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?

The Problem of History

‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’

• Orwell, 1984

I suspect that I am in the minority amongst practicing Catholics for holding this view, but I sincerely believe that one thing that would be of critical importance to any renewal within the Church in Ireland (and, indeed, globally) is an objective, detailed and comprehensive history of the Church and its battles in this country.

Who controls the present in Ireland? Chiefly the universities and media, I would say. Neither are impartial observers. Take this interesting article on historyireland.com on historical revisionism in this country. The focus is on nationalist history, but although this is not principally my area of expertise, I suspect that the history of the Church is portrayed by secular historians in a similarly skewed way.

One key way in which religious history is often reinterpreted by atheist academics and journalists is the application of a Marxist framework to religious belief, which assumes that all religion is about power structures and power struggles, an elite trying to control the masses. There are, of course, men of the cloth who use religion in this way, but the Marxist worldview (I use ‘Marxist’ in the academic sense of the word) refuses to even acknowledge the possibility that some clerics could join the priesthood, for example, out of a desire to serve God.

We also often hear talk of ‘the bad old days.’ There were, indeed, many bad things happening in 20^th Century Catholic Ireland that have thankfully come to light. Industrial schools, clerical child abuse, thoroughly unchristian attitudes towards unmarried mothers (which never seemed to apply to unmarried fathers, funnily enough). But to present only one side, namely the negative side of history, is to skew the picture.

On the other hand, we can often have Catholics who hearken back to the glory days and ignore that which is bad, pointing to the massive number of vocations and high rate of Mass attendance and so on. Never mind that clericalism, the honour of having a son in the priesthood and a distorted vision of discernment that viewed those who left seminary as ‘failures’ grossly inflated the numbers and meant unsuitable candidates trained for the priesthood. Never mind that many of those who left our shores and went to England and further abroad stopped going to Mass once society wasn’t looking over their shoulders.

But why is it important to correct this narrative? Why is it important to look to the past instead of just move on doing God’s work and trying to revive the Church?

I would argue that there are several reasons to do so.

One reason is that it is important to set the record straight, so that people can realise that the past wasn’t all bad and that the Church is more than just a force for unmitigated evil, as bad as many of its actions in this country were. A narrative dominated by the enemies of the Church in this country, one that focuses solely on the negative to the exclusion of the good, will convince people that the Church has no answer to their problems or their spiritual longings.

But more importantly, it is vital that we understand how we got to where we are and what went wrong so that we can learn from past mistakes, learn what worked well and what didn’t, learn what forces and personages were at play in previous years that may still have an impact on the future of the Church here. We need to think on a large scale here, looking at both very recent history and that of the last two or three hundred years. The Penal times and the nineteenth century were key in the developments in the Church that were to come post-Independence.

This needs to look to the future; both to the immediate future, but also to decades from now when new generations will need to learn from the mistakes of much older ones. The urgency of this is that one of the most important sources for understanding the Church in the 20^th Century, namely oral sources, are by their nature dwindling. Every year the limited number of people who lived through the Church’s dominant period pass away, leaving out a part of the story.

Most important of all, I think, is the complex, multifaceted question of why the apparently strong Irish Church collapsed as it did. A decline and fall narrative, if you will, albeit one that must resist a pessimistic ‘long defeat’ attitude or the temptation to look for simple answers.

But apart from this there are other issues. Here is a sweeping sample of questions that might shed light on the Church in this country, what went wrong, how past mistakes might be avoided and future ones corrected:

• To what extent did clericalist attitudes form and how did this impact upon the laity? How did these attitudes form?
• Was there genuinely a lack of intellectual life in the Irish Church in the 19^th and 20^th centuries compared to the continent as is often claimed, or is this an exaggerated or distorted view of the situation? Or was there simply an intellectual core in the Church that didn’t impact on a wider scale (That is to say, did intellectual religious simply not encourage similar inquisitiveness amongst laity and secular clergy)?
• Was Irish Catholicism really influenced by Jansenism as is often claimed, or more by Victorian Puritanism? To what degree was the rigid nature of Irish Catholicism down to theological factors and to what degree to social factors?
• How did the Irish desire for public respectability become so enmeshed with Catholicism and how did the two forces interact?
• To what degree was the faith largely or entirely external in some of the population? How did the Church leadership manage to blind itself to such a phenomenon?
• How were the sex abuse scandals so badly mishandled?
• How did the Church interact with cultural forces such as artistic circles, media etc. and to what degree were these quietly co-opted by groups opposed to the Church?
• Why was there no ‘Catholic University’ such as the one envisioned by Newman?
• What were the forces acting upon the Church that caused such radical change and eventual collapse after Vatican II? Why was the hierarchy so unprepared for it?
• What is the history of the collapse of Catholic catechesis in schools and the seminaries? How did this come about?
• What was the role of the religious orders in Ireland and how did they go into decline?
• How exactly was Humanae Vitae accepted by most of the Irish population? Was it really as widely rejected as the Irish Times claims or was there a more gradual shift away from Church teaching after the Council?
• What strengths did the Church really have that we can learn from?
• What is the history of all of the various lay movements/sodalities and so on that were present in Ireland in this period?
• What factors in the 19^th century impacted upon the 20^th?

There are also a number of interesting questions to be asked on a more global scale, such as the history of Vatican II and its outcomes, the emergence of the New Ecclesiastical Movements (a detailed analysis of what they get right and what they get wrong would be very useful indeed) and the history of the Traditionalist movement come to mind. That said, there are a good number of books out there written on such topics from a variety of viewpoints; their international nature means that they have attracted more attention.

Two difficulties occur to me in such a project, and they are to a degree interlinked. I doubt that many would see the value in such a project given our limited resources and more pressing concerns, and besides, who is going to take it on? Such research would be a full-time job, probably involving a team of people. Who would pay for such a thing and where would it be run from? It couldn’t be done through a secular university, such is the bureaucracy involved in academia these days. Through the Bishops’ Conference perhaps? But then that might lead to conflicts of interest. I’m honestly not certain.

One very good resource in this regard is a blog run by a young Catholic under the pseudonym ‘Shane’ called Lux Occulta (‘Hidden Light’ in Latin). I often disagree with Shane’s viewpoint, but the work he does of putting up old Catholic articles, pamphlets and interviews with clergy amongst other things gives a valuable window into the life of the Church in Ireland over the last two hundred years.

Let me give an example of how this work sheds light on certain aspects of Catholicism by taking one of the questions I listed above: ‘Was Irish Catholicism really influenced by Jansenism as is often claimed, or more by Victorian Puritanism? To what degree was the rigid nature of Irish Catholicism down to theological factors and to what degree to social factors?’

Jansenism imported from France is often the supposed culprit here. Shane provides some cuttings arguing against this thesis. Now, I’m not certain that this proves that the fault is purely that of Victorian prudishness, but it would bear further examination.

This probably seems an overly academic issue of interest only to historians. But I believe that there would be value in taking a look at this topic to determine the root of the puritanical side of Irish Catholicism so as to avoid taking on such values in future.

Let me give a more concrete example, again drawing from material Shane has provided. This is a pamphlet on the 1983 Pro-Life Referendum which draws attention to the media’s role during the referendum. One of the most notable aspects of this pamphlet is that it identifies not only a strong media bias against the referendum in the 1980s (in contrast to the majority of the population who voted to enshrine an anti-abortion law in the Irish Constitution), but also that several media personalities and politicians who opposed the referendum were unwilling to come out and say that they supported abortion. They opposed it based on the specific wording. (Ironically, they may have been right, one of many bitter ironies about this issue in Ireland). Many of these figures have since voiced their support for liberalising the law here, now that they don’t face the same backlash. Some of these individuals include Irish household names such as Vincent Browne and Michael D. Higgins, the current President.

There is a wealth of information here that the Church and the pro-life movement could have learned from (although they are not the same thing, the Church features heavily in the content of the pamphlet due to its support for the amendment).

