Author: Michael Kirke

Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.

A way forward for a Christian Ireland?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters3 Comments

celtic_cross_knock_ireland

There are many in Ireland today – and indeed more beyond her shores – who see a formerly Catholic country where religion is now decidedly on the back foot.

Last year her people, in a popular vote consigned the Christian definition of marriage and the natural definition of conjugality to the rubbish heap. In the previous year the country’s elected parliament compromised the life of unborn children by a law permitting abortion in certain circumstances, rejecting the moral guidance of Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy in the process. The same Government is now in the process of neutering the Christian churches and hobbling them in their traditional roles in the country’s education system. Just last month the left-wing Minister for Education announced that she was going to abolish a rule by which faith schools devote 30 minutes per day to the subject of religion in the school timetable.

Against this wave of secularization there has been some resistance, heroic at times but ultimately, to all appearances, ineffective. The redefinition of marriage in the name of equality – a false concept of equality which without a blush of embarrassment insists on proclaiming things which are different to be the same and demanding that they be treated in the same way – will have far-reaching consequences. In its aftermath many are now anticipating the prosecution of those who beg to differ. Ireland’s justice system is now administered by a government department entitled the Department of Justice and Equality – the self-same flawed concept of equality now enshrined in the country’s constitution.

Ireland now may well be in the throes of a new religious reformation, driven by a secularist State and acquiesced in by a lax and apathetic population.  Ireland’s people might resist this if it were awake but does not do so because in all probability it does not really comprehend what is going on. It acquiesces because it has succumbed to the mantra of “Ireland must move with the times”, not recognizing that what is going on is a subversion of the Christian faith which has characterized the soul of Ireland for more than 1500 years.

Tom Holland, the English scholar and popular historian has asserted that “Liberalism is essentially Christianity-lite, and you can include atheism and secularism in that bracket too—these are basically Christian heresies. The ethics involved are really New Testament ones.” It would seem that Christian Ireland has now fallen victim to this latest wave of religious reformation while still thinking of itself as Christian or Catholic – just about. Those driving this “reformation” will soon be forcibly imposing their doctrines on all, not with the bloody ferocity of the State-led ideologies of former times but not any less draconian for all that.

Those Christians in Ireland who wish to hold on to the “Faith of Our Fathers” but who are now being marginalized by the Irish State must be asking themselves what hope is there of a new “counter reformation” as their ancestors did in the 16th century?

But perhaps Ireland’s Christian people and their leaders could do worse than look across the Celtic Sea for inspiration. There they might find a model for a revival of the faith in their land, the only antidote to the poisonous ideology now seeping into its political life and culture.

In France, the First Daughter of the Catholic Church, there is now talk of a Catholic Revolution. In Paris, on October 30 last, the iconic Le Figaro ran the headline “La révolution silencieuse des catholiques de France.” The article described how what the paper called France’s néocatholiques are now forming a new generation of leaders in the nation’s political, cultural, and economic debates.

America’s Catholic World Report noted, in commenting on the Le Figaro story:

Significantly, the new Catholics’ idea of dialogue isn’t about listening to secular intellectuals and responding by nodding sagely and not saying anything that might offend others. Instead, younger observant Catholics have moved beyond—way, way beyond—what was called the “Catholicism of openness” that dominated post-Vatican II French Catholic life. While the néocatholiques are happy to listen, they also want to debate and even critique reigning secular orthodoxies. For them, discussion isn’t a one-way street. This is a generation of French Catholics who are, as Le Figaro put it, “afraid of nothing.”

(These peple)  are… skilled at bringing the insights of Catholic orthodoxy to bear in fresh and powerful ways. Certainly, la bien-pensance (political correctness) continues to suffocate French cultural life. That culture also remains dominated by a left that tends to label its critics as “un reactionaire” or anything to which the word “phobic” can serve as a suffix. The point, however, is that Catholics in the public eye are increasingly unintimidated by this. That’s a mindset which French secular thinkers are simply unused to encountering.

All this will be uncomfortably familiar to the Irish who tried to resist the tsunami of media and political orthodoxy which persuaded – if that’s not too neutral a term – 62% of the Irish electorate into accepting gay “marriage” last May. Not since the aftermath of Ireland’s Civil War in the first half of the 20th century did such acrimony result from a political campaign as did in this case. But if the brave French can resist and overcome the intimidation which their laicist ideology has generated perhaps the Irish can do the same.

What is happening in France? Catholic World Report traces this development over the past 50 years, noting how remarkable the change has been in French Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council.

In the years immediately following the Council, it says, there was a turn to the left among some French Catholics, especially clergy. This resulted, for instance, in an emphasis upon Catholic-Marxist dialogue and weakened resistance to changes in France’s abortion laws. Such trends were matched by some of the worst progressivist experimentation within the universal Church, whether in terms of liturgy, pastoral practice, or how one approached the modern world. Many men left the active priesthood, while others, including the Jesuit editor of the prominent journal Études, exited the Church altogether.

