Escaping the Box

David Quinn, a Catholic journalist here in Ireland, is probably best known for heading up the conservative think tank called the Iona Institute. The Iona Institute, despite its moderate tone, is a good contender for the position of “most hated institution,” and whenever there is a big debate around social issues like abortion or gay marriage, Quinn spends a few months at a time living rent-free in the heads of a half million angry leftists who flood the Irish Twittersphere with dire rants about his pernicious Catholic conservatism.

I don’t intend to focus too much on Quinn’s career here. What interests me most is a comment he made off the cuff a number of years ago about a political talk show he was invited onto (it might have been Primetime, but I can’t recall exactly) to talk about one of the usual conservative Catholic issues, but at the last moment there was a change of programme on account of some breaking news, and he ended up speaking on a panel about other issues that didn’t relate to the culture wars. Quinn said that it was refreshing not to have to speak about the same five culture wars topics over and over.

Something about this last remark unsettled me, and it took me a while to figure it out. Quinn only ended up talking about non-culture wars issues by a fluke; he happened to be on TV, and they happened to change the topic last minute. This is despite the fact that he had been a prominent journalist with the Irish Independent for donkey’s years. But why did a prominent journalist like Quinn, who writes on all sorts of topics, never get invited to talk about non-culture wars affairs?

Likewise one of the other few prominent practicing Catholics in our Irish media, Breda O’Brien, writes for the Irish Times about a broad, expansive range of topics, often with a social justice (in the good sense) bent, and yet I’m fairly certain that the only times she gets invited onto radio or television is to hash out gay marriage and the likes.

Quinn and O’Brien have reputations, you see, as Catholic journalists, and that puts them firmly in a particular box that only gets opened when it’s time to wheel out a conservative Catholic to play their particular role as the villain in any given public debate.

I touched on this in the last post, when I said that the few Catholic figures which my character “Drinks Girl” sees in the media are safely boxed away in a corner labelled “Catholic,” and by being so labelled she can safely ignore them.

In that last post, I talked about the challenges of reaching out to young adults in Ireland, as typified by Drinks Girl, and one of the challenges was finding channels which reach her. I think that what I’m grappling with here is that when Catholic public figures are labelled as Catholic, our media, and the establishment, and high society, label them as outsiders, as persons not in the in-group. They’re not one of us.

Secularists in this country will always bang on about how Catholics are well represented in the media, as after all we have O’Brien in the Times and Quinn in the Indo. But there’s a subtle way in which such figures are pushed into an oppositional role (or squeezed into that Catholic box), which is separate from the rest of Irish society and can safely be castigated and demonised if you’re into that kind of thing, or safely ignored if you’re not.

And all the other conversations in our society, not just the debates but all the news and reviews and online discourse, revolves around those who aren’t in the box, those who are seen as normal and “one of us” and therefore not Catholic. What I think is going on here (not consciously for the most part, albeit perhaps consciously on the part of some high-ranking liberal mandarins in the media) is that certain voices are excluded from the narrative except when convenient, and by being placed in the “not one of us” box your average younger Irish person (such as Drinks Girl) cannot relate to them, and in fact sees them as part of a strange outgroup. And that makes it harder to find that channel into her heart, to bring the Gospel message, because she doesn’t view it as coming from a normal person like herself, but from one of them.

There’s a related phenomenon which I observed with the Eighth Amendment, which protected the right to life of the unborn. During the campaign to repeal that amendment by a vote of approximately 2 to 1 in 2018, the amendment was often portrayed as a Catholic imposition on Ireland, and the fact that it was voted in approximately 2 to 1 in 1983 by the Irish people themselves was glossed over. The actual Irish people who voted for that amendment in 1983 were airbrushed out during that campaign, replaced by a vague image of “the Church” imposing itself on Irish law (as though a million priests were flown in from Rome to vote for it), whereas the Irish who voted to overturn it were detailed in full colour in all the papers.

I don’t know what to do about this on the public stage at the moment. I think that if this box didn’t exist, then what we would have would be the minority of Irish public figures and celebrities and so on who were practicing Catholics being at ease with being public about their faith and their views about such social issues, but also continuing to contribute to the wider conversation about all the non-culture wars issues whether that’s the latest styles and pop culture or the back and forth of Irish politics or the various smaller niche interest groups and charitable campaigns. I don’t know how to get from here to there, how to break out of the box and have people talking about David Quinn’s controversial views on the winners and losers in the latest season of Dancing With The Stars.

But I want to pivot and talk about a point a commenter drew attention to on my last post which I think is related: the issue of being visibly Catholic, and how there’s a tension with the message we often receive to go softly-softly or to “blend into” our surroundings and be a witness by being nice people. I think that there is a way to thread this needle.

I had a conversation with a good friend back when we were in college (many moons ago) about the question of evangelising in such a deeply secular culture. His theory was that the best way to go about it was to, in the first instance, “blend in,” make sure you get to know the people you are sharing your working day with, be their friend, let them know that you are normal. Now my commenter is right; you can’t just do that and expect miracles to happen. But there’s another step. It’s to be unafraid to bring up your faith in conversation once people know you reasonably well, not in an awkward way but when there’s a natural moment, say if somebody asks how your weekend was and you tell them that you went on a retreat, or something like that, which then sparks the question “Oh, so you’re religious?” or “Oh, I didn’t know that you were a Catholic!” or something to that effect.

Because if in the first instance they see you as “one of us” and not “one of them”, it disarms them, it goes past the prejudices. To go in on day one and proclaim your faith is admirable in one way, but in a certain sense it dooms you to be put in the box, because without knowing a little more of the depth of your person, a new classmate or co-worker is going to mentally assign to you all of the prejudices they have against the Church. To be known as a person, first of all, cuts past those prejudices (except maybe with the most strident of true believers in the liberal narrative). You can then be Catholic outside the box. Of course, this only really works if you’re a decent person who is reasonably likeable. If you’re not you need to work on that first, otherwise you have to deal with a whole other set of (justified) prejudices too!

I asked my friend many years later how it had gone. He told me about a return visit to Dublin where he bumped into a classmate he’d known for years. The topic of religion came up unexpectedly in conversation, and he mentioned for the first time his Catholic faith. They ended up going for coffee for hours to talk about who the person of Jesus was. She had a deep curiosity about religion, but it was the relationship in class built up over many years previously which helped her to open up to the conversation.

