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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 15, 2014 21:36:22 GMT
This is a big subject, but here goes. The Catholic Church in Ireland seems in dramatic decline for many decades now, going by objective measures like church attendance and vocations. There seems very little consensus on what went wrong, or what brought this situation about. Did a too-powerful Church become triumphalist and complacent, and consequently unable to adapt to social changes like television and contraception? Or did the Catholic Church in Ireland shoot itself in the foot by changing a winning formula after Vatican II? Or were the changes that swept through Irish society in the second half of the twentieth century destined to bring secularisation with them? Or a mixture of these? Or none of these?
I am not sure of the answers myself, so I am extra interested what other people think. There has been some discussion of this in other threads but as far as I can see it has not had a thread dedicated to it.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 16, 2014 8:51:15 GMT
How much time do you have?
I suppose the first answer is that the Catholic Church is failing anywhere as a long as its members are not answering the universal call to holiness, or to put it in a more traditional manner, not living lives of heroic virtue. This is not exclusive to clergy and religious.
Against that, there are great many factors including the grounds offered above and many more. In retrospect, the culture of a passive laity was a bad one (though people like Frank Duff worked against it), there certainly was an arrogance around the hierarchy, clergy and religious (and their position in society could draw in the wrong sort of person too). For all that, the Second Vatican Council was only in the business of modifying some practices, but this was misinterpreted internationally (to be honest, the Irish Church began with a better understanding of the council implications than other Churches, but couldn't stand the waves around them).
On an international level, the late Mgr Cremin drew strong parallels between the Irish and the Dutch churches. He believed we would go the same way as the Netherlands. He was not far wrong. I know from conversation, Hibernicus and I regularly come back to comparing Ireland with Quebec and Belgium (particularly Flanders). I know Fr Vincent Twomey's analysis focussed on Germany, but there is no one German Catholic experience. The Rhineland (close to Holland and Belgium) gives a very intellectual version of Catholicism, where Bavaria is populist and as with Austria (and also from a German-speaking point of view, some Swiss cantons) and south-western Europe, there is a strong tradition of state Catholicism. Furthermore, there are pockets of Catholicism in northern and eastern Germany which are closer in experience to English Catholicism. But the point I would make is whatever way you analyse the Catholic experience, whether nations with a tradition of state Catholicism (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, some Swiss cantons, Bavaria, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Luxembourg, almost all Latin America); nations where Catholicism has been a popular unifying force (Poland, Ireland, Quebec, Lithuania, Belgium, Malta, the Rhineland); nations where Catholicism has been a strong minority (Netherlands, some German states, some Swiss cantons, England, Scotland, Latvia, Ukraine, Romania, Czech Republic); nations where emigration has created strong Catholic presences (United States, Anglo-Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) and nations where Catholicism is an often articulate small minority faith (Scandanavia, Russia, Wales, Greece), all have problems. There is no model of success. BTW, no list is perfect or even exhaustive. We are all in unknown territory here.
