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.

Goodbye Liberty, Equality and Fraternity

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

For more than two centuries the three pillars of western democracy have been Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Enshrined and balanced in the rule of law as we know it, they have been the handmaids of our evolving civilized world.  Crucial to their influence, however, is that word “balance” because if any one of them becomes distorted the house which they support will come tumbling down.

We are now in crisis, because that very act of distortion is being perpetrated before our very eyes – the pillar of Equality is day by day assuming gross characteristics which have already begun to cripple its two siblings, Liberty and Fraternity. Someone else can draw up the catalogue – Obama’s Mandate alone will provide ample illustration. Suffice here to draw on one authoritative source which lists a frightening scenario of injustice which, in the name of Equality, is now threatening any number of citizens in any number of states who treasure their Liberty and their Fraternity.

Britain’s Coalition For Marriage has sought an expert legal opinion on the perceived threats to freedom of conscience in the destruction of marriage now promised by the British Government. Add to that similar threats in the public policies of the USA, France and Ireland – to name just three. If you take away freedom of conscience you destroy, not only Liberty itself but one of the foundations of Fraternity, respect for the individual conscience of my brother.

Concerned that worries about gay marriage and freedom of conscience were too narrowly focused, the C4M commissioned a legal opinion from leading human rights lawyer, Aidan O’Neill QC. Mr O’Neill was asked to give his expert advice on a series of scenarios related to legalising gay marriage which took the focus beyond places of worship and ministers of religion who conduct weddings. They added hypothetical cases which dealt with the impact in the workplace, in schools and in other areas of everyday life which they felt had been been overlooked.

For example, what would be likely happen to a Church of England chaplain working in the state-run National Health Service who, while conducting a wedding service in his parish church, preached that marriage is only for one man and one woman? If his NHS bosses found out about this would he be disciplined for breaching NHS diversity policy?

Mr. O’Neill’s view is that under the Equality Act 2010 the NHS managers would have proper grounds for justifying disciplinary action, even if the chaplain was preaching in his own church outside work time. Furthermore, the situation would be the same for any chaplain employed within the public sector, such as armed forces chaplains or university chaplains.

What about a primary school teacher who is asked to use a storybook about gay marriage called King & King? This book is recommended by local authorities and by gay rights charities. Would a conscientiously Christian teacher who says using the book conflicts with her religious beliefs about marriage be threatened with dismissal unless she backed down?

O’Neill says yes, she certainly would and that the school would be within its legal rights to dismiss her if she refuses to use the material.

What about the case where parents ask for their child to be withdrawn from school lessons on the history of gay marriage, for deeply-held religious reasons? The parents might say that they have a right to withdraw their child under European Convention on Human Rights. But the school might refuse to accept this pleading that it is under a legal duty to promote equality.

O’Neill’s legal opinion on this is that the parents do not ultimately have a right to insist that their child be withdrawn from such history lessons, and that the parents “will have little prospect of success in challenging the school’s insistence that their child attend” the lessons.

How would that scenario play out in schools which are explicitly designated as “faith schools”? He said: “If the school in question were a faith school, or otherwise one with a religious ethos within the State sector in England and Wales, this would make no difference to my answer”

Then there is the case of fostering. Take a couple which applies to be foster carers. They tell social workers they are motivated to care for children because of their Christian faith. On hearing this, the social workers ask them whether they support gay marriage. The couple says they do not, and the social workers halt the application because of equality and discrimination policies. O’Neill confirmed that a local authority fostering agency would have legitimate legal grounds for acting this way.

This opinion can be backed up by a judgement already handed down by a British court. In February, 2011, Eunice and Owen Johns, a Christian couple, married almost 40 years, were deemed by the High Court to be no longer eligible for fostering children aged between five and 10. They were deemed unsuitable, in law, to do so any longer because they were unwilling to promote a homosexual lifestyle to a child. Neither Mr nor Mrs Johns had anything against gay people but they were not in favour of sex before marriage, whatever an individual’s orientation.

Mr. O’Neill was asked about a case where a church hires a council-owned community centre each week for its youth club. The church website states that it will only conduct opposite-sex marriages. Someone complains to the council, and while the church can’t be forced to conduct gay weddings, it is stopped from hiring the community centre. “Yes”,  he says, the council would be within its legal rights to do this.