The alternative is… well, I think of a particular very liberal work colleague who I got along well with, but didn’t know that I was a practicing Catholic. One day she had to deal with a member of the public making complaints, which to a large degree boiled down to homophobic (and I do not use that word lightly) rants. And looking back I realise that that might have been the only practicing Catholic she had knowingly met all year, and that if I had had a little more courage I could have opened up a bit more at an opportune time, and her tally for that year might have been one positive experience with a Catholic and one negative, instead of just the negative one. I don’t know, she might have flown off the handle at me, as certain entrenched liberals do. Or I might have taken that risk and ended up with a conversation from a place of mutual respect.

I don’t know how we get from there to a world of Catholic Bressies. But at the individual level we need to make a start, to break down the prejudices against the Church, person by person, by being relatable, lovable, and loving people, willing to speak about our faith, but having the prudence to lead into it at the right time, and only then will we find our way out of the box.

The Challenge of Evangelising Drinks Girl

It has been six years since I last wrote on this blog. They’ve been six long, busy years. I’ve thought now and again of returning to this old haunt, and a sudden fit of inspiration has driven me back.

Although I have had no time to blog these past few years, I have been reading, thinking, taking notes. The old posts here fumbled around with analysing the state of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and throwing out odds and ends of solutions. I hope my ideas have matured a bit, and what has occupied my thoughts the past few years has been an attempt to really grapple with how to renew the Church in this country, to go beyond mere analysis into solutions, and to go beyond solutions into practice. I still have a long way to go.

The other day found me thinking through the various milestones and goals that might lie on the road to seeing the light of Saint Patrick’s flame burn brightly once more in Ireland, and what achieving them might entail. My thoughts felt too abstract, too difficult to pin down, so I went to pray for a bit in Whitefriar Street Church, and as is the way of these things, inspiration hit me on the way home from there.

I was passing a young couple waiting for the Luas, and they were going on about some party they were going to, and the girl then said something along the lines of, “Oh I’ve got looooads of drink for tonight.” I was suddenly thrown back to the distant worlds of college and secondary school where drinking yourself stupid was considered a vaunted national pastime, and it set me thinking: the question isn’t some abstract one of “how do we evangelise all of Ireland again” or something like that. It’s five million little questions, individual questions, questions along the lines of: “How do we evangelise loads-of-drink girl?”

For the sake of ease let’s call her “Drinks Girl.” Now I don’t know Drinks Girl from Adam, and it would be unfair of me to judge that one girl based on one comment about alcohol. So I’m going to sketch out an image of Drinks Girl, not the girl at the Luas stop, who might or might not fit any of the following descriptors, but a generic description that in my own experience would fit many young women in this country. And since the question is about evangelisation, I’m going to assume that Drinks Girl, like most of her 18- to 35-year-old female contemporaries, is not a practicing Catholic.

Which means that the first question we have to ask is: why is Drinks Girl not a practicing Catholic?

• Family: It starts with Drinks Girl’s family. Between one and four of her grandparents, if they are all still alive, are practicing Catholics of varying degrees of orthodoxy, but for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, they found it difficult to pass on the faith, and Drinks Girl’s parents are either not practicing Catholics at all, or else they go to the odd Mass in a lukewarm kind of way and have a sentimental attachment to Catholic school, First Communions, Church weddings, etc. In short Drinks Girl’s home environment might have had some vestigial Catholic trappings, but there was never a big push to pass on the Catholic faith to her and more worldly goals like school, college, and career were the priority in her home.

• School: Insofar as the Church had an opportunity to put its case to Drinks Girl in Primary School, it did a woeful job of it. Teachers who don’t really believe teach children about “holy bread” and read from inane, wishy-washy textbooks where the Eucharist is explained through the metaphor of witches baking magic bread, and the story of the prodigal son is done on repeat in various guises (look, this is a Scottish prodigal son, the illustrations have kilts!). There’s no consistency, no beauty, no depth or authenticity in the Catholic education Drinks Girl received. And so she has become inoculated from Catholicism, thinking that she already knows all that faith has to offer. Nothing in the way the faith is taught in our Catholic schools speaks to the heart, to the excitement that Drinks Girl’s heart longs for. Instead it has given her a pseudo-familiarity that has bred a mild contempt.

• Social Circles: Whether she is in college or in the workplace, Drinks Girl is in a cultural milieu that considers the Catholic Church as its ultimate opponent. John Charles McQuaid is the new Satan. The Church opposed Repeal (of Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion). The Church opposed Marriage Equality. The Church repressed women. The Church upheld patriarchy. To her mind, and most importantly to the mind of all of her friends and co-workers, not to mention her college lecturers and her fave celebs, the Church is an ideological foil, an enemy that they can raise their banners against.

• Sins of the Church: Drinks Girl isn’t entirely wrong in her negative view of the Church; for all that certain stories are concocted or blown out of proportion by anti-Church figures, we nonetheless live with the legacy of child abuse, shame and stigma for unmarried mothers, double standards and whitewashed sepulchres. The Church has allowed great evil to fester within itself and it has reaped the whirlwind.

• Lack of Counter-Examples: Drinks Girl doesn’t know any counter-examples of Catholics living their faith in the world that might serve to balance out this distorted image. The vast majority of her generation don’t practice (the vast majority voted ecstatically for Repeal). If Drinks Girl does happen to know any Catholics, they’re either her granny, or they’re deeply closeted, or they’re part of the small, vocal fringe of nutjobs that don’t do the Church any favours. In short Drinks Girl doesn’t see anyone on a day-to-day basis who challenges her preconceptions of the Church.

• Culture: Finally, Drinks Girl lives in a culture which has formed in her a vision of the Good Life which is antithetical to Christianity. It’s a culture formed by chick flicks and Netflix, by Tik Tok and OMG What a Complete Aisling, and above all by her circles of friends from school and college and work who are all formed by the same values. It’s a vision of life that tells her happiness comes from getting drunk, getting laid with random lads on a night out, getting a decent career and some money, dating a Drinks Lad, getting into Green or Repeal ideology, then getting married at 35 and having 1.8 children by the time she’s forty, and all the world travels and creature comforts in between.

So why in the hell would Drinks Girl care about the Catholic Church?

Because I think that deep down, Drinks Girl is unhappy with what this society offers. She’s unhappy with the hookups with Drinks Lads. She’s unhappy with her life and she’s unhappy that she medicates the pain by getting smashed at every opportunity. Deep down, Drinks Girl is longing for something more. It’s a longing that gets filled with career and pleasure and trendy political causes but that’s not enough. The human heart is made for something more. It’s made for beauty and truth and goodness. It’s made for the infinite. It’s made for God. And it’s restless until it rests in Him.

