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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 2, 2019 10:23:26 GMT
So G.K. Chesterton's cause for sainthood is not going to be opened. catholicherald.co.uk/news/2019/08/02/chestertons-cause-will-not-be-opened/The Bishop of Northampton wrote: "“That conclusion is that I am unable to promote the cause of GK Chesterton for three reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, there is no local cult. Secondly, I have been unable to tease out a pattern of personal spirituality. And, thirdly, even allowing for the context of G K Chesterton’s time, the issue of anti-Semitism is a real obstacle particularly at this time in the United Kingdom.” Personally, I am fine with this decision. It's up to the Church who becomes a saint and who doesn't. It doesn't take away from my love or admiration of G.K. Chesterton one little bit. I don't think Chesterton was an anti-semite but I understand that we live in an era when the Church is making great efforts at inter-religious dialogue and I see the wisdom of tact. Some things Chesterton said about the Jews were objectionable. I would like to see the "pattern of personal spirituality" remark expanded upon. I had wondered if Chesterton's apparent lack of dedication to the sacraments might be an obstacle-- I don't know if this is what the Bishop means. He went to Mass and Confession, of course, but he didn't seem to have the zeal for them that characterizes most saints. The "local cult" remark intrigues me. Does this mean that there is a local cult for every saint the Church canonizes, or whose cause is opened? Was there a local cult for Blessed Columba Marmion, for instance? I think there was rather too much of a focus on Chesterton's canonisation, and I think we can now go back to appreciating him as the amazing writer and evangelist he was, despite any faults he had.
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Post by assisi on Aug 2, 2019 16:07:07 GMT
So G.K. Chesterton's cause for sainthood is not going to be opened. catholicherald.co.uk/news/2019/08/02/chestertons-cause-will-not-be-opened/The Bishop of Northampton wrote: "“That conclusion is that I am unable to promote the cause of GK Chesterton for three reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, there is no local cult. Secondly, I have been unable to tease out a pattern of personal spirituality. And, thirdly, even allowing for the context of G K Chesterton’s time, the issue of anti-Semitism is a real obstacle particularly at this time in the United Kingdom.” Personally, I am fine with this decision. It's up to the Church who becomes a saint and who doesn't. It doesn't take away from my love or admiration of G.K. Chesterton one little bit. I don't think Chesterton was an anti-semite but I understand that we live in an era when the Church is making great efforts at inter-religious dialogue and I see the wisdom of tact. Some things Chesterton said about the Jews were objectionable. I would like to see the "pattern of personal spirituality" remark expanded upon. I had wondered if Chesterton's apparent lack of dedication to the sacraments might be an obstacle-- I don't know if this is what the Bishop means. He went to Mass and Confession, of course, but he didn't seem to have the zeal for them that characterizes most saints. The "local cult" remark intrigues me. Does this mean that there is a local cult for every saint the Church canonizes, or whose cause is opened? Was there a local cult for Blessed Columba Marmion, for instance? I think there was rather too much of a focus on Chesterton's canonisation, and I think we can now go back to appreciating him as the amazing writer and evangelist he was, despite any faults he had. I too am not too put out by this either. GK was one of a kind. I like the variety in Catholicism, from the ascetic to the genial genius who likes a few beers. As long as they are, generally speaking, orthodox and try to practice their faith as best they can. GK used his talent to the full and has been a big positive for Catholicism, saint or no saint.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 2, 2019 22:13:10 GMT
