How do you end something that never really began in the first place? Ireland had very high levels of Mass attendance until recent years. But it stopped there, at the start. Ireland never had the Catholic intellectual life, the fully formed Catholic culture, of the Continent or even of England.
Blaming the Church is a very useful way of distracting from the fact that the Irish Republic has always been a failed state. The level of emigration never abated, long, long decades after independence. They were not fleeing the Church. If anything, the Irish became more profoundly Catholic abroad than they had ever been at home, creating Catholic universities, reviews and so on in places such as America and Australia, things that existed barely at all in Ireland.
No, they were fleeing the Republic. The Republic that had failed to attempt to give practical effect to Catholic Social Teaching in the ways promoted by Irish Catholics through the British Labour Party, the American Democratic Party, and the ALP and DLP in Australia. Name a Western European capital city in which into the 1980s children could be seen running around with no shoes because their parents were so poor. There is only one.
The Cloyne Report found breaches of God's Moral Law and of the Church's Canon Law which were not breaches of the law of the land, placing the fault firmly in the Republic, not in the Church. As for Brendan Smyth, slowness to extradite was also and by definition a civil, not an ecclesiastical, failing. And Brendan Boland was 14. Cardinal Brady's baiters from Dublin to London need to ask themselves how they would have reacted in 1975 to sex between a middle-aged man in their own circles and a 14-year-old boy, or how they would react to such a thing now.
Whether or not His Eminence, as he was not then anywhere near becoming, dealt well or badly with the problem, he did at least identify it as a problem, and he did at least deal with it at all. In those days, sex between men and boys was actively promoted in institutions run by British local authorities, and openly so in the academic work used to train and assess social workers. Patricia Hewitt, later to have overall responsibility for every social worker in England, was working with Harriet Harman to give legal cover to the Paedophile Information Exchange and to Paedophile Action for Liberation.
Is the BBC going to ban appearances by Peter Tatchell, who would make such activities no offence under the criminal law? Whereas they would remain a specific offence under Catholic Canon Law if the younger party were any age below 18. Have you got that? Eighteen. It is perfectly obvious who has the moral high ground. And who has not.
Whether or not His Eminence, as he was not then anywhere near becoming, dealt well or badly with the problem, he did at least identify it as a problem, and he did at least deal with it at all. In those days, sex between men and boys was actively promoted in institutions run by British local authorities, and openly so in the academic work used to train and assess social workers. Patricia Hewitt, later to have overall responsibility for every social worker in England, was working with Harriet Harman to give legal cover to the Paedophile Information Exchange and to Paedophile Action for Liberation.
Is the BBC going to ban appearances by Peter Tatchell, who would make such activities no offence under the criminal law? Whereas they would remain a specific offence under Catholic Canon Law if the younger party were any age below 18. Have you got that? Eighteen. It is perfectly obvious who has the moral high ground. And who has not.
I may have missed your point but it seems that you are trying to excuse child rape by saying that it had more to do with the failings of the Irish Republic than conspiracy to conceal clerical pederasty by the catholic church, and that it was perfectly acceptable for Brady to sit by and do nothing while these children (and then the little sister of one of them) continued to be raped for another 13 years? Might I also venture to point out that systematic and continued rape of children has absolutely no connection whatsoever to consensual sex between adults.
ReplyDeleteThis would seem to be the Damian Thompson defence... blame it all on the backward Irish and disassociate them from the Church.
ReplyDeleteIf the social work Establishment of the 1970s and beyond, including their allies such as Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, had had their way, then these acts would have been perfectly legal.
ReplyDeleteThe sainted Peter Tatchell continues to urge such legalisation and social acceptability, and who knows how many people still agree with him behind closed doors? Harman, for example, has never recanted or apologised.
That is what we are talking about here: sex between men and teenage boys, only considered wrong by anyone except the Catholic Church when Catholic priests do it, and in fact the mainstay of male homosexual culture both popular and elite.
Wash your mouth out, James!
ReplyDeleteBut we are talking about Ireland here. We can hardly make it about Burkina Faso, can we?
The Irish have always had a strange relationship with the Church. They thought of themselves as the great bulwark, but when it came to anything beyond the levels of Mass attendance, and the use of the Priesthood or the Religious Life to escape from the poverty that persisted or actually worsened long after independence, then what was there to Irish Catholicism, really?
Who is the Irish More (not in terms of eventual martyrdom), or the Irish Fisher (likewise), or the Irish Lingard, or the Irish Acton, or the Irish Newman, or the Irish Hopkins, or the Irish Belloc, or the Irish Chesterton, or the Irish Waugh (father or son), or even the Irish Greene? Such figures simply do not exist. They never have done.