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Post by eircomnet on Jul 16, 2014 10:41:14 GMT
There are a number of factors : the relentless anti-catholicism of the media, the badly formed clergy ( when did you last hear a sermon on sin judgement heaven hell ?)but what I would like to concentrate on just now is the deplorable state of catechesis in Ireland & indeed all over.) I am constantly surprised at how unaware people are of the dire programmes used in school. Some time have a look at the books of Alive O in one of the school bookshops. And there is almost no catholic teaching in secondary schools. You can easily see the bad fruits of current catholic education if you pose some doctrinal questions to schoolchildren of various ages. My wife taught for years in a primary school & refused to teach Alive O, instead basing her teaching on orthodox solid stuff that she was brought up on in school & otherwise. This sad state of affairs did not start yesterday or recently but goes back at least 40 years. If you don't get the faith as a child, how will you get it in later life unless you are unusually lucky? A courageous group called Pro Fide brought out booklets many years ago pointing out the deficiencies in the school programmes but their cogently presented criticisms fell on deaf ears. My wife lives with the certainty that every morning she gets up she is aware that in every school in the country the faith of the young is being destroyed. She came across one exception to this "every" many years ago.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 16, 2014 18:11:44 GMT
The anti-Catholicism of the media and the badly formed clergy are to some extent symptoms rather than causes, given that many of the media types experienced Catholic education, and the clerics/staff who wreckovated Catholic catechesis and clerical formation were themselves products of the earlier system. A few suggestions:
(1) Tribal solidarity - in Ireland this was exacerbated by our nationalist heritage, in that we presented an idealised self-image for fear that the British/the unionists would seize on self-criticism as proof that we were every bit as bad as they said we were, and anyone who uttered criticisms (beyond certain limits) was seen as letting the side down. Some of the recent research on C20 episcopal responses to the question of whether the fact that large numbers of Irish immigrants to Britain lapsed quite quickly, and whether this might indicate flaws with Irish Catholic culture, is very eye-opening; not only did the Irish church authorities deny this was taking place, they refused even to consider the possibility and treated any discussion of it as slanderous. This was not, however, unique to Ireland, because in the C19 Catholicism was strongly bound up with a number of minority subcultures (immigrant groups or national minorities; the Dutch Catholics, Quebecois, Irish and Poles were all minorities in bigger political units and were all famously devout. I wonder if the same was true of the Swiss Catholics, who were traditionally seen as backward and rural and certainly played second fiddle to the Protestant Swiss.) To some extent this is an unavoidable risk; the Faith is not a purely verbal or purely individual phenomenon and needs community support to sustain it, but this in turn runs the risk of creating a sort of "amoral familialism" or Pharisaism.
(2) There is also a tension between popular revivalism and middle-class intellectual faith. Popular revivalism requires simplification and can very often be superficial and simplistic (whether that takes the form of harshness or laxity). Middle-class/intellectual faith requires sophistication and complexity but this can often develop into aridity, legalism, and privatised religion (i.e. exclusive concern with the fate of my own soul and letting the world go to hell in a handbasket). One of the interesting things about Newman is his concern to bridge this gap (he had real pastoral concern for ordinary parish work, often under very difficult conditions)
(3) I suspect in the Irish case there was a real depth of clerical arrogance and taking deference as something to which they were entitled. A positivist attitude (whatever Father says is right because Father says it, no explanation is necessary and anyone who asks for one is dodgy) shades very rapidly from simple authoritarianism into more straightforward corruption (once you assume that whatever you want is what God wants, it becomes easy to assume that God wants your nephew to get that nice job, or that He wants you to head off and enjoy yourself at the Cheltenham race meeting. I have heard quite a bit of oral recollection of, for example, clerical laziness and pre-Vatican II Irish Catholic schools which neglected religious education because they wanted to focus on exam results and because they assumed the faith would be picked up from the surrounding culture without needing to be formally taught. I've also come across quite a few instances in twentieth-century pre-Vatican II Catholic publications of clerics and religious who thought that ordination or profession should be treated as automatically conferring all possible gifts and qualifications, and that anyone who wished to assess their abilities and qualifications on any other grounds was anti-Catholic. There certainly was a strain of religious commentators (such as Fr Michael O'Carroll) who were worried that religious formation did not go deep enough, that the development of a real interior religion was being neglected in favour of outward conformity. (I've heard of religious congregations which actually dispensed novices from spiritual formation in order to send them straight into the classroom or the ward, which is like dispensing a house from having foundations and expecting it not to collapse.) Just as some writers in Elizabethan England attributed the downfall of the English Church, the loss of the priesthood and the Sacraments, to moral laxity and widespread sacrilegious communion, I suspect the drying up of vocations could be seen as divine punishment on the mishandling of vocations, even the acquiesence in and toleration of forced vocations, when they were plentiful; and I suspect that a lot of the liberal-religious commentators who assume that traditional teaching consists merely of arbitrary commands without any rationale or substance, originally got that impression from the way it was presented to them in formation. (Again the sudden switch from"nothing can be changed because we say so, and changing anything would call everything into question" to "everything must be changed because we say so, and nothing we said before implies any more" just encouraged the view that the whole thing was meaningless and senseless.
