Irish destroy their own catholicism

When I visited Ireland, the main press and media had the idea that if Ireland was to be "modern" they had to destroy the Catholic influence on culture.

That was 40 years ago, but the drip drip drip of criticizm and distortion (including the obvious bias of the BBC and british media) was intense.

What broke the camels' back, of course, was the "abuse" crisis: Yet the only one who pointed out that the number of cases in proportion to those who were helped was tiny, was an atheist ex catholic at Spiked.

Whatever.

And of course, no one dares to put it into perspective of the general abuse in secular or other church institutions, especially in the UK. Their latest scandal at pushing pedophilia as legal has hit the UK Mail and the Telegraph, but this is the tip of the iceburg according to some sites. But never mind: Being PC is never having to say you are sorry.

David Warren has an essay on all this here:

I should note he is Canadian, and a similar "paradigm shift" occured in Quebec.

I look at Ireland. I was raised in the belief that it was a Catholic country. It had stayed that way through centuries of siege by my Protestant ancestors, who in the end did not even manage to take all of Ulster. By osmosis I learnt that the Irish were impossible. They could not even be killed off. Lord, we tried. Starved them out and they somehow found boats: started washing up everywhere else. No matter how poor, no matter how desperate, they clung to their Mass. That old Ireland: the pre-eminent scandal of the British Empire, so close to Home. Even the Scots could be co-opted. Even the Welsh understood threats. Nothing could be done about Catholic Ireland. Decades before their cut-and-run from huge unmanageable India, little Ireland had made the English give up.
Only the Irish could defeat the Irish, and now they have done it to themselves. In the space between the last two censuses the number of divorced people in Ireland has much more than doubled. The number attending Mass has plummetted, and there is every other indication of religious and familial collapse. In my now Catholic view, they have sold their souls for a mess of EU pottage, and got in addition a staggering bill. They have bought into the post-modern void, and are voiding all over themselves.

one is reminded of Balaam: seduce them so they destroy marriage, and they are open to the rest of the errors of bad paganism (i.e. child sacrifice to get rich-- Abraham's story of being told to sacrifice his son is best understood if you realize that this was the local custom...not to mention misuse of slaves, both boys and women, cheating, stealing, taking bribes, pushing around the poor)...

In Ireland, the collapse of the church is hard to estimate from 12000 miles away, but I remember two prophecies about it.

One, is that a tsunami will hit Ireland 7 years before the anti christ.

Two, that of a local seer (who has been "exposed" as a money hungry fraud by the press and denied by the bishop: her "spiritual director" is already in deep doodoo for exposing pedophiles.) She warned that voting for the Mastrich treaty would result in the loss of their faith and heritage. That last one is interesting, since she has also predicted tsunamis around the world  at a time when tsunamis were dismissed as rare ans unusual...this was years before the Boxing day tsunami hit and people became aware of the danger. Since then, Japan's earthquake and tsunami, and a huge tsunami in New Guinea have killed many...

Ireland has been hit by small tsunamis, such as after the Lisbon earthquake, but most are limited, or might have just been tidal waves or storm related.

So if they are ever hit by a real tsunami, I'll start worrying.

Well, back to Warren's essay: It is about the Vatican and the PC european bishops trying to rewrite the rules on marriage.

His most signal failure was to take matrimony itself seriously; he only considered the demands made against it. He addresses what we call today, “the problem” — people are not obeying the rules, so something must be done about the rules. It is easy enough to see the solution towards which Cardinal Kaspar’s leading questions lead. Through one of his soi-disant “questions” he proposes to take the Sacrament of Penance less seriously, and then the Sacrament of the Eucharist less seriously, in order to facilitate the quick fix that will take the Sacrament of Matrimony less seriously...

We are trying to accommodate the outside world: that world in which marriage has become a joke. This is the opposite of what we did in the first centuries, when we were trying to make the outside world accommodate Christ. But the world to which we now bow is fluff. It is “redefining marriage” even as I write. Our answer, to the greater challenge in that pagan Roman environment, was defiance. This led to martyrdoms and many other unpleasant developments; and concluded with our triumph. But now we seem embarked on a course to avoid unpleasantness, by accepting defeat.

Again, one is reminded of another (Protestant) prophecy that the European bishops (along with some but not all American bishops) will embrace the PC church and approve of divorce, abortion, homosexual behavior...and eventually this will allow them to join with the PC Anglicans of the UK and mainstream churches in the US to form a super church. Regular Catholics and other christian believers will be pushed out, and left to be served in underground churches, where they will unite informally because they truly believe in Christ.