Then there is the question of state employees in registry offices. At present a local authority can decide to accommodate the religious beliefs of one of its registrars by not designating him or her to be a “civil partnership registrar”. Other registrars within the local authority’s team are sufficient to provide the service to the public.

Mr. O’Neill’s view is that if gay marriage becomes law, “that kind of adjustment to accommodate a registrar’s particular beliefs would no longer be an option for any employing authority because there would then be only be one system of marriage (rather than, as at present, a distinct civil partnership regime for same sex couples)”.

Going back to schools, the O’Neill opinion also considers the impact of redefining marriage on teaching. It says that the law will require that children learn about gay marriage in sex education lessons. This is because Section 403(1A)(a) of the Education Act 1996 imposes a duty on the Secretary of State “to issue guidance” ensuring that pupils “learn the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and the bringing up of children”. If gay marriage becomes law then “its importance for family life and the bringing up of children” must be taught as part of sex education.

So there you have it. Equality trumps Liberty every time. Goodbye Liberty, and it is quite clear that the Equality which will prevail in this brave new world will be of the Orwellian variety: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”.

(This post also appears on MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog).

Alma mater – reflections on a mother and child reunion

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

It was the best of times, it was, some would have us believe, the worst of times. It was in fact neither. It was, nevertheless, like now, great to be alive. To be young was, well, not quite heaven but still a very good place to be.

We met together last weekend, twenty or so of us, fifty years later. We remembered those times and the fifty-two of us who walked a road together over a period of five years, journeying from boyhood to manhood. On a day in June, 1962, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways through the gates of St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, Ireland.

Over those five years there were fifty-two stories unfolding, each one was different from the other in many respects but not as different as they were going to become in the years that followed our departure through those gates. We all arose to the clanging of a bell at 7.10 each morning. We all raced to the college chapel for prayers and Mass – and I won’t mention the fate of any boy who had not succeeded in getting through the chapel door by the dot of 7.30, when the last ring of that bell had sounded in the courtyard of the school. At the end of the day the same bell was carried around the bedroom corridors of the school and with the last stroke we were all in bed in our dormitories or behind the closed doors of our shared bedrooms. Day after day, week after week, for fifteen terms over those five years, these and similar routines filled our lives and in a way helped make us what are. Last weekend’s gathering recorded no regrets about any of it that I heard.

We are aware now – although it did not really enter our minds then – that we were in fact the last generation to experience an educational culture that is now well and truly dead. Although the generations which followed us tend to look back and say, “and good riddance”, we, at worst, had no more than mixed feelings about it all. Later generations paint the 1950s in lurid colours and with very rough brush-strokes. We did not look at it through rose-tints, nor did we fail to see its touches of barbarity, but it was neither as lurid nor as rough as they portray. What was then unthinkable but what is now a reality was reported in statistical terms in a magazine just last week:

Primary schools in England exclude – that’s the euphemism for expel – an average of 89 pupils a day for attacking teachers or classmates. My recollection from five years in St. Eunan’s is that 4 students were expelled – admittedly for something much less serious that inflicting violence on teachers or fellow pupils. Discipline was firm and indiscipline had its serious consequences. Slipping out of bounds at night and returning from a dance in the early hours was not something that was tolerated.

We were not conscious of it, but the self-discipline induced in us by the imposed discipline of those years probably played an important part in the fifty-two very different stories which began to unfold with our passage through those gates – each young man going his separate way to build his own life on the common foundation laid by our families, our teachers and our companionship with each other.

We came together last weekend to catch up on those stories but they were perhaps too numerous and too varied to do justice to that. We probably spent more time reflecting on the world in which we lived together for those five years than we did on the separate worlds we had helped build for ourselves and others in the intervening years.

Two of our old teachers accompanied us and that helped keep our focus on the years which moulded our resilience for the world. In 1957, the year we nervously and apprehensively entered that sheltered and somewhat forbidding world, Ireland recorded its highest level of emigration since it became an independent state. Although no one said it at the time, it had what might now be considered the hallmarks of a failing state. By 1962, when we entered the wider world, the forty-year-old state had already turned a critical corner and was beginning to claim a better place among the nations of the earth. We considered it our good fortune to be part of the generation which helped make good that claim.

Ireland in 2012 is a very different place from what it was in 1957 or 1962. In many ways, but not in every way, it is a better place. But there has been loss as well as gain. Humankind is very flawed when it comes to judging what happiness is and how it is attained. Success or failure in that pursuit is better judged in retrospect. The little and great challenges which confront the human spirit, friendship, joy in little things are at the root of human happiness. We had all of those and no amount of material progress since then has proven that it can bring any greater enrichment to mankind than these.

