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Post by cato on May 26, 2017 23:40:09 GMT
In the aftermath of Islamic state violence
Media spokespeople become experts on islamic theology (the religion of peace) and solemnly warn us of the dangers of islamophobic prejudice against the average moslem in the street or our workplace and how Islam cannot be discredited for the atrocious actions of mad individuals. That is a mainstream secular dogma and is perhaps a debate for another thread.
What I want to ask is this , why when a catholic priest or an individual commits a scandalous crime do we never hear "catholicism is a religion of love"?
Or that we should be careful about stigmatising an entire religion or tarring all priests or catholics with the same brush because of the sins of individuals who have sinned and betrayed Christ and his church ?
Why are all Irish nuns reviled and subject to hated filled sexist abuse for the crimes of a group of their foremothers now largely dead? Perhaps Amnesty or the Council the Status of Women have spoken out courageously against this hysteria. Perhaps , perhaps perhaps.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on May 27, 2017 0:01:57 GMT
I don't think anyone is going to disagree with you on this! The weird tenderness of leftism towards Islam is the ultimate, or at least the most apparent, fault-line in their logic, I think. It's also amusing, in a depressing way, that we keep being told it's a tiny minority of Muslims who resort to terroristm, but that there's also too many of them for the intelligence services to keep an eye on. Fintan O'Toole made SOME effort recently to make the same sort of distinction in the case of Catholicism, but not much. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/the-keepers-shows-the-struggle-between-good-and-evil-in-the-church-1.3092206However, I don't like to plead "good works" or "many good priests", because secularists always interpret that as meaning Fr. Peter McVerry etc. The idea that the good might be principally supernatural is immediately discounted. I don't think Muslims are evil. I don't see any backlash against Muslims in our society, though. The UCD Islamic Society had an "Anti-Islamophobia Week" recently. Seeing those posters did make me angry. I don't want to be manouvured into being anti-Islam just because liberals are Islamic terrorist apologists. Milo Yiannapoulous says: "The problem isn't radical Islam, it's Islam." I don't want to go that far. If there's any Muslims reading this, I'd be interested in their views, though perhaps that's unlikely. |
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Post by cato on May 27, 2017 10:44:05 GMT
Agree with your point about the "good priests" who tend to be heterodox doctrinaĺly and uncritically left wing politically. At the risk of contradicting myself Brother Kevin the capuchin who runs the capuchin day centre and Sr Consilio of Cuan Mhuire the addiction treatment service are caring and orthodox from what I hear.
Islam when it is discussed in the west is usually badly informed due to historical ignorance of the imperial nature of Islam, a total lack of religious education generally and a liberal inability to deal with a confident rival who rejects most of the key beliefs of modernity.
Add in the obsession with Israel as the main cause of injustice on the planet and a general blindness to the Shia /Sunni schism . This dispute is at the heart of the Saudi rivalry with Iran for leadership in the Islamic world which is killing tens of thousands of moslems in Yemen Syria and Iraq. I think the popular classical historian Tom Holland produced a programme on the historical roots of Isis on channel 4 last week but this is an unusual exception.
From a conservative point of view I do admire the moslems I encounter who are largely hard working and who value God , prayer and the family structure. Part of the problem is not about Islam in
itself but Islam confronting our rotten self loathing self centred culture. If our society was stronger and grounded in tradition I doubt this problem would be as serious as it is.
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Post by MourningIreland on May 28, 2017 18:23:46 GMT
The elephant in the room is that Catholic doctrine comdemns all the abuses for which the Church is regularly vilified by the Irish media as intrinsically evil. Until Catholics - and all people of good will who love the Judeo-Christian West - start demanding that these secularist-materialists adhere to basic principles of intellectual honesty the lynch mob mentality will continue to flourish.
This is all by design. These people are Cultural Marxists, and Cultural Marxists are long-term planners. If you want to see where we are headed look at the Vendee. These folks won't be satisfied until all the priests and nuns left in this country are drowned in the Liffey.
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Post by cato on May 29, 2017 10:59:18 GMT
In Ireland there is no need for a massacre. The mass apostasy of the laity allied with the drying up of religious especially female vocations and the steady aging of the priesthood will cause a huge decline without the need for the enemies of the church to lift a finger.
