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.

Centrifugal

One of the regular posters on the aforementioned Irish Catholic Forums often uses the term ‘centrifugal’ to describe the diffuse movements, groupings, and (dare I say it) factions within the Church today.

In other words, they’re all spinning away from the centre, the centre in this instance being rationality, orthodoxy, the leadership of the Church, balance, what have you. I suppose that this is what happens when centres cannot hold.

I bring this up because I experienced a microcosm of the diverse problems we face as a Church today.

This morning, on the feast of St. Charles Borromeo, the great reformer of the 16th century, I heard a homily in which he was described as being a good thing for the sixteenth century, but now the Councils of Trent had been surpassed and rendered obsolete by the Spirit of Vatican II and all these Latin-botherers should learn to give up and just follow the Holy Spirit into the new age of beautiful uncertainty and no priests.

When I came home, I logged onto Facebook to find a Catholic of a very different stripe reposting an article written by an elderly American reminiscing about his time in 1960s Spain. This gentleman was idolising (and I mean that in the most pejorative sense of the word) El Caudillo, General Franco of Spanish fame.

This man’s piece ran along the lines of: ‘if only we could go back to an era when bikinis were banned, the state inspected women’s swimsuits to make sure that they were acceptably modest, police would arrest young couples for holding hands in public, etc. etc.’ This individual went on to lambaste Stalin and the communists and their Republican allies in Spain for their awful atrocities (no disagreement there), but the contrast is intended to provide a justification for doing the same to enemies of the Franco regime. Here I quote directly:

What interests us is that fighting the Crusade, and also the maintenance of Christian social order after the Nationalist victory in 1939, sometimes required the execution of spies, revolutionaries, and other malefactors. As commander of military forces in war and Caudillo later, Franco always insisted on reviewing the file of anyone sentenced to death, and also that he be the one who signed the death warrant. It was important to him because shooting a man is no small thing.

The article itself is here, but try not to give this kind of nonsense too much traffic. Franco was a brutal tyrant. The Church was stupid to get into bed with him, although I’ll have to admit that the Republicans managed to kill a similar volume of innocents in a shorter period.

Why do I bring this up?

We have a dying left-wing guard within the Church, which want to imitate every failed policy of our Prostetant brethren and have dug in deep, partially energised by what I can only call the Spirit of Pope Francis.

And we have a newly energised far-right wing emerging within the Church, typified by the worship of figures such as Francisco Franco, Vladimir Putin and every right-wing thug under the sun, as long as they’ll pay lip service to the Church’s corner in the culture wars.

We desperately, desperately need to articulate a strong, truly orthodox position that adheres to Christian principles over feel-good capitulation to the world on the one hand and the growing extremism that preys on a fragmented Church on the other. We need to build bridges between Catholics. Without that the extremes will be the only voices heard. And the Gospel will be lost amidst the tambourines and the stomp of jackboots.

The key problem here is the right-wing extremism, which is gathering a vicious, angry energy in many quarters, rather than the left-wing laxity, which is on its last legs anyway (even if we shall live with the consequences for a long time).

This kind of extremism preys on those who have an idea that the dominant left-wing cultural narrative does not correspond to reality, but who can see nowhere else to turn since the Church seems to have lost its preaching voice, at least here in Ireland and Europe more generally.

I think that the problems here are threefold:

1. Lack of strong leadership. We need bishops and other Church leaders to really be shepherds of their flocks, leading by example, firing up the lukewarm whilst channelling the passion of the zealous. Hopefully the new crop of bishops will provide this.
2. Lack of a well-articulated, visible, balanced and orthodox Catholicism that can attract those dissatisfied with the status quo. If we’re shut out of mainstream media, we need to find ways around.
3. Finally, and very importantly, I think that the image of a ‘centrifugal’ Church reveals something very important. We’re atomised; the normal point of contact, the parish, is often ineffective at best at reaching out to a modern generation. There are too many young Catholics out there who need the support of Catholic peers and mentors who are balanced, and there aren’t enough lines of communication and encounter to meet them. This is a big problem in universities, where it’s difficult for Catholics to coalesce and form groups, and so those naturally inclined towards the Church feel alone and are either swept away by the culture, or reject it and go into extremism, which they often encounter on the internet. And there IS a radical, extreme version of Catholicism doing the rounds and growing in strength online. We need to find new avenues of reaching such people.

