Here is a straight-up factual report from an Irish media watchdog showing how Ireland’s national broadcaster seems to be betraying the trust it should be honouring – the trust which the Irish people put in it to present them with the whole truth about the news it covers. This a trust which it is statutorily obliged to honour.
Good news for people hoping for political reform and honest politics in Ireland. Lucinda Creighton “hasn’t gone away, you know”. Today a new interview with her appeared in Dublin’s Sunday Independent in which she suggested that Ireland’s current malaise of corruption and double standards was infecting the entire party system there, not just Fine Gael, the party which denied her the right to vote according to her conscience and sacked her.
“There is a complete absence of intellectual rigour in party politics as it now operates. It is a palace of zombies where people who are elected give up their faculties and capacities for independent thought.”
Is this the beginning of a new wave of communist persecution of Christians in China? Today the Daily Telegraph reports from the city of Wenzhou:
On Monday night excavators laid waste to one of the city’s largest places of worship, the state-sanctioned Sanjiang church, amid accusations that the Communist Party was preparing to launch a nationwide assault against Christianity.
At least 10 churches here in Zhejiang province have been ordered to remove their eye-catching red crosses or are facing partial or total demolition, activists claim. Already this month two churches, one Catholic, one Protestant, have been razed.
Perhaps Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, or his deputy and Foreign Minister, Eamon Gilmore, now boasting about their improved relations with the Catholic Church, will speak up for the human right of these beleaguered Chinese Christians.
“There is now an extraordinary situation where State-funded third-level colleges are openly advising would-be teachers that their career prospects depend on their religious faith.”
The hidden secular totalitarianism of this statement is what is “extraordinary”.
Fintan O’Toole’s proclaimed agenda – emphasised again in his Irish Times column today – is to deprive the citizen-parents of this country of one of their fundamental civil and human rights – that of being supported by the state in their work as primary educators of their children.
The Irish State funds third-level colleges to train teachers who will work in primary schools which the vast majority of the parents of this country wish to be “faith” schools, that is, schools in which their children will learn about their faith and grow in their knowledge of and commitment to the God whom that faith proclaims.
The State does this because it is the will of the people that it should do so. The details as to how to manage a fair distribution of scarce resources – given the religious denominations represented in the population – is another matter. But it does not lead us to a conclusion that the faith commitment of those staffing the schools is something irrelevant.
For that reason it would surely be extraordinary if teacher training colleges did not point out to their students that their commitment to a particular faith might be a factor influencing whether or not they might be successful in applying to a post in the majority of schools.
The day in which this will become irrelevant will the day in which schools will have given up on a responsibility which the majority of the citizens of this State have chosen to share with them, denying them their rights in the process. The rights of parents to have their children educated are primary. In this context, the rights of teachers to have jobs are secondary.
The anti-faith secularism of O’Toole and the militant new atheists is not just extraordinary. It is profoundly sinister and utterly cynical in the manner in which it is dressed up in the garments of righteousness.
I noticed the headline of a Maureen Dowd New York Times column on April 22 last. It was her lapsed Catholic effort to put a dent in the shocking display of veneration for the two popes canonised on Sunday. ‘A Saint, He Ain’t’, it declared, referring of course to St. John Paul II.
It was nothing out of the ordinary, I thought, in the context of Ms. Dowd’s anti-catholic oeuvre. It simply threw all the mud she could find, all the calumny, detraction and misinformation she was able to recycle at both the Church and the late Pope. It was par for her course.
What really surprised me, however, was what appears to have been The Irish Times decision on this column. Dowd’s columns are syndicated and appear weekly in the Dublin paper. Not this one – or if it did it slipped under my radar. Even this was too anti-catholic for the Townsend Street bigots. Or was it that they just couldn’t face the prospect of another surge to the lifeboats by outraged Catholic readers which just might be the final one to sink this dangerously listing vessel.
It has been boasted of as the biggest democratic event in the history of mankind. Half the world – at least – is going to the polls over these two months to elect local government assemblies, national assemblies, international assemblies, or heads of states.
All the countries in the European Union are heading into elections on the 23rd of next month to elect a new European Parliament. In many of them elections for local assemblies are also taking place. Why does this civic right and duty, which should be an inspiring, hope-filled and uplifting experience, induce such a distasteful feeling and even disgust in our hearts?
As those of us living in Dublin, Ireland, made our way to work yesterday through streets which overnight were festooned with banks of posters pinned to streetlamps, our hearts sank. A myriad of smiling and determined faces stared at us from these lampposts, asking us to give them our “number one” vote. Could that sense of disgust, that sense of wanting to look the other way, be in some way connected with the disillusionment of the people of Ireland – I cannot readily speak for other parts of the world – over the past few years which is reflected in opinion poll surveys showing ever decreasing support for the nation’s political establishment. This is a disillusionment bred out of the experience of broken promises, lies and corruption which is what a large section of the Irish electorate now associates with its political parties.
