Tuesday 15 May 2012

Hardly The End Of The Bed

An anonymous (and rather off-topic) comment on a previous post read:

"We know that you have misgivings about the Irish who have a place in the church that makes you, a convert, feel somewhat trapped at the end of the bed."

In fact, I find Ireland, like the Israel that I am also sometimes accused of hating, a fascinating country. In either case, I have bothered to find out far more about her history than many of her own people have ever bothered to do, never mind those who love her so much that they live in New York or wherever. But my reply to the above comment was:

Oh, that one again. You have been watching too much Corrie. For at least two generations, it might be more, most Catholics in England with Irish backgrounds have denied it, made a joke of it, or simply been oblivious to it. Under 40, possibly 50, that last is now somewhere between the norm and almost universal.

Converts are a high proportion of practising Catholics in this country, and a very high proportion of those being ordained, rapidly approaching a majority. Perhaps the lack of them is why next to no one is ordained in Ireland anymore. Next to no one would be ordained in England anymore (not that very many people ever were, really) if it were not for converts. At least one English diocese only still exists because of priests formerly ordained in the Church of England. It would literally have been closed down years ago without them.

Together with the vastly more middle-class feel produced by the Catholic school system, very often the nearest thing to a grammar school in its locality and these days often more traditional institutionally than it was 20 years ago (my old one now has blazers, for example, and Sixth Formers writing and producing their own theatrical pieces from scratch), the high number of converts gives the Church in general and the Priesthood in particular a completely different feel and ethos from that which you seem to have in mind, which has not existed in many places for decades, and which is now almost completely unknown.

Personally, I was made a governor of the flagship local Catholic secondary school within a year of becoming a Catholic. So much for "feeling trapped at the end of the bed". I doubt that you have been to Mass regularly for 20 years. You certainly can't be going to the tea and coffee afterwards. Or are you a member either of the Ordinariate or of the obstinate Papalist remnant within the C of E? They both try and justify themselves with this sort of rubbish: "We'll be made unwelcome by the Irish." What Irish? There is roughly one in each parish, if that. Probably more than half now have none at all.

6 comments:

  1. You are right. The active membership of the Church in this country is now middle class cradle Catholics with little or no concept of being at all Irish (if they are) 50%, middle class converts 30%-40%, the Irish working class no more than 20% and maybe as little as 10%. Among priests being ordained today, the first two figures are probably reversed, if there are still any in the third category.

    The persistent depiction of priests as Irishmen on television is ridiculous. The single biggest source of vocations is now the University of Oxford and the priests it produces sound, live and are exactly as you would imagine "Oxford men". Frankly, their parishioners now expect that sort of thing because of who and what they are themselves nowadays.

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  2. Saint Thomas More, Saint John Fisher, John Lingard, Lord Acton, Blessed John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G K Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, even Graham Greene: the Irish equivalents of these and so many other figures, right down to the present day, simply do not exist and have never done so. And that is only England, herself hardly the heart and soul of Catholic life. "The scandals" have not done for the Church in Ireland. Her foundations there were always weak to nonexistent.

    So you wrote earlier this month and I agree with you. But have you considered how hardly any of those were cradle Catholics? Two were born before the Reformation, two were Recusants, one had a French father and an English Protestant mother, and the rest were all converts, mostly from the Church of England. Likewise Ronald Knox, Christopher Dawson, Elizabeth Anscombe, Malcolm Muggeridge, all converts. There are scores and scores more, as you will know. Why is this? Why does the main body of the Church in this country no more produce these figures than Ireland does?

    On a different note, based on your aside about Israel, you have remarked in the past that Nationalists in Northern Ireland were not at all like people from the Republic. Do you think that settlers on the West Bank might not be at all like people inside Israel's 1948 borders?

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  3. Many people in the Church of England have always said that, and still do: apparent Catholic intellectual and literary revivals in England, of which there have been several and one of which is at least arguably going on at the moment, have been and are almost entirely produced by waves of converts, usually from the Church of England. They have been and are hardly at all products of the existing Catholic community or even of its schools.

    There is, I am afraid, a lot of truth in that, although I expect it to have shifted by the time that the next one comes along, due to what is now the character of that community in general and of those schools in particular. However, it does mean that England has any Catholic figures of that kind. And they are figures very well worth having.

    There are still far too many Israelis like, or at least sympathetic towards, the settlers. But the settlers' arrogance and sense of entitlement, up to and including their propensity to use armed force against Israel's teenage conscripts of both sexes, should take of that in the long run, or even in the short run. They are not unlike Ulster Loyalists, whom very few people in Great Britain actually like, any more than very many people in the Republic like Northern Republicans.

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  4. This is all well & good but you still haven't added a photo to your twitter avatar. You can use the one here from the blog. Suited up & showing up on our twitter feed.

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  5. Are you kneeling to receive communion David? I know you said you had surgery on your back so maybe it is difficult for you. Are people encouraged to kneel before the host in Lanchester?

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  6. I've tried that one and the Facebook one, but neither of them will take for some reason.

    We are not that sort of parish. We are not partisan here. That has its advantages for infiltration...

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