I had another post I meant to write; this was a footnote that got carried away. Oh dear. I might get onto that other tonight.

The Irish Catholic Blogosphere

I’d like to return to a problem I briefly alluded to in my last post, namely the fact that we’re very reliant on the US Catholic blogosphere for much of our online analysis and news in the English-speaking Catholic world, or at least here in Ireland.

A comprehensive list of examples would be too exhausting to compile; just take a look at the samples in the last link for a lengthy debate between points of view that only scratches the surface when it comes to US Catholic blogs and online news outlets. Most of those links are bouncing ideas off or rattling sabres with yet more blogs and there is a massive range of opinion, if at times a bit too much hot air in this humble blogger’s opinion.

Although I am less familiar with it, the British Catholic Blogosphere seems to be fairly extensive as well going by this list.

Although it is good to pay attention to what goes on in the US Church, and I have no intention of ceasing to look at US Catholic blogs and news sources, the lack of a wide range of online Catholic engagement, discussion and debate regarding our specific situation in Ireland is not a good thing. Without this debate, the sharing of ideas and contacts and the sharpening of our thoughts, strategies and arguments against one another, our sense of isolation can be increased and we can lack the resources and knowledge necessary to help our own situation.

An American or English or Australian Catholic blog can certainly provide very good opinion, analysis and formation when it comes to more generic topics such as different devotions, the lives of the Saints or different experiences and strategies in cultural battles can be very useful, and many US resources are very helpful for liturgical calendars and so on.

But what we lack is a wide-ranging online discussion of our specific situation and the nuances and history that must be navigated. Things like the specific history of our abortion battles and how it impacts upon networking and strategy. Things like online lists of prayer groups, resources, local networks. Things like places to form networks between Catholics across the island.

Now, some of these things already exist to a degree. I am not saying that there is no Irish Catholic presence on the internet. Such a statement on an Irish Catholic blog would be, well, ironic.

What I am saying is that it is pitifully small. Google ‘Irish Catholic Blogs’ and suchlike and you will find the first few search pages littered with the ageing shipwrecks of Irish Catholic blogs and websites started full of hope and ended prematurely, the last posts in 2013 or 2011 or before.

Part of the problem is that we are smaller than the US, of course. But looking at the extent of the British Catholic Blogosphere, in a country with a similar Catholic population to us, surely we could be doing better. And our size works in our favour, because we can be more concentrated in our effect.

We need more discussion, more linking up between people, more debate, more research, more ideas, more promotion of the ideas that are working out there in the real world.

So let me plug a number of the things that are out there.

First off, there is the excellent if small-scale Irish Catholic Forums. I have mentioned them before; several very good people are engaged in a fascinating discussion of our problems in the Church in Ireland and the history of those difficulties. I post there myself, albeit as one of the less erudite members. One difficulty there is that the active membership hovers at around a dozen people, with others joining intermittently or for once-off posts. There are many more ‘lurkers’ who don’t join in the discussion. It’s an excellent resource, that could benefit from more traffic from people willing to engage in constructive debate.

I also previously quoted at length from Shane’s blog Lux Occulta in this post here. He has very good historical resources and has uploaded numerous interviews and Irish Catholic pamphlets, although I don’t always agree with his strident traditionalist views. Nonetheless he is performing a very valuable service, providing us with a resource that allows for a real look at Irish Catholic life in that period.

There is the Irish Papist blog as well by Maolsheachlann O’Ceallaigh, the head of the Irish G.K. Chesterton society. Very broad-ranging look at a lot of issues, touching on Life, the Universe and Everything from a Catholic perspective. Maolsheachlann always has an interesting perspective on things, and I appreciate the fact that he branched out from apologetics early on. He also very kindly linked to this blog back when it started up.

The Thirsty Gargoyle hasn’t posted in almost a year, but his archives are well worth a browse. Besides interesting historical pieces and musings on comic books, he has the most in-depth, balanced, well-researched analysis of the child abuse scandals here in Ireland, not to mention other issues such as abortion debates and more. Always an edifying read.