Two of the reasons seem odd. There is certainly a cult - that is, a following of people who venerate Chesterton as a saint. The fact that it is not centred in (let alone confined to) the Diocese of Nottingham is beside the point (unless the implication is that it suggests the people who knew him best did not so regard him). This is like judging the CAuse of John Henry Newman purely on the extent of veneration for him in the Archdiocese of Birmingham. - Oddly enough, some people have responded by claiming Paul VI did not have a local cult; in fact before his recent process, veneration for him was quite strong in (and almost confined to) his home diocese of Brescia. Similarly, Chesterton has a very coherent spirituality based on the goodness of BEing and of Creation, with affinities to St Francis of Assisi and to St Thomas Aquinas (both of whom he wrote on). He was a Dominican Tertiary in later life. - Perhaps the bishop refers to, and places too much weight on, the fact that as an Anglican Chesterton's church attendance was irregular, which in fact is fairly standard Anglican practice. Sadly, I see his point about anti-semitism. I think there is quite enough problematic material in this area to make the progression of his cause inexpedient at least at present. Finally, the Church (by which I take it you mean the Church on earth) does not decide who is a saint - God does that. It decides who may be publicly venerated at the altars.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 8, 2019 21:14:13 GMT
Here we see two extreme responses to the Bishop of Northampton's decision. Eccles equates the bishop with Gollum and dismisses his reasoning out of hand: ecclesandbosco.blogspot.com/2019/08/no-halo-for-gk-chesterton.htmlThe internet stalker who has attached himself to the Anglican Ordinariate rejoices at what he sees as a defeat for snobby Anglophile fantasists: stmarycoldcase.blogspot.com/2019/08/rod-dreher-is-weepy-for-chesterton.htmlReally, the spite and bile that emanates from that blog is remarkable (not to mention the assumptions he makes about people's motives). For example, Newman attracts coteries of intellectual snobs and Anglophile wannabes - that doesn't mean that is all there is to him, or that his canonisation should have been stopped.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 9, 2019 8:44:26 GMT
Here we see two extreme responses to the Bishop of Northampton's decision. Eccles equates the bishop with Gollum and dismisses his reasoning out of hand: ecclesandbosco.blogspot.com/2019/08/no-halo-for-gk-chesterton.htmlThe internet stalker who has attached himself to the Anglican Ordinariate rejoices at what he sees as a defeat for snobby Anglophile fantasists: stmarycoldcase.blogspot.com/2019/08/rod-dreher-is-weepy-for-chesterton.htmlReally, the spite and bile that emanates from that blog is remarkable (not to mention the assumptions he makes about people's motives). For example, Newman attracts coteries of intellectual snobs and Anglophile wannabes - that doesn't mean that is all there is to him, or that his canonisation should have been stopped. On the whole, I'm pleased and impressed with how calm the responses have been. The various Chesterton societies seem to be respectful of the bishop's authority but determined to continue pursuing GKC's cause (and indeed the bishop said he expected this). I rather hope this decision mitigates the tendency to quote Chesterton as an authority. I quote Chesterton all the time, but only because he articulates ideas so well, not because I see him as an authority. I've become so exasperated with the tendency to cheer anything attached to Chesterton's name that I have sometimes quoted Chesterton passages on social media, but attributed them to other people-- to see what response there is. There seesm to be considerably less approval or interest when GKC's name is not attached. The reason I get exasperated with this tendency is because I suspect his ideas aren't really being appreciated for their own sake, a lot of the time-- and that means they simply pass through the reader's consciousness. Reverence is an endearing quality in iteslf, and I think it's good for people to revere eminent writers and thinkers. But it's better if people can be reverential and discerning at the same time. (The same applies to Tolkien.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 5, 2020 20:16:57 GMT
