Category: Culture Matters

Well, well, well! Things are moving very fast

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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Four militants belonging to FEMEN — a Ukraine-based “feminist” group which organizes topless protests at people and things they dislike — yesterday evening attacked the Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Andre-Joseph Leonard, as he took part in a university debate on (of all subjects) freedom of speech and blasphemy.

Professor Guy Haarscher, who was debating the archbishop, said afterwards:

What most shocked me was the attitude of the photojournalists present. When we arrived in the hall, we were both surprised by the number of photographers — about a dozen of them. Obviously they photographed the whole scene, then left with the Femen [militants]. We must therefore deplore this event as something concocted between the Femen [militants] and the photographers to sell pictures. The proof was that very shortly afterwards the pictures were on Lalibre.be and other sites.

Read the full account from Catholic Voices here

About a boy…climbing mountains

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

Donal Walsh is a young Irish boy living in County Kerry, one of the most beautiful places on this earth. He came to national prominence this Spring when a letter he wrote made a plea for an end to what has all the appearances of a suicide epidemic among young Irish people. Donal is 16. At 12, he was diagnosed with cancer. This is his letter:

A few months left, he said. There it was; I was given a timeline on the rest of my life. No choice, no say, no matter. It was given to me as easy as dinner.

 I couldn’t believe it, that all I had was 16 years here, and soon I began to pay attention to every detail that was going on in this town.

 I realised that I was fighting for my life for the third time in four years and this time I have no hope. Yet still I hear of young people committing suicide and I’m sorry but it makes me feel nothing but anger.

 I feel angry that these people choose to take their lives, to ruin their families and to leave behind a mess that no one can clean up.

 Yet I am here with no choice, trying as best I can to prepare my family and friends for what’s about to come and leave as little a mess as possible.

 I know that most of these people could be going through financial despair and have other problems in life, but I am at the depths of despair and, believe me, there is a long way to go before you get to where I am.

 For these people, no matter how bad life gets, there are no reasons bad enough to make them do this; if they slept on it or looked for help they could find a solution, and they need to think of the consequences of what they are about to do.

 So please, as a 16-year-old who has no say in his death sentence, who has no choice in the pain he is about to cause and who would take any chance at even a few more months on this planet, appreciate what you have, know that there are always other options and help is always there.

 I’ve grown fully in both body and mind by climbing God’s mountains

 I live in a part of the world that is surrounded by mountains. I can’t turn my head without finding a bloody hill or mountain and I suppose those were God’s plans for me. To have me grow up around mountains and grow climbing a few too. And that’s exactly what I’ve done, I may have grown up in body around them but I’ve fully grown and matured in mind climbing his mountains.

 He’s had me fight cancer three times, face countless deaths and losses in my life, he’s had my childhood dreams taken off me but at the end of the day, he’s made me a man.

 I am always called brave, heroic, kind, genuine, honourable and so many other kind compliments, but I have to try and explain to everyone why I seem to reject them. I have never fought for anyone but myself, therefore I cannot be brave or heroic, I’ve only been kind because my religion has taught me so.

 What impact could I ever make on the world if I was fake or how could I ever be honourable if I was not honoured to be here.

 I am me. There is no other way of putting it, little old Donal Walsh from Tralee, one body, one mind with a few other cobwebs and tales thrown in.

 I’ve climbed God’s mountains, faced many struggles for my life and dealt with so much loss. And as much as I’d love to go around to every fool on this planet and open their eyes to the mountains that surround them in life, I can’t. But maybe if I shout from mine they’ll pay attention.

 If I start to accept these compliments, I’m afraid of what I’ll become. Will I be braver than YE? Will I be kinder than YE? More genuine than YE? Or more honourable than YE? Better than YE? No. I can never accept that there is a YE. We are all the same, we are all given one body, one mind. The only difference for me is that I’m looking from the mountain.

That was impressive enough. Then, two weeks ago Irish television took the story further and last Sunday a national newspaper took up his story and Irish people were able to learn something very special, not just about one special person, but also about themselves, about life, death, and above all about friendship, human and divine.