A more recent blog is Shadows on the Road, Ireland’s outpost on the Catholic channel on Patheos run by Ben Conroy of Iona Institute fame (contain your searing white rage, o liberals). Ben has represented the Church and causes such as the campaign against same-sex marriage, chastity education and more on the radio and television very admirably, and he’s a bit of a gent too.

Please also check out Ex Umbris et Imaginibus by the Carmelite spiritual director of the Fraternity of St. Genesius here in Ireland, he always has a fantastic, even-handed look at the Church here and abroad, and the blog of the Brandsma Review which contains some of the pieces from each issue. I should also mention the blog of Roger and Kim Buck, traditionalist Americans now living in Northern Ireland.

There’s more than just blogs, of course; the Irish Catholic website has many of their articles online, for instance, as well as the resource website Catholic Ireland. Then there is the new iCatholic news website too.

There are others, too. It would be incorrect to say that there is no Irish Catholic presence online. But without more voices, more ideas, more debates on a scale similar to the US (but appropriate for our size here in Ireland) we risk not making the most out of the internet and all the possibilities and opportunities it provides.

All of this, of course, will be next to useless if every second Irish Catholic blog goes down the route of hysteria and infighting we’ve seen elsewhere over the smallest differences of opinion.

As the saying goes, ‘in the essential, unity, in the non-essential, liberty, in everything, charity.’

Pope Francis and Polarisation

Something has been bothering me about the reaction to Pope Francis in the run-up to and during the Synod on the Family, particularly amongst orthodox or traditionalist Catholics.

Those in the liberal camp, and the usual media suspects, of course, are spinning this as if it’s the beginning of the Great Liberal Revolution and so on. Plus ca change, as the French say.

But amongst those who profess loyalty to the Magisterium of the Church (I’m choosing my words carefully here), there seems to be a completely polarised reaction.

On the one hand, there are those who are freaking out, big time. There is a belief in some quarters, it would appear, that the papacy of Francis heralds The End Times, the End of the World As We Know It and generally very bad things. I exaggerate to an extent, although in some cases there are those who do seem to believe this.

For example, we have:

• Maureen Mullarkey’s essay which got her kicked off First Things (warning: that link contains some violent images of ISIS atrocities)
• Or this one from Michael Brendan Dougherty, endearingly entitled ‘Does Pope Francis fear God?’
• Or this example from Fr. Z, who is somewhat more restrained, even if he wants us all to ‘be sad and scared’ about the Synod, because apparently a little bit of anxiety will help us to ‘stay focused.’
• The blogger Scott Eric has a list of cases of what he calls ‘Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome’ going back to 2013.

On the other hand, there seem to be a good number of Catholics essentially shutting down any criticism of Pope Francis as mere hysteria. Move along, nothing to see here, they seem to say. This is from Catholics who are normally quite balanced and whose views I normally respect.

• For example, here is Mark Shea dismissing all criticism of Francis with some sweeping statements directed at First Things amongst others.
• Meanwhile Erin Manning, whom I have great respect for, looks at this same divide and concludes that those who are not worried about Pope Francis the Synod in the slightest are probably the side that have the ‘right’ of it.
• Here too is Artur Rosman with a similar viewpoint.

How do we have such incredibly divergent reactions? Whatever happened to the possibility of a balanced viewpoint? Every Catholic opinion-former I can see is either laying into Francis as if he’s the antichrist or else they’re whitewashing the whole Synodal process as if the massive debates and political shenanigans involved are inconsequential and Francis is blameless.

In exasperation, I remarked to somebody close to me that I just wished that there would be more balanced coverage somewhere. They replied, ‘YOU should write something more balanced.’

Oh dear. Well, I suppose I should.

Here’s what I think.

On the one hand, as Popes go, Francis is quite good. He’s incredibly pastoral, in the right sense of that word, meeting people where they are at, actually going out ‘into the marketplace’ as the phrase goes, trying to reach out to lost sheep person to person. He has done an excellent job of reminding us that we must reach out to the poor first and foremost, rather than getting bogged down in endless culture war debates, whilst simultaneously standing up strongly for life and marriage. I’ve been informed that his Apostolic Exhortation Evanglii Gaudium is excellent on joyfully preaching the Gospel (as its title might suggest) and I’m actually dying to read it.

