The Devotional Revolution and Tradition

Cúirt an Mheán Óiche— allpoetry.com/Cirt-An-Mhean-Oche-(The-Midnight-Court) Irish and English versions here

Written at the end of the 18th century, the Midnight Court is healthy, frank, earthy and roundly sexual, more so than much of the 19th and 20th and maybe the 21st attitudes in Ireland. So, again I'm thinking, how much of what has been passed down as traditional really is.

No? The Irish church?  I don't know where to start with that one. 

The forces of modernity are in operation everywhere but the fall has been spectacular here, and it clearly has much to do with  what the Irish church has done and what they have failed to do

It's a bit hard to compare our era with the Pius IX/Sacred Heart/Immaculate Conception/papal infallibility epoch. Church-going Catholics generally obeyed John XXIII, Paul VI,in particular, and John Paul II and their many changes in practice and attitude fairly blindly. That won't happen now with either the intensely secular or the intensely religious. It goes beyond Benedict XVI stating that a traditional mass was never banned, decades after it was essentially banned- we see situations like an American nun who was dismissed from her institute under the direction John Paul's Rome for her work with Catholic homosexuals now given an award by Francis' Rome... for her work among Catholic homosexuals.

I'd agree, sexuality is malleable. Homosexuality becomes more prominent in all male environments where there is limited access to heterosexual relations. I think the trans thing is essentially social contagion, and generally an inability to think in anything other than literalism. It also tracks fairly closely with autism.

Marriage is a desirable institution, and we'd likely agree on the ills of a commodified throwaway culture. As for divorce, there are situations where it is and was warranted, battered wives etc.

It was the norm for  grandparents born a hundred years ago to come from families pushing double digits, and to have half a dozen children themselves. I don't think they were particularly sexually repressed. 

What we possibly disagree about is the extent of the  twisted view of sexuality among the clergy. I'm guessing you are of an age with myself. Pope memorabilia on granny's mantlepiece from a few years earlier. Holy water by the front door. Rosaries and first Friday masses, no divorce, precontraception etc.

  I was around for John Paul II visit, but too young to remember it. Think of the great and the good flanking John Paul II on stage at that time, Casey, Cleary, Magee the reverence each of these three was held in... think of them now ignominious end all having to do with a twisted view on sex. Sordid stuff, and not just the 'human weakness' kind. And, if we are of the same generation, it's harder to think of a fouler leering cesspit  than Brendan Smyth. Any reflecting child and adolescent of the 80s must surely have given thought to what they had been raised in.  Bona fide psychopaths exist and always have of course but who with any balanced view would  send this creature out of the country as far away as Fargo  when the alarm bells had been ringing for decades. 

It's hard for me to believe that a concern for children's welfare played a big role in the secularisation of Ireland when the same process led to a legalisation of abortion and commodification of children via surrogacy, etc.

Which is not to deny the gravity of the Church's crimes.

I grew up when the sex abuse crisis was just coming out. I remember hearing a story in a class discussion in school (true or not) which involved a priest hearing a boy confess sex acts a priest had performed on him. According to the story, the priest asked the boy to see him later and did the same things to him.

Whether or not that was true, equally awful things were true. But it never even came into my mind that this affected the truth or otherwise of Catholicism. Or that it outweighed all the good that ca,e from Catholicism in Ireland.

I particularly remember, on the day that we received our Junior Cert results and got the rest of the day off, a priest (not connected to the school) standing in the street and congratulating every kid in uniform he saw at that early hour. Without asking about results. A small thing, but I knew even then that only a priest would do something like that, and that it reflected a particular humanistic sort of outlook which was already ebbing.