By the late 1970s in France, things had degenerated to the point whereby the well-known Jesuit philosopher Gaston Fessard, openly criticized the social statements issued by the French episcopate in that decade, effectively accusing it of being an unwitting fellow-traveller with the French left and endorsing its ideological program and wider tendencies to distort the faith into socialist, even Marxist ideology.

Nothing quite as bad as this happened in Ireland. Or perhaps it did. Ireland did not fall victim to Marxist ideology but it did fall to a consumerist hedonism. It largely turned a blind eye to the Catholic Church’s moral teaching on sexuality and many its clergy were no exception. The sexual scandals, deviant and abusive or not, rocked the population’s trust in the clergy and filled the ammunition dumps of the anti-Catholic politicians and the media for decades of warfare against the Church. The Catholic World Report article speaks of “low-energy Catholicism” in France of 70s. By the year 2000 Ireland’s Catholicism could not be described as anything else. But, CWR asserts, with reference to France:

It was into this atmosphere of “low-energy Catholicism” that a man whose nickname was ‘le bulldozer’ was appointed first bishop of Orléans and then archbishop of Paris in 1981. Called by one biographer ‘le cardinal prophète’, the late Jean-Marie Lustiger was anything but typical. The son of two secular Jews—one of whom was murdered in Auschwitz—Lustiger converted to Catholicism as a teenager during World War II and entered the seminary after the war. As chaplain at the Sorbonne’s Centre Richelieu and then parish priest at a suburban Paris church, Lustiger led particularly dynamic ministries that attracted the attention of people in the bishop-making business. These included Saint John Paul II. He would have noted Lustiger’s ancestral roots in Polish Judaism. More generally, John Paul was looking for men who could shift French Catholicism out of the accomodationist rut into which he believed it had fallen—a point the Pope made clear during his first visit to France in 1980 when he pointedly asked: “France, Fille aînée de l’Eglise, es-tu fidèle aux promesses de ton baptême?” (France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?).

Upon becoming archbishop, Lustiger didn’t stop upending things in Paris. Whether it was opening his own seminary and new schools, starting Catholic radio and television stations, or creating venues and opportunities for himself and other Catholics to engage and argue with secular thinkers, Cardinal Lustiger presented a different way for Catholics to interact with French society. A critic of progressivism and Lefebvrism (which he saw as two sides of the same problem), Lustiger’s agenda was that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI: one that recognized there was no going-back to a pre-Vatican II, non-existent golden age, but that was also clear-eyed about just how dysfunctional much of modernity was turning out to be.

Perhaps most importantly, Lustiger attracted many vocations. Often called La génération Lustiger, many of these priests have assumed leadership in significant dioceses and subsequently adopted a distinctly Lustigerian-style. This breaks decisively with the diffident, ever-so-anxious-not-to-give-offense mentality that once prevailed among the French episcopate, which gave the impression of having read too much Karl Rahner in the 1970s and not much else since.

And now, it seems, the post-Lustiger bishops are shaking up French Catholicism. While not aggressive, they still refuse to be overawed by secular France. They are described as free of the disease of clericalism and they happily empower lay people to spread the Gospel. They are primarily interested in one thing: the Church’s central business: i.e., evangelizing and finding creative ways of doing so. It’s a model replicated by many young French priests. Not surprisingly, their parishes and ministries are the ones attracting people, converts, and vocations. Are there not signs that something similar may be beginning to happen in Ireland? In Ireland there may be hope that it might happen more quickly than in France where 200 years of secularist heresy – to borrow Tom Holland’s thinking – has been corroding the deposit of its Christian faith. Ireland’s secularism is probably only skin deep and the infra-structure of the Church has only begun to be attacked by the State. The vast majority of Ireland’s people are baptized Christians.

Put this into perspective relative to France, where only about 56 percent of the total population has been baptized Catholic and where weekly Mass-going Catholics are about 6 percent of the overall population. Ireland’s Catholic practice, while declining sharply among the young and while also harbouring a good number of practitioners of what the French call “catholicisme zombie”, is still considerably stronger than that. The most recent reliable survey shows that 42.1% of Catholics in the Republic of Ireland attend Mass once per week.

Le Figaro maintains that the momentum in French Catholicism is with the néocatholiques. Liberal and lax Catholicism has faded into lapsed status and has failed as any kind of serious religion. The same process is at work in Ireland. As Cardinal Robert Sarah has said in a recent book, it is really a matter of “God or nothing”. Now, in France, the God option is increasingly subscribed to. If you attend Sunday Mass in Paris, for example, Le Figaro says, it’s hard not to notice the growth in numbers attending middle-class and working-class parishes, but also, as one French commentator, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry points out, you notice just how many Mass-goers are married couples with young children.