I think it' s time to realise that in the very near future we will become missionary territory again. It has happened probably 3 times before and maybe it needs to happen again.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on May 29, 2017 11:42:13 GMT
Indeed the cultural Marxists could hardly have been more successful, and whatever survives of Catholicism mostly gets by on inertia. As Cato says, it's only a very few years before our priests and religious start dying off, not to mention our congregations in most cases. I even wonder if the secularists will miss the Church when it's all but disappeared; it made a convenient enemy.
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Post by ClassicalRepublican on May 29, 2017 13:33:35 GMT
To understand the answer to this, you have to understand progressive thinking.
You have to visualise a weighing scale: Islam on one side, Catholicism on the other
(in the imagination of progressives) Islam is the religion of brown people, immigrants, poor people, oppressed people, stereotyped people, discriminated against people and the victims of racism.
Outweighing this is Catholicism, the religion of white people, rich people, normal people, privileged people, native people, people with a sense of entitlement to belong in Ireland, people who oppress outsiders, people who exclude outsiders, systems and institutions.
The heavier side of the scales is the bad side and you should always make every effort to support the lighter side no matter what and under every circumstance. You are authorised to call the other side 'racist' and 'bigoted' with impunity.
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Post by MourningIreland on May 30, 2017 15:33:23 GMT
In Ireland there is no need for a massacre. The mass apostasy of the laity allied with the drying up of religious especially female vocations and the steady aging of the priesthood will cause a huge decline without the need for the enemies of the church to lift a finger. I think it' s time to realise that in the very near future we will become missionary territory again. It has happened probably 3 times before and maybe it needs to happen again. Prior to St Patrick Ireland was missionary territory. But what are the two times in Irish history where this country went into in mass apostasy? My understanding is that the faith was largely underground during times of persecution, but remained strong. But I'm not an Irish historian. I'm really wondering about this as I try to make sense of the last 25 years, and try to figure out what the hell if anything I can do about it. |
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Post by MourningIreland on May 30, 2017 15:41:59 GMT
I even wonder if the secularists will miss the Church when it's all but disappeared; it made a convenient enemy. They won't, but in 25-30 years time when the fumes of 15 centuries of Christianity have evaporated entirely and their own children are living in a Marxist society and all it entails, they might start to express alarm or even wax nostalgic. Whether they will connect the social climate to the socially engineered destruction of Christianity in Ireland I cannot predict. As things stand, these folks don't contemplate this dystopian future because, having transcended the restrictions of Christianity, they are too busy planning Ryan air holidays and counting their $$$$$. |
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Post by cato on May 30, 2017 22:30:40 GMT
Hi mourning Ireland . I didnt say the laity apostasised 3 times but rather Ireland was a missionary territory 3 times. Apart from St Patrick I was thinking of when Rome brought us into line in the 12th century over strange practices we Irish had regarding marriage , baptism and ordaining bishops. We were regarded as dangerously out of step having compromised on key christian teachings
and were reined in by reforming missionaries including St Malachy.
The 3rd occasion was the 16th century reformation leading to the infamous anti catholic penal laws. You are right about the faith going underground but there were very few periods when there were no priests in Ireland .Missionaries were coming in even during the worst persecution and persecution tended to ease when England was at peace with the catholic powers in Europe. It was still a deeply traumatic and destructive period for catholicism and the church had to be rebuilt and re-evangelised mainly in the 19th century.
Your question about what to do now is not an easy one to answer. Fidelity is key. We cannot give in either to despair nor to the pious it ll be ok as Jesus promised to be with us attitude so we need do nothing but wait. The Irish Church is in meltdown and our leaders are are still largely denying that. Accepting a problem exists is the first step in fixing it.
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Post by ClassicalRepublican on May 31, 2017 10:51:46 GMT
Certainly the Irish Church in the Medieval period was very irregular. Especially around things like clerical marriage and church and monastic organisation. It was not uncommon, particularly in Munster, for a king to also hold the office of bishop. Cormac Mac Mothla, king of the Deisí for example also appropriated for himself the bishopric of Ardmore as well as the abbacies of Lismore and Kilmolash. In secular society, there was widespread divorce and polygamy and the church was unable to correct this.
Monasteries seem to have been almost indistinguishable from secular petty kingdoms save for stone buildings and a Latin ecclesiastical aesthetic to titles. Monks were married and abbots passed their titles on to their sons! In the pre-Norman period this led to the Ceili Dé reactionary movement of serious monasticism based at Finglas and Tallaght, but this never grew strong enough to establish orthodoxy. Henry II of England famously invoked a papal bull issuing authority to the King of England to enforce orthodoxy in Ireland.