This is just one small document. A detailed history of the pro-life movement, and more broadly the history of the political battles fought over Culture War flashpoints such as abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage and so on, from the 1980s through to the present day via the very important early 1990s would be an invaluable resource for discovering what went right, what went wrong and how the Church was outflanked by its opponents. It would be key for deciding how to move ahead in the political arena, if it is not too late.

If it is possible, an objective look at the history of the various divisions in the Irish pro-life movements would be useful, especially with a view to healing them and building bridges, although it would be difficult to be truly objective and to have people open up and give oral accounts of what happened given that many wounds are still hurting twenty and thirty years on.

Without such a broad-ranging study, we are left with the Left’s take on things, which whilst sometimes shedding light, also leaves a great deal to be desired when it comes to objectivity.

One other good resource is the Irish Catholics’ Forum, where several very knowledgeable posters and a few significantly less knowledgeable ones such as myself contribute. Well worth checking out, although the difficulty again is that the historical elements are piecemeal, which is not the fault of the contributors since none of them are provided with an income to research these issues.

Historical research is not my area of expertise; nevertheless, when I’m a little farther along with the development of my ideas I may attempt to tackle one of the questions above simply as an exercise and post the results here. Don’t hold your breath though!

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.

The Divisions in the Church (Part II: Amongst all Irish Catholics)

This is the second in a three-part series on division with the Irish Church. As previously stated, these posts are largely based on personal observation, although in this one I’ll inject a little hard data so as to get an idea of certain proportions.

The first part looked at divisions amongst active, practising Catholics in Ireland.

I demonstrated this using a diagram:

Diagram 1: The Four Camps

It’s time to develop this argument. I originally brought up the ‘Four Camps’ idea with a good friend in the Church and he broadly agreed with the points I had made. But he pointed out that I was missing a very, very large part of the picture. He said that the camps could be seen as extremes, and in the middle was a much larger group of Catholics who were practising but not active. They might have tendencies or leanings one way or another, but in general they do not get involved in the life of the Church beyond showing up on Sunday and going through ceremonies such as weddings and funerals in the Church. It is worth noting that like in the active practising group, there will be a number who are not orthodox.

We might now take the diamond in the diagram above and place it in a new diagram.

Diagram 2: Active and Non-Active

I’m not certain how proportionate this diagram is, as I’ve no idea of the real percentages, but I do imagine that it is a minority of weekly Massgoers who are active in parishes, movements and apostolates in the sense of actually running things and moreover attempting to evangelise and build the Kingdom of God. Reflecting on this idea, I decided to develop it further, and contrast these two distinct groupings again with another, larger grouping: non-practicing Catholics.

This brings us to a diagram within a diagram within a diagram.

Diagram 3: The Distinct Groupings Who Call Themselves Catholic on the Census

You’ll notice that I decided to include Non-Catholics in the diagram, outside the circle, mainly for completeness’ sake.

Before we look at what the point of all this categorization might be, I’ll crunch some of the available numbers, and make up some estimates where numbers are not available. The links to the data are available in this previous post of mine.

According to the most recent Census:

• About 85% of Irish citizens and residents identify as Catholic
• About 15% of Irish citizens and residents do not

Of those who identify as Catholic, an Association of Catholic Priests survey found that:

• 35% go to weekly Mass (which is roughly 30% of all Irish)
• 65% do not go (which means that roughly 55% of Irish are non-practicing Catholics)
• A maximum of 13% agree with all of the Church’s teachings that were surveyed (which is roughly 11% of all Irish)

Now, two caveats about these stats:

One, the ACP survey has a much greater margin of error than the Census, given that they polled about a thousand people and the Census polled everyone.

Two, I’m about to conflate orthodox Catholics with Massgoing Catholics, which you can’t do in 100% of cases, but for the sake of ease we’ll assume that they are the same thing, which in the majority of cases they are.

So we end up with statistics like these for the population of Ireland:

• 11% Practising, orthodox Catholics, of which an unknown percentage are active
• 19% Practising, unorthodox Catholics, of which an unknown percentage are active
• 55% Non-practising Catholics
• 15% Non-Catholics

Now, I’m going to make a wild estimate of how many of the people who show up in the pews each Sunday are active according to my previous definition. Does 1 in 5 sound reasonable? (I imagine that this grouping is weighted towards the orthodox, but that’s just my perception).