In the new issue of the NEW CRITERION Anthony Daniels (who also publishes under the pen-name Theodore Dalrymple) has an essay on visiting second-hand bookshops in Southsea (absorbed into Portsmouth, on the South coast of England). These are the last paragraphs: EXTRACT ...I hastened to read one of the books I had bought in the shop: The End of the Armistice by G. K. Chesterton, published in 1940, four years after his death. It was a collection of Chesterton’s articles about Germany, from which Chesterton emerges as part brilliant seer, part appalling bigot. He saw the danger of Hitler early and clear, and the need for re-armament: A man does not give up his umbrella at the exact moment when a thundercloud is threatening to crash over his head; a man does not give up his sword at the exact moment when his next-door neighbour, who has obviously gone mad, is waving sabres and battle-axes over the wall. But then we read: We might applaud a hundred things done by the Nazis if we could bring ourselves to applaud the motive and the mood. Unfortunately it is a hysteria of self-praise, which is fed by its own virtues as much as its own vices. For that is the vital or rather mortal weakness of Pride. It says, “I did a fine thing kicking out a Jew usurer”; but it also says: “Bashing a Catholic boy scout was a fine thing, because I did it.” How terrible in its implication is the single word but in that last sentence! END OF EXTRACT newcriterion.com/issues/2020/1/all-washed-up I must say I think that Dr Daniels has a point. It might be possible to suggest that the "Jewish usurer" is not meant to represent all Jews, but if this were Chesterton's intention it is unfortunate that the contrasting figure is not an honest Jew but a Catholic. This reflects an even more deep-rooted problem with Chesterton and Belloc (Belloc much worse than Chesterton) than their anti-semitism, which is their contempt for legal and constitutional forms as a mere cover for oppression by the rich and influential (which of course is often the case) and their consequent idealisation of despotism and extra-legal violence in the name of justice, which we see in their cult of the French Revolution and Napoleon, from a safe distance in time and place.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 5, 2020 20:58:55 GMT
I have recently read Chesterton's 1929 story collection THE POET AND THE LUNATICS and it is quite remarkable. It's a variant on the Father Brown theme in which the hero is a poet who diagnoses and (sometimes) cures lunatics by understanding their madness through imaginative empathy, with a consequent risk of going mad himself. This goes back to Chesterton's memories of his own adolescent spiritual crisis, and such details as the man haunted with the fantasy that he may be God, and trying to "test" the idea by seeing if he can make one raindrop travel faster down the windowpane than another read very much as if remembered from life. One story in particular is a really perfect parable about the difference between Aristotelean freedom (freedom to achieve your true nature) and Millian liberty (absence from constraint). It centres on an anarchist who, having escaped from a political prison with explosives, successively releases a canary into the local woods (where it is promptly attacked by the wild birds), smashes a goldfish bowl to "free" the goldfish, and blows himself and his residence up with dynamite because he finds existence too constraining. This is specially recommended to certain contributors to the IRISH TIMES and similar papers who are never done telling us how happy we have become since we were freed from chastity, piety and so forth. There is, I am sorry to say, a but. In one of the stories our hero is about to be committed to a madhouse by two dishonest doctors at the behest of his wealthy neighbours. He proceeds to diagnose the doctors, and remarks of one of them that he suspects that his services to his rich patrons include "the killing of the unborn" - in other words, that he is their private abortionist. (I know of two extremely wealthy and powerful men whose lives overlapped in time with Chesterton who are alleged by their biographers to have employed doctors of this sort.) In describing the doctor's reaction, Chesterton refers to his "semitic features". Now of course Jews are as likely as anyone else to be scoundrels, and the doctor is a minor character in the story (it is the second doctor who is the major villain). What creeps me out is the sense that there is no particular reason why this character should be a Jew; his Jewishness is mentioned nowhere else in the story, and by holding it back to the moment his most disgusting crime (as Chesterton rightly regarded it; in his book on Shaw he remarks that even the mention of it provokes disgust) Chesterton seems to imply, perhaps unconsciously, that the two are associated - that the doctor would do that sort of thing because he is a Jew. This is the problem with trying to prove or disprove that Chesterton was anti-semitic by isolated quotations. It's the whole atmosphere of his passing references to Jews which gives that impression, and the effect is like going out walking in the sort of drizzle where you can't exactly say that it's raining, but the longer you stay out the damper you become.