(4) I would say that Irish Catholicism came to be bound up with a form of socio-economic organisation (small town, small farmer, local family-run enterprises, relative insulation from the outside world) which had advantages and faults and assumptions (e.g. that your good or bad fortune is much more bound up with your personal moral failings, detectable in face-to-face interaction, than we would assume in our more globalised world; e.g. the idea that an employer would treat a potential employee's church attendance as evidence of reliability was fairly common then, but was very rapidly dropped). The disruption of that world by technological change (e.g. the impact of containerisation, which reduces the demand for unskilled labour, on port districts of cities) and by globalisation (e.g. the takeover, often the closure, of a lot of family-owned local businesses by bigger companies, often multinational, was a major feature of the opening-up of the Irish economy in the 60s and 70s - and of course the big shift from a rural society to a predominantly urban one, which has happened almost within my lifetime; I saw some old newspapers from the early 70s recently and was startled to realise how much more rural they were, how much more attention they paid to the little towns, than their successors) and by mass communications, was always going to have a major effect. There were BTW traces of this visible in the 50s if not earlier, certainly I've heard stories that vocations were already predominantly coming from rural areas in certain religious orders, and that town students were treated with suspicion.)
I have a lot of things to do and not much time, but I want to agree with Alasdair that it's an international crisis and no-one has come up with satisfactory answers - but it does seem to me that Ireland, having resisted at first out of inertia, has failed to rethink things and articulate a defence of the faith that was in us while the generations who got a somewhat sounder formation/ catechesis (despite the worries listed above) were still with us, and are consequently going to suffer an even worse apostasy than we are currently experiencing. I do not say this from despair, but because in order to address the problem we must first face up to how bad it is and how much worse it will become.
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Post by shane on Jul 16, 2014 19:49:52 GMT
not only did the Irish church authorities deny this was taking place, they refused even to consider the possibility and treated any discussion of it as slanderous. That's an exaggeration, surely? Reports of apostasy among Irish immigrants was an obsession among Irish newspapers in the 1950s; the Irish bishops may have preferred to have kept it all in-house but it was well-known and far from being a secret. BTW, that attitude wasn't just taken by Irish bishops. Cardinal Heenan, while Archbishop of Liverpool, argued that reports of apostasy among Irish immigrants in Britain had been exaggerated, that they reflected only a temporary falling away and that most of these so-called apostates later returned to religious practice. (I'm not suggesting that he was right or wrong.) Jeremiah Newman's paper from 1958 on religious vocations in Ireland is well worth reading on this: lxoa.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/priestly-vocations-in-ireland-1958/
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 16, 2014 20:45:20 GMT
and of course the big shift from a rural society to a predominantly urban one, which has happened almost within my lifetime; I saw some old newspapers from the early 70s recently and was startled to realise how much more rural they were, how much more attention they paid to the little towns, than their successors) and by mass communications, was always going to have a major effect. There were BTW traces of this visible in the 50s if not earlier, certainly I've heard stories that vocations were already predominantly coming from rural areas in certain religious orders, and that town students were treated with suspicion. I was reading some volumes of Studies magazine from the fifties or sixties, can't remember which...anyway, I was really surprised that there were very many articles on agriculture, and they were written in considerable depth and with considerable technical detail.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 16, 2014 22:57:55 GMT
In answer to Shane: The two particular examples I was thinking of were as follows: (1) The family of Halliday Sutherland recently released some unpublished draft material for his book on a 1950s visit to IReland. Sutherland was a very high-profile English Catholic doctor and writer (he had been sued for libel by Marie Stopes for claiming that the form of birth control which she promoted damaged women's health). Sutherland describes a conversation with Bishop Browne of Galway in which Browne flatly denied there was any problem (not clear whether he meant the lapsation didn't exist or that it didn't mean it indicated the lapsi's Catholic formation was flawed). Browne told Sutherland flat out that this was propaganda put out by certain English Catholics for political reasons (he mentioned Cardinal Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster 1903-35, whose hostility to Irish nationalism was notorious). In other words, even in a private conversation with someone whose Catholic credentials were unquestionable, Browne refused to even consider the possibility that there was a problem, and claimed that anyone who suggested there was a problem was in bad faith.