Ireland you are not alone. Across the Irish Sea the same disillusionment is being experienced. Jeremy O’Grady, editor of The Week writes in the current issue:
What a disquieting maxim it is: “honesty is the best policy”. Blam: just like that, a virtue is demoted to a stratagem. Yet even as a stratagem, few of our politicians seem to have much faith in it. They act as if dishonesty always has a better pay-off.
He is loath to accept that they’re devoted to telling lies. However, the Daily Telegraph columnist, Peter Oborne is less shy about pointing the finger in this direction. Oborne maintains that in Britain, since the time of John Major’s premiership, lies and politicians have been constant bedfellows. Oborne has written a book on the subject, The Rise of Political Lying, in which he says “mendacity and deception” have become the norm, adding that British politics “now lives in a post-truth environment”.
O’Grady, while clearly not liking the politicians edging away from virtue, faults them on simple pragmatic grounds. This isn’t just unvirtuous: it’s a strategic error. So move over Machiavelli. I believe honesty does pay. I honestly do.
But is there any hope of Aristotle – or even Plato – replacing Machiavelli? Not much, unless the voters of the world look all these smiling and determined faces and ask them to make themselves accountable to the Truth with their deeds, not pretending to do so behind a veil of false promises. Our feelings of hopelessness in the face of their past deceit and hypocrisy is the first thing they have to address before they begin to make new promises about what they are going to do in the future. Only then will we have any chance of being able to walk out into our streets and not be reminded, with every few yards we travel, of sad betrayals of misplaced trust.
From Mark Steyn’s disturbing article on freedom of speech in The Spectator:
Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, ….in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.
The article is here.
Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph about the attacks on David Cameron which followed his Church Times article describing Britain as a Christian country, noted some inconsistencies in the Prime Minister’s thinking. Specifically, he pointed out how Cameron has sold out on one of the country’s most valuable Christian institutions, marriage.
Of all the human institutions developed in the light of Christianity, marriage has been the most abiding. It is because of Christianity that marriage became a lifelong and increasingly equal bond between one man and one woman, chiefly in order to bring up children lovingly. Without Christian teaching, it was not much more than a property deal about women (with sex thrown in), made between men.
Because he wanted to be seen to modernise his party, Mr Cameron decided to introduce single-sex marriage. In rushing forward to do so, he made no attempt to reflect on the Christian heritage which he now extols. He never seems to have thought about why the relationship between a man and a woman might not, in fact, be the same as that between a man and a man or a woman and a woman.
Although an exemplary parent himself, he did not consider how refounding marriage on a quite different basis could endanger the rights of children. The people who framed his new law started – too late – to consider what marriage law actually involves and found that the law of consummation, central to the definition of marriage, could not apply to any same-sex act. Quite unintentionally, marriage has been redefined, with sex taken out of it. The good Christian Mr Cameron has trivialised and de-Christianised our greatest social bond without meaning to. Not surprisingly, he chose not to speak about marriage at all in his Church Times article last week: he would not have known what to say.
Moore’s Telegraph article is here.
Richard Hoggart died recently, aged 95. He was the author of The Uses of Literacy (1957), one of the most influential books published in the decades following the Second World War. It was a study of working-class culture and the impact of what could be called the Cultural Revolution – not Mao’s monstrosity – which followed that war in the 50s and 60s of the last century. For Hoggart, however, there was within this Cultural Revolution a large helping of what he saw as monstrous as well.
As the Daily Telegraph noted in its obituary of Hoggart, “In the 1950s it had become fashionable to argue that a newly affluent worker was emerging who was becoming middle-class in lifestyle and political attitudes. Hoggart saw the cultural impact of such developments as almost entirely negative.”
Hoggart’s view and apparent pessimism were disparaged by many and mocked by others. However, in the month in which he died another fierce critic of aspects of our contemporary culture described the world in which we live now in terms which can only serve to make us see Hoggart’s words as profoundly prophetic. David Bentley Hart, in his First Things withering assessment of Adam Gopnik’s now famous article on religious belief in The New Yorker, sees the current vogue in atheism as partly derived from some of the same things which Hoggart railed against. In Hart’s terms, this is “the assumption that all cultures that do not consent to the late modern Western vision of reality are merely retrograde, unenlightened, and in need of intellectual correction and many more Blu-ray players.”