It is again noted by Catholic World Report that in recent years there has been much talk about the Church as a field-hospital. It’s true that the French Church finds itself providing much help to the many people damaged by the culture of cynicism, economic statism, self-loathing, and hedonism bequeathed by France’s May 1968 generation.

The generation of Irish politicians now quietly exiting the Irish public square into retirement are from the exact same era. It is they who, by and large, have left Ireland’s social policies in the secularist mess in which they now rest – bequeathing to future generations the crowded Accident and Emergency department of social problems which policies encouraging divorce, single parenthood, ambiguous marriage laws etc, always bequeath. That this happened on the watch of some of them was the result of their apathy. For an influential minority it was deliberate. As they do so they clap themselves on the back and consider that they have achieved their goal of modernizing their backward country.

But it is not over yet.

The new Catholics in France, it seems, are now entering an era in which they recognize that no-one is supposed to remain perpetually in a field-hospital. They are saying good-bye to mediocre Catholicism and seem to have chosen, according to the view of Catholic World Report, to live out what Benedict XVI suggested would be Western European Catholics’ role for the foreseeable future: a creative minority—one that imaginatively engages culture from an orthodox Catholic standpoint in order to draw society closer to the truth, instead of meekly relegating Catholics to the role of bit-players in various secular-progressive agendas.

There are signs of a leadership emerging among Irish Catholics with a similar vision, some who really are determined that the country will not descend into that graveyard of the Faith, Christianity-lite. These are those who believe and take to heart the words of St. Paul in his letter to the beleaguered Romans of his day:

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

Crisis? What crisis?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

In the English-speaking world, over the past half-century, the proportion of students studying humanities at university has hardly changed. True, as one might expect, in the US, the United Kingdom and Australia, there have been fluctuations and important changes in educational demographics, most importantly more women going to college. The crude picture is this: in 1971, humanities students outnumbered business students; now it’s the other way around. But in 1971 there were also about 50 per cent more business majors than science majors; now there are about 250 per cent more.
So relative to business, both the sciences and the humanities have fallen behind since 1971, and the sciences much further. Since the 1980s, however, the gap between the humanities and business has, in fact, shrunk, while the gap between the sciences and business continued to grow. And, very importantly, the rapid expansion of higher education in the world over the past couple of generations means that, in absolute numbers, more people are studying the humanities than ever before.

The question is why humanists have not been able or willing to recognise their own sustained success.

Read more http://pocket.co/soc52u?cta=1.

Opening a treasure chest or dumbing down?

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fantasia_a_l

Before video tape recorders came along it was the masterpiece that was very hard to see. But was it a masterpiece or just a dumbing down of great music on the back of Disney animation?

In a short online piece today courtesy of the New York Times we are reminded that Walt Disney’s Fantasia is 75 years old this month.

The movie, the Times tells us was Walt Disney’s most artistically ambitious feature. It was “dreamed up to bring highbrow masterpieces to everyone.” It didn’t succeed, at first. It cost the equivalent of $39 million and it was only after repeated releases over decades that it finally recouped its costs.

Like all approaches to classical music which concentrate on the “good bits” of the masterpieces of the repertoire, it is ultimately disappointing – little better than what Old Spice did for Carmina Burana or what Hamlet cigars did for Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major. On wonders how many people hearing any of these actually ever found their way to the originals in all their glory?

Fantasia features unrelated segments set to music performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
“Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” accompanying an 1897 composition by Paul Dukas, features Mickey Mouse as a wannabe magician.
Animation for “The Rite of Spring,” composed by Igor Stravinsky, tells the story of evolution.
And “Dance of the Hours,” from the opera “La Gioconda,” becomes a comic ballet performed by animals.

When the film finally arrived in video tape format it was an immediate bestseller among school teachers who saw it as a way of awakening an interest in great music in their pupils. There is not much evidence that it helped in any way to stem the tide of inane pop which was already swamping musical taste across the globe. Reaching the higher reaches of any great mountain requires effort and stamina. The same applies to the great works of literature, drama and music. Funny pictures and soft options are not enough. Pretending that they are is in fact selling out on the things of real value in our culture, those things which will really enrich our lives and cultivate our sensibilities at the deepest level.

Is there a bigger story behind this?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters3 Comments

What “an open, honest and under-oath detailed description of what goes on during state-of-the-art legal abortion” revealed in the Kermit Gosnell trial in Pensylvania, but which no Irish news outlet has ever printed or broadcast, is openly spelled out in the pages of the pro-abortion Irish Times today.

That story, in the Irish context, may be even more significant than the abortion story itself. Has the editor of the Irish Times cracked the stranglehold which his pro-abortion staff have held the paper in for more than a decade? Might we now get other media to follow suit and give the Irish people the honest discussion on this issue which they have been denied to date?

