I do remember reading in my local library's copy of Sinister Street-- which I borrowed, but never finished, or really got more than a few pages into it-- that he could do very little work in the immediate aftermath of his conversion because he felt such deep content. I read that a long time ago.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 9, 2024 16:26:20 GMT
He was originally a High Church Anglican (he wrote quite a funny trilogy of novels about that milieu, including a description of a ramshackle attempt to establish an Anglican Benedictine monastery and a moving fictional account of the work, and dismissal as a result of Protestant protests, of the Portsmouth slum cleric RR Dolling) but converted shortly before the First World War. There was a tendency for a certain type of bohemian aesthete in early to mid C20 Britain to be attracted to Catholicism as a way of self-distancing from Protestant bourgeois respectability. He lived with his second wife, who was a Catholic from the Hebridean island of Barra, before marrying her after his first wife died; though being a sinner is compatible with underlying belief. Carnival by Compton Mackenzie was one of my favourite books as a teen. I read it several times, in whole and in part. It's the story of a Cockney ballet dancer. I never hear it mentioned but it must have been very popular back in the day, three films having been made of it by 1946. I did some research into Mackenzie's Catholicism recently. I couldn't find a whole lot out about it, but he seems to have been rather on the liberal Catholic side. I do remember reading in my local library's copy of Sinister Street-- which I borrowed, but never finished, or really got more than a few pages into it-- that he could do very little work in the immediate aftermath of his conversion because he felt such deep content. I read that a long time ago. If I remember correctly, he was among the 50 cultural figures in Britain who signed the petition for the retention of the traditional Latin Mass in 1968.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 13, 2024 11:35:05 GMT
Carnival by Compton Mackenzie was one of my favourite books as a teen. I read it several times, in whole and in part. It's the story of a Cockney ballet dancer. I never hear it mentioned but it must have been very popular back in the day, three films having been made of it by 1946. I did some research into Mackenzie's Catholicism recently. I couldn't find a whole lot out about it, but he seems to have been rather on the liberal Catholic side. I do remember reading in my local library's copy of Sinister Street-- which I borrowed, but never finished, or really got more than a few pages into it-- that he could do very little work in the immediate aftermath of his conversion because he felt such deep content. I read that a long time ago. If I remember correctly, he was among the 50 cultural figures in Britain who signed the petition for the retention of the traditional Latin Mass in 1968. ...and we're talking about the Latin Mass again...
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