A comment I read recently on Viktor Frankel’s magnificent book, Man’s Search for Meaning, reminds us that

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond.

We learned something about all of these in those five years. Frankel himself wrote in that book,

Again and again I therefore admonish my students both in Europe and in America: “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run – in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”

I would not want to make even the shadow of a suggestion that the horrors of Viktor Frankel’s experiences were anything like our benign confinement behind the gates of St. Eunan’s, but his epiphany was one which might be hopefully experienced by all of humanity – as it was by us. He wrote,

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth-that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

We look around us at our world today, with all its progress, and wonder, as he did before his death some years ago, whether we are more adept at realizing this truth than we were fifty years ago. I think not.

He spoke of an existential vacuum which has afflicted humanity in the twentieth century. In part he attributed this to a loss suffered in our more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed our behavior are now rapidly diminishing. He wrote:

No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). A statistical survey recently revealed that among my European students, 25 percent showed a more-or-less marked degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students it was not 25 but 6o percent. The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.

In the ‘Fifties and early ‘Sixties we lived in a world which had many more “taboos” that we have today. But we also lived in a world where those evils to which taboos attached were less common than they are today. We knew little of many of the things which Frankel partly ascribes to this existential vacuum: suicide, depression, aggression and addiction. He speaks of various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes, he maintains, the frustrated search for meaningis vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, its place is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why, he says, existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. He observes that in such cases the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.

Let me not be a Jeremiah. I am not. The times we live in are the best of times, because we live. But the times we lived in then gave us a heritage – and it is only right to ask, firstly, are we grateful for what was good in it and how much of it we may have squandered.

After our reunion we departed to our respective worlds. What was most moving about our day together, perhaps our last – nor did we forget the nine companions who had gone to their eternal reward, – was the sense of gratitude we shared for what we had received all those years ago.

Fifty shades of gloom and glorious sunshine

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Irish summer weather is renowned for extremes, not in seasonal terms but in day-to-day, even hour-to- hour terms. In one day you can be basking in glorious sunshine and within the hour you might find yourself negotiating a motorway in treacherously blinding torrential rain – as I experienced the other day in Dublin.

But extremes of experience are not confined to the weather and there are some which can be a great deal more treacherous and depressing that the odd downpour of rain or blast of cold arctic air. Last week also, I experienced two extremes of what you might call spiritual revelation, one which left me with one of the grimmest and grimiest outlooks on the future of our species I’ve had for some time; the other which brought me to heights of joy and optimism about the true nature of the human condition and the true prospects of the human race.

On the afternoon in question I happened to turn on the car radio and pick up a discussion on the latest publishing phenomenon of our time, the book that has now, by all reports, outsold Harry Potter – Fifty Shades of Grey. The discussion was not just about this wretched book – and I’ll let Leah give you some idea about why it is so wretched and what you might do about it – but about the whole cultural underbelly which it represents. This was not describing the behaviour of strange people a million miles from Ireland’s capital city. It was describing things in the very heart of this city which gave a new meaning to the term “dear old dirty Dublin”, which we sometimes affectionately use to describe it. The young woman, introduced to afternoon listeners as a promoter and purveyor of the life-style described in FSOG, told us in her unmistakable Dublin accent that these practices are commonplace across Ireland.

It was a grim afternoon, and no amount of sunshine was going to lift the gloomy thoughts which invaded me about the end of civilization as we know it. It seemed that we had descended into a pit of depravity and that not just the Celtic race but the entire human race itself had just lost it.

But then came the evening and another vision of the human condition revealed itself through the medium of the most glorious work of music ever composed and performed there and then in the most sublime rendering humanly imaginable. No longer were men and women pitiable creatures that were happy to wallow abusively in mud like base animals. They were pitiable indeed, pitiable because noble and in the image of God their creator. But if pitiable the source of that pity was divine and redemptive and that redemption was the very subject of those glorious two hours of music and song.

Somewhat casually, still smarting from the offence felt in that afternoon experience, I turned on the BBC broadcast of the Promenade Concert with the intention of recording it for a time when my spirits might be more up to the occasion. From the words of introduction I was curious but from the opening bars of the work I was spellbound. I then knew that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Nothing in this world is irredeemable. The sad and devastating scenario which had been laid out before us in the afternoon was ultimately nothing. It was simply evil, and evil is just that, nothing.