The article comes from two journalists, a husband and wife film-making team based in Los Angeles. They are  Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney and write of their experiences watching the trial of Gosnell. This was a trial ignored by Irish media – and a good deal of international media as well – because it did not flow with the politically correct current which sweeps our media along its biased way.

In their article they tell us that it was not primarily the crimes of Gosnell which shocked anyone who spent time at the trial. It was the evidence from legitimate abortion providers describing to the court what their daily practices involved.

It was the industrial scale of the abortion industry that shocked the jury and spectators who gasped (the only time during a horrific trial) when Dr Charles Benjamin matter of factly stated he had performed over 40,000 abortions. They write:

We were always fairly disinterested in abortion. And by “disinterested” we mean we never thought much about it but, when we did, believed it was an unfortunate but probably necessary part of modern life.

And as such we would have agreed with those who have called in The Irish Times and elsewhere for more honesty and openness about abortion in the belief it would lead to a more liberal abortion regime in Ireland.

However, our recent experience would suggest that campaigners might want to rethink this strategy if they want Irish people to support a campaign to repeal the eighth amendment. .

We are making a movie and writing a book about Dr Kermit Gosnell – described by ABC News as “America’s biggest serial killer”. Gosnell was a Pennsylvania abortion doctor who performed illegal abortions past the state’s 24-week limit. His abortion “technique” was to have the babies born alive and then to stab them to death with scissors.

His case led many people, investigators, lawyers and jury members to hear for the first time the reality of abortion, illegal and legal, and how it affected them might surprise those calling for more honesty surrounding the procedure.

A pro-choice prosecutor told us how she and her female co-worker were amazed that the legal limit in Pennsylvania was 24 weeks: “That’s six months” she remembers blurting out as they read the statue for the first time. Then they discovered that PA wasn’t an outlier.

In several US states you can have, and people do have, abortions up to the day of delivery.

But the evidence that shocked the most was the evidence that was supposed to reassure the most.

To highlight Gosnell’s illegality, prosecutors decided the jury should hear from “good abortionists”.

In other words just what those campaigning to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution are demanding – an open, honest and under-oath detailed description of what goes on during state-of-the-art legal abortion.

It was the industrial scale of the abortion industry that shocked the jury first. They gasped (the only time during a horrific trial) when Dr Charles Benjamin matter of factly stated he had performed over 40,000 abortions.

An arm or a leg

Dr Karen Feisullin was also called to describe what a legal abortion looked like. The jury and many in the courtroom shifted uncomfortably as they heard about “tools going up into the uterus and basically pulling parts out . . . an arm or a leg or some portion of that”.

And those were the easy, early abortions. For later procedures, Dr Feisullin explained the foetus was so well-formed that it couldn’t be ripped apart in the uterus. It was normally removed – through the birth canal – completely intact. But, as Feisullin explained, a baby born at 23 weeks has a 40-50 per cent chance of surviving. To avoid a live baby coming out during an abortion, the doctor demonstrated how, before the abortion, a poison – potassium chloride – was injected through the woman’s stomach directly into the baby’s heart. This would stop the heartbeat, allowing the foetus to be pulled out intact.

Dr Feisullin was asked what would happen if she missed the heart and the baby was born alive.

She explained that the live baby would be covered with a blanket and given “comfort care”.

You could see the genuine puzzlement of people in the court about what “comfort care” was until Dr Feisullin cleared up any confusion.

“You . . . really just keep it warm, you know. It will eventually pass,” she said.

Steve Volk, a Philadelphia-based journalist for an alternative newspaper who described himself as comfortably pro-choice before the trail, said that, as Dr Feisullin spoke, his fellow reporters all checked if they had heard correctly.

Dehydration and neglect

Was it really standard medical practice to let a baby die of dehydration and neglect if an error was made during an abortion? It was and they were shocked.

Local journalist JD Mullane, who interviewed many of the key players, confirmed our research that the trial changed many minds and shook assumptions.

“Almost everyone . . . who spent significant time at the Gosnell trial was less pro-choice at the end. This change was probably because they were for the first time hearing about the reality of abortion from experts under oath . . .

“They had to tell the truth and they had to tell it in detail,” he said.

Out of the shadows

Those seeking to remove the constitution ban on abortion believe the best way to do it is to bring it out of the shadows in the hope that when people hear the details, they will support the liberalisation of abortion in Ireland.

Two years ago, we might have agreed with them.

But our experience of the Gosnell case is that anyone who has learned more about the reality of abortion – the pullings apart of the foetus, the injecting of poison into the heart, the “comfort care” – has come away with only negative feelings about the procedure.

It may be a case of be careful what you wish for.

