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.

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Cinema is a very broad church. In recent decades it has become an increasingly infantile church and leaves you ashamed to be counted among its believers. But there are also times when it gives us works of the rarest beauty and depth, restoring our faith in its power to open our minds to truths – soetimes reassuring, sometimes disturbing – about our personal existence and about the realities of our communal lives.

The year gone by was one of the most dire on record as the misguided moguls of Hollywood led us further into the world of comic book characters we thought we had left behind in early adolescence. As ever, they thought they had a formula for a fast buck but were disappointed when the fast buck never showed. It was their worst year in over a decade.

But let us not waste time moaning about the 99% of drivel Hollywood shovels our way and look for the jewels which sometimes manage to make it through the system.

Two films stand out this year, each unique and each utterly untypical of nearly everything else around it. You will not go to see them for an adrenaline rush – or any other kind of rush – but if your human soul is alive at all you will come away from them wiser than you were.

First came Ida, which actually dates from 2013 but only made it to the Anglophone cinema in 2014. The second was Boyhood, which actually began its shooting life over twelve years ago and has just garnered the first of the many major awards it is likely to take home this year – winner in the best drama category at this week’s Golden Globes event.

Of the two Ida is the purer and richer specimen of the great art form that cinema is, showing us how the medium can rise to the task of touching the transcendent at a level which can leave us breathless – to the point where its resonances might even provoke a life-changing experience.

Ellar Coltrane who plays Mason through the years

Boyhood is different. Its capability is more negative. It is firstly a triumphant experiment in film-making, using, as it does, the same actors to play its central characters from year one to year twelve in the story which it unfolds before us. But while this certainly adds to the fasciation of the film it is not at the heart of its power. What is at the heart of its power is its searing truthfulness. It is a portrait of a family as our sorry society has now determined so many families are. It is a “document” of ordinary people muddling along through life, hurting each other, harming each other and breaking each others hearts and trying to make the best of it. For the most part they are good people but they are also flawed people, living in a society which has generated mores for them where hurts increase and multiply and no one can do much about it other than try to get on with it.

Ida (Directed by Pawilikowski) looks bleaker than Boyhood – but it is not. Boyhood’s lovable flawed protagonists muddle along and basically stay muddled, neither happy nor miserably unhappy. Boyhood asks questions – without even appearing to – but it gives no real answers, partly one suspects, because there are no answers in the world they have constructed. Two young people mull over the received wisdom that we should “seize the moment” – carpe diem the original. They conclude – and that is even too strong a word – that rather, it is the moment that seizes us.

All we can hope for is that Richard Linklater – the genius who conceived, wrote and directed this little masterpiece for a mere four million dollars – might continue for another twelve years to tell this story of young Mason whose boyhood is the central subject. Perhaps then the fatalistic note on which Boyhood ends might resolve itself in a more redemptive way. But something tells us that is not going to happen, and that this would not ring true in a story where truth is at its very heart. This is a story of a muddled world bequeathed to children by muddled adults who try to do their best but their best is not good enough to save their children from making the same mistakes which they made. This is a universal story about the ordinary, sad and somewhat perplexed human beings who populate western culture in our age. That makes it a treasure.

Ida’s setting is much grimmer than the suburban middle class Texas setting of Boyhood.

Agata Trzebuchowska plays Ida

It takes us back to the Spartan environment of a Poland which seemed to be settling into its harsh communist utopia. The counterfoil to the grim reality generated by communist ideology is a convent of nuns where some novices are preparing to take their vows and accept the ascetic terms and conditions of a life in this world dedicated to the God so vehemently denied by everyone around them. On the surface it appears no less grim, but the intimations of immortality which it engenders sets it an eternity apart from the other.

We follow the path of one of these, Ida, whom we discover is the orphaned daughter of Jewish parents she never knew and who were murdered while trying to escape the holocaust. Before taking her vows she is given leave to visit her mother’s sister – and it is only then that she discovers that she is Jewish. Her aunt survived the holocaust and became a hardened communist magistrate, with not a few death sentences to her credit. The portrayal of the family bond juxtaposed with the contrast between the life of faith of one and the clearly disillusioned ideology of the other is one of the master-strokes of the film.