(2) The Irish Manuscripts commission recently published a very detailed joint report about Irish emigration to Britain prepared for the Irish and England & Wales hierarchies in the 1950s. The report was not published at the time because the two hierarchies could not agree on it. The Irish bishops (with John Charles McQuaid playiing a leading role) demanded that all the material relating to widespread emigrant lapsation and its possible implications about the state of Irish Catholic formation should be taken out. They did not dispute its accuracy, or suggest alternative interpretations; they just flat out demanded that the subject should not be included at all, because they said so.
I submit that those two items constitute prima facie evidence of an ostrich mentality on the subject among (at least) certain sections of the Irish hierarchy in the 1950s. The reports that you mention do indicate the problem's existence was acknowledged, but I suspect it was discussed purely in terms of "pull" factors (i.e. Irish immigrants being corrupted by pagan Britain a la the famous 1940s stage melodrama THE RIGHTEOUS ARE BOLD in which a young woman who has gone to work in England returns to Ireland in a state of demonic possession) and the question of "push" factors (flaws in Irish society, the use of Britain as a dumping-ground for Irish social problems) was the great unmentionable (rather like the tendency in certain circles - and I know it was not the only approach - to discuss rural depopulation purely in terms of naive emigrants being seduced by glitter into irrational discontent with their lot.)
Maolseachlainn - that would not be at all surprising. Not only was agriculture still the backbone of the Irish economy and society, but STUDIES was Ireland's main social studies journal at a time when specialist journals barely existed (and Irish Jesuits were involved in the agricultural co-operative movement from its foundation in the 1890s, notably the famous Fr Tom Finlay).
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Post by shane on Jul 17, 2014 0:01:39 GMT
Hibernicus, Sutherland was not an English Catholic, he was a Scottish Catholic.
We have already debated Irish emigrant lapsation and its implications. I still contend that it is not an accurate barometer of the strength of Irish Catholicism, nor does it tell us very much about the efficacy of Irish pastoral methods. Irish Catholics were raised in a profoundly Catholic environment and religious education appropriately reflected this. But it is difficult to remain Catholic in a non-Catholic culture and even the best theological formation does not negate free will ("you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink").
Unless Irish emigrant lapsation rates were significantly higher than native English Catholic lapsation rates, they are not statistically meaningful insofar as we're assessing Irish Catholicism.
Oliver Reilly (national organiser of Muintir na Tíre) observed in 1958 whilst working amongst Irish immigrants in Birmingham that: "a boy and girl of twenty-one may hold on to the Faith, but their children have little hope at all". Is the lapsation of the children of these emigrants (raised and educated in England) to be likewise blamed on the pastoral deficiencies of the English Catholic Church? If not, why the double standards?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 17, 2014 12:07:35 GMT
There's a load of material here that I would like to reply to. I think on an immediate level, Catholicism is going downhill in Ireland (and elsewhere) because of poor catechesis, poor liturgy, lack of evangelical zeal (most religious orders are waiting for their own extinction), inabilitiy not only to provide a response to the media onslaught, but also in many cases to actively go along with it (ACP, for example). In regard to the international level, many of the failed processes in Ireland were imported from abroad and many were seen as having the explicit blessing, if not the mandate of the Holy See. There was certainly a carry-over of ecclesiastical arrogance which didn't help.