At the same time, he’s not perfect. Many of his off-the-cuff remarks have been ill-considered; to take an example, I know Catholic parents with large families who were quite hurt by his remarks about ‘Catholic rabbits,’ which he later apologised for. Other remarks have been wildly taken out of context by the media worldwide, and yet they have done a massive amount of damage. Our Holy Father is not always prudent in his choice of words.

Moreover, some of his decisions regarding personnel at the Synod are questionable, to say the least, particularly his decision to grant Cardinal Danneels of Belgium a position as Synod Father. Besides his outspoken support of gay marriage and allegedly pressuring King Baudouin to sign Belgium’s abortion law, the good Cardinal has also been implicated in the cover-up of Belgian child abuse scandals. Why has he been given this position then? Why has a man who defended a bishop who abused his own nephew permitted to weigh in on the Church’s response to family matters? It beggars belief.

The Synod is worrying, if only because it will cause more confusion about what the Church actually stands for, something the Church does not need right now. I am particularly frustrated at the fact that this Synod, like the last one, has been spent to a large degree waffling on about proposals that go against Church teaching when the time could have been spent actually coming up with ways to deal with the multitude of issues facing the modern Christian family: divorce, separation, trying to raise children in a hostile culture, or local issues such as polygamy in Africa and Asia or the dangerously low birth rate in many Western nations.

Here’s the thing: is it not simply possible, that rather being the personified ‘Smoke of Satan’ as I saw one writer refer to him, or rather than being yet another living Saint, as we tend to see all of our Popes of the last century (indeed, some were; I’m not questioning the Church’s judgement on this), that Pope Francis is simply a decent pastor, trying to do good work according to his own style, who like all of us has the capacity to make mistakes, even big ones?

After all, Pope Paul VI, the Pope who presided over the disastrous misinterpretations of Vatican II, was also the Pope who gave us the prophetic and courageous Encyclical Humanae Vitae.

After all, Pope Emeritus Benedict, the incredibly wise and gentle Pope who gave us so many clear, insightful teachings and genuinely tried to tear out the culture of child abuse and cover-up amongst certain members of the clergy was in the end unable to escape media portrayals and the machinations of his opponents in the curia.

After all, St. John Paul II, for all of his incredible work trying to reach out to the world, helping to bring down Communism, correct many of the excesses that went before and providing beautiful teachings on art and human love, made mistakes, including some terrible mistakes; think of his blind endorsement of the infamous Fr. Marcial Maciel, in spite of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s deep-seated concerns about the man who did in fact turn out to be leading a terrible double life. This doesn’t take away from his canonisation one bit.

I think I know what the difficulty here is. We have fallen into a particularly Ultramontane view of the Papacy. A perfect storm of circumstances, namely the collapse of much of the Church’s traditional power bases and orthopraxy (that is, the correct implementation of Church teaching on the ground) coupled with new forms of instantaneous global communication have meant that many Catholics have turned to the authority of the Papacy, the one thing that seemed to be a common bulwark against collapse, unchanging throughout the turbulence of the twentieth century, a phenomenon which has gathered pace over the course of the last few decades.

Since the Pope is looked to for this kind of leadership and stability, as opposed to local Bishops’ Conferences and priests, an expectation of perfection is placed upon a figure who is, at the end of the day, a human being. The Vicar of Christ that man may be, but he is not Christ and not perfect. When this level of perfection is not met, there is a tendency to whitewash and explain away, or else to experience a strong negative reaction.

This state of affairs can last without a collapse as long as the papacy remains relatively unchanging and the throne of Peter is occupied by a man who is both holy and wise, a tall order in most circumstances. Of course, the abdication of Pope Benedict should teach us that nothing in this world remains constant.

We have been blessed with the Popes of the last century. They have been, to varying degrees, both holy and wise.