The following morning Geoffrey Norris in the Daily Telegraph reviewed the performance in the following terms:

 This was a remarkable evening. A very remarkable evening. An exceptionally remarkable evening. While acknowledging that everyone’s idea of perfection is different, there seemed to be a consensus among the audience that this practically flawless performance of Bach’s B minor Mass was something quite extraordinary. It might perhaps be slightly out of keeping that a work of such rapt intensity and devotion should be followed by whoops of approval and wild cheering, but the impact of the music-making was such that the joy and enthusiasm it generated seemed only natural.

 When, very near the end, that supreme young countertenor Iestyn Davies sang the “Agnus Dei” with such sublime, moving eloquence, it set the seal on an interpretation that had been conceived not only with the utmost care but with a depth of human feeling that was wholly enveloping.

 Never did “Gratias agimus tibi” sound so true and the jubilation in the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” was electrifying. “Et resurrexit” from the Credo meant exactly what it said. I might still have been shocked and saddened after the experience of the afternoon if this appeared as some relic from the 18th century. But it was not that. It was a living breathing performance into which all involved poured their hearts and souls and the absolute truth of what was being sung was expressed as true by each and every one. Being so perfect it could not have been otherwise.

The afternoon had made me at one with Lear, crying

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,

That make ingrateful man!

The evening and Johan Sebastian Bach, thankfully, changed all that.

Were the barbarians any worse than this?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith Matters1 Comment

Many, many years ago the Mamas and the Papas sang, in one of the great songs of the ‘Sixties, “California Dreamin”. It didn’t mean much but it was a great song. These lines from it came back to me last week in the context of a rather unpleasant experience,

“…on such a winter’s day

Stopped into a church

I passed along the way

Well, I got down on my knees

And I pretend to pray”

Well, no, it was a beautiful summer day and I was actually trying to pray but I wasn’t given much of a chance.

It was, sadly, a Catholic church in Dublin. There were about ten or a dozen people in the church and they had been preparing for either a funeral or a wedding in the day or two that followed. It was probably a wedding because had it been a funeral there might have been a little more decorum.

But decorum there wasn’t. It was like the harvest fair day in Glenties in there. All of them were gathered in a group at the back of the church without the slightest sign that they had any idea of the Presence in the place or the purpose of the place.  I looked at them – I hoped, disapprovingly – but I got no acknowledgement nor was there the slightest sign that they were aware that their raucus conversation was 100 miles out of place.  Like Mama Cass, I knelt down and pretended – it was all I could do – to pray. I thought that they might take a hint. Not a hope. I looked around again. Still no response.

Had I been braver – I felt there were too many for one person to take on – I would have taken the Lord’s cords and driven them out. But I wasn’t. I just resorted to a pointedly disgusted march to the door. I wish I had their email addresses. If I had I would send them this splendid little video from Leah, telling us how we should behave in a church on SheisCatholic.

This will either make you laugh or cry

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

The Irish Times probably isn’t too worried by what appears in The Daily Telegraph about it. For the rest of us, however, it is encouraging to have some confirmation that we are not alone in our nausea when we have to read it every morning – for the time being.

Damian Thompson took it to pieces in today’s Telegraph and tossed a few more Irish pc fellow-travelers under his kosh for good measure.

He begins by asking us to check out a few headlines, not telling us where they came from. It didn’t take some of us to pick up the scent. It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Here’s a trenchant headline for you, he wrote: “Transgender community celebrates ‘great diversity of gender identity’ in new book.” And another: “President tells youth groups to be vigilant against racist attitudes and to value diversity in society.” Care to guess which venerable organ published them? Here’s a clue: “Multicultural awards take place in Dublin following three-year break.”

Actually, that last one is a bit of a scoop. To anyone who knows modern Ireland, the notion that Dublin went a whole three years without multicultural awards is frankly incredible. Somebody really screwed up. They’re supposed to happen every month at least. The newspaper is the Irish Times, which these days makes the Guardian look like the bulletin of the Prayer Book Society. Rumour has it that it employs a special nurse to soothe joints sprained by marathon sessions of finger-wagging.