I agree with eircomnet in that poor catechesis is the greatest contribution to lapsation among the young and early middle-aged. Before Alive-O, there was the Children of God. It was this latter that Pro Fide campaigned against. I know a number of these: the late Maeve MacGuill (Dundalk, originally of Greenock); the late Robert van Cortlandt Herbst (Tralee, originally from Washington DC). Their theological advisor was Mgr Cremin. But anyway, some people might remember the Raphoe Catechism which was used as a resource for preparation for First Communion and Confirmation. One of the case scenarios presented in the Confirmation book was of Catholics emigrating and keeping up the practice of the faith overseas. England was mentioned, though I suspect the Raphoe diocese dealt with Scotland frequently enough - but the picture was of young Irish people going within a few years of confirmation and whether the gifts of the Holy Ghost were strong enough to keep them practicing. This was directed at 12-year olds in Ireland in the late 60s to mid 70s (I was a little younger, but inherited the confirmation volume from a cousin). This is reflective of a mentality in the Irish Church at the time which makes for an interesting analysis.
With regard to the international situation, Switzerland might make an interesting case study as there is a such a cross-section of cultural and denominational groups there and also because it is thoroughly research. The fact that Swiss Catholics tend to be rural is interesting; I recall one thing that makes Flanders similar to Ireland is that it is rural and perceived as being backward.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 17, 2014 22:47:32 GMT
If loss of the Faith was inevitable when people moved to a non-Catholic environment, then nowhere would ever be evangelised. (This raises such questions as - why was there not universal apostacy among nineteenth-century immigrants who often lived under hideous conditions?)
Even if the suggestion that Irish methods of catechesis and other aspects of Irish Catholic culture were in no way to blame was correct, the fact that the Irish bishops' immediate reaction was NOT to examine the hypothesis and rebut it, but to close down the discussion, deny that the hypothesis could possibly be true, and accuse anyone who advanced it of deliberate bad faith suggests a very unhealthy attitude. Assuming that you MUST be right and therefore need not give reasons, and that anyone who disagrees with you MUST be not merely mistaken but dishonest, pretty much guarantees trouble sooner or later.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 17, 2014 22:58:05 GMT
BTW just in case the format of this thread might lead to a suggestion that there was nothing to lose in the first place - I have seen descriptions of the real instinctive belief in the supernatural which marked Irish Catholic society up until quite recently, not only by Catholics but by atheists who disagree with it and think it delusional.
I remember reading a quote from a Samuel Beckett letter in which he says that while he disliked populist Irish Catholicism for many reasons (I suspect from a mixture of Bohemian atheism and early C20 middle-class Dublin Protestant social attitudes) he admitted that it had the ability to provide its dying adherents with hope and consultation, whereas some of his family members whose deaths he had witnessed died with no comfort at all from their professed Anglicanism. (I am not BTW suggesting that this is true of every form of Protestantism; Beckett seems to be suggesting that his family's version of Christianity and that of their class had, without their realising it, degenerated into a sort of middle-class social club based on good manners.)
I think that is an important point because I believe from reflecting on my own life that the devil wants us to despair. HE wants us to fix all our hopes and dreams on power and ambition - on fame, wealth, sex (as possessing the other, not relating to them) - and when these don't happen or don't satisfy us, to decide that life is a meaningless and worthless chaos. Idolatry always leads to despair because it asks of a finite good something which it can't give.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 18, 2014 9:04:39 GMT
How much does catechesis in schools really matter? Don't schoolchildren just dismiss whatever their teachers tell them out of hand, anyway?
This is a big topic, too. The above questions are far from rhetorical. I'm not sure of the answers.
When I think of my own religious education, it strikes me that it was the atmosphere as well as the substance of our Christian education that failed. Religion was simply not treated as an important subject. That signal was being given all the time in many ways.
Another thing that strikes me is that I don't remember anyone ever telling me WHY I should believe. I got the impression it was all to be taken on pure faith.