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Post by assisi on Jan 8, 2020 14:52:43 GMT
I have recently read Chesterton's 1929 story collection THE POET AND THE LUNATICS and it is quite remarkable. It's a variant on the Father Brown theme in which the hero is a poet who diagnoses and (sometimes) cures lunatics by understanding their madness through imaginative empathy, with a consequent risk of going mad himself. This goes back to Chesterton's memories of his own adolescent spiritual crisis, and such details as the man haunted with the fantasy that he may be God, and trying to "test" the idea by seeing if he can make one raindrop travel faster down the windowpane than another read very much as if remembered from life. One story in particular is a really perfect parable about the difference between Aristotelean freedom (freedom to achieve your true nature) and Millian liberty (absence from constraint). It centres on an anarchist who, having escaped from a political prison with explosives, successively releases a canary into the local woods (where it is promptly attacked by the wild birds), smashes a goldfish bowl to "free" the goldfish, and blows himself and his residence up with dynamite because he finds existence too constraining. This is specially recommended to certain contributors to the IRISH TIMES and similar papers who are never done telling us how happy we have become since we were freed from chastity, piety and so forth. There is, I am sorry to say, a but. In one of the stories our hero is about to be committed to a madhouse by two dishonest doctors at the behest of his wealthy neighbours. He proceeds to diagnose the doctors, and remarks of one of them that he suspects that his services to his rich patrons include "the killing of the unborn" - in other words, that he is their private abortionist. (I know of two extremely wealthy and powerful men whose lives overlapped in time with Chesterton who are alleged by their biographers to have employed doctors of this sort.) In describing the doctor's reaction, Chesterton refers to his "semitic features". Now of course Jews are as likely as anyone else to be scoundrels, and the doctor is a minor character in the story (it is the second doctor who is the major villain). What creeps me out is the sense that there is no particular reason why this character should be a Jew; his Jewishness is mentioned nowhere else in the story, and by holding it back to the moment his most disgusting crime (as Chesterton rightly regarded it; in his book on Shaw he remarks that even the mention of it provokes disgust) Chesterton seems to imply, perhaps unconsciously, that the two are associated - that the doctor would do that sort of thing because he is a Jew. This is the problem with trying to prove or disprove that Chesterton was anti-semitic by isolated quotations. It's the whole atmosphere of his passing references to Jews which gives that impression, and the effect is like going out walking in the sort of drizzle where you can't exactly say that it's raining, but the longer you stay out the damper you become. In his autobiography he sort of answers the anti-semitic accusations. However it is one of those set of Chesterton passages where his writing style doesn't do him any favours. He defended a Jewish schoolmate from bullies, he recognises the Jewish family closeness and traditions as a good thing. He had Jewish friends but also points out that people still perceive the Jew as a foreigner. His brother Cecil was involved in a high profile court case against the managing director of the Marconi company who got a lucrative government contract rumoured to be achieved by a tip off, as the managing director's brother was Attorney General at the time. Both brothers were Jewish. Chesterton and his brother and others involved in the case got accused of anti-semitism. I don't think Chesterton held back in praising or criticising Jews. In the next chapter of his autobiography he is talking about Quakers as having political influence way above their numbers. Elsewhere in his works I remember him railing against the Prussians in no uncertain terms, he didn't like them at all. He liked to talk about people as individuals and as groups. He was sympathetic to the Irish, and as a group, I think he saw us as having more poetry in our psyche than the prosaic English. Maybe he just didn't like Jews as much as Irish, and maybe liked Jews more than Prussians.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 8, 2020 15:29:16 GMT