These are the answers of somebody already heavily invested in the Church. They’re answers which I could easily tell myself to reassure myself of the universality of the Church’s claims. But I do think they’re true. The only proof I can offer for this is anecdotal, all the moments when friends and acquaintances let their guard down (usually, ironically, under the influence of alcohol) and told me how deeply unhappy the drinking and the meaningless sex makes them and how they do long for something beyond. If nothing else, my goodness, look at the trend in alcohol-free drink so that you can look like you’re boozing while you’re not. People give in to the pressure to conform to this vision of the good life, they give in because they want to be happy and want to be loved and they live in a society that tells them that this is the way to find those things. But I think that they are ultimately deeply unhappy.

I can’t peer into Drinks Girl’s heart to check if it really is restless until it rests in Him. But my own life experience leads me to believe that it is.

So my third question is: assuming we had a chance to evangelise Drinks Girl, what stands in the way of her coming into the Church?

Oof. There’s a lot here. Let’s break it down.

• Prejudice: Drinks Girl already thinks she has the Church figured out. Her guard is going to be up against it. After all, didn’t she spend fourteen years in Catholic school? Didn’t the Church abuse all those children and lock up all those women in Magdalene Laundries? Doesn’t the Church want to control women? Why the hell would Drinks Girl listen to that shower?

• A Channel that will Reach Her: But imagine that we could get past Drinks Girl’s prejudices. Where are the channels that will reach her? She might not have any Catholics in her social circles, or if she does they might be too afraid, or too inept, to witness to her. The pop culture she ingests, the college lectures she attends, the books she reads, don’t speak a Catholic message to her because the voices she hears there are all avowedly secular (or “spiritual but not religious” in a horoscopey kind of way). The few Catholic figures she sees in the media are safely boxed away in a corner labelled “Catholic” and by being so labelled she can safely ignore them. The State is thoroughly secularised (apart from the useless schools). She’s insulated behind layers and layers of secularism. How does the Gospel message get to her?

• A Message that Moves: Let’s cheat and say that a Gospel message gets to Drinks Girl over and above her prejudices and through some channel that reaches her. Maybe it’s the one Catholic she knows who is neither timid nor inept that she chats to one day. Maybe she got curious and Googled something that leads her to a Catholic website. The next problem is that any old message can’t just be landed in her lap. It has to be a message that will move her. It has to disenchant her current view of what life is all about, and stoke a bit of curiosity and real enchantment, enough for her to look for more. It has to speak to the part of her that is restless until it rests in God. If it’s a poorly crafted message it won’t work. But even more than that, different people are spoken to in different ways. To get past the armour around Drinks Girl’s heart might necessitate a friendship, or it might necessitate art, or maybe rigorous intellectual argument. Because each Drinks Girl is different, and each Drinks Girl’s heart is moved by something different.

• A Message that Speaks Insistently: Okay, so say we’ve overcome Drinks Girl’s prejudices, sent a perfectly crafted message through our ingenious channel that has smitten her heart and had her seeking more. But it’s not enough to move her heart once, to make her curious. In the parable of the sower, the seeds are cast out everywhere, but some are choked up by the cares of the world, and some are picked off by the birds, and some start to grow but wither in the sun. In the same way, if Drinks Girl were to decide to start the long journey to becoming a practicing Catholic, indeed, the long journey to becoming a saint, she will encounter opposition. The friends she knows will turn on her for ideological reasons (“You’re against gay marriage now? You bigot!”) or more profane ones (“You’ve stopped getting drunk every weekend? You dry shite you”). Her parents may be unsupportive if she’s getting “too into it” to a degree that interferes with their worldly dreams for her. Drinks Girl’s boyfriend might not be happy if she suddenly wants to stop having sex with him before marriage (and that’s without getting into how hard it is for her to let go of him). There may be issues with her career if she can no longer do certain things in good conscience. Then on top of all that, she has to step from “The Right Side of History” over to the institution which all her favourite celebrities and role models up until now view as the Enemy. In short, there is a huge amount of pressure on her from all quarters that can easily crush whatever slight doubts she has. And so Drinks Girl doesn’t just have to hear the Gospel. It has to speak in her heart in a way that is insistent and persistent, so that it speaks to her soul louder and more passionately than all the voices of her peers and family and the world around her which is in thrall to  glamourised concupiscence. Otherwise the little moment of light reaching into the dark, neglected corner of her heart that longs for God will quickly be overshadowed.

• A Place to Come Home To: Then imagine Drinks Girl does all this. She leaves behind her old life. She earns the ire of her old friends. Her parents think she’s mad. Her boyfriend dumps her for somebody who will put out. Does Drinks Girl have a place to come home to within the Church where she can find the support she needs, the companionship, the formation, the friendship, the guidance, above all the love she is searching for? Can she find somewhere that isn’t grey and dull but which still speaks of beauty and truth and goodness to her heart, so that she won’t slip back into the old world for want of something to draw her further up and further in? Such places exist in Ireland still. But they are few and far between. You won’t find them in most parishes.

Let’s get one thing straight. These challenges are enormous. They all interlock, like so many layers of defences built to keep grace at bay.

How many Drinks Girls are there in Ireland? I could dig around the last census for a few hours, but I’ll save time and hedge instead and say, probably between a quarter and a half million (with about as many Drinks Lads). There’s a lot of variation within them. They will all have different interests and family setups, some will be working class and some middle class, some will be rural Aislings and some will be urban Saoirses, some will be die hard into liberal causes and others will just shrug and fall into line behind them. But I think that the sketch above does accurately describe a huge number of young Irish women (and, mutatis mutandis, Irish men).

The challenge of reaching one is enormous as it is. Reaching them all…?

We need to caveat the above with two things. The first is that, we in the Church could find every way of overcoming these obstacles, and Drinks Girl would still need to choose. We can’t (and shouldn’t) overcome the free will that God gave her. By the same token, we might fail to overcome a single one of these obstacles, and God could still send through a shaft of grace that touches Drinks Girl’s heart.

I suppose the Gospels do tell us that it is the poor who inherit the Kingdom of God, and the simple will shame the wise. I think that it’s the downbeat and the unpopular and those on the margins who will in the first instance be most open to the Gospel message, as they have the least to lose in rejecting the mores of modern Irish society. But then we’ll need to get the Church in order and actually evangelise to reach even those most open.

How do we meet the challenges above? That’s something I’ll want to write more about. But in short:

• We’ll get the message out by building a creative minority that can grow skilful in all the kinds of evangelisation that there are, whether person-to-person or through art or engaging culture and everything in between, and from there joining our efforts to break through the walls of a secular culture that has locked out the Church.

• We’ll have a place for Drinks Girl to come home to if we build up our own communities and institutions, and avoid the pitfalls of making those communities little angry fortresses, but rather oases of love and compassion for those trapped in a fallen world.