For all this, I would not simply dismiss my religious schooling. Even the dodgier parts. I used to complain that we were shown 'inspirational' feature films a lot of the time, but as a matter of fact many of these feature films did actually make a big impression on me, and the very circumstances in which they were shown made a big impression on me. They were films like Shadowlands and On Golden Pond. I honestly believe they helped inculcate a Christian (if not Catholic) sensibility in me.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 18, 2014 14:59:49 GMT
Well, we are talking about different issues here with catechesis. The substantial failure is in primary catechesis, where preparation for the sacraments is done and the groundwork is laid. In secondary schools, religious education is not treated seriously. I remember having had discussions with people who are not particularly religious who believed that religious education represented an important opportunity to address the bigger questions. Many RE teachers I had at second level had no training or preparation and many inspirational films were shown. A lot of time was spent on social issues and another experiment, in line with what was then the main thinking in religious education, was to put us into small discussion groups. The catechetics expert who devised this heralded it as a success, but I know from experience that we rarely stuck to the point. However, I believe there was little to build on from primary and that the fact it was seen as a doss subject in secondary school destroyed any hope it had to take hold among the youth. This means for a poorly informed youth. This has its effects on those who pursue religious vocations - some are as clueless as everyone else, and seminary doesn't make up the deficit. There still is a high attrition rate among the ordained - a friend of mine told me an ordained friend of his showed him the 1991 photograph and said half the priests had left. Why were the problems not faced up to at the time? I think there was continuity of some of the denial that the bishops seem to have been in the 1950s.
Given the level of emigration from Ireland before the 1960s, there must have been some consciousness of lapsation among emigrants. This was brushing problems under the carpet.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 18, 2014 19:45:48 GMT
I am a bit older than Maolseachlainn, so I got the tail-end of traditional catechesis (switching from memorising catechism to a vaguer approach early in secondary school, and they showed us movies like the Zeffirelli JESUS OF NAZARETH and the evangelical Gospel movie (which is a literal adaptation of one of the Gospels - I forget which - which has no extra-biblical incidents or dialogue, and unknown actors) - in other words, the choice of movies was still centred on the Gospel rather than a wider exploration of faith or ethics. (I have never seen ON GOLDEN POND, but I doubt from what I have heard of it that it is explicitly religious; the SHADOWLANDS film, which I have seen, casts doubt on the possibility of intellectually-defined faith, rather more so than either the original play or the events on which it is based.) Certainly Religion was treated as a "doss" subject as there was no exam, and it tended to be based around undirected discussion. Most of it was left to a young teacher who I think had not graduated and who took "trendy" views - I did not get on well with her, through my fault as well as hers (I had picked up some very odd views from my attempts at religious self-education - some of the ideas I got from Robert Hugh Benson, whose politics were reactionary to put it mildly, and from some of Chesterton and Belloc's wilder flourishes, quite frankly horrify me.) This although there were still a few teaching brothers on the staff, which may suggest how long ago it was. I "caught the germ" outside school - I fell for Chesterton's Father Brown stories and then for the rest of him, my parents were concerned for my faith and encouraged me to read old-style apologetics (which widened the gap between what I got in school and what I was reading, given that much of what I read was written before Vatican II, even before WW2) and I had a traditionalist great-uncle who gave us a subscription to CHRISTIAN ORDER, which though it had its eccentricities was not demented like it is now and had a lot of good stuff. What I took from this was the sense that the faith had a rational basis and it all hung together and made sense even if I didn't quite grasp it. Where I fell down was on any more advanced understanding. I remember walking down a street in my late teens reading Michael Davies' book on Anglican Orders, and suddenly realising what I had never really grasped before, that the priesthood was instituted at the last Supper and the Apostles were the first priests. When I went to college I was profoundly disturbed to discover, almost immediately, how wide is the gap between Chesterton and Belloc's idealised Middle Ages and the real thing. I stopped reading the lives of the saints until my thirties because I didn't know how to integrate them into history; oddly enough, it is only recently that I have really understood the full sweep of church history although as a teenager I read a couple of short histories of the church, which obviously I didn't really grasp it. I was a very strongly committed pro-lifer, and realised that sexual promiscuity led to abortion, but I think for my twenties and part of my thirties I was a Catholic in the sense that one might be a member of a political party, and there was a time in my late twenties when I had a degree