This week was a good one for the finger-waggers. The Irish parliament passed a law stripping political parties of state funding unless 30 per cent of their candidates are women; in later elections the quota will rise to 40 per cent. This means that bright men will be dissuaded from entering politics because the system will fill the Dáil with dim hectoring feminists with DIY Sinéad O’Connor haircuts. (Incidentally, did you know that eight out of the past 10 World Hectoring Champions have been lady members of the Irish Green party? It’s called Comhaontas Glas. Don’t ask me how it’s pronounced: the bizarre vagaries of Gaelic pronunciation were designed to trip up the English.)

Anyway, my point is not that rigged elections will destroy the democratic mandate of the Dáil, though they will. It’s that an especially toxic strain of political correctness has infected almost the entire Irish intelligentsia. Small-government conservatives are treated like lepers – something that, the Guardian/BBC axis notwithstanding, isn’t true of British public life. Meanwhile, the sucking up to minorities is beyond parody: a recent Irish Times profile of the travellers made them sound like latter-day Athenians. How long before there’s a transvestite traveller quota in the Dáil?

Admittedly, the programme of thought reform is not complete: the Irish working class is still instinctively socially conservative. But it is, unsurprisingly, increasingly anti-clerical, and that takes us to the heart of the matter. Churchgoing in Ireland has fallen off a cliff, thanks to the clergy’s dreadful record of committing and covering up paedophile crimes. The moral vacuum at the top of a hierarchical society has been filled by political correctness, much of it imported from the European Union at the height of Ireland’s Brussels-worship.

PC ideology flowers on the ruins of religion. It’s not just Ireland: in Australia, Canada and metropolitan America, the Catholic Church is paralysed by scandal and the old Protestant denominations have turned into gibbering pantheists or angry sects. Secularism is spreading incredibly fast.

Well, we shall see. There is only so much nonsense – not to mention nausea – that people can take. Just now The Irish Times has something like a captive readership because there is no half-responsible alternative to go to.  The Irish Independent , although it has some good columnists – as even the Times has – is trying to be too many things at the same time. A few years ago Damien Kiberd shook up the radio news monopoly of the national radio service, Radio Telefis Eireann, with his Newstalk station. He did the same thing a few years before for the Sunday newspaper market with his Sunday Business Post. Newstalk is now owned by one the The Irish Times’ top hate-figures, Dennis O’Brien. O’Brien is now poised to take over Ireland’s biggest newspaper business, Independent News and Media and that “entire intelligentsia” to which Thompson pays his tribute is becoming apoplectic at the thought. Could an O’Brien-Kiberd combo be the way back to health and lower blood pressure levels for a lot of us?

When ideology blinds

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

An eminent historian said in a lecture I heard the other day, something to the effect that writers on history are always taking contrary views of each others’ work – that’s the way the debate progresses, that’s the way the system works. It’s an adversarial process for getting at the truth. At least one hopes it gets us nearer the truth. By and large it is a good one and one that should offer, over time, act as a defence against the crime of twisting an manipulating the truth to serve the purposes of ideology.

He was referring to historical writing but this process is one which serves all academe equally well. Modern historiography has benefited greatly from the honest rigour which this process has generated within it and few writers will now get away with the excesses of some of the historians writing 100 years ago or more.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for other more modern disciplines in the academic field. Just now the feeding frenzy being indulged in by the ideologues circling, snapping at and ready to devour the sociologist Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas, Austin, is a sad example of the level to which academics can lower themselves – leaving aside the scavenging media elements feeding on the scraps of Regnerus’ reputation flying around from the mauling being given to him by his erstwhile colleagues. Continue reading here…

The massacre of innocence

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

This one was too long coming, often thought but ne’er so formidably expressed. This is truth speaking to the entrenched liberal establishment, that is, the power of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Who are the sexual abusers of our children asks Lisa Fabrizio, columnist in The American Spectator?  She doesn’t name names – because there are too many of them – but she mercilessly blasts the hypocrisy of the pharisaic establishment feigning scandal at the atrocities which they themselves have been perpetrating while pointing condemning fingers by the new time.

The last time we saw someone raise their head above this parapet and suggest that the permissive culture of the ‘sixties and subsequent decades had anything to do with the increase in the abuse of children there were screams of outrage from the defenders of the spirit that particular age who saw in it a threat to their precious “freedom” to engage in whatever “consensual” aberration grabbed their fancy.

Fabrizio will have none of it and shouts “stop!” to the hue and cry in the wake of the Pennsylvania State mess and the revelations of the heinous abuse crimes of the university’s assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky.