• We’ll meet prejudice and ignorance by being holy, and being visible. We’ll overcome the Church’s sins by showing what it means to truly be Catholic, by being known by our love, in short, by presenting the world with Saints.

I hope I didn’t come across as judging Drinks Girl. The Ireland she was born into wasn’t her fault. She is my sister in Christ, and she is loved by Jesus, and he wants her to dwell with Him forever in Heaven. So to end this post maybe let’s offer up a prayer, that God work His grace in the life of that random girl who inspired this post, and for all the Drinks Girls out there in our country.

ISIS has a Plan: Some Comments

Just a few clarifications of my piece on ISIS and having a plan, brought on by some fruitful discussion on the Irish Catholic Boards.

When I ask if the Church has ‘a plan,’ that probably sounds like I want the Church to have some grand master plan in which one person or one small clique is giving the orders, either on a local or global level, and the rest of us just follow along meekly and unquestioningly.

My language probably didn’t help, and as one person pointed out ISIS is a much more centralised, rigidly structured organisation than the Church, for all of its diffusiveness.

So no, I don’t think that such a situation is desirable, even if possible. But to quote one of my own replies on those boards, I think that there are three things which can be done regards ‘having a plan’ if I may use that expression in a broader sense than just the literal:

I think that rather than one big plan, there is a place for some or all of the following:

1) A clearer broad diocesan/countrywide/global vision of where we need to be at, which individual bishops or congregations could try to implement and work towards without necessarily shutting down other means, apostolates, initiatives etc… this carries the risk of those in charge trying to impose their vision on others, but I think I’m thinking in a looser sense of the diocese actually having a strategy to re-evangelise, catechise etc. that is professional, coherent, consonant with the Church’s teachings etc. rather than just lots of haphazard top-down events that don’t build on each other or towards anything (for instance, was there follow-up to the Eucharistic Congress?)

2) A greater degree of coordination between Catholic groups in a region and between regions, so that resources can be shared and people won’t double up work so much by starting a ‘new’ apostolate that is actually already going on in every other parish and need not be started from scratch; this would also make it easier to see where there IS a gap to be filled

3) A greater degree of planning, foresight and thought going into each local initiative that can more easily plug into the resources that are there. I think that the thing is to balance connectivity and coordination with creativity and individuality

Another point that comes out of this is how the Church is rather diffuse itself in many ways and everybody is free to go and follow their own projects, apostolates and initiatives. Despite having a centralised teaching authority and bureaucracy in Rome, the Church is very decentralised in general.

This is a feature, not a bug. If an organisation the size of the Church was to be monolithic, well, as one person on the Boards pointed out, it would go the way of the Soviet Union. We need different ideas, we need debate, we need diversity.

But we also need unity in that which is essential. We need an idea of where we have to get to and we need to each plan how we’re going to get there. Renewal won’t happen if we don’t look to the years ahead and plan.

Yes, the guidance of the Holy Spirit comes into this. But that same Spirit Who made us gave us the brains to think things through for ourselves.

Hopefully what I meant by ‘having a plan’ is a little clearer now…

Attitude Adjustment

Terrible pun in 3…2…1…

When a spaceship has to dock with a space station, the crew must orient the ship at just the right angle so that the airlocks actually connect. It’s kind of like parallel parking, except that it takes place in three dimensions, the parking space is moving almost thirty times faster than a Boeing 747 in mid-flight, and if you mess it up slightly Allianz probably won’t cough up the cash to cover the damage.

This is colloquially known as attitude adjustment.

Those who know me in person know that I will go to any length to deliver a cheap and terrible pun, so let me say that I think that we Irish Catholics need to make some serious attitude adjustments if we’re ever going get the Church in this country where we want it to go without a spectacular crash.

Michael Kelly, editor of the Irish Catholic, had a very clever article a short while back about what he calls the seven last words of the Irish Church, which kind of sums up the problem.

What are the seven last words of the Irish Church?

He gives two seven word sentences that hit the nail on the head when it comes to the attitudes we seem to have in the Church here:

“We’ve never done it that way before.”

And, paradoxically…

“We have always done it this way.”

He goes on to call for openness to new ideas in order to overcome the pessimism that paralyses the Church in Ireland.

You know, I have to own up to this. Every time I complain about something in the Irish Church, I’m also complaining about attitudes and problems I need to get over myself. I’m a cynic and I shoot first, ask questions later when I’m presented with a new idea.

But I’ve been presented with a few different concepts in my life that have pulled me up short and helped me to question some of the negative attitudes I’ve imbibed over the years, and I think that they’re worth sharing so that hopefully others can benefit from them. So a few vignettes are called for.

• I have a friend who used to work with the Church in Latin America, and he had a comment about the differences between Latin Americans and Irish. One of the biggest differences is the attitude towards obstacles. He said something along these lines: ‘An Irishman sees a tall, wide brick wall between him and what he wants, and he gives up and goes home. But your average Latin American sees a brick wall between him and what he wants, and he decides: “I’m going to go over that wall, or under that wall, or around that wall, or through that wall. It’s not going to stop me.”’ If only we were the same here!

 

• I heard a priest give a talk once on how we often tend to have a bit of a siege mentality in the Church. Things seem so bad that we feel the need to bunker down and protect what little we have rather than trying to evangelise and change the world. He pointed out something obvious about a Gospel passage that I hadn’t noticed and I think most people don’t notice. The passage is the one in which Jesus says ‘upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ This priest said quite simply, ‘The gates of hell shall not prevail. Gates are not an offensive weapon. They are a defensive Jesus isn’t saying that hell will try to overcome the Church and fail, He is saying that we can take the fight to the enemy and win.’ It’s a reminder that in the end, Jesus Christ is victorious, and we need to fight to bring that victory to as many people as possible. We can’t give in to despair and we can’t assume that we’ll be forever on the back foot. We need to seize the initiative, something the Church here in Ireland doesn’t seem to do.

 

• I heard another talk by a priest about another scripture passage, that of the parable of the unjust steward. This is a difficult passage, because it’s hard to tell what exactly Jesus is going for. A superficial reading of it might even suggest Jesus is advocating dishonest behaviour, even if we know that can’t be true. The key line this priest singled out was this: ‘For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.’ On one reading of this passage, it might appear that Jesus is saying that the forces of darkness will always be more cunning. But He also said elsewhere that we must be as cunning as serpents and gentle as doves, and in light of this the passage could be seen rather as an admonition from Jesus: we, the ‘people of the light,’ must learn to be more cunning than the ‘people of this world.’ In everything we do, we must try to outsmart those who oppose us, we must try to be more professional, hone our talents in whatever arena of the world we find ourselves so that we can be as good as the best in our field.