of doubt. Oddly enough, it was reading American Catholic blogs and discussion sites in an attempt to come to terms with the abuse crisis that gave me a sense of the profounder nature of faith and the Church. (also to some extent studying a bit about Protestantism; it was not until I actually came into contact with Protestants that I realised that some of the features/practices I was used to, such as the crucifix, were specifically Catholic rather than universally Christian. I even remember wondering at one point if the crises in the Church and the apparent success of the evangelicals might mean they were right after all, but the more I learned about evangelicalism the more I realised its shallowness compared to Catholicism.) I remember Andrew O'Connell had a column in the IRISH CATHOLIC awhile back which is very strong on the shortcomings of catechesis: www.irishcatholic.ie/article/we-need-our-game-passing-faithEXTRACT As the academic year comes to an end I’m reminded of a conversation I had a couple of years ago during a dinner in Dublin. The group at the table included several young professionals – barristers, consultants, accountants, stockbrokers – who had gathered for an after-work bite to eat on a Friday evening. After politics and sport the conversation eventually turned to religion. Unusually, everyone at the table was a practising Catholic, and what happened next was telling. People began to share stories of why they had decided to continue in the practice of their faith at a time when most of their peers had drifted away. Some spoke about the influence of a grandparent or local priest. Others attributed it to their involvement in a local youth group or university society. However, there was one feature in common: a latent anger regarding their experience of religious education in secondary school. Put bluntly, they felt that they were Catholic today in spite of – not because of – their religious formation at school. At the heart of their complaint was a disappointment with the intellectually unchallenging presentation of the Faith to which they had been exposed. One girl pointed out that her Leaving Certificate English course demanded a precise knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare’s Hamlet but there was nothing comparable expected of her in Religious Education class. Reluctance Another mentioned that even at Junior Certificate level he was expected to study works such as T.S. Eliot’s Lovesong of Alfred J. Prufrock and Tennyson’s lengthy Lady of Shallot and yet there seemed to be a reluctance to demand anything similar in RE. It begs the question, are we underestimating young people’s ability and interest in the rich intellectual elements of the Faith? The encouraging reality is that students are well able for more substantial content. I’ve seen how groups of teenagers enjoy Augustine. Indeed it would take a hard heart or a dull head not to respond to the stirring, “Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient ever new.” Similarly, I know a school chaplain who reluctantly (by his own admission) showed Fr Robert Barron’s Catholicism DVD series to his non-exam 5th year class recently and was delighted with their response. Certainly, the intellect cannot be the sole focus of forming people in the Faith; the head needs to be balanced against the hand (service) and the heart (prayer). Nor can schools be expected to do all the work. But it’s probably fair to say that we need to ‘up our game’ when it comes to our approach to faith formation. END OF EXTRACT - See more at: www.irishcatholic.ie/article/we-need-our-game-passing-faith#sthash.hMBxo1iy.dpuf
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 18, 2014 19:59:43 GMT
BTW Alasdair, I think you have missed the point slightly. There was a good deal of discussion of emigrant lapsation in the Forties and Fifties; the problem IMHO was that this discussion was conducted on the basis that it was the fault of the pagan Britain to which they emigrated, or of the emigrants themselves for succumbing to temptation. Where the debate was lacking was in the question of whether the lapsation might reflect weaknesses in Irish Catholicism itself, and my point was that the bishops were not willing to consider this possibility and actively suppressed suggestions about it.
Shane's argument so far as I can make it out is that the existence of the lapsation does not necessarily mean there was a fault in preconciliar Irish Catholicism, and that a certain amount of lapsation was probably inevitable under the circumstances. There is some truth in this, and I would also agree that Irish Catholicism of the generation before the Council tends to be written about by its critics (ranging from liberal Catholics to militant atheists) and its strengths are underestimated. Certainly Shane's reproduction of preconciliar documentation is useful; my beef with Shane's approach is that the documents need analysis and contextualisation. Similarly, I don't think there was an obvious and clearcut alternative we didn't take, given that a wide range of Catholic cultures and societies were disrupted by the crisis, whatever approach was tried. Where I disagree with Shane is in his apparent view that external factors explain it all. The external factors would not have produced this result without pre-existing internal weaknesses, just as the French Revolution derived from corruption in the ancien regime; the most fruitful Catholic response to that Revolution was not the attempt to re-create the old regime, but the desire to go back to first principles and apply them anew.
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