I have recently read Chesterton's 1929 story collection THE POET AND THE LUNATICS and it is quite remarkable. It's a variant on the Father Brown theme in which the hero is a poet who diagnoses and (sometimes) cures lunatics by understanding their madness through imaginative empathy, with a consequent risk of going mad himself. This goes back to Chesterton's memories of his own adolescent spiritual crisis, and such details as the man haunted with the fantasy that he may be God, and trying to "test" the idea by seeing if he can make one raindrop travel faster down the windowpane than another read very much as if remembered from life. One story in particular is a really perfect parable about the difference between Aristotelean freedom (freedom to achieve your true nature) and Millian liberty (absence from constraint). It centres on an anarchist who, having escaped from a political prison with explosives, successively releases a canary into the local woods (where it is promptly attacked by the wild birds), smashes a goldfish bowl to "free" the goldfish, and blows himself and his residence up with dynamite because he finds existence too constraining. This is specially recommended to certain contributors to the IRISH TIMES and similar papers who are never done telling us how happy we have become since we were freed from chastity, piety and so forth. There is, I am sorry to say, a but. In one of the stories our hero is about to be committed to a madhouse by two dishonest doctors at the behest of his wealthy neighbours. He proceeds to diagnose the doctors, and remarks of one of them that he suspects that his services to his rich patrons include "the killing of the unborn" - in other words, that he is their private abortionist. (I know of two extremely wealthy and powerful men whose lives overlapped in time with Chesterton who are alleged by their biographers to have employed doctors of this sort.) In describing the doctor's reaction, Chesterton refers to his "semitic features". Now of course Jews are as likely as anyone else to be scoundrels, and the doctor is a minor character in the story (it is the second doctor who is the major villain). What creeps me out is the sense that there is no particular reason why this character should be a Jew; his Jewishness is mentioned nowhere else in the story, and by holding it back to the moment his most disgusting crime (as Chesterton rightly regarded it; in his book on Shaw he remarks that even the mention of it provokes disgust) Chesterton seems to imply, perhaps unconsciously, that the two are associated - that the doctor would do that sort of thing because he is a Jew. This is the problem with trying to prove or disprove that Chesterton was anti-semitic by isolated quotations. It's the whole atmosphere of his passing references to Jews which gives that impression, and the effect is like going out walking in the sort of drizzle where you can't exactly say that it's raining, but the longer you stay out the damper you become. In his autobiography he sort of answers the anti-semitic accusations. However it is one of those set of Chesterton passages where his writing style doesn't do him any favours. He defended a Jewish schoolmate from bullies, he recognises the Jewish family closeness and traditions as a good thing. He had Jewish friends but also points out that people still perceive the Jew as a foreigner. His brother Cecil was involved in a high profile court case against the managing director of the Marconi company who got a lucrative government contract rumoured to be achieved by a tip off, as the managing director's brother was Attorney General at the time. Both brothers were Jewish. Chesterton and his brother and others involved in the case got accused of anti-semitism. I don't think Chesterton held back in praising or criticising Jews. In the next chapter of his autobiography he is talking about Quakers as having political influence way above their numbers. Elsewhere in his works I remember him railing against the Prussians in no uncertain terms, he didn't like them at all. He liked to talk about people as individuals and as groups. He was sympathetic to the Irish, and as a group, I think he saw us as having more poetry in our psyche than the prosaic English. Maybe he just didn't like Jews as much as Irish, and maybe liked Jews more than Prussians. Well said, Assisi. I think this subject is so clapped-out at this stage. There are so many more interesting things to say about G.K. Chesterton.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 8, 2020 15:31:39 GMT
Regarding "freedom from" and "freedom to"-- I have a certain amount of sympathy with those (like Isaiah Berlin) who say you can legislate the former but not the latter. At least, it's much more dangerous to legislate the latter. That is why I am wary of Catholic integrism.