And even the levels of Mass attendance, and the use of the Priesthood or the Religious Life to escape from the poverty that persisted or actually worsened long after independence, have gone now. Although the poverty hasn't, and is in fact coming back with a vengeance. What will they become, now that they certainly will not be becoming priests, nuns or Brothers?
I referred your posting to an Irish friend of mine - who lives in Ireland - and this was his response.
ReplyDelete"One of the most offensive articles I've had the misforture to read. The first paragraph is nonsense. The second overlooks the fact that no Irishman ever wanted the 'State' that was foisted upon us by an alien power - and, indeed, have fought consistently to end the puppet 'State' with which we have been burdened. The second and third paragraphs at least admit that when he left the artificial states, the Irish Catholic was perfectly capable of those achievements this gentleman sets up as the definition of Catholic culture.
In point of fact, until the mid-19th cent. Sunday Mass attendance in Ireland was deplorably poor - mind you, when your Churches are stolen and your Priests exiled or persecuted, regular attendance at Mass isn't easy. Quite late into the 19th cent., it was impossible for Catholics to obtain sites for Churches - Chapels as they were offensively called, even upon OS Maps - without resort to ruses. Even then, well into the middle of the 19th cent., most Irish Churches were so small that most of the congregation had to stand outside - a phenomenon that still, less excusably, persists to this day. If Irish Catholicism started with Sunday Mass attendance, it is a very recent phenomenon - and just as Sunday Mass attendance was rising, we were blessed with genocide and soup kitchen missionaries, with faintly Protestant 'National Schools' and every foul means to starve, exile, pervert and oppress. It's a wonder that this gentleman admits that we are Catholics at all!
I looked up the words of Bishop Maginn of Derry when he was asked to support mass emigration at the height of the famine:
"In sober earnestness, gentlemen, why send your circular to a Catholic bishop? Why have the bare-faced impudence to ask me to consent to the expatriation of millions of my co-religionists and fellow-countrymen? You, the hereditary oppressors of my race and my religion,—you, who reduced one of the noblest peoples under heaven to live in the most fertile island on earth on the worst species of a miserable exotic, which no humane man, having anything better, would constantly give to his swine or his horses;—you, who have made the most beautiful island under the sun a land of skulls, or of ghastly spectres;—you are anxious, I presume, to get a Catholic bishop to abet your wholesale system of extermination—to head in pontificals the convoy of your exiles, and thereby give the sanction of religion to your atrocious scheme. You never, gentlemen, laboured under a more egregious mistake than by imagining that we could give in our adhesion to your principles, or could have any, the least confidence, in anything proceeding from you. Is not the ex-officio clause in the Poor-law Bill your bantling, or that of your leader, Lord Stanley? Is not the quarter of an acre clause test for relief your creation? Were not the most conspicuous names on your committee the abettors of an amendment as iniquitous as it was selfish—viz., to remove the poor-rates from their own shoulders to that of their pauper tenantry? Are not they the same members who recently advocated, in the House of Commons, the continuation of the fag-end of the bloody penal code of the English statute book, by which our English brethren could be transported or hanged for professing the creed of their conscience, the most forward in this Catholic emigration plan? What good could we expect from such a Nazareth?" And now we are lesser Catholics because we continue to suffer from the wounds of eight and a half centuries?"
I do not share judging people who are called sons of G'd against their respective cultural backdrop. Would you? And why so?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if David's distaste for the Irish is because he is excluded from the Irish identity that many of his fellow Catholics in Northern England share. David tries to make up for not being "one of us", Irish, by claiming the Irish in turn are not properly "one of us", Catholic.
ReplyDeleteIt is a good 20 years since I met a Northern Catholic who thought of himself as remotely Irish, and they were a good age even then. Anyone under 50 now would be bemused or positively offended at the suggestion, even if his name were O'Hagan or something. The makers of Coronation Street might still think of Catholic priests as Irishmen, but no one else does. I am told that below a certain, quite high, age, they are all Polish or African even in Ireland these days.
ReplyDeleteOn Saint George's Day, I heard one of the priests of Saint Patick's, Consett, no less, give a church full of Scouts one of the most uncompromisingly English sermons that I have ever heard, far beyond anything that I ever heard in the Church of England. He dismissed "Celtic propaganda", the term used, about the historical status or otherwise of Saint George. Do not be too surprised in future years to see churches called Saint Patrick's renamed Saint George's.
A far higher proportion of the Catholic population of England than of Ireland is practising, or even occasionally observant. The Church can now realistically claim a greater influence on public policy here than there. No wonder that Irish-descended Northern Catholics no longer feel even the tiniest "Irish identity". You do get the odd parish bully who tries to keep it up, but they are very old now and it is fair to say that most parishes do not even have so much as one of them anymore.