 

These are all lessons I’ve tried to take to heart. They could perhaps be summed up as:

• Whatever obstacles block our way, we can’t let them stop us; we just need to try harder to find the right way around them and if one doesn’t work we try another
• We have the final victory; we can’t allow ourselves to be cowed by the world or go on the defensive or give in to despair in the face of all the evils in the world
• We have an obligation to be as smart and as professional as our talents will allow wherever we are placed; if the people of this world are cunning and shrewd and hone their talents so as to oppose us, we must do the same

The forces that hamstring the Church in this country are often pessimism, cynicism, defeatism, an unwillingness to cooperate and hear out other people’s ideas, an unwillingness to take on board constructive criticism, an unwillingness to change as the situation demands it. It’s a very Joycean paralysis, and sometimes it makes me empathise with Yeats’ ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone/It’s with O’Leary in the grave.’

We can’t allow this kind of cynicism to defeat us. We need to adjust our attitude, realise that we can win this, even if it’s a long victory, and we may be working towards a renewal of the Church we won’t see in our lifetimes.

Sometimes what we need is simply to try and see things a new way.

ISIS has a Plan. Do We?

From time to time I hear people say that the problem with the Church, whether here in Ireland or globally, is that there is a lack of vision.

I’ve heard some others attack that as clichéd and nebulous. But I think that there’s something to it and I’d like to draw a comparison that might show what ‘vision’ might be.

I hope it’s not considered bad form to learn some lessons from such a horrifically violent and evil organisation, but there are certain things that ISIS seems to be doing quite well, and I think it’s because they have a vision of what they want and they know how to sell that vision quite well to the right target audience. In short, they have a plan and they’re determined to put it into action.

Let me draw your attention to two pieces by Rod Dreher from about two months back. In this first one he quotes extensively from Scott Atran, an anthropologist who has been studying ISIS, its appeal and its methodology in an in-depth way, apparently because nobody else has bothered to.

I’d like to single out a few pieces from this article for the Guardian:

This is about the organisation’s key strategy: finding, creating and managing chaos. There is a playbook, a manifesto: ‘The Management of Savagery/Chaos,’ a tract written more than a decade ago under the name Abu Bakr Naji, for the Mesopotamian wing of al-Qaida that would become Isis.

Think of the horror of Paris and then consider these, its principal axioms: Hit soft targets… Strike when potential victims have their guard down. Sow fear in general populations, damage economies… Consider reports suggesting a 15-year-old was involved in Friday’s atrocity. “Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach ‘moderation’ (wasatiyyah), security and avoidance of risk.”

There is a recruitment framework. The Grey Zone, a 10-page editorial in Isis’s online magazine Dabiq in early 2015, describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil, the caliphate and the infidel… It conscientiously exploits the disheartening dynamic between the rise of radical Islamism and the revival of the xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that are beginning to seriously undermine the middle class – the mainstay of stability and democracy…

…what inspires the most uncompromisingly lethal actors in the world today is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings. It’s a thrilling cause that promises glory and esteem. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: fraternal, fast-breaking, glorious, cool – and persuasive. A July 2014 ICM poll suggested that more than one in four French youth between the ages of 18 and 24 have a favourable or very favourable opinion of Isis, although only 7-8% of France is Muslim…

We have “counter-narratives”, unappealing and unsuccessful. Mostly negative, they rely on mass messaging at youth rather than intimate dialogue. As one former Isis imam told us: “The young who came to us were not to be lectured at like witless children; they are for the most part understanding and compassionate, but misguided.” Again, there is discernible method in the Isis approach.

Eager to recruit, the group may spend hundreds of hours trying to enlist a single individual, to learn how their personal problems and grievances fit into a universal theme of persecution against all Muslims.

Current counter-radicalisation approaches lack the mainly positive, empowering appeal and sweep of Isis’s story of the world; and the personalised and intimate approach to individuals across the world.

There is a lot in this article, but I’d like to just take a few points from the excerpts I’ve taken out:

• ISIS has a ‘playbook’ or manual for creating and exploiting chaos, which it follows with big results. In other words, it has a plan for what it wants to achieve.
• It has a very effective recruitment methodology backed up by professional propaganda (take a look at Dabiq if you want to see it; I took out the hyperlink because I don’t really want unwanted attention but you can search for it) which targets disaffected youth with an attractive narrative that promises brotherhood, victory, glory and so on.
• This recruitment includes spending hundreds of hours getting to know young men and women who are searching for meaning and love in their lives.
• It is very clued into the situation in the West and elsewhere and is effective at exploiting tensions for its own ends.
• The West is clueless as to how to respond.

• ISIS has a very powerful, compelling narrative which the West can’t compete with.

 

This interview with Atran from Russia Today expands on some of these points in a revealing way, particularly in relation to attracting youth to their cause:

…the counter-narratives I hear, at least in the Western Europe and in the U.S. are pathetic. They basically say: “look, ISIS beheads people, they’re bad people” – God, didn’t we know about that before already? The way ISIS attracts people is that they actually are both very intimate and very expansive. So, they’ve brought in people from nearly 90 countries in the world, and they spend hundreds, sometimes even thousands of hours on a single person, talking about their family, saying to young women, for example, in the U.S.:”Look, we know you love your parents and your brothers and your sisters, and we know how hard it’s going to be to leave them, but there are more things to do in life. Grander things. More important things. Let us try to help you explain it to yourselves when you get here, and explain it to them.” And they go through the personal history and grievances and frustrated aspirations of each of these individuals, and they wed it to a global cause, so that personal frustration becomes universalized into moral outrage, and this is especially appealing to young people in transitional stages in their lives: immigrants, students, between jobs, between mates, having just left their genetic family, their natural family and looking for a new family of friends and fellow travellers. This is the age that ISIS concentrates on, and in response, most of the countries of the world, and the Muslim establishments, who call for “wasatiyyah”, moderation. Well, everybody who has ever had teenage children, they know how worthless that is. So, the counter-narratives we’re proposing are pretty pathetic.

…it appeals to young people and their rebelliousness, and again, that’s the specific target population of the Islamic State – and they provide a very positive message.  I mean, what’s reported in our press and in our media, are of course the bad things, the horrific things, but if you pay much closer attention to what ISIS is actually producing in its narratives – it is offering a utopian society. I mean, they show warriors playing with children in fountains, and at the same time they’re training them to kill. I mean, it’s not all one-sided and they’re perfectly aware of trying to balance the two. That is, showing the future of peace and harmony, at least, under their interpretation, with the brutality that is needed to get there.