But let’s cast our eyes back to some of the Popes from before living memory. There were the Medici and Borgia Popes, amongst others, who wildly abused their power during the Renaissance period. Their abuses (sale of indulgences and positions, shoring up their power bases by making their friends and relatives Cardinals, using Church funds to launch personal wars, fathering numerous children) led directly to the Reformation.

Let’s face it. Pope Francis may have his faults, but they are tame compared to these.

We are guaranteed, according to Church teaching, that the Pope will not make an ex cathedra statement on faith or morals that is false. That’s all. There is presumably some kind of grace of state that goes with the Papacy, but like any grace one must embrace it freely.

We need to detach ourselves from an unhealthy reliance on the papacy, because as long as it lasts it will take one Alexander VI or a Pope along those lines to knock the feet from under us. We need to have both eyes open when it comes to the Holy Father.

Similarly, there needs to be more balance, charity and respect for the position of the Pope in the criticism levelled at him.

Pope Francis isn’t the antichrist. Neither is he God. He’s a weak human being, like the rest of us, who makes mistakes. And we need to stop tearing each other apart in debating those mistakes.

We need to stop the polarisation, the frustrating, divisive, stupid battles we fight against each other over the smallest of differences!

Although the examples of blogs above are coming from the USA and not Ireland, (something I hope to address soon) I think that we may be seeing the same kind of divide we see between the different camps I mentioned before here. The verbal battles over Pope Francis almost seem like proxy battles for a different polarisation between traditionalists and liberals, Camp A and Camp B (still haven’t thought of other names for those two!).

There Are No Silver Bullets (Also Entitled ‘Things Fall Apart’)

There is a trend I’ve noticed cropping up from time to time when Catholics, concerned with the state of the Church in Ireland, set about thinking of solutions and come up with a ‘silver bullet;’ that is to say, a single thing that can be done to change everything.

Often these Catholics have correctly and astutely identified a key problem and suggest good things that might be tried to overcome it. An assumption is made that there is one simple thing that can be done, or one thing more important than any other.

Take this blog post, for example, by Dom Mark Kirby, Abbot of Silverstream Priory.

Dom Kirby highlights the fact that in the wake of the same-sex marriage result, many people are suggesting various particular strategies as solutions to the Church’s decline:

The Church in Ireland finds herself in a crisis from which, not a few are saying, she will not emerge. People of goodwill are attempting to identify the root of Ireland’s spiritual pathology. Some would argue that it has to do with the cultural shift away from immutable objective values, and the consequent spiraling down into the tyranny of relativism. Others would wish for an Irish Savonarola to rouse sleepy consciences, denounce vice, and spearhead moral reform. Still others would wish for a new rising of intellectual insurgents and articulate theologians capable of appealing to reason: teachers of the true faith gifted with eloquence; orthodox catechists; zealous apologists; a new Frank Duff and a new Fulton J. Sheen.

He goes on to suggest his own solution:

I would identify a different pathology and propose a different remedy…

The vertical dimension of Catholicism has been mortally compromised by an approach to the sacred liturgy that offers no piercing through the limitations of time and space into the eternity of God and the unfading beauty of His kingdom…

“As for me and my house we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 4:15), by placing at the beginning of this glorious restoration, what the Fathers placed at the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, the liturgy, God, and adoration…

Now, I think he’s right in saying that the lacklustre state of the liturgy in the Irish Church is a major contributing factor to the exodus from the Church. If the liturgy gives the impression that not even the priests believe that what they are doing has any supernatural meaning, then what’s the point in the rest of us going?

So kudos to Dom Kirby for tackling this issue and trying to do something about it. His community in Silverstream are a blessing to Ireland, and in using him as an example of what I perceive to be an unhelpful trend I hope I don’t come across as criticising him. He’s done more for the Church in Ireland in the last few years he’s been here than I ever have. Think about supporting their work if you can! If I single out the Dom, it’s because he’s put his solution of choice in a convenient place on the internet which I can link to.

But here’s the thing. I’ve heard others suggest other pathologies, to use the Dom’s term, and cures for those pathologies, which will seemingly cure the Church in Ireland. It might be better catechesis in schools, or this or that devotion, or promoting openness to life, or…

The list goes on.

What is common to these different ideas is a leaping on a particular solution to one aspect of the crisis, perhaps in the hope of a quick fix or simple remedy.