Of course, that's just the political application of the concepts- from the sound of it, Chesterton was writing about them from a broader perspective. I haven't read the Poet and the Lunatics. I don't like detective stories, even Chesterton's.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2020 21:32:52 GMT
The stories on THE POET AND THE LUNATICS are only detective stories in a very broad sense. The issue about "freedom from" and "freedom to" is not just about legislation - it is about the sort of life we should pursue of our own volition. It's important to note that the anarchist's original imprisonment from which he escaped was almost certainly unjust (neither Tsarist Russia or the Soviet Union - it is not clear under which he was imprisoned - being havens of disinterested justice). He is going overboard on something that was originally good and legitimate. If he is seen as being a demon unleashed right from the start, as I assumed when I read it years ago, the whole force of the story is lost. I am trying to come to terms with Chesterton as I read or reread some of his works from time to time,and unfortunately his attitude to Jews will come up a lot in this because it comes up a lot in the work. (In the same way in order to really understand the greatness of CS Lewis you have to come to terms with the fact that he had a tendency to be a sadistic bully - something which he recognised and struggled against throughout his life.) There were two separate issues in the Marconi Trial, which Cecil Chesterton completely muddled up through his obsession with Jews: (1) Herbert Samuel, the Home Secretary, oversaw the choice of a radio transmitter system for the British Empire and chose Marconi. It was abundantly proved that this decision was entirely justified and Samuel acted with perfect honesty. (2) Although the contract was with the British Marconi company, the allied US Marconi company was about to be floated on the stock exchange and stood to gain from the transaction. Godfrey Isaacs, a stockbroker involved in the float, arranged for his brother Rufus (the Attorney General), Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and the Master of Elibank (Government Chief Whip) to buy shares in the US Marconi company in the knowledge that the shares were likely to go up. This sort of insider trading may not have been illegal at the time, but it was certainly immoral, especially since the government (Lloyd George in particular) regularly denounced the unearned incomes of the idle rich. If it happened now, they would have to resign and run a serious risk of jail. The ministers compounded matters by misleading Parliament by denying that they had bought shares in British Marconis without mentioning that they had bought US Marconis - though they admitted this later under dodgy circumstances. Cecil Chesterton saw in this a great Jewish conspiracy, lumping together Samuel who was innocent and Isaacs who was at least morally guilty. (They were incidentally the first two unbaptised Jews to serve in a British Cabinet - Disraeli was baptised an Anglican in childhood -and as such got a lot of anti-semitic abuse.) He deliberately challenged Godfrey Isaacs to sue him for libel, and after being accused of various dodgy dealings, some of which accusations were true and others were false, Godfrey did so. The cabinet ministers had some awkward moments in the witness box, but survived politically (partly because Cecil Chesterton was so busy chasing the Elders of Zion that he didn't concentrate on the proven allegations. Cecil was let off with a small fine which he and his friends saw as a moral victory. Cecil died of an illness contracted during military service in 1918; GKC saw him as a martyr and went Jew mad for a year or two after his brother's death. This is why the tone of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, written at this time, is so nasty - THE POET AND THE LUNATICS was written some years later when the fever had subsided. There is a standard book on the Marconi Affair by Frances Donaldson, published in the early 1960s. Shortly after the trial the post of Lord Chief Justice fell vacant; there was a convention that the Attorney-General was entitled to this post if he wanted to claim it, and Rufus Isaacs did claim it, saying that to do anything else would be a confession of guilt. Given that he had certainly engaged in dodgy dealings even if they were not strictly illegal, this was widely criticised, and Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem comparing Rufus to Naaman, the servant of Elisha the prophet who made himself rich by lying to those whom his master had cured and was punished with leprosy. I don't know how far Kipling's intentions were anti-semitic, but the poem is certainly applicable to any public figure, Jew, Gentile or whatever, who notoriously abuses the public trust and gets away with it though everyone sees him for what he is. It might be applied to Charlie Haughey, for example: www.bartleby.com/364/131.html
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Post by hibernicus on May 6, 2021 21:10:43 GMT
In one of the later Father Brown stories there is an Irish trade union leader (clearly based on Jim Larkin) who furiously denounces the Church. When some employers are murdered, this man is suspected. Father Brown dismisses this suggestion by predicting the man is about to be reconciled to the Church, and asks "Why would he devote so much energy to denouncing the Church unless he had begun to glimpse that she really is what she claims to be?" This argument struck me as impressive at the time, but in recent years as I have studied Irish apostates and have come to realise that Chesterton has it backwards. Such people often denounce the Church because they used to believe and trust that she is what she claims to be and have come to believe (often through bitter experience of her professed representatives) that she isn't. The apostates often have bad reasons for their apostacy, but this - alas - is one instance where Chesterton was facile.