The two go in search of the truth about the fate of Ida’s parents – and find it. In doing so a thrid protagonist enters the story in the person of a young man both fascinated by the mystery of Ida’s dedication and attracted to her. Their relationship develops and finally comes to a point where, in the most extraordinary circumstances imaginable, the denouement unfolds.

The final scene, reminiscent in some ways of Truffaut’s iconic freeze-frame finale in les quatre cent coups – but without the ambiguity of that scene – is long and paced in such a way to give us, the viewers, time to unravel something of the miracle which has unfolded before our eyes as we absorb the landscape and the serene and determined expression on the face of Ida.

Both these films ask the fundamental eschatalogical question – the one directly, the other implicitly – probably without even knowing it is asking it. Ida asks it in the final two words spoken in the film and the question is answered for us in the 10 or so silent minutes which follow that scene – at least for those who have eyes to see it.

Boyhood does not formally ask it – unless you consider young Mason asking his father, as they discuss attending the Christening of his baby half-brother, if he had baptised him when he was a child. His father’s skeptical answer puts an end to that conversation. There is also, of corse, the implication of the soundtrack which features George Harrison’s “What is Life?”.

But while the question is not asked the answer is still there. Towards the end of Boyhood, as Mason is about to leave his mother’s nest and she somewhat ruefully reflects on her half-happy life, she says to him “I thought there would have been more”. He has no words of consolation or reassurance – for he himself is not even sure of where he is going or what is in store for him.

Seizing, or not seizing, the moment.

The New Yorker review of Boyhood had the following observation

So many of the men in “Boyhood” seem like losers, or bullies, or both, minds and mouths locked tight with disapproval and denial, and the challenge for Mason—and, you feel, for any kid—is not just to survive the squalls of youth but somehow to grow from boy to man without suffering a death of the spirit.

We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone. Just like the final fade.

The semi-desert setting of the final scene in the film parallels with the grey bleak landscape through which we see the young novice walking in the last minutes of Ida. The contrast between the two is in the souls of the protagonists. They are in entirely different places. In the one we can say, “There is a vision of Life.” In the other the desert in the soul is sucking life away and all we can say is that where there is still some life, well, there is some hope.

Neither of these films is ‘an entertainment’, nor comprehensible without a certain level of maturity. Boyhood features some very strong language within very unrestrained but wholly authentic conversational banter between adolescent boys.

What we have in Ida and in Boyhood are two parables, each telling us a truth about our condition and our time. The one shows us the soul’s capacity to perceive the transcendent meaning of our lives and our capacity to act on that perception. The other shows us – irrespective of what may or may not be the particular perception of the teller of the tale – the dreadful consequences of a degenerate culture which blinds us to our nature and inhibits us from acting according to our true identity as rational, sentient and free beings.

The combined power of these two films, true and honest reflections on our human condition from very different perspectives, redeem cinema and do a great deal to restore our faith in this great art form.

“No one has ever spoken like this” – to these people

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

People are still talking about Pope Francis’ surprising and forthright address to our masters in Europe. This was the way one of the writers at the ever-irreverent, always refreshing and frequently surprising Spiked.com saw the event.

Most official papal visits follow the same, tired formula. The pope swans in, armed with the grace of God and a host of heavenly security heavies; he prays piously for an end to persecution; and he stops at some cathedral or shrine to remind us to remember Our Lord every now and then in the drudgery of our busy, profane existences.

But His Holiness’s most recent drop-in to the European Commission was a different story. Breaking the record for the shortest formal papal address ever to a European assembly, Pope Francis packed his 34-minute speech with a takedown of the EU, a damning appraisal of Europe’s fetishisation of red tape, and a scathing rant about Europe’s decline from chief protagonist to ‘tired grandmother’ on the world stage.

The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, squirmed in his seat as Francis asked the European elite why it had chosen to commit continental suicide by driving Europe into an intellectual impasse where cultural relativism and austerity-mania have become the only games in town. His Holiness was clearly peeved by the idea that the EU was useful to anyone, European or otherwise. For its citizens, the EU is seen as ‘aloof, if not positively harmful’, he warned. Francis fumed that people don’t take kindly to their jobs and laws being subject to the whims of a faceless, centralised council of unelected experts.