Hoggart was a scholarship boy, orphaned at eight years of age, who came from a very poor family in Leeds in England. In The Uses of Literacy he described how the old, tightly-knit working-class culture of his boyhood — of stuffy front rooms, allotments, back-to-back housing and charabanc trips — was breaking up in the face of an Americanised mass culture of tabloid newspapers, advertising, jukeboxes and Hollywood. “The hedonistic but passive barbarian, who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for three pence, to see a five-million dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent,”
Was he a portent of what Bentley Hart was to describe this month? Perhaps.
“Everything,” Bentley Hart writes… “is idle chatter—and we live in an age of idle chatter. Lay the blame where you will: the internet, 940 television channels, social media, the ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup, whatever you like. Almost all public discourse is now instantaneous, fluently aimless, deeply uninformed, and immune to logical rigor. What I find so dismal about Gopnik’s article is the thought that it represents not the worst of popular secularist thinking, but the best. Principled unbelief was once a philosophical passion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now, perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say, gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice. Perhaps this really is the way the argument ends—not with a bang but a whimper.”
For Hoggart, ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties popular culture was not some kind of new Renaissance but was “full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”, tending towards a view of the world “in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral levelling and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure”.
He railed against that icon of the age, “milk bars”, probably the Anglo Saxon equivalent of the “drug store” hangout of the Jets and the Sharks of West Side Story. These he saw as inducing “a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk”. The manipulation of generations by those he called he called “the mass publicists” was so all-pervasive that genuine native popular culture was destroyed by the toxic confection produced by these.
Hoggart wrote in the 19th-century Arnoldian tradition of radical idealism, with its strong sense of moral values. He was passionate about culture but disdainful of modern mass culture – which for him lacked the essential humanist ingredients of genuine culture. He believed in the transformative value of great literature but held that for that to thrive: “In a democracy which is highly commercialised you have to give people critical literacy. If you don’t do that, you might as well pack it in.”
His thought in some respects might be echoed in the ideas of Pope Benedict XVI on the evil of relativism. Relativism for Hoggart “leads to populism which then leads to levelling and so to reductionism of all kinds, from food to moral judgments”. In Hoggart’s judgement, those who might argue that the Beatles and Beethoven could occupy the same plane of appreciation represented a “loony terminus”.
Perhaps the irony inherent in the life’s work of Richard Hoggart is that in his attempt to correct the evils he saw overtaking our cultural life, he pioneered the discipline of “cultural studies”. He is seen by many as the father of this discipline. This was then taken over by the theorists of mass culture who proceeded to install the Goddess of Relativism on the high altars of all our universities and thus created the very desert which David Bentley Hart describes.
How painful this must be for Anglican Christians who believe themselves to be members of a Church founded by Jesus Christ? Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury sets his doctrinal compass by judging who or who will not continue to follow his example rather than by the moral compass set by Jesus Christ himself.
In a Daily Telegraph article we are told: Although indicating that he was sympathetic to calls for the Church to publicly honour gay relationships, the Archbishop says that it is “impossible” for some followers in Africa to support homosexuality. In the interview, the leader of the Anglican Church, which has 77 million followers globally, speaks movingly of the persecution faced by Christians in parts of the world. He indicates that the Church must not take a step that would cut off these groups, most of them in the third world, however much this angers parts of society in Britain.
Following that way of thinking Christ might have said to those faithful disciples who remained with him after others walked away when he promised the Eucharist: I cannot give you this great gift of my body because these others who would like to follow me find it “impossible” to accept it.
Archbishop Welby’s followers surely expect him to decide on what he should teach and legislate for in these matters on the basis of what is right or wrong, what is sinful, and not on how many people here or there find something possible or impossible.
Welby acknowledges that in the past people experiencing same-sex attraction have suffered at the hands of others, Christians and non Christians. That this should have happened was never, and never will be, part of authentic Christian teaching. The principle which governs a Christian’s attitude to all this derives from Christ’s own example when he said to the woman taken in adultery: Go and sin no more.
The sexual attraction which led that woman to the act of adultery was not sinful. Its indulgence, her response to that attraction in an adulterous act – whether in mind or in body – was what was sinful. Christ did not fudge that.
Homosexual attraction is not in itself sinful. The Catholic Church is blue in the face reminding us of this. The indulgence of that attraction in acts – again in mind or in body – is sinful. No amount of head-counting, opinion polling, counting who does or does not find something “impossible”, will change that.
Christians in Africa have their own deeply rooted customs and social practices to cope with which are alien to Christianity. At some future date we might have a sub-Saharan occupant in the See of St. Augustine in Canterbury. If there were pressure from his flocks in Africa asking the Christian Church to bend its moral laws and come to terms with polygamy, it would be a very weak and flawed response on his part to offer as a reason for not doing so that people of another culture would find that “impossible” to accept.
A moral teaching which seeks to operate on this kind of criteria will soon wither away.
Garvan Hill 