She writes: The unanimous war cry across the nation has been: ‘We have a moral responsibility to protect our kids; we must preserve the innocence of our children!’ Are they kidding? Can they be serious? How can our children be innocent or protected in a country that, rather than defining deviancy down, has defined deviancy up; up to the level of not only acceptance, but approval.

Penn States’ scandal is for her just another example of the putrefying infection that runs right through American culture. There are few of us who cannot also apply it to our own diverse cultures and societies. The price will be paid in millions of dollars by Penn State for its negligence – as the price has been paid by other institutions for their negligence. But how long are we going to have to wait for recognition of the responsibility of those driving the ideology of permissiveness for the corruption of the innocence of whole generations of children. When will they be confronted with the reality of the abuse they have perpetrated: the TV organisations, film producers, the entertainment industry, the political campaigners for so-called freedoms to indulge this, that or the other deviant behaviour – on the basis that no such category of behaviour exists.

Fabrizio asks: What are the messages that our culture daily delivers to our kids? That they don’t need fathers to nurture and raise them; the idea that males are essentially useless to the family unit has proven not only dangerous to society — it is no coincidence that Sandusky chose as his victims, boys with no fathers in their homes — but criminal. That any brothers and sisters they might have had are too expensive or inconvenient, and will either be chemically destroyed or murdered in the womb because in today’s America, the family budget prioritizes toys for adults over the desire and care for children.

How can innocence survive in any of our citizens — let alone the youngest and most vulnerable — when our very laws now define classes of people based solely on their sexual proclivities? No, the innocence of our children cannot be preserved until it is restored.

If we really cared about our children we would stop teaching filth and perversion in our public schools by brainwashing them to believe it is good for Heather to have anything other than one Mommy and one Daddy who are married to each other. We would stop promoting the idea that free and unfettered sex is beneficial for them in any way and stop glorifying it on TV, using children as straight men for any number of unfunny and repulsive sexual jokes.

Sandusky and others who physically assault the bodies of our children are indeed monsters, but as the lynching parties assemble, let them broaden their gaze to include those who wound the innate innocence of our children’s souls.

Until that happens, child protection in this or any other country will be little more than a sticking plaster on a hopelessly putrefying wound.

Life, death or deadlock?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith Matters1 Comment

What has gone wrong? There can be no doubt but that something has gone very badly wrong when the very basis of mankind’s self-understanding has come to a pass where the vision of life and good living itself has been perverted beyond recognition. How did we get to the point where the termination of life, both by oneself and by another is considered a moral option? How did we reach a point where in the chaos and confusion emanating from the meltdown of our financial system, everyone talks about regulation and regulation agencies but no one talks about a moral sense of right or wrong or of the springs from which such a sense emanates. How did we come to lose our sense of the meaning of human love to the extent that it is now the pretext for the wholesale abuse of human sexuality?

Some years ago – not too many – in the aftermath of the emergence of Islamic rage against the West, the historian Bernard Lewis asked the same question about the collapse of Islamic civilization. He did so in a book which was simply titled, What Went Wrong?

I attended Mass one morning recently in a Dublin parish church. The parish priest concelebrated while a priest whom I had not seen before was the main celebrant and he preached a short homily. That homily gave me at least part of an answer to the question, what has gone wrong for us?

Bernard Lewis, 85 years of age, is professor emeritus at Princeton University and for many is thedoyen of Middle East studies in the West. How, his question asks, did the preeminence that the Islamic world once enjoyed and the civilization it had created collapse?

Lewis’s argument is that the success of Muhammad in establishing not merely the Muslim religion, but also an empire dominated by that faith, served to create a society that is totalitarian by its very nature, bound by rules and strictures that make it too static to adapt and compete with a West where Christianity, in contrast, does not demand control over the political and economic spheres.  The very foundations of these respective faiths for him hold the key to the histories of both civilizations – to date.

Could it be that the true crisis of the West today is that it may now be about to abandon the very reason for its triumph – its Judaeo-Christian heart, in favour of an amalgam of so-called “politically correct” principles founded on…nothing.

 Lewis argues as follows: The absence of a native secularism in Islam, and the widespread Muslim rejection of an imported secularism inspired by Christian example, may be attributed to certain profound differences of belief and experience in the two cultures.  The first, and in many ways the most profound difference, from which all others follow, can be seen in the contrasting  foundation myths–and I use this expression without intending any disrespect–of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. 