Let’s use a metaphor. Let’s say the Church is a complex machine which has stopped working, and those who rely upon the machine are standing around, each pointing to a different part of it that seems to be broken and saying: ‘There, that one, if we just replace that one it’ll be working like new in no time!’

Allow me to demonstrate using another of my incredibly artistic marker diagrams:

 

Now you know that I am not an engineer.

If we just replace that red cog, then the others will get to work in no time, right?

The problem with this approach is that the focus is too narrow. It ignores all of the other problems impacting on each other.

We think of the Church’s problems as being like the diagram above, but really we’re looking at a different situation:

The problem isn’t that one aspect of the Church’s approach is off-kilter, and fixing that one thing will solve everything. The problem is that everything is broken. It’s the liturgy, but it’s not just the liturgy. It’s catechesis, but not just catechesis. It’s lack of a proper focus on the Sacraments, but not just lack of such a focus. It’s clericalism, and anti-clericalism, but not just clericalism and anti-clericalism. It’s the abuse crisis, but not just the abuse crisis.

We’re not looking at isolated problems; we’re looking at a total systemic failure with very, very deep roots.

We can see this in the wide range of problems we face.

Any approach we take has to take into account ALL of the factors, all of the broken parts, all of the systemic problems, and deal with them together. Whatever our strategy is, it has to deal with all of the problems as parts of a greater whole.

There are no magic bullets.

Thankfully, there is Providence, and He’s not going to abandon us. We just need to prayerfully reflect on what we can do to cooperate with Him, and get to work.

Further Musings on what Same-Sex Marriage Means for Us

Apologies for the two week absence, various circumstances intervened and I was unable to write.

I want to shortly post about certain divisions within the Church in Ireland and what they mean for us, but another short post on same-sex marriage first.

I don’t particularly want to dwell on culture war flashpoints like this. There’s so much ink spilt about these issues and in some ways they can distract us from the work that really needs to be done.

So I hadn’t intended posting again about same-sex marriage, but recent events have thrown up a few more thoughts worth reflecting on, and since one of the purposes of this blog is to deal with the obstacles to renewal in the Church, we might as well take another look at an issue that is going to present us with one of our biggest hurdles to overcome.

Gay Pride Parade

As it happened, I was away from home last week. I came back on Saturday, and found myself in the midst of the tail end of Dublin’s gay pride parade in the city centre.

What struck me was the massive number of people in their teens and early twenties dressed up in rainbow colours and flags cheering and celebrating as they dispersed through the streets. Some media sources said that there were more than 50,000 at it, and although the numbers have been exaggerated before (such as this Irish Times article, which in addition to the 25,000 they claim were at the 2011 parade decide to include 100,000 who ‘watched;’ I wonder if they’ll do that for this weekend’s Rally for Life?) I don’t doubt given the movement’s momentum post-referendum that for once the numbers are accurate.

My point being that the Catholic Church in Ireland has lost an entire generation, in the sense that it has embraced and campaigned for a cause antithetical to Catholic sexual morality.

Even amongst the vanishingly small percentage of under 25s who are still practicing Catholics and active amongst Church groups, a certain sizeable portion are also in favour of gay marriage in spite of the Church’s teachings. I can’t blame them, really, when the Church has done such an abysmal job of evangelising and catechising in this country.

The problem is compounded by peer pressure. How can you convince a teenager who is insecure in themselves to stand up against their peers on such an emotive issue as this in which opponents of same-sex marriage are labelled bigots and haters? How many would be willing to risk the unpopularity of being associated with such a cause?

This issue isn’t quite like any other. Of course, there have been losing battles over other issues such as divorce and abortion and contraception and cohabitation and so on, but there has never been such a public demand to accept an issue. People will debate abortion and acknowledge that the pro-life side has an argument, and divorce will always be seen as a bit messy, but with gay marriage one must AFFIRM.

We can see more of this in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s outlandish decision to invent a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage (Who knew that it was hiding away amongst all those amendments all this time? But five justices somehow managed to coax such a right out of hiding like a rabbit out of a hat).