In the Sunday Independent, Donal told practically the whole story of his life from 12 years of age to the present day, of his battle with anger and disappointment, how he won his life back, and how he has faced his terminal illness.

Every day people say I’m brave, that I’m courageous and I hate that, he wrote. I’m just doing what I have to do to survive, to live another day.

 I had a friend, Stuart Mangan. He said he wasn’t brave because he didn’t have a choice. He didn’t have a choice to be paralysed but he chose to live every day of his life with a smile on his face and even though he knew he didn’t have long to live, he spent the time he had designing technology for people who would end up like him. That to me is brave and inspirational.

 The first time they told me, I was at home, I was on the phone to my friend. It was September 11, 2008, my mom came in, she didn’t have to say anything, I knew straight away what had happened. The test results were bad and the tumor was malignant. I hung up the phone without saying anything and I felt like throwing it at the wall. But to be honest, I didn’t know what it meant. I was 12, and all I cared about was playing sport. I knew it was bad but I didn’t understand the severity of it. I had cancer, a tumor that had grown on my right femur just above my knee and little did I know it would destroy parts of my life that I had never planned on letting go of.

The first step was chemo. Donal takes us through the months of treatment. We see his mind, his mentality evolving through those months – and his maturity unfolding.

They would save my life and nearly kill me but I was doing it. I wanted to live, to play for Munster, to travel the world, to raise children and die when I’m 100, not 12.

On June 1, 2009, Donal walked out of St John’s Ward in Dublin’s Children’s Hospital a happy boy. He had finished his last chemo and he promised he would never return as a patient.

Over the next few years he collected over €10,000 for the ward. “They looked after me and I promised myself that I was going to do everything I could to look after them. They were looking to renovate the ward for the first time since the Seventies so I had to help.”

It was a promise he was able to keep. The other promise was a different story. O February 15, 2012, he went for a chest X-ray and a CT scan of my chest. He describes how he and his father waited for the result.

 There was a bin next to me and tissues on the table. He came in and told us I had a tumor in my lung. It was back. My heart sank. My world fell apart again. I was angry. This was too much. I stood up and kicked the bin. I wanted to run. I fell to my knees in tears. I couldn’t handle it. He said I would be going for surgery the week after, on February 25.

The operation was successful but more chemo had to follow. This was the hardest part for him but now his resilience and courage were beginning to reveal themselves.

 I realised I was back to where I was three years ago, he wrote. It is unreal the support I am getting. He explained: I don’t take it seriously when I’m at home because if I do, my friends will and I don’t want them to worry about me. Cancer has already ruined my life so I’m not going to let it do anything to my friends.  It’s hard to call some of them ‘friends’, when they spend every day with you, they become family. So at home I’m Donal, but in hospital I’m sick and that’s the way it’s going to stay.

Even the focus of Donal’s anger is exceptional. He describes his return to Our Lady’s Hospital for his treatment:

I walked back into that ward with a sick feeling inside me, knowing what I was walking into. The ward hadn’t changed at all. The walls were the same, the curtains were the same, the airtight windows were the same and, of course, the same empty promises given to countless dying children by countless gentlemen in suits. It really does make me ashamed of my government when they can get wages in the hundreds of thousands annually, but when one of the most important children’s wards in Ireland, for some of the sickest kids in Ireland, has to rely on charitable donations to buy a bucket of paint and a brush. That is one of the sickest things I have ever come across in my short lifetime here.

Nor was his anger a futile emotion. As a result €50,000 was raised for the hospital in Dublin and another children’s charity. He also describes how in these months his friendships deepened.

During my three-week breaks, I would have spent most of the time recovering while my friends were at school. I had one friend who came around every day after school and made me smile. That was John. He visited me in hospital and made me laugh even though it hurt like hell. We ended up like brothers throughout it all. Then there’s Cormac, Hugh and James, my three best friends from school, they supported me through everything and visited me as much as they could while studying for their exams. I was also trying to study for my Junior Cert as best as I could but I could only make it into school for one week while I was at home. This made it difficult at times but I had huge support from my school and they helped me to do as much work as I could at home.