The problem, in Francis’s eyes, is that Europe has failed to keep pace with its more sprightly, optimistic rivals. As the EU’s reach has expanded, the world has become increasingly interconnected and global – and thus less ‘Eurocentric’. For Francis, the problem runs deeper than how the EU elite has handled certain situations – the problem lies with the European project itself. Europe is ‘elderly and haggard’, His Holiness diagnosed, and is increasingly incapable of offering solutions to international problems.

There’s a delicious irony, of course, in the head of the Roman Catholic Church politely, but forthrightly, telling the EU that it looks miserably tired and decrepit. But, boy, did it need saying. It was a vital and eloquent denunciation of the pencil-pusher politics of the EU, of a political elite obsessing over pedantic protocols at the expense of genuine ideological debate. The EU project is a symptom of the closing of Europe’s political imagination. It’s a shame that it took an elderly clergyman in a frock to spell it out for us.

Well said, and well said Pope Francis.

Remembering in sorrow

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The New York Times reminds us of a tragic anniversary today.

Thirty years ago today, water seeped through a pipe and into a tank at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in central India, setting off a runaway reaction with chemicals that released 30 metric tons of toxic gases.
It turned into the world’s deadliest industrial accident.
The enormous cloud of poisonous gas drifted through the nearby city of Bhopal. By morning, more than 2,000 people had died. Another 6,000 were dead in a week.
Since then, 20,000 more deaths resulted from health issues brought on by the disaster, activists claim. Birth defects and other injuries continue to afflict more than half a million others, they say.
In 1989, Union Carbide paid $470 million in a settlement to the victims of the disaster.
Survivors have long sought further compensation and executive culpability.
Warren M. Anderson, the chief executive of Union Carbide at the time, was arrested and charged in the case but never extradited. He died two months ago at age 92 in a Florida nursing home.

Seeds bearing life, seeds bearing death

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

“Ah, dear friend, when something happens in life, do you ever think of the moment that caused it, the seed from which it grew? How can I explain it…? Imagine a field being sowed and all the promise that’s contained in a grain of wheat, all the future harvests… Well, it’s exactly the same in life”.

I don’t know why exactly, but these words brought to mind two very sad events of the recent past. They were events, each of which had the character of both fruit and of the seeds of fruit which in their turn produce more fruit – and more seeds. One event was bitter-sweet, the other filled with a bitterness devoid of any sweetness.

The words themselves come from one of the novels of Iréne Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood, which like all her novels, are pathos-laden explorations of human nature and flesh and blood human beings, each revealing the follies, weakness, and wisdom of our kind – wisdom sometimes induced by our follies and our weakness.

The recent events brought to mind were the sad stories of two people afflicted with terminal illness – the one being young Brittany Maynard on the West Coast of America, the other, even younger, being 17-year-old Donal Walsh who lived in Co. Kerry, on the West Coast of Ireland. They both died but did so in starkly different ways. Their respective deaths were the fruit of seeds sown and being sown in our culture, seeds whose fruits determine our vision of the very purpose and meaning of life itself.

Young Donal Walsh’s story is now known by everyone across the land in which he lived. Afflicted with cancer as a child he fought a successful battle with it for years. Eventually, however, the prognosis emerged that his condition was terminal. This happened at a time when Ireland in general, and Donal’s home place in particular, seemed to be inflicted with an epidemic of suicide, and more shockingly suicide among young people in their teens and early twenties. Donal was shocked and dismayed by this. Here he was, in love with life but asked by God – and this is the way he saw it – to leave this life. He did not want to leave it and he was appalled by those who not only took their own lives but in doing so inflicted pain and suffering on those who loved them. He went public with his thoughts on the local radio station. The story was picked up by a national newspaper and eventually he appeared on prime-time weekend television to put his case for life. There is no way of knowing how many lives he may have saved but there is no question but that his idealism, his love of live and his heroic confrontation of his illness inspired his country and his own generation.

On May 12, 2013, Donal moved on to his final journey and reached “God’s Highest Mountain” – as he called it – climbing it with a great phrase on his lips and spoken to the priest who gave him the last sacramental rights in the following conversation:

Donal: “Father, Father, what is it like on the other side?”