I support the Pope because much of what he actually says is filtered through the propaganda machine of the press...and much of what is taken out of context has a completely different meaning, especially for those of us who put it into the context of the third world. (i.e. corruption in government and business is the rule, not the exception as in the USA).

And alas this latest kerfuffle has probably been also taken out of context: Kasper is one of the bad guys, and the German bishops are as corrupt as some of the famous US bishops, some of whom have since been removed or died, but some of whom still make our eyes roll up in despair.

If the Pope does these PC things, he will be praised by the European and US press and be welcome in the world.

If he remains silent, he will desert those who still believe.

"Quo vadis, Petrus? If you leave Rome, I will go to Rome to be crucified..."

Marriage? I haz that

Marriage is not a land of milk and honey but a vocation.

Marriage is a Cross. Marriage is a vocation to creation in total self-giving. To say that marriage is a Cross is to say that it is part of God’s design and that many graces flow from it and even that it is joyous. But it is also to say that it sucks sometimes and that it demands a total gift of self.
If we see vocation as a call to creative self-giving, we see that marriage and celibacy are two sides of the same coin.

 yes: in the Balkans, the married couple's hands are tied together with a cross, to remind the folks that they are part of Christ's plan to save each other, but also that the husband will be the "cross" for the woman to bear, and vice versa.

And one is reminded of Tolkien's letter to his son about marriage, quoted here.

"Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him--as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial."
Tolkien traced unhappiness in marriage, especially on the part of the husband, to the Church's failure to teach these truths and to speak of marriage honestly. Those who see marriage as nothing more than the arena of ecstatic and romantic love will be disappointed, Tolkien understood. "When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along."

It should be noted that many of Tolkien's tutorial students were women, who often visited their home socially and were treated by Edith as daughters... nor is it only with those he tutured: did he base Eowyn on the strong nurses he knew from his long convalescence from typhus in World War I? Yet so far, perhaps because of the reverence many hold for him, no one has done an academic examination of this, nor interviewed his former students, servants etc.  The closest one gets to this is from CSLewis in the fictional relationship of "Jane" with her professor and his wife in That Hideous Strength...

All of this reminds me of my husband and his first wife: He saw that failed marriage as God's will, since it meant he preferred to work 80 hours a week as a doctor than be with her, so could send more money to support his extended family at home. The bad news is that his workaholic lifestyle harmed his own children.

Ironically, he only divorced her when he was planning to return home to the Philippines, and at the urging of his daughter (for legal reasons) he did so. She refused to divorce him for years, because she "was a Christian and didn't believe in divorce". (read: liked the status of a doctor's long suffering wife) but the laws had since changed to allow non fault divorce.

She was a trained nurse, so only got alimony for five years, but never bothered to work, but after there was  no alimony, lived with relatives complaining of poverty (never mind that he kept up the house repair, taxes and car payments).

So how could I marry in the Catholic church? No, he didn't get an annulment (although her mental illness might have made this possible). Luckily, she was a bigot and hated Catholics, so they had a civil wedding (which in the 1950s meant my husband was excommunicated and couldn't receive the sacraments). She could have gone with him to the priest and asked for the marriage to be "blessed" (i.e. recognized by the church) but she was too much a bigot to do this, so essentially the marriage




headsup TeaAtTrianon.

Christian churches in Muslim Lands?

 John Allen, who used to work for the NatCathReporter (a very good reporter at very left wing paper) is at the Boston Globe and has this report:

the Arabian Peninsula today is also, improbably, seeing one of the most dramatic Catholic growth rates anywhere in the world. The expansion is being driven not by Arab converts, but by foreign ex-pats whom the region increasingly relies on for manual labor and domestic service.

Filipinos, Indians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Koreans, and members of other nationalities are becoming the new working poor in some of the world’s wealthiest societies.
The result is a Catholic population on the peninsula estimated at around 2.5 million. Kuwait and Qatar are home to between 350,000 and 400,000 Catholics, Bahrain has about 140,000, and Saudi Arabia itself has 1.5 million.
Despite the triple handicaps of being poor, lacking citizenship rights, and belonging to a religious minority often viewed with suspicion, these folks are trying to put down roots for the faith, and having some surprising success.

I call them "the invisible man" because this story is rarely reported on in any of the media, including our local papers, but all of us who have family members who have worked in these areas know this.