The children of Israel fled from bondage, and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land.  Their leader Moses had only a glimpse, and was not himself permitted to enter.  Jesus was humiliated and crucified, and his followers suffered persecution and martyrdom for centuries, before they were finally able to win over  the ruler, and to adapt the state, its language, and its institutions to their purpose. 

Muhammad achieved victory and triumph in his own lifetime.  He conquered his promised land, and created his own state, of which he himself was supreme sovereign. As such, he promulgated laws, dispensed justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made peace.  In a word, he     ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions as ruler is sanctified in Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim tradition.

On the contrary, Lewis goes on to explain, Judaism and Christianity had the concept of the secular state forced upon them by circumstance from their very beginnings. Where Christian theologians like St. Augustine developed complex theories to explain and justify the secular state, Muslim thinkers never even had to face the dilemma. 

Judaism and Christianity, in that view developed spiritually and lived spiritually in alien worlds before they came to terms with those worlds. They knew what true freedom was. They knew the place of law and regulation but also knew what their foundation was. On the other hand, lacking any sense of the secular and the eternal play between the City of God and the City of the World within which lives our sense and enjoyment of human freedom on a day-to-day basis, the Islamic world became crippled and dangerously resentful of its triumphant rival.

But if that rival now abandons the principles of the faith – and in particular if the ministers of that faith begin to abandon the authentic teachings which, in its Scriptures and traditions, have sustained it for millennia –  and which have given it its very essence, then the future is very uncertain indeed.

And this is where my epiphany in a Dublin parish church comes in again. After that Mass I went to talk of my concerns to the homilist – but the bird had flown. What had he said that was so worrying? It was more what he did not say that was the problem.

His homily referred to a film in the context of the gospel of the day (Matthew 9. 1-8). The film recounted the story of a young man who announced to his family and friends that he was gay. His mother was distraught and left the event at which this announcement took place, apparently rejecting her son in the process. The preacher made no further comment on this other than simply to pose the question to himself and his congregation: “How do I react when people tell me things I don’t particularly want to hear”.

It was no earth-shattering heterodoxy. But that phenomenon of late 20th century heterodoxy of which it is a symptom might ultimately put in the shadows the breach in Christendom effected by the 95 theses nailed on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517. The moral implication was clear to all. There was no moral issue whatsoever about the choice and actions of the gay son. The moral deviance was on the mother’s side, in failing to deal adequately with nothing more serious than something that she did not want to hear – like a choice of political party she might have disapproved of, a choice of a wife deemed unsuitable, or ever a rejection of her very good dinner. There was no recognition that what the mother might have been dealing with was the realisation that her son had made a choice which she knew to be immoral according to the norms of natural law, the teaching of the authentic Judaeo-Christian faiths and the law of God.

If our secular world continues on its rudderless way, guided only by groundless and flawed politically correct principles, and if the ministers of the Judaeo-Christian religions abandon their duty to hold up before their faithful followers the authentic shared principles of those religions, then the freedom we have enjoyed coming from the very heart of those religions will perish and we will end up with totalitarian systems fighting it out among themselves – to the death or deadlock.

Do we really deserve this?

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

The “silly season” seemed to start early this summer – not even waiting for our revered political assemblies to take their well –earned breaks. A month ago the newspapers were already scraping the bottoms of their troughs of choice. Time spent on them in the morning got shorter and shorter as the weeks moved on. America excepted. While the political battle being engaged in there over the next few months is not promising to be very inspiring, it is, however, offering some food for the politically curious among us.

This, from an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post by Anne Applebaum, makes an astute but somewhat dark observation on the prospect ahead of us there – and like it or not, it is a prospect in which we all have a stake.

“You know the stereotypes already. Both Obamas come from what might loosely be called the intellectual/academic meritocracy, the “liberal elite,” the post-WASP Ivy League, easily caricatured as the world of free-trade coffee, organic arugula, smug opinions and Martha’s Vineyard. The Romneys, by contrast, belong to the financial oligarchy, the “global elite,” the post-financial-deregulation world that is just as easily caricatured as one of iced champagne, offshore bank accounts, dressage trainers and private islands.

“The two groups have some important overlaps. Although Romney got some attention for holding a fundraiser in the Hamptons last week, Obama has raised more money in the Hamptons overall (the president scored particularly well in Sagaponack, by one account, where the median home price is $4.4 million)….