[Interviewer]: But, you know, we’re used to think that young people, teen in transition, like you say, they want freedom. They want to have fun, they want to have sex and drugs and drink. What we see with ISIS is forbidding this, for young people and for everyone – yet, there is this flock towards ISIS. I still don’t understand why, because whatever they’re trying to convince young people of, it’s pretty obvious there is no freedom where they are going. And young people usually strive for freedom…

DR.SA: Yeah, but I believe they do think they’re getting freedom. Instead of freedom-to-do-things, it’s freedom-from-having-to-do-things, where a life well-ordered and promising. I mean, again, they appeal to people from all over the world. I got a call from head of Medical School telling me that her best students have just left to set up field hospital for ISIS in Syria, and she was asking me why would they do this; and I said, “because it’s a glorious and adventurous mission, where they are creating a Brand New World, and they do it under constraints.” I mean, people want to be creative under constraints. A lot of young people just don’t want the kind of absolute freedom you’re talking about. The choices are too great, there’s too much ambiguity and ambivalence.

…

[Interviewer]: So, there’s no way to win this social media war against the Islamic State?

DR.SA: Yes, there is; and that is coming up with some kind of equally adventurous and glorious message that can give significance to these young people, and this – I’m not hearing. At least in the Western democracies, things have become sort of “tired” as young people become alienated from their leaders and no longer believe in them very much. …young people are finding this call to glory and adventure quite enticing. Again, it’s understandable… decisions are made at the levels of governments and bureaucrats, which are about as appealing to youth as, you know, those cigarette commercials showing diseased mouths and lungs, which have really no effect. It’s young people who get other young people away from cigarettes – that works.

Dreher has more in a second piece here about how ISIS ‘evangelises’ which is well worth looking through.

 

 

There are a few pertinent points to tease out from all of this, building on the ones I mentioned previously.

• ISIS has a plan, in other words a utopian vision for society and a concrete series of steps to follow to get there
• ISIS is incredibly calculating, professional and effective in striving towards that goal
• ISIS is very effective at recruiting young people by spending hundreds of hours getting to know them and bringing them into the brotherhood (this is referred to as ‘ministry’ by one person Dreher quotes in his second piece; I would almost call this a form of Jihadist spiritual direction); they focus on disaffected teens and young adults who feel a sense of emptiness in spite of the freedoms of the modern West
• ISIS has a very compelling narrative which it sells to these people and which Western 21^st century liberal narrative can’t seem to counter

Which is at once impressive and horrifying. Impressive in that this is a social movement that knows how to achieve its goals. Horrifying in that those goals involve mass beheadings, rape, forced conversions, terrorist attacks, with the ultimate aim of establishing a global caliphate…

I said that this would be a comparison. So let me turn these four points above on their head and ask four questions about how the Church is doing in its mission here in the West. I’ll try to answer with my own two cents.

1) Does the Church have a plan?

Do we? There are two sides to this: the spiritual and the practical. One the spiritual side, God has a plan. The Holy Spirit is our guide, and given that He is omnipotent, omniscient and loving it’s going to be a pretty good plan.

However, God in His generosity allowed us humans to take part in His plan of salvation, so there is a practical side to this.

I could be wrong, but I think we’re doing a terrible job of our end of things. I’ve already spoken about how things are in the Church in Ireland (they are not good). We’re divided, we disagree on exactly what our mission is and even more bitterly disagree about how to go about that mission. We’ve lost the culture of the West and seem to walk into scandal after scandal.

There are many good leaders within the Church, and I don’t wish to be overly harsh on them given the difficulty of the job they have, but I never seem to get the impression that there is any coordination or cooperation, that anybody’s in charge, that there’s a plan to revive Catholicism in the West. This isn’t just down to bishops either; the laity also need to get stuck in. We’re in this together.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that many good things are happening within the Church. They’re just haphazard. For example, I had a bit of a debate with somebody a few weeks back about Youth 2000, a movement I have a lot of time for. This person was complaining that they were failing to do X, Y and Z. To which I could only reply: their job is A, B and C, and they’re doing well at those. Somebody else in the Church should be doing X, Y and Z because this is a team effort, but nobody’s plugging the gaps or solving the problems that are there.

This confusion seems to stretch right up to the top of the Church. I don’t know what Pope Francis is up to, I see many positives but also some not-so-positives in his leadership. I see even more division in the Curia and I think that this is why Pope Emeritus Benedict had so many problems getting real reforms through; I don’t think politics was his strong point.

So yes, the Holy Spirit has a plan. But we need to cooperate with Him, and figure out the practical side of that plan (i.e., the bits that we humans need to work on). And I don’t know if anybody is really doing this.

2) Are we being professional and effective in the things we are doing?

I’ll hopefully write another post that touches on this point later in the week, but it’s one to mull over. How many of our apostolates and movements do things in a planned, considered, coherent but also proactive manner?

3) Is the Church doing a good job of ministering to disaffected youth searching for meaning?

Here there are some positives (again, I refer to Youth 2000). But I think more needs to be done. Youth 2000 provides a very good entry/re-entry point to the Church for young people, as I mentioned. This is the A, B and C it does well. The X, Y and Z of this is ongoing spiritual guidance and formation. This isn’t Youth 2000’s job, and I don’t see a huge amount of it elsewhere.

This is incredibly important.

This article by a Greek Orthodox writer identifies three factors that are key in teenagers and young adults being raised in a faith tradition making that tradition their own and continuing to practice it:

1. The young person’s parents practiced the faith in the home and in daily life, not just in public or churchly settings.
2. The young person had at least one significant adult mentor or friend, other than parents, who practiced the faith seriously.
3. The young person had at least one significant spiritual experience before the age of 17.

I can very much identify with these points; but where in the Church are young people given the opportunity to have adult mentors in the faith, or are they exposed to the wide array of spiritual experiences within the Church that might touch their hearts? And there’s more to it than just that. Catechesis. Spiritual direction. Catholic community. Just plain being-there when things are difficult. Much work must be done there.

The importance of the younger generation is that they have the energy, dynamism and freshness needed to revive and renew the Church. It’s the same in every organisation. ISIS has got this. Have we?

And it’s not ‘moderation’ that attracts youth (although moderation in the true sense is a good thing) but rather meaning, purpose, a cause, a genuine radicalism, the radicalism that will take up its cross and follow Christ.