Bishop Cruz gets it right

I sometimes overreact to those trying to push promiscuity as normal, especially the gay rights mafia in the USA. Seeing abused children here does not help, although most of those I saw as a woman doc, of course, were young girls.

Here in the Philippines, these folks are more accepted in society (when politicians who sit in the front of church order hits on their rivals, the presence of a transvestite at church isn't a big thing).

Archbishop Cruz, who is now retired, but worked for years on the marriage bureau of the country, has a long and informative post on the church's position, from a pastoral standpoint, where charity is more important than waving fingers. An excerpt:

Church:
SSA – “Same Sex Attraction” – this is now how the Church addresses the question. Among updated Church groups addressing the question or problem, the following are the more relevant truths to consider: All – and this means all – boys and girls, men and women are created to the image of God and wherefore have the same human dignity and sublimity. All are children of God just as all are redeemed by the Blood of Christ. No one really chooses much less wants to have and feel a sexual identity problem. While one’s sexual identity may be in question, the inmate dignity of every single human person is the same. Everybody is the subject-object of the Commandment of Love, including those with the question on his or her sexual identity. In other words, no one – with or without a sexual identity predicament – is outside the love of God, excluded from the concern of the Church.

and he goes on to warn:

By the way, it is more and more commonly held that the predicament of sexual identity is said to start at home, depending on how a father treats his son, how the mother treats her daughter. And with more and more dysfunctional families, there are also more and more individuals suffering from sexual identity.

One of the major problems here is family members working overseas, with children brought up without dad (or sometimes without mom). This has led to a lot of economic improvement for the rest of the family, who often benefit from being given money for a decent house or school fees, but I worry about the long term problems.

religion links

A lot of PC stuff about World War I pretends everyone went nuts and loved the war, as if there were no peacemaking efforts.

StrategyPage reviews a new book about those peacemakers: Elusive Dove.
an excerpt:

“The Long Road to Peace” deals with efforts to end the war from 1915 through 1918.  Much of this chapter deals with what might be called popular efforts to end the fighting, proposals by individuals or political groups such as the socialists to encourage the peoples of the belligerent nations to take action, including in some cases efforts to suborn the troops into mutiny.  It also covers further efforts by the Vatican, the U.S., and other nations to encourage negotiations, and takes a look at the curious, promising, but unsuccessful “Sixtus Affair,” during which Emperor-King Charles of Austria-Hungary reached out through his royal kin and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between the Central Powers and by-then Soviet Russia.

 more on the Sixtus affair here.
It might have worked if the Germans and French in power didn't cooperate because they figured they could win...

Usually the PC history of peace lauds the socialists, but there is another side of the story.

Catholic trivia: Charles of Austria Hungary is being considered as a Catholic saint, partly because of his private piety but also because he was willing to risk his throne to search for peace. Read more at Andrew Cusack's site.

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TeaAtTrianon links to an article that summarizes a new book about the myth of religious violence.

William Cavanaugh so powerfully argues in his Myth of Religious Violence, when we take a closer look at the 16th and 17th century wars of religion we find that differences between Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants and other Protestants, were secondary to the aims of the emerging nation-states and various political and dynastic intrigues. Simply put, the main cause of these wars was political, not religious.

Actually if you study history, you know this (heck, even if all you read are accurate R rated historical romances like Angelique you know that some of these civil wars weren't about religion per se and had folks of faith cooperating on both sides.)

The problem is that the elites and the kids no little or nothing about history, so the "new atheists" are allowed to get away with pushing nonsense that simply isn't true.

And, of course, as the article points out, that the myth that religion is behind all that violence allows elites to remove pious voices from the public square so they can rule.

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It's Mardi Gras time! Singalong here.

No, we don't celebrate it here in the Philippines, which is strange, because we celebrate all the time.

But Lent is big here. I dread it because it is hot season, and when we go to church it will be crowded and hot...

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Wolf of Wall Street ignores that most of the victims were hard working middle class folks, not rich folks who inherited lots of dough. Many lost their life savings.

And Freakonomics blasts the movie and the claim that the huckster will use his profits from the movies to help those he defrauded.

Since its release, The Wolf of Wall Street has earned over $300 million worldwide, becoming Martin Scorsese’s highest-grossing film. But the producers of the film, Red Granite, may have paid as little as $125,000 to the victims’ fund—seemingly under a court order.

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Guess who is worried if LaLa land turns into Lotus Land?

...how many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?" he asked. "The world's pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together."

Governor Moonbeam...

and the comments saying Alcohol is worse ignore the problem of the long half life.

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