Here are some new statistics, the bold being estimates.

• 6% Practising, Active Catholics, some orthodox, some not?
• 24% Practising, non-Active Catholics, some orthodox, some not?
• 55% Non-practising Catholics
• 15% Non-Catholics

Now, where on earth am I going with all of these figures?

Simple. We now have a series of distinct groupings within Ireland as regards their relationship with the Catholic Church:

• Orthodox, Practising, Active Catholics
• Unorthodox, Practising, Active Catholics
• Orthodox, Practising, Non-Active Catholics
• Unorthodox, Practising, Non-Active Catholics
• Non-Practising Catholics
• Non-Catholics

My point is that the Church in Ireland is divided into five categories, the largest of which by far is Non-practising Catholics.

In addition to this, there is a minority of Non-Catholics, which is an entirely heterogeneous category consisting of Muslims, Protestants, Orthodox, Atheists, Agnostics and everything in between.

So in order to reach out to people and bring renewal to the Church, we need a different approach for each category.

Those who are Orthodox Practising Active form the bulk of the group that fall into the Four Camps I mentioned previously. They are the backbone of the Church, but as I pointed out face poor leadership and are divided, often over petty differences.

This group requires the building of bridges, greater unity and closer networks as well as stronger leadership, of the holy kind and not the charismatic, egotistical kind. This group also needs greater catechesis and spiritual guidance so as to grow in knowledge of the faith and personal sanctity. Encouragement too. We need to stand by each other and watch out for each other in the days t come.

You know what else what be great? More retreats, guided and non-guided, preferably in retreat houses that haven’t been swamped with New Age practices.

Those who are Unorthodox Practising Active need those of us who are orthodox to reach out to them. They obviously feel deep within themselves the need of the Church, but have left its teachings somewhere along the way.

Patience, charity and clear, informed, reasonable discussion will be key to drawing them back to the Church’s teachings. Hammer-of-the-heretics style attacks will drive this group away more than anyone else, since their bête noir is the return of more rigid days.

Those who are Orthodox Practising Non-Active need those of us who are active to encourage them, invite them, inspire them to become part of the mission of the Church, to respond to the calling that is in their hearts; we need to help them to catch fire. Beautiful, attractive communities (in the sense of communities that really practice Christian charity and strive for a true relationship with God) of the faithful will help.

Those who are Unorthodox Practising Non-Active need a bit of both of the previous approaches.

Those who are Non Practising need to be reached out to as well, although probably with the assumption that their understanding of the faith is very limited. The whole gay marriage issue will be particularly difficult here, I think; as I’ve said before we need to find ways around that particular barrier. Above all else we need people to feel welcome to come home.

Those who are Non-Catholic…well, they will need as many approaches as there are beliefs. But again, they will need those of us active in the faith to be willing to reach out, answer questions, invite, try to dialogue and understand where they are coming from.

In a way, there is a hierarchy here; the approaches needed for each group can be built upon as they grow closer to being Orthodox, Practising, Active Catholics.

This is a brief sketch, but I hope I’ve made the point; the divisions we face will need a myriad of solutions, but unity and charity amongst those of us already active is key. After all, as somebody once said, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

As always, these are broad brush-strokes; really there needs to be an individual approach to each person. But we need to recognise the broad trends and where we stand to make a start, and putting the means in place and getting our own house in order will be the first step.

I’ll have the final post up in this trilogy soon I hope, on the different generations.

The Impact of Geography

I will soon launch into a more detailed examination of what I believe some of the difficulties we currently face are as a Church, but first I would like to quickly take a look at an issue that is currently an obstacle but could easily be turned on its head to become an advantage.

I think that we must always be careful when trying to emulate the successes of the Church in other countries; cultures vary, and aspects that might be advantageous elsewhere can prove disadvantageous when adapted to a different culture.