Quick reversal

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The Week (Europe) reports a bad week for “official figures”, after the body responsible for university funding in England had to admit to an embarrassing blunder: this summer, the HEFCE claimed that 82% of students from state schools achieved a first or upper second class degree, compared to only 73% of those from independent schools. But it has now been forced to admit that it got the figures the wrong way around.

Reflections on Ireland’s Long Revolution Part 3

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Regime Change or Revolution?

Be wary of commemoration. Be careful about what you celebrate. Not only may they be perniciously divisive but they may also grossly distort the truth which should first and foremost be the guide to authentic freedom and the ground on which we build our lives and our communities. When we commemorate what we call the Irish Revolution we should know that it was not really a revolution – certainly not at the time. It was a rebellion against the authority of the state and a rejection of its legitimacy. Those who rebelled were undeniably revolutionary in their intent – although their revolutionary agendas were not uniform.

While Ireland’s 1916 rebellion ultimately achieved regime change, for most of the century nothing else of a very radical nature happened. Ireland remained much the same culturally. The flowering of Irish literature, drama and the burning commitment to a Gaelic Ireland which had flourished in the two decades prior to the rebellion were in fact never matched again in the century which followed. In fact the new regime ultimately alienated many from the ideal of a Gaelic Ireland by seeking a compulsory imposition of Ireland’s native language on the people. Ireland is much less Gaelic at the beginning of the 21st century than she was at the beginning of the 20th. That is tragic. She is quintessentially Irish, no less now than she was then, although that Irishness is now heavily influenced and characterised by Anglo-American culture. Meanwhile, her Gaelic soul is on life-support.

Politically, Ireland continued to be ruled and administered through the time honoured institutions it had inherited from the old regime. That was no bad thing. They are the institutions, the machinery of state, that are envy of most of the world. In terms of political life, for many decades Ireland stagnated in the strait-jacket of the enmities generated in its post-rebellion Civil War. Only now, in the 21st century, does there seem to be any hope of escape from that. Escape to what? That remains a moot question.

For most of the 20th century the new Irish State sought to assert her sovereignty in the world and for a number of the early decades sought somewhat ineptly to do so economically. That came to an end with another Act of Union, union with the evolving entity which is now the European Union. Clearly there were differences between the terms and conditions which applied under this Act and the Act of 1801. Just as the terms and conditions of that first Act had evolved into a more benign character by 1900, so also the terms and conditions of our union with Europe are of a new order as well. By 1916 Home Rule for Ireland had been put on the statute books.

The modern British state has evolved by Burkean principles for more than two centuries. Its mode of change was and remains evolutionary and constitutional. This was not good enough for the Irish.  The Irish insurgents took the law into their own hands in a way which would be an anathema to that greatest of Irishmen, Edmund Burke.  The foolish violence which ensued, after the inept leader of the militants tried to call off the planned insurrection, begot more  and equally terrible counter-violence, including the foolish execution of the Insurrection’s leaders. Ireland has had to live with the consequences of that ever since.

One way or the other – and probably it had nothing to do with the act of rebellion in 19 16 – Ireland is now a society much closer to the mores and ideals of Rosamund Jacob, P.S. O’Hegarty and the Sheehy-Skeffingtons of that time. If it was a revolution, it really was a long revolution. What cannot be denied is that in what is now about to be celebrated there is much of the tragic – not least the loss of almost 6000 lives between its inception and its celebration 100 years later.

But human history will never be devoid of tragedy. How could it be otherwise if what Christian theology and divine revelation tell us is true? We are a fallen nature and on the level of nature much of what we touch does not turn to gold. This may be denied by the Jacobs and the O’Hegartys of the New Ireland – of whom there are now many more among us. That does not make it any less true.

Commemorate? Yes, perhaps. There was nobility and heroism in the lives of many of those who sought to carve a different identity for their country than the one they found it had in their time. Celebrate their actions and all their consequences? That path seems more problematic. Commemoration allows for a level of questioning of the wisdom of those we commemorate? Celebration seems not to do so.

Concluded

A Chesterton for our times?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
Ross Douthat

How we should learn learn to stop complaining and love the New York Times! How could we not, for it has given us a Chesterton for our times. Who would have believed it? It did not begin this week – but it certainly reached a new level of power this week.  The latest shining of this new and welcome light began last Monday with the  First Things Erasmus lecture in New York City. Then today we have a penetrating column, a veritable gauntlet for the cause of orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church thrown at the feet of its heterodox academic theologians, in one of the free world’s greatest liberal newspapers.

We are talking about New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. His star as an interpreter, explainer and sometimes warrior in the culture battles of our time has been rising for a number of years. Since his move to the Times a handful of years ago it has reached super-nova dimensions.