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Post by assisi on May 9, 2021 19:24:05 GMT
In one of the later Father Brown stories there is an Irish trade union leader (clearly based on Jim Larkin) who furiously denounces the Church. When some employers are murdered, this man is suspected. Father Brown dismisses this suggestion by predicting the man is about to be reconciled to the Church, and asks "Why would he devote so much energy to denouncing the Church unless he had begun to glimpse that she really is what she claims to be?" This argument struck me as impressive at the time, but in recent years as I have studied Irish apostates and have come to realise that Chesterton has it backwards. Such people often denounce the Church because they used to believe and trust that she is what she claims to be and have come to believe (often through bitter experience of her professed representatives) that she isn't. The apostates often have bad reasons for their apostacy, but this - alas - is one instance where Chesterton was facile. I think Chesterton is half right. Right in that the apostates do actually know that the Church is right, at least in the broader moral sense, but they are only too happy to have an excuse to apostasize, usually citing the Church as an institutional problem. Where Chesterton may be wrong is that, in most cases they do not wish to be reconciled to the Church, they would rather dismiss the Church and carry on with their lifestyles free of guilt (which they will find, is not possible).
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Post by hibernicus on May 11, 2021 19:40:04 GMT
I think that's a bit oversimplified. First of all, it changes over time; I suspect apostates nowadays feel less guilt than some decades ago, because they are much more likely to assume the Church cannot be taken seriously. I can think of at least two other sources of apostasy besides what you mention: (1) Coming to the conclusion that many/most Catholics or clerics consciously or unconsciously do not believe what they profess to believe, but are simply going through the motions. This has quite a long history, but I must say that the cathechetics of recent decades could hardly do more to produce such a response if it had been actively designed to do so. (2) Having been brought up in a self-contained Catholic (sub)culture which is taken for granted, and suddenly realising there is a much bigger and more complex world out there where such beliefs and practices are not merely shared but are not even noticed. (This is often coupled with the sense that the person has or could have had access to that wider world but is being held back by Catholicism.) Again, this was probably more common some time ago (partly because Catholic subculture was larger and more self-contained) and in one respect less common (because there was less social mobility and the mass mdia hadn't permeated so deeply.)
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 6, 2021 18:04:21 GMT
Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society of E&W offers a critique of ORTHODOXY, which he thinks borders too much on subjectivism, pragmatism and divine command theory. Now I think he has a point to some extent - it is interesting to contemplate the possibility that the thief Flambeau, disguised as a priest, who advocates divine command morality, might speak for part of Chesterton's own sensibility as much as the Thomist-Aristotelean rationalism expressed by Fr Brown (though in the end it is precisely this rationalism which allows Fr Brown to outwit Flambeau even on his own terms) - but from my long-ago memories of reading ORTHODOXY I think Dr Shaw has mistaken the unquestionably orthodox doctrines that God created the world out of nothing and without His constant sustension it would be nothing, and that God does not create from necessity or compulsion but out of pure grace, for occasionalism (the denial that laws of nature exist separately from God's arbitrary will). Similarly, Dr Shaw suggests that Chesterton's leniency towards the French Revolution and failure to understand how anyone could think democracy is opposed to tradition relate to subjectivist romanticism has a certain amount of truth (his remark that the view that you can't put back the clock is easily disproved by putting it back does suggest a command model of reality, and he is a bit soft on original sin in some places though not in others) but ignores the minor detail that Rousseauism and the French Revolution were directed to a significant extent against an enlightened despotism which was quite arbitrary, cynical and anti-Christian. (Indeed, one critique of Chesterton and very much more of Belloc might be that they wrap up early modern absolutism in mediaeval trappings). I think Dr Shaw has not really grasped what GKC is saying about the nature of Being. casuistrycentral.blogspot.com/2016/10/worries-about-chesterton.html
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