That said, we can still attempt to learn from others. Each culture comes with its own unique strengths and weaknesses and we can learn from what is good in other cultures as long as we carefully discern that which is not so good and avoid it. Catholicism is a both/and religion, and it does fusions quite well; just look at the drawing of the good elements of pagan Irish culture into the art, literature and life of early Catholic Ireland for one successful example.

Geography and Travel

I want to take a specific look at one aspect of American culture which does not come naturally to us in Ireland but could prove advantageous in future cooperation between Catholics here. I am speaking of our respective attitudes towards geography and travel.

Because the US is such a large nation and its cities and towns are spread out across such a vast countryside, the average American is quite content to travel long distances each day for work or pleasure and indeed very long road trips are the norm. From having spent time in numerous parts of the US in various different circles I can say that most people seem happy to drive three hours to a meeting and three hours back and still take time out in the evening to go somewhere else.

Here in Ireland, because we are such a small country we tend to think that the relatively small distances between different parts of the country are an entire day’s journey each way. Part of the difference is of course the difference in the quality of roads between the two countries, but I think that there’s more to it than that. We have an attitude that travel is difficult and thus more of an obstacle than it needs to be in the 21^st Century.

I generalise, of course; I’m sure that there are Americans who just want to stay in a small area and dread the thought of long road travel, and of course there are Irish who think nothing of a jaunt from Belfast to Cork in the car. But these are general cultural differences I’ve noticed between the two countries.

What can we learn from this?

It’s quite simple. With a bit of a shift in our attitudes, we can see travelling and meeting others in different parts of Ireland as much easier and simpler than we often believe these things to be. I think that this is important because the in the years ahead we as Catholics are going to have to cooperate to a greater degree to try and evangelise our culture. We are too few to not work with those on the other side of the island.

And let’s face it: it is a small island. It can be crossed north to south in a day and east to west in much, much less time than that.

On top of that, face-to-face communication is always superior to electronic. Connections are made much more firmly in person than they are over the phone or online. Meeting with others in person is going to be important to form the networks we’ll need for the years ahead.

I don’t mean to dismiss the advantages that the internet or modern communications in general bring (I am writing a blog after all), but personal contact nonetheless comes with its own advantages.

City and Countryside

There is another aspect to this, of course, which is perhaps uniquely Irish. I mean the divide between Dublin and the rest of the country.

There is a tendency of the part of Dubs to see their city as the centre of Ireland. Obviously, given that a quarter of the people on the island live in the city or county of Dublin, it does carry a certain weight politically and infrastructure such as roads and railways are focused on the city to a large degree, which makes it a central hub in which meetings of those around Ireland are easily organised.

But there can be a tendency to focus too much on the city and leave out the other parts of Ireland, which can cause resentment amongst those who live outside and likewise can blind those who live in the city from seeing what lies outside the Pale. I’ve seen this happen when trying to organise events between groups from around Ireland.

Here there needs to be another shift in attitude on both sides. Those in the city need to take into account the fact that three quarters of Irish live elsewhere, and even if outside the smaller cities they are more dispersed, there tends to be a greater degree of faithful practising Catholics in the countryside and there cannot be such a focus on the city that it excludes those outside.

On the other hand, the simple fact is that, rightly or wrongly, a great deal of Irish infrastructure is set up with Dublin as the centre of all things, and organising a meeting with Catholics from the four provinces is often easier in a place where everybody can travel to easily by car, bus or rail. Despite being more secularised as well, the large population of Dublin does mean that there is nonetheless a fairly big concentration of Catholic groupings in the city as well.

Change in Attitudes

We’re facing into a difficult period ahead and every little advantage we can gain will help us to weather the storm and God willing rebuild the Church here in Ireland.

I give this as one example of how we can adjust our attitudes towards our country and the Church here by rethinking our geography.

Remember, we’re a small country, which can be used to our advantage in building tight networks between Catholics. And whether we’re from the centre of Dublin city or the furthest parts of the Donegal or Kerry coast, we’re all in this together and we need to work together and understand each other if we’re going to weather the storm.