Fr. Padraig  “ Donal I’m not sure but I can tell you that it will be a much better place because you are there. Donal, why? Are you afraid?”

Donal “No Father, just a little nervous!”

Following his death his parents have continued his work. Donal fundraised tirelessly for the hospital where his illness was treated. His family has now had the Donal Walsh #Livelife Foundation set up in order to bring forward his causes of providing age appropriate teenage facilities in hospital and hospice centres as well as promoting his anti-suicide message.

Donal Walsh’s life, his story, is not just a memory. It is a tangible legacy, a seed which gave life and continues to give a harvest of joy, faith and optimism to the young people of his country and to the world.

How different the sad a bitter emptiness of poor Brittany Maynard’s story. The bleak pagan ideology which infected her spirit has reaped – and will continue to reap – a devastating legacy, the legacy of the culture of death. Where did this great evil come from? How did this great evil once again, after two thousand years, gain the foothold it held in the ancient world. It was not her illness which took Bettany Maynard’s life from her. Her apparently voluntary act was the bitter fruit of the corrupting seed which now lives within our body politic and which will continue to snuff out many more lives, of the young and not so young, until the spirit of Donal Walsh vanquishes it.

Twenty-nine year-old Brittany, ended her life on 1 November 2014 in Oregon. Having been told in April that she had less than six months to live, Maynard and her husband relocated to Oregon, one of three US states that allows assisted suicide.

The false reasoning of the demons which led Brittany Maynard to her death are well documented but not so well understood.

Kevin Yuill wrote earlier this month about this sad case in Spiked.com. “Many will say that no one should judge Maynard for her decision, that it was her life and her choice, and that no one could understand the kind of suffering she had gone through. Such objections are misplaced. Brittany Maynard wanted us all to judge her situation, to approve of her action. It was Maynard herself who decided to go public with her suicide. She approached Compassion & Choices, the well-funded proponent of the legalisation of assisted suicide in the United States, and offered to tell her story in order to support legalisation. The result was a slickly produced video that has been viewed by nearly 11 million people. Maynard positioned her suicide as part of the campaign to legalise assisted suicide; we were invited to judge.”

A potent seed indeed, widely sown, and with inevitable and dreadful consequences.

Why, Yuill asks, was her action regrettable? Because it is based on an unreal understanding of death. As Kevin Fitzpatrick,of Not Dead Yet, – who spoke movingly earlier this year at Ireland’s Pro Life Campaign’s annual conference in Dublin, –  an organisation of disabled people opposed to legalising assisted suicide, noted perceptively, death is the end of all the possibilities of life. To be dead is more disabling than any injury or disease. Fitzpatrick remarks that ‘[w]e have lost our sense of “terrible beauty”’, whereby even in the depths of suffering and horror ‘there can still be something there for us to find profound, even beautiful’. Suicide is disturbing because it cuts short the possibility for human interaction, for participation in one another’s lives.

There is no doubt but that a great battle is raging out there for the minds and hearts of all the members of our race, the human race. It is the battle between those who aspire to the spirit of noble heroes like Donal Walsh and those who would lure wounded human beings to the false, pernicious and inhuman vision by which Brittany Maynard was betrayed.

“Ah, dear friend, when something happens in life, do you ever think of the moment that caused it, the seed from which it grew?” By thinking clearly about the seeds which are sown among us we can sometimes distinguish the good from the bad and then act courageously in consequence.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith MattersLeave a comment

A few hours ago Professor Robert George of Princeton posted this on his Facebook page.

The Descent into Gomorrah. First, please, somebody tell me that the interview in New York Magazine entitled “What It’s Like to Date a Horse” is a fake or some sort of spoof. Second, I will not post it here, because it is too disturbing. I urge friends not to read it unless you have a very, very, very strong stomach. I mention it, reluctantly, only to show that anyone who thought we had already reached the bottom of the slippery slope is mistaken. The descent into Gomorrah continues. I believe it can be reversed, but not simply stopped. “This far and no farther,” is not an option. “He who says A, says B.” Once a set of premises is adopted or endorsed, logic carries one to certain conclusions. One may have a subjective wish (rooted in an aversion, or preference, or lack of interest, or whatever) to where the logic of a position takes one, but a wish (or an aversion, or a preference) is not a principle.