Moderation does not inspire. Rather, it comes after inspiration in order to channel that energy in the right direction. This is the role of the older generations in the Church, but this only works if those older leaders and mentors are truly authentic, inspiring and devoted, if their moderation is a sign of the virtue of prudence rather than a fig leaf for toothlessness.

4) Does the Church have a compelling narrative that speaks to the human heart and inspires men and women to give their lives for it, even to the point of death?

There are two ways of answering this.

One is resoundingly YES. There is so much beauty, joy, passion, struggle, nobility, love, hope, humanity and divinity in what we believe as Catholics that if it truly takes root in our hearts we cannot be but transformed, inspired, ennobled.

But to slightly change that question: are we getting that narrative out there?

It seems as though we aren’t.

The cultural movements in Europe at the moment that seem to me to have vitality and passion (by which I mean are rapidly growing in overall numbers and in the number of vocal proponents) are threefold: Social Justice Warrior Liberalism, Islam and Far-Right Ideology (we can see the clash of these three in Germany at the moment).

Those that seem to have run out of steam and are dying an ignominious death are classical I-will-tolerate-my-political-enemy-for-liberty’s-sake liberalism and (to an even greater degree) Christianity.

This is a problem that truly speaks to me; as somebody who hopes to be an artist (I won’t say what form of art here) I wish I could convey more and more that Beauty, Truth and Goodness of the faith in the compelling way it deserves.

As it stands, a jihadist death-cult that seeks utopia through bloodshed and chaos is managing to make itself more compelling to the 21^st Century than Catholicism, with all of its wealth of beauty, goodness and love, heroism and sacrifice. It’s an absolute travesty. A tragedy. The Greatest Story Ever Told has been lost in the static.

 

I’m not sure how to go about solving this, other than to reiterate the first step of all attempts to renew the Church: personal sanctity, which is a fancy theological way of saying becoming more like Jesus by loving Him and our neighbour more.

But there is more, even if that is the most fundamental thing.

We need to figure out strategies and means for restoring the Church. This will require a degree of unity and learning how to plan and strategise.

We need to learn to be professional in how we do this. Amateurism only sells out the faith.

We need to provide more real youth ministry, not a series of initiatives ‘for the young people’ that will only drive them away by pandering to what the middle-aged think ‘youth culture’ is.

We need to find new ways of carrying forward our narrative, which is in the end the Good News, the Gospel, bringing it into society in a way that is both timeless and yet speaks to people here and now, with all of their prejudices, merited and unmerited, against the Church.

 

The world is starving for lack of God’s Love. And it is our mission to bring that Love to the world.

We DO need a vision. A plan for how to do that.

I hope I’ve begun to explain what that might mean.

 

 

UPDATE: Some comments on this piece here.

I am for Barron! I am for Voris!

[Many thanks to Ben from Shadows on the Road for linking to me, welcome if you’re here from his blog!]

My apologies for the lengthy blogging absence. This will be a ‘short’ post to get back into the run of things, but I hope to get up another two or three shortly. I hope that you all had a wonderful Advent and Christmas!

I mentioned previously on my post on Pope Francis that I felt that the battles over the Pope online and in print were in some way ‘proxy battles for a different polarisation’ between different camps in the American Church, a polarisation which inevitably creeps in here due to the influence America has on the English-speaking world.

These battles seem to map onto a division between the Four Camps I’m always yammering on about, specifically between the more extreme Traditionalists (affectionately known as Radtrads) and (I think) Camp B (alas, I did not devote my time away from blogging to coming up with better descriptors for the camps). These divisions are a bit different in the US, but perhaps close enough for comparison.

One thing that I noticed about this division is that the Radtrads seem to be devotees of Michael Voris of Church Militant TV fame, whereas the B-Camp seem to be followers of Bishop Robert Barron and his Word on Fire channel. There are exceptions, as always.

Hence the title of this post, which comes from a line in 1 Corinthians 3 you might be familiar with.

Interestingly enough, a short while ago my attention was drawn to a post by a former staffer at Voris’ group called Miles, who has become disillusioned with Church Militant and left. It’s a very good, charitable, but incisive post and impressive for somebody as young as he is. Fair play to him for being able to make up his own mind at that age.

But I bring this up mainly for the title of the post: ‘From Vorisite to Barronite: Why I Left Church Militant.’ Here we have these two factions within the Church summed up at their most explicit.

Many Traditionalists seem to have a beef with Bishop Barron. Steve Skojec sums up some of these here. I don’t always agree with Skojec, and I don’t think he’s right in every point he makes necessarily, but he’s right in this: Bishop Barron shouldn’t be beyond criticism, as long as it’s charitable and reasonable. There does seem to be a knee-jerk defence of Barron sometimes.

The problem I have with much criticism of Bishop Barron is that some of his critics don’t even give charity the merest of lip service (or truth, for that matter). I’ve often heard Barron denounced as a heretic from the get-go as a means of writing him off rather than engaging with his more controversial views. It seems to go into a form of tribalism.

I think that this tribalism is summed up pretty well by Mark Shea (Note Well: firmly in the Barronite camp) in this piece, which is very good. (For the sake of balancing out the Skojec article, here is a piece critical of Voris and his approach by the same Shea).

And I think that this tribalism is contributing to the problems of divisions within the Church, whether it’s the divisions between the Vorisites and Barronites in the USA or the similar-but-different Irish divisions I’ve mentioned before in the Four Camps post.

What’s very interesting about this is its similarities to certain other divisions which have been described as tribal. Recently I’ve been reading a lot of posts at a blog called Slate Star Codex. It’s written by an atheist psychiatrist working in Michigan (who incidentally studied at an Irish university) who goes under the nom du blog of Scott Alexander. Here are two key posts that deal with precisely this issue:

I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

Five Case Studies On Political Polarisation

The first is an interesting study of how the USA is divided into two ‘tribes,’ the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe, and how while everybody believes that they are tolerant of differences etc., really they are just tolerant of diversity within their own tribe. Each tribe coalesces around a set of views that are often mutually contradictory. This summary doesn’t do the very lengthy, excellent post justice; go read it yourselves!

The ‘Red Tribe’ according to Alexander

…is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The ‘Blue Tribe’ on the other hand

…is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country.”

There’s also a smaller, libertarian ‘Grey Tribe’ which he lumps in with the Blue Tribe for simplicity’s sake.

The second post describes how issues get politicised by these tribal affiliations; for example, your views on global warming or the correct response to the recent ebola outbreak almost always correlate with which tribe you belong to.

I think that we see a similar phenomenon being played out within the Church both in the USA and in Ireland.

We have a ‘Vorisite Tribe’ which dislikes Pope Francis, dislikes the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, usually follows Republican politics, favours ‘hammer-of-the-heretics’ style rhetoric and has a very rigid view of theological debate amongst other characteristics.