“They also have some important differences. The financial oligarchy, as we learned from the Barclays scandal in London last week, is happiest when it operates in deep secrecy, where it can manipulate interest rates, package derivatives, hide its profits and shelter its taxes as it sees fit. The liberal meritocracy prefers to operate in the glare of publicity, where it can give lectures, write books, make documentaries and generally promulgate its own views as loudly as possible. Aged 34, Obama wrote his autobiography. Aged 37, Romney founded Bain Capital.

“But while you might think one or the other group more preferable or more offensive for reasons of politics, culture or taste, you certainly cannot argue that either of them is in close touch with “average” or “ordinary” or even “middle-class” people, however those terms might be defined. And although they and their supporters may shout about “radical left-wing professors” on the one hand or “Gordon Gekko” on the other, neither Obama nor Romney can plausibly claim to leading a populist revolution against the “elites” who are allegedly destroying America.

“Which is just as well, because the political success of both Obama and Romney proves that radical populism in the United States has failed spectacularly. For all of the attention they got, neither Occupy Wall Street nor the tea party has a candidate in this race. Neither found a way to channel inchoate, ill-defined public anger — at the deficit, at the banks — into electoral politics or clear alternatives. Whoever wins in November, we’ll therefore get the elite we deserve.”

Did the Irish electorate deserve the “elite” it has been landed with for the next several years – with not another prospect in sight for at least a decade? One wonders what cataclysm we will have endure before we can escape from the politically correct mediocrity we are now crippled with.

The Shattered Mirror of Our Times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Many years ago the late Bernard Levin, the most gifted columnist of his generation, wrote an article for The Sunday Times entitled The Cracked Mirror of Our Times. In it he cited a number of social and cultural phenomena of the late twentieth century that for him represented all that was rotten in the British society in which he lived and – often – lamented. I am glad he has been spared witnessing the shattered mirror of the culture of our times today.

Even the most hardened cynic must have found his stomach turning as he listened to the Irish Foreign Minister proclaim his support for “true love” and marital commitment  in Dublin at the weekend. The Irish Labour Party leader, Eamon Gilmore, proclaimed these sanctimonious words in what was probably the most tacky and tasteless  and naked – almost literally – display of hedonism and sexual exhibitionism ever seen on the Irish capital’s streets. It had nothing whatsoever to do with true love, true friendship or any kind of permanent commitment.

Gilmore declared that it was time for Irish legislation to move in the direction of public opinion and legislate for gay “marriage”. This will not be easy because constitutional hurdles will have to be overcome by means of a popular referendum. At that point many feel that the politicians in parliament – who are fully subscribed, almost to a man, to the media’s gay agenda – will find that public opinion may be of hues other than those of the rainbow. It will be even less easy if the people  Mr. Gilmore is campaigning for continue to display themselves in  vulgar exhibitions of the type witnessed in Dublin’s Fair City at the weekend.

In Facebook comments on Gilmore’s statement,  Maria Conroy Byrne asks if there is “any political party that would disagree with him? As far as I can see, they all seem very similar at the moment. Is there any brave TD (member of the Irish parliament) who’s willing to put his head above the parapet and express a different opinion?” Brendan O’Regan’s view is simply that “they’re afraid to appear illiberal.” That fear stalks the political streets of Ireland today just as the rainbow exhibitionists did in Dublin’s O’Connell Street on Saturday.

As the gross display drew to a close on Saturday Gilmore said he congratulated the organisers. He said that the parade also had a political dimension.

“As leader of Labour, a Party for whom the politics of personal freedom is so central, I acknowledge that when it comes to promoting understanding and respect, progress has been made in recent years. However, there are some outstanding matters, and if we as a Party are serious about building a new progressive society, these are matters that we will have to resolve.

“I believe that in certain key areas, our laws are out of step with public opinion. I don’t believe for example, that it should ever be the role of the State to pass judgement on whom a person falls in love with, or whom they want to spend their life with.

“That is why the issue of same-sex marriage is to be included for consideration by the Constitutional Convention. I believe in gay marriage. The right of gay couples to marry is, quite simply, the civil rights issue of this generation, and, in my opinion, its time has come.”

If it has, and if that time has anything of the flavour of what Dublin witnessed on Saturday, then it is going to be a nasty and brutish time indeed. The bizzare and grotesque representatives of humanity who displayed themselves on the streets of the capital last week are the people who claim to be eligible for the nurture and upbringing of children. Good night.

(an earlier version of this post appeared on MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog this morning)