Don’t buy the jibe that he is the Times’ token conservative. The Times is a genuinely liberal paper and as such will inevitably give voice to – and at its top level may also sincerely subscribe to – a view of human nature which is wide of an accurate reading of the real nature of the human condition. But its first ideal is to  try to give voice to intelligent human beings who are seeking the truth. This it will generally do regardless of what the paper’s own view of the truth at any time might be. The Times may even be as confused as Pilate was about the very possibility of Truth. Its starting point is, however, unarguably a good ideal, one which is at the very heart of our civilization. Because of a commitment to this ideal we can hear the voice of Ross Douthat.

This week Douthat gave us a razor-sharp analysis – for me at any rate – of where the “Catholic moment” is today. This was the 28th Annual Erasmus Lecture. It presents a challenge to be sensible, honest and continuously courageous in thinking about where we have been, where we are and where we are going with out Christian civilization yesterday, today and tomorrow.

You can watch and listen to this lecture here courtesy of First Things (firstthings.com). Now in its 28th year, the Erasmus Lecture has been bringing world-renowned speakers to New York—including Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Gilbert Meilaender, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks—to address an audience of over five hundred people each year.

Ross Douthat, who like Chesterton – but without the semantic and rhetorical fun and games – is nothing if not provocative, is the author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012), Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005), and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008).

Last week he was challenged by a group of academic theologians who must surely now regret their silly passing remark casting doubt on his “authority” to speak about religion at all since he had no qualification in theology. In fact they did not challenge him. They complained behind his back – like true liberals – to the New York Times for giving him a platform at all on “their” subject. Today he answers their silliness – silliness which all honest people will laugh at but which nevertheless they should also take seriously, as he does. He begins:

I read with interest your widely-publicized letter to my editors this week, in which you objected to my recent coverage of Roman Catholic controversies, complained that I was making unfounded accusations of heresy (both “subtly” and “openly”!), and deplored this newspaper’s willingness to let someone lacking theological credentials opine on debates within our church. I was appropriately impressed with the dozens of academic names who signed the letter on the Daily Theology site, and the distinguished institutions (Georgetown, Boston College, Villanova) represented on the list.

I have great respect for your vocation. Let me try to explain mine.

A columnist has two tasks: To explain and to provoke. The first requires giving readers a sense of the stakes in a given controversy, and why it might deserve a moment of their fragmenting attention span. The second requires taking a clear position on that controversy, the better to induce the feelings (solidarity, stimulation, blinding rage) that persuade people to read, return, and re-subscribe.

Both his lecture, his column today and on many other occasions, make compelling reading.

He concludes today’s column, making reference to their elitist and Gnostic jibe, where they imply that all these things are above his pay grade and that he does not understand them because he is not a theologian: “…indeed I am not. But neither is Catholicism supposed to be an esoteric religion, its teachings accessible only to academic adepts.”

What is their real position on doctrine and the teaching of the Church, he asks? He suspects that it is that almost anything Catholic can change when the times require it, and “developing” doctrine just means keeping up with capital-H History, no matter how much of the New Testament is left behind. He concludes:

As I noted earlier, the columnist’s task is to be provocative. So I must tell you, openly and not subtly, that this view sounds like heresy by any reasonable definition of the term.

Now it may be that today’s heretics are prophets, the church will indeed be revolutionized, and my objections will be ground under with the rest of conservative Catholicism. But if that happens, it will take hard grinding, not just soft words and academic rank-pulling. It will require a bitter civil war.

And so, my dear professors: Welcome to the battlefield.

It is good to have another Chesterton among us.

Reflections on Ireland’s Long Revolution Part 2

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Testimonies of the disillusioned – Irish Zhivagos

Ernie O’Malley’s later life and the records he has left us tell their own story, subjective but very revealing in a way which the sanitised glorification of the New Republic never is. Those who deny that the IRA of recent years bears any resemblance to that of the early 20th century should familiarise themselves with it. O’Malley, in the ten years before his death, reacted to the state-sponsored Bureau of Military History. This was the state agency entrusted with the task of setting down the official record of all that happened between 1916 and the truce of 1921. O’Malley set out to compile what for him would be a true account.

In pursuit of this he criss-crossed Ireland in his old Ford, searched out his old companions in arms and interviewed over 500 of them. The transcriptions of these remain – although the magnum opus which he had planned never saw the light of day. Foster writes: “The memories recorded therein suggest a less sanitized and more embittered memory of revolutionary violence than those of the Bureau of Military History. Violence, expropriation, intimidation, random killings and enduring resentment can be inferred through many of the recollections he recorded.” One of his interviewees regretfully observed, “Sandy Nagle should never have been shot; he was a harmless ould devil.” Sandy, whoever he was, typified the victims of the callous violence of the war. There would be many more Sandys in Northern – and indeed Southern – Ireland when the war was reignited at the end of the century.