Without a doubt, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned”. This comes into view on the day after we hear on Irish television news that “vandals” climbed to the top of Ireland’s highest mountain with a petrol powered con saw and cut down the five metre steel cross which has be there for nearly 50 years. The worst are full of passionate intensity.

Sergeant Dermot O’Connell of Killarney Garda station is appealing for witnesses, in particular “the last person who saw the cross standing” to come forward.

“We are treating this as criminal damage,” Sgt O’Connell said.

We know that this is much deeper than that. This is one more assault by the secular jihad, those to whose hedonism the Cross is the last remaining challenge. This is the secularist beast, slouching towards Bethlehem, already born.

Collateral damage?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment
Who is guilty of this crime?

Foreign Policy reported today that eight women died and 68 more were hospitalized in India after being operated on with infected instruments during a one-day sterilization drive in the central state of Chhattisgarh.

Am I being unfair in saying that all this makes the hollow, superficial, and il-informed outrage of the Indian press about Galway’s Savita tragedy seem even more so? I also wonder how outraged the Irish Times is going to be about this.

This is a by-product of the world population control industry. Will there be any investigation, multiple inquiries, scrutiny of the agents behind this atrocity? No, it is it all going to be taken as collateral damage which is inevitable in the “very worthy” campaign to stem the tide of unwanted people being imposed on the planet by a feckless “third world”.

We will wait and see – but we won’t be holding our breath.

Will this tide ever turn?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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Here is some common – and moral – sense from Peter Hitchens in the Mail Online. Why are there so few like him, ready to stand up against the corrupt forces of hedonism which are swamping our societies?

The mystery of sex education is that parents put up with it at all. It began about 50 years ago, on the pretext that it would reduce unmarried teen pregnancies and sexual diseases. Every time these problems got worse, the answer was more sex education, more explicit than before.

Since then, unmarried pregnancies have become pretty much normal, and sexual diseases – and the ‘use’ of pornography – are an epidemic.

It is only thanks to frantic free handouts of ‘morning after’ pills and an abortion massacre that the number of teenage mothers has finally begun to level off after decades in which it zoomed upwards across the graph paper.

In a normal, reasonable society, a failure as big as this would cause a change of mind. Not here.

If you try to question sex education, you are screamed at by fanatics. This is because it isn’t, and never has been, what it claims to be. Sex education is propaganda for the permissive society. It was invented by the communist George Lukacs, schools commissar during the insane Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, to debauch the morals of Christian schoolgirls.

It works by breaking taboos and by portraying actions as normal that would once have been seen as wrong. Last week we learned that the Government has officially endorsed material which says sex at 13, ‘for those of similar age and developmental ability’, is normal.

This is, no doubt, a point of view. In a free society, people are entitled to hold it, even if it is rather creepy. But do you want your child’s school to endorse it? And how does it square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?

If we are so keen on the innocence of the young – and I very much think we should be – then surely this sort of radical propaganda is deeply dangerous. We do not give schools this huge power over the minds of the young for such a purpose.

How odd it is that we teach 13-year-olds to go forth and multiply, but can’t somehow teach them their times tables. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

And this might serve as a footnote to Hitchens’ piece. It was reported in the current issue of The Week.

Doctors have been urged to look out for children whose health may be suffering as a result of sexting or revenge porn, reports The Sunday Times. GPs have previously been warned that children who seem withdrawn, or who complain of mysterious stomach pains or headaches, may be being bullied or abused. Now, the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has advised its members to be aware that the growing practice of circulating sexual images online can be similarly harmful, and that even very young children are being affected. “Children and young people today are facing unprecedented pressures at a younger and younger age,” said Dr Maureen Baker, chair of the RCGP. Research by the NSPCC found that 20% of 11 and 12-year-olds who are active on social media report being upset on a daily basis by trolling, cyberbullying and/or sexual imagery.