Then we have a ‘Barronite Tribe’ which loves Pope Francis, prefers the ‘more flies with honey than vinegar’ approach to apologetics, is usually politically Independent and so on.

(There are also sides to the US Church that also map somewhat onto my ‘Liberal’ and ‘Camp A’ axes, but they’re not quite at the heart of this particular debate)

How do we solve this problem (And it is a problem; a house divided cannot stand, especially when those divisions seem to be at each others’ throats)?

The first solution that occurs to me is for us all to try and grow in the virtues of humility and charity when debating with others in the faith. Obvious, perhaps, but so necessary. When ego, anger and self-righteousness take over we end up doing far more harm than good.

The second thing we need to is a little harder. Let me be honest. One of my personal faults is that I don’t make enough of an effort to reach out to those I disagree with in the Church, sometimes writing them off because we don’t see eye to eye. I think that I might not be alone in having this fault. But I need to get over myself and reach out, trying to build bridges so that we might understand each other and together in Christ grow closer to the truth and grow in unity. I think that many of us need to learn this. Unity is incredibly important to strive for and we have to work at it.

Thirdly, so many of these debates could be avoided or at least improved by really studying and trying to understand what the Church actually teaches and why it teaches what it does, and moreover how to know the difference between a prudential matter and a matter of dogma.

The problem of politicisation Alexander points out is a real problem within the Church, and it happens here in Ireland too along different lines. I think that those three points are a start, but I think that more must be done somehow to break out of the tribal mindset.

Because I am not for Paul or Apollos or Barron or Voris.

I am for Christ.

 

Any ideas?

Spheres of Influence

Let me begin this post with a diagram, which I shall then explain:

Diagram 1: I had a much more complicated version with smaller writing and more arrows, but seeing as it’s the Year of Mercy I decided not to inflict that upon you all.

Now, to explain.

This diagram represents all of the various ‘spheres’ of our society that impact upon Irish society and culture. The size and relative position of the various spheres is not really relevant; I made some bigger to highlight them, and some are clearly attached to show an interdependency, but each and every one of those spheres impacts on society as a whole.

A few details that might need further explanation. The Catholic Church has a cross in its sphere. You’ll notice that there is also a cross beside those spheres where the Church has some nominal control over the sector. It’s not to say that this control amounts to anything. The only such spheres I identified were in primary education, secondary education, and healthcare.

As we’ve seen, the Church’s role in education has been a disaster, at least insofar as instruction in basic Catholicism is concerned. Likewise, its nominal patronage of numerous hospitals in the country doesn’t exactly count for much when Irish hospitals are happy to capitulate to the new abortion laws.

But it’s worth including, if only to show how many spheres the Church has no major influence in.

A second symbol is a blue triangle, which you can see in the Tertiary Education sphere. This triangle also appears beside all of the spheres which nowadays usually require a three-to-five year stint in Tertiary Education in order to actively participate. In other words, you don’t get to be a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or even in many cases a journalist or newsreader without having a Bachelor’s or perhaps Master’s degree. I highlighted this to show how absolutely crucial this sphere is. Access to most other spheres is mediated through this one sphere.

Of course, every sphere influences every sphere in some way. The Government, in all of its various listed forms, impacts upon every other sphere via legislation… and yet the makeup of governments in a democracy is down to the people, who are influenced by all the other spheres.

For example, the government just passed the legislation regarding same-sex marriage. But that campaign was influenced by almost every one of those spheres.

In the corner labelled ‘The Culture,’ each sphere played a part. The sphere of Sport played its role, with sportsmen taking public sides and using their popularity as a platform to weigh in. Traditional media such as newspapers and television as well as digital media played their role too obviously, and inevitably we had those from the ‘Arts’ weighing in to give their two cents.

But so too did other spheres, such as that powerful sphere lurking in the bottom right corner in which I attempted to jam all of the various institutions that deal with business and money, with companies donating to campaigns and putting up ‘Yes Equality’ stickers in shop windows and so on. Not to mention the involvement of the Gardaí, a sphere normally resolutely neutral, as it should be.

The same-sex marriage campaign is a very obvious example, perhaps a little too obvious for our purposes.

My point is that if a particular grouping, such as the Catholic Church, wishes to have any influence whatsoever on society (and I don’t mean that in a shadowy, Machiavellian kind of way; I don’t condone that type of thing) it needs to be putting itself out there in each of those spheres in order to be heard in society. It needs to be contesting these spheres. These are all of the areas of society that we need to be evangelising and putting forward the Gospel in if we want to reach hearts and minds.

The most critical and influential are the two I’ve separated into their own little grouplets: ‘The Culture,’ meaning broadly all the entertainment and news people consume and the things they do in their free time, and Education.

Now, think about each of those spheres. Most of them are nicely, neatly wrapped up by varying factions and groupings that are hostile to the Church.

You probably need little convincing that Traditional Media, bar a handful of Catholic newspapers, are hostile to the Church. I just recently wrote about our lack of influence online, at least in terms of Irish-based blogs and websites; much of the Irish internet is hostile to Catholicism.

In terms of Sports, well, there was a time when the GAA worked hand in hand with the Church, for instance. Now matches of all kinds are organised on a Sunday, clashing with Mass times.

In terms of business, one need only look at the amoral behaviour of many of our financial institutions during the boom years to know that not much Catholic teaching has made an impact there, although there are good Catholics involved in business here and there.

As for Tertiary Education, well, as has been noted many campuses are not exactly open to the idea of Catholic societies, for example.

And many of the homegrown and international NGOs and other bodies have been lobbying the government for some time to change laws regarding same-sex marriage and abortion.

We need to come up with strategies that take all of these spheres into account. We need to contest them. These are the areas in which power resides, and that power is being used against us, day after day after day. The questions we need to ask are:

How can we gain influence in each sphere once more? How are these spheres being used against us and how can we counter this?

Really, it’s not going to be a question so much of seizing control of these spheres (not really something I’m interested in; I did just spend my last post bashing Franco after all) so much as it is carving out a space in each where our voice might be heard, might not be silenced forever. Even if it is a voice crying in the wilderness, we have to try to become all things to all men that some might be saved.

I will attempt to develop these ideas further in future blog posts… for now ideas and comments are appreciated.

—

On a side note, we must remember that the Church has something to say about each of these spheres. Somebody quite close to me, on seeing the first draft of this image, suggested that one could edit it and include the names of Church documents, Encyclicals and the like, that relate to each of these spheres. It would be a valuable exercise, and I might get around to it at some stage.