One of the consequences of this is Facebook’s campaign to have people adopt rainbow colours on their profile picture. There’s a good critique here of how this results not just in celebrating but also in shaming those who do not embrace the rainbow colours (I don’t know why the editors of that piece decided to bring Lenin into the issue, but the text of the article stands).

The placing of Yes Equality signs and rainbow flags in the windows of businesses put me in mind of this essay by Vaclav Havel, the Czech politician and philosopher who opposed Communism, particularly the section about the greengrocer. To quote:

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests.

I couldn’t walk by a business without a Yes Equality sign without wondering why the decision had been made not to put one in the window, and whether or not there was pressure to do so.

So it is with Facebook. Of course, it’s a softer form of pressure than that exerted by the Communist party, but it’s a form of pressure from all around nonetheless.

The Obstacles

So this brings me back to a point I mentioned in my last post on this. This issue is one that will separate people from the Gospel message.

But more than that, I wonder now if I was too hasty in dismissing what I referred to as ‘Persecution Lite.’

I am hesitant to use the word persecution at all, even with the qualifier. Here in Ireland or elsewhere in the west we do not have to endure the torture of Communist regimes or the rape and beheadings of ISIS. Some commentators have said that it is insulting to use the same term to describe intolerance of religious conservatives in the west as is used to describe the slaughter of Christians and other groupings currently happening in the Middle East.

There’s a lot of truth in such remarks. We do have it comparatively very easy here.

Perhaps I will refer to it as ‘intolerance’ in this piece, although that too is a clumsy word with other connotations.

So we are not facing the persecution of beheadings and crucifixions and lions in the Coliseum.

But we are facing the intolerance displayed towards Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript who was forced out of Mozilla for donating to an anti-gay marriage campaign in California. I know of others, people who do not have the profile of Eich, who are afraid to make public their beliefs because of fear that they will be fired; this is particularly a problem in large tech corporations.

It will be the intolerance displayed towards Paul Barnes, former owner of Daintree Paper, who was forced out of business because he refused to stock gay wedding cake toppers. The subsequent manager decided to crow about her decision to bring them straight back in when she took over the business. Naturally, other businesses will take note.

It will be the intolerance displayed towards institutions which do not conform to the status quo, as the Obama administration’s Solicitor General Donald Verrilli stated might be a problem for universities or colleges which oppose same-sex marriage after the Supreme Court ruling.

It will be the intolerance displayed towards voices that dissent.

So it might not be persecution, in the sense that we normally think of that word. But that’s small comfort to somebody who loses their job or their business for having the wrong opinion.

And moreover, persecution has to begin somewhere, with the demonization, marginalisation and silencing of a society’s designated acceptable targets of hate.

Which now means us.

So again, this brings us to two obstacles we face.

The first is the one that I mentioned before: people, especially but not only younger people, now believe that Catholicism stands for hatred, and this is going to present the biggest obstacle towards helping them to come to know and love God in His Church.

The second is the institutional difficulty. How do we get the word out about what we believe when we are unable to speak out for fear of losing our jobs or being marginalised or having our businesses destroyed? How do we speak out when there is no outlet permitted in the media or at university, or only the most limited, truncated freedom of speech?

I raise these points not to be defeatist, but rather to point out that these are the obstacles. There are barriers in front of us. We cannot be deterred by them, but we cannot ignore them either.

We must take stock of what these barriers are, what their nature is, how they might be overcome.

And then we go around them, or over them, or under them, or through them.

The first step, of course, is to always be ready to give an answer for the hope that we have. We need to know and understand our faith before we can share it. We must try to understand and take to heart the Church’s teaching on sexuality.

I’m not certain still how to go around the emotional barriers that people have on this issue, the kind of drawbridges that get pulled up when people find out that you don’t agree with gay marriage.

As for the practical points of getting the word out, we need to be creative and find new platforms and outlets and build communities in new ways outside the systems that exist. The internet is our friend here, at least for as long as that too is free.

The Labour Party, however, has its own plans for the internet in this country. You’ve been warned. (That source seems to be quite left-wing, so obviously I don’t agree with his arguments against censorship on the basis that it holds back abortion, but the primary point at the beginning of his post about how draconian these bills are still stands)