Of course we can expect plenty of outraged idiots to come forward and tell us that the is no connection between the kind of exposure which is going on in classrooms and this phenomenon.

Regrettable foolishness of Hilary Mantel?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

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I don’t know if this makes me sad because of its arrogant vanity, its crass stupidity – in suggesting that the world’s greatest treasures of art, music and literature have been inspired by a “trashy religion”, – or the realisation that being a gifted writer is no guarantee of wisdom, or even common sense.

Rod Dreher, in theamericanconservative.com drew our attention some time ago to some of Hilary Mantel’s reasons for her rejection of the church of her baptism. His reading of her words of wisdom is that she considers Catholicism suitable only for trashy people, not respectable people like her and her friends.

The multiple prize-winning British novelist says of herself, “I’m one of nature’s Protestants. I should never have been brought up as a Catholic. I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.”

“Nowadays”? I suppose she doesn’t really mean that. As someone who has some familiarity with history she must surely be aware that there have always been people within the Catholic Church who have given scandal – and that with all our problems we now enjoy something of a golden age in comparison with certain epochs in the past. So, we can take it that her repulsion relates to any and every age.

We will take it on faith that her novels were worthy of their accolades. I have not read Wolf Hall on the basis that an apologia for Thomas Cromwell, the vicious persecutor of Thomas More, was on the other side of a line which I felt no inclination to cross. Catholics will undoubtedly pray for him – and leave him in God’s merciful hands. Mantel probably thinks that is a pretty trashy thing to do.

Hilary has lots or admirers of her work and doubtless the admiration of all the “respectable” company she keeps is enhanced by her rubbishing of Catholicism. I wonder does she consider the respectability of the BBC compromised in the same way for the blind eyes in that corporation which were turned on the rampant abuse of children there over a few decades?

Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, remarked in an article on Mantel’s confessions of infidelity,

I think she’s unwittingly come up with the best line possible for a new marketing campaign: “The Catholic church – not an institution for respectable people.” It reminds me of a priest a few years ago who told me that a young woman came to him who’d got pregnant and been thrown out by her parents. He told her story to one of his parishioners, saying he didn’t think the girl could cope on her own in a flat but wasn’t sure what to do to help. Simple, said the parishioner, she comes to live with me. And it makes me think of another priest I know who was trying to help some asylum seekers living in lousy accommodation, and in the end decided they might as well move in with him. Or the young kids living on the street, often with drug problems, who have been helped by charities such as The Passage and the Cardinal Hume Centre. None of these people are exactly respectable – with complicated, chaotic lives – but Catholics and their institutions have tried to do their bit and have welcomed them in.

Dreher, not a Roman Catholic, is with Pepinster on most of this. He says:

I certainly hope to be thought of as a member of a church that inspires sneers and hatred by cultured despisers like Hilary Mantel and The Respectable People. Given the way of the world these days, if you are a Christian and aren’t in some way hated by The Respectable People, you are doing something wrong. I suppose it has always and everywhere been the case, but I think that in Europe and in America in the very near future, orthodox Christians of all kinds will soon have to make a stark, clear decision about whether or not to be Respectable, with all the privilege and ease of life that entails, or be truly Christian.

The Irish writer, diplomat and politician, Conor Cruise O’Brien, a man of agnostic disposition, once made a very ugly remark about Pope John Paul II. In deference to Cruise O’Brien’s memory I will not repeat it because before he died the man was generous and noble enough to say that he regretted what he said. Mantel, in her recent diatribes against those who are her brothers and sisters in the faith – they still are, whether she likes it or not -has now built up quite a store of things to regret. We might hope for the wisdom of humility for her – but then, she is no Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Confessions of Faith and Reason

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Confessions of faith – or confessions of reasons for having faith – seem to be more and more common in recent times. A few weeks ago we had Daily Telegraph columnist and blogger, Tim Stanley, telling us “If you have to choose between being liberal and being Christian, choose Christian”, and going on to explain why.

More recently we had Ross Douthat, columnist with the New York Times, in the wake of hostile Catholic and pseudo Catholic reaction to his expressed concerns about the Synod of Bishops, feeling the need to explain to us “Why I am a Catholic”.

The first draft of this post was published on October 7. The full post can be read here.