One of the literary figures of the early years of the century, George Russell (AE), thought and hoped that the violence of the epoch was just a phase, a “passing illness” contracted from all that had gone on in Europe during the Great War. He was not to know that within 50 years it would sweep over Ireland again in the final decades of the century, leaving a death toll even higher than that of the 1916 Rebellion and its immediate aftermath.

O’Malley and many of his companions might have been the embodiment of Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, a revolutionary caught in the blinding light of what looked like a new dawn for humanity but ending up in the pit of disillusion and terror. In his last years O’Malley was still looking for that illusive light – “How does one reconstruct a spiritual state of mind?” he asked himself despairingly. He ended up describing his life as a “broken” one, rejecting the world many of his former comrades had constructed for themselves in the New Ireland.

For some it was an unfinished business

Another dimension of the Irish story which Foster’s book reveals, but which will surely be played down by official Ireland for all sorts of reasons in the forthcoming celebrations, is the strong undercurrent of rebellion against the Catholic ethos of Ireland. This Catholic consciousness, in the aftermath of the persecutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had grown in the nineteenth century and had developed very powerful institutional roots. Indeed, if the commemoration were really honest it would be celebrating the fact that it is just now, finally, after one hundred years, that the dream of some of those revolutionary visionaries has finally come true – the vanquishing of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the rooting out of its influence among its people.

Rosamund Jacob, another whose post rebellion life was one of disillusion and disappointment, set out vehemently at the start to undo the Catholic influence in Ireland. Foster observes of her: “In classic back-to-the-people mode, Jacob records her attempts to learn Irish, to seek out like-minded people, and to make the contacts which would bring her…into revolutionary nationalist circles in Dublin… In this world, she searched for similarly secularist thinkers, though she was often disappointed: her robust if rather reductionist belief that ‘the Catholic Church is one of the greatest influences for evil in the world’, and that it was incomprehensible how any sane person of any intelligence could be a Catholic’, did not always meet with approval among her new nationalist companions.”

Jacob, also obsessively interested in matters sexual, would feel much more at home in the Ireland of today where student debating societies regularly rubbish the Catholic Church and Catholic beliefs in terms similar to those she expressed, where secularism is enthroned in Government departments – particularly in Health, Justice and Education – and where, among other things dear to her heart, radical gender ideology, among other secularist dogmas, reigns supreme across ninety percent of Irish media.

Undoubtedly in 1916 the view that Irish Catholicism was part of the national malaise was a minority one – but not insignificant. It would have been shared, among others, by the Sheehy-Skeffingtons, P.S. O’Hegarty and Muriel McSweeney, later to be the widow of the pious Terence McSweeney but not particularly pious herself. She later became a communist. All of these were later to take the view that the undeniably stronger Catholic element in this generation ended up hijacking the revolution and returning Ireland to what was, in their view, a different form of subservience. George Russell was among the disillusioned, moaning in the 1930s about “Catholic thought-control,… smug Catholic self-satisfaction with its own sanctity”.

Next week: The pitfalls of commemorations

Update on the progress of a bad law – Ireland’s bogus pretext for abortion

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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Ireland’s Pro Life Campaign has issued a statement saying that the fact that a number of abortions have already taken place using the ‘suicide’ ground brings to light the entrenched problems with the legislation introduced by the present government in 2013. Three recorded terminations took place on the suicide grounds in the period January-July 2014. No figures have been released for the number of abortions since then. In recent days, outgoing Master of the Rotunda Hospital, Dr Sam Coulter Smith, criticised the new abortion legislation, primarily on the grounds that it set no time limits for when abortions can take place. He said however that he overestimated the number of abortions that would occur on the suicide ground and that the “floodgates” had not opened as predicted.

Commenting on the impact of the new law, Pro Life Campaign spokesperson, Dr Ruth Cullen said: “Within months of the new law being activated three pregnancies were terminated on the ‘suicide’ ground resulting in the intentional ending of unborn human life. The loss of even one life is a tragedy but the fact that we now have a law that facilitates the taking of human life, with the full knowledge that abortion is not a treatment for suicidal feelings, is shameful in the extreme.

“No one on the pro-life side forecast that the floodgates to wide-ranging abortion would happen overnight. Our criticism of the new law was that over time it would normalise abortions taking place on the ‘suicide’ ground given that the decision to carry out an abortion does not have to be based on any medical evidence showing that the intervention was necessary to save the life of the mother. Sadly, it has already been shown that abortions are taking place using this bogus ground despite all the reassurances given by the Taoiseach that it wouldn’t happen.”

Reflections on Ireland’s Long Revolution Part 1

On By Michael KirkeIn 1916 Rebellion, Irish independence, Irish Republican Army, R. F. Foster, Roy Foster, Sinn Fein, Vivid FacesLeave a comment

Part I: A Commemoration Nurtured in Bad History?