What we know about St Malachy comes from a hagiography written about him by St Bernard of Clairvaux. It depicts the Armagh region as having been completely despoiled and desolated by the Vikings and what was left of its population regressed to paganism. Of course St Bernard never visited Ireland for himself and he is depicting a background against which St Malachy could be cast as a missionary. The vista St Bernard paints is pretty much the exact opposite of what contemporary Irish sources have to say. Armagh is probably the best documented region of Ireland in this period.
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Post by MourningIreland on May 31, 2017 16:13:55 GMT
Hi mourning Ireland . I didnt say the laity apostasised 3 times but rather Ireland was a missionary territory 3 times. Apart from St Patrick I was thinking of when Rome brought us into line in the 12th century over strange practices we Irish had regarding marriage , baptism and ordaining bishops. We were regarded as dangerously out of step having compromised on key christian teachings and were reined in by reforming missionaries including St Malachy. The 3rd occasion was the 16th century reformation leading to the infamous anti catholic penal laws. You are right about the faith going underground but there were very few periods when there were no priests in Ireland .Missionaries were coming in even during the worst persecution and persecution tended to ease when England was at peace with the catholic powers in Europe. It was still a deeply traumatic and destructive period for catholicism and the church had to be rebuilt and re-evangelised mainly in the 19th century. Thanks cato for the history lesson. What I wonder most about is the social history of these periods - did the laity reject Christianity en masse as is currently the case? Today's Ireland could never raise up men (and women) of heroic self-sacrifice like it did during the various rebellions. This is a recurring theme in this country's history yet the quality is either absent today or - if it exists - invisible. Has it been socially engineered out of our race to the point of extinction? |
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Post by cato on May 31, 2017 17:59:57 GMT
I think you are hitting the nail on the head. I fear this crisis is terminal. A Dominican Priest said recently the Church itself has succeeded where Oliver Cromwell failed. Large numbers of catholics are now abandoning catholicism mainly quietly and becoming non or anti religious. A small minority join protestant churches or even Islam. In the USA the fastest growing religion are the "Nones"- Young ex christians a large cohort of them former catholics.
Once the faith is lost in a country it's gone . North Africa and much of the Middle East was once Christian. Perhaps someone can think of an ancient christian country that lost the faith and which has been reevangelised sucessfully . I don't think one exists. We can't despair of what God's grace may achieve in the future but we shouldn't ignore the church's history neither.
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Post by assisi on May 31, 2017 18:19:58 GMT
Indeed the cultural Marxists could hardly have been more successful, and whatever survives of Catholicism mostly gets by on inertia. As Cato says, it's only a very few years before our priests and religious start dying off, not to mention our congregations in most cases. I even wonder if the secularists will miss the Church when it's all but disappeared; it made a convenient enemy. Secularists may be starting to sense it but not strongly enough for them to change their ways. There was an editorial in the Guardian last year. After the usual anti-religious cliches in the first two thirds of the editorial the last 2 paragraphs were as follows: A post-Christian Europe will of course have a morality but it won’t be Christian morality. It will likely be less universalist. The idea that people have some rights just because they are human, and entirely irrespective of merit, certainly isn’t derived from observation of the world. It arose out of Christianity, no matter how much Christians have in practice resisted it. Although human rights have become embedded in our institutions at the same time as religious observance has been in decline, they could become vulnerable in an entirely post-Christian environment where the collective memory slips from the old moorings inherited from Christian ethics.
Tennyson produced his famous line about “Nature red in tooth and claw” as a contrast not to human nature, but to human optimism, which “trusted God was love indeed and love Creation’s final law”. Some such trust in love and goodness underpins all belief in progress and all faith in the future. But, as Tennyson clearly also saw, Nature “shrieks against it”. This century will be one in which humanity faces gigantic challenges, brought about by our own success in colonising the planet. Global warming and the still present threat of nuclear destruction both need a sense of global solidarity to overcome, and a vision of humanity that transcends narrow self-interest. If Christianity no longer can supply that, what will?
The whole editorial is at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/27/the-guardian-view-on-disappearing-christianity-suppose-its-gone-for-ever |
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Post by cato on Jun 2, 2017 10:13:27 GMT
Douglas Murray has a thought provoking article in last week's Spectator on the motivation, particularly hatred of women, of Islamic terrorism. It's subtitled- Terrorists are very clear about what they want -We just aren't listening.
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