There is something of the tragic about Ireland and her story. But then, there is something of the tragic in all of human history. Last year Roy Foster published Vivid Faces, his study of the generation and the cultural milieu in which the Irish Insurrection of 1916 and its aftermath fermented. It is a masterful study. It is a book which, if it were read with the detachment from the current received mythology of Ireland with which it is written, will stand as one of the most valuable reflections on that Rebellion which its centenary next year will be likely to leave us.

How honest, how intelligent, will this exercise in the enhancement of the memory of a people be next year – which is what this kind of commemoration is all about? Will it lay before us the “terrible” element of the “beauty” born in those years or will it just give us the feel-good version and go on feeding the legend. This is the legend which has to this day sustained the blood-lust of Sinn Fein and its military incarnation, the Irish Republican Army – and its multiple Hydra heads.

The roots of tragedy often lie in the failure of a man to recognise his inner truth – his real self, warts and all. The value of good history to a people is the revelation of the truths of the past, the motives, the mistakes, the right turnings and the wrong turnings, the good and the bad, their roots and all the things which make that people what they are today. It is not there to condemn or to praise. It is there simply to try to tell the truth.

The curse of bad history – which is no history at all – is that it blinds the people whose story it purports to tell. It is not even good mythology – for mythology is good only when it is true to the core truths which underlie reality. It is a corrupting and pernicious mythology when it does not.

It is unlikely that Ireland in 2016 will be commemorating with any sense of tragedy the events which were the catalyst which brought it independent statehood. Should anyone suggest that the horrors of the years between 1969 and the end of the last century had any roots in the armed struggle which followed the 1916 Rebellion, there will be a shaking of heads and muttering of “no, no, no”. This will be the first self-deception. There will be many more.

“In the name of God…” Did he really approve?

There are many passages in Foster’s book which reflect the reality of the epoch and its lingering legacy of hatred of Britain. Ireland now boasts that it has relations with its nearest neighbour that have never been seen before in its history, at least not since the time some fourteen hundred years ago when Irish missionaries crossed the seas and brought Christianity to Scotland and the North of England. It is true that the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland in 2011 was a watershed in relations between the two islands. We can but be grateful for it. But it is also true that there still resides in the hearts and minds of many of the Irish a level of animosity towards the people of Britain – and of England in particular – that is as deep and unchristian as it is silly and distasteful.

One such passage in Vivid Faces – the title comes from W.B. Yeats celebrated poem, Easter 1916 -tells the story of Ernie O’Malley, a survivor of the Anglo-Irish War which followed the 1916 Rebellion. Having fought in the war and in the subsequent civil war, he lived on until 1957 but never joined the new Irish Establishment in independent Ireland. He cuts a sad figure in the story. O’Malley left instructions for his burial. He was to be buried upright, facing eastwards across the Irish Sea, facing his enemies, the British. But, Foster tells us, he added a coda: “In fact they are no longer my enemies. Each man finds his enemy within himself.” And so he died.

Foster’s achievement in this book is to give us pictures of the dramatis personae of the Irish cultural revival as flesh and blood human beings like ourselves and those around us today. That revival, which began in the last years of the 19th century, fed into a new Irish and Gaelic consciousness. It was one strand of this which exploded in the face of the Government in 1916. It seemed, to a radicalized minority in the Gaelic movement, that the only way forward to their vision of Ireland was through the barrel of a gun. Irish republican mythology has turned that minority into heroes and Ireland finds it very difficult to surrender the comfort of that mythology. The truth is that they were men and women like many of those who are leaders in our country today – no better, no worse. That, however, is not good enough for the myth. The mixture of good and bad common to all humanity is thought to be unworthy of these men and women. We are not allowed to see them as they saw themselves, as for, example, we see in Dr. Patrick McCartan’s assessment of Sean MacDiarmada, one of the executed leaders of the rebellion. He “was bright and energetic but mentally superficial; he had not an idea in his head when (Bulmer) Hobson took him up and directed his ‘education’….he was cunning rather than clever, would do a crooked thing if it served his purpose.” McCartan himself was a survivor. He lived until 1963. He went on to become one of the co-founders, with Sean McBride, son of Maude Gonne and John McBride, another of the executed leaders – of Clann na Poblachta in the 1940s. This new political party was yet another failed attempt to reincarnate the vision of the revolutionary generation.

The executed leaders.

The paradox inherent in Yeats’ “terrible beauty” is terrible in many ways and not the least of them is the distortion of the humanity of the men and women of 1916. With our need to make sacred martyrs of them we simply distorted into a parody of beauty. To seek the truth about them, and to tell it as is was is to be thought of now as sullying their memory. But if we cannot admire them as they really were what is the point of admiring them at all?

Next Friday: Testimonies of the disillusioned