At the end of his second bout of treatment the time came for his scan. This took place on Friday June 15, 2012, his 16th birthday. The news was good.

I couldn’t believe it, that all I had thought over the last few weeks and all I had gone through over the past few months was over. I spent the summer travelling between Bantry and Tralee. I spent the time in Bantry with my cycling coach James Cleary. I returned to school in September and had gotten into a daily routine of an early start at seven to get my food ready for the day, go to school, go straight to the gym or go for a cycle which I had reached up to 60km at the time, come and study and then some weeknights coach youth rugby. My life seemed to be perfect. I had everything I ever wanted and it couldn’t have gone any better.

One day in September Donal had an accident on one of his cycling trips. He recovered from his injuries but when some pain persisted anxiety began to increase and when eventually he returned to Dublin for his check-up his worst suspicions were confirmed. Dr Capra, the oncologist gave him and his mother the news with these words: “We’ve been on this road too many times, eh?” That was it. My heart sank. I didn’t know whether to follow them to his office or run out the front door.

 We arrived home four hours later to a house full of support, everyone had come out. That week was a blur to me. After letting the news out that the cancer was back, the amount of support that I got was crazy, I didn’t need any of that chin-up bullshit, because I had all the positivity and strength and support I needed to get through this 10 times over but it still felt like a mountain I couldn’t climb, nonetheless God had given me hiking boots so I might as well start climbing.

 We were called up for scans the following Thursday. On the way home, I stopped in Portlaoise to meet with a prayer minister, John Delaney. He has been a very strong part of my faith and on that night we prayed together. I thought to myself that if this was what God wants me to do, if he wants me to fight cancer, if he wants me to be a symbol to other people, or if he just wants me to die then I guess I’ll strap up my hiking boots and get to the top of this mountain.

The scans now revealed that the condition was terminal. Donal remained calm. At the start of his school midterm-break, he asked his parents if he could go away on a break with his friends somewhere. They did. Then, as a family, they later went to Lourdes.

While I was there, I didn’t experience much healing but I went for confession and met a South African priest. I asked him why God could give such an illness to young infants who have not had a life. His reply gave me great comfort: we are not in this life for answers, this life is for lessons and questions, it isn’t until heaven that we receive answers.

 I met for the first time with my palliative doctor and her team, after that it kind of hit me that these were the people who were going to help me die. It was like they were fluffing my pillows for a good night’s sleep and it sunk in that there was going to be an end soon. That still didn’t mean I was going anywhere without a fight. I had trips to Cork for radiotherapy which would slow the cancer down but my doctors still warned my parents to have an early Christmas but because I knew this was going to be my last Christmas, I still wanted it to be special. Nonetheless Christmas remained December 25.

 I wanted unique gifts for all the people I loved, signet rings for my four best friends and one that I would wear as well, unique pieces of jewellery for my sister and my mother and other special friends. I didn’t ask for any gifts but somehow my mom managed to bring Santa Claus to the house on Christmas Eve while my friends and cousins were here. He gave a gift to everyone and we had a good laugh.

 I got a lot of happiness out of Christmas, we had more house parties and my debs was soon after. I got to bring one of my best friends, Joanne, and went with James and his date for the night.

 Some days I would wake up and I could easily appreciate the beauty of the world that I was leaving behind, although it does make me upset that I will never get to experience the feeling of living that I had on the bike or in the gym, or that I will never get to see my sister walk up the aisle next to the love of her life, or that I will never get to travel the world and see places like New Zealand, Asia or America or that I won’t get the chance to see my four best friends do as good in life as I know they will. But I have to remember that God is using me; whether He is using me as a symbol for people to appreciate life more or whether His first two mountains weren’t high enough for me, all I know is that I am walking with Him even though it is along His path.

Donal ended what he wrote with this:

I would like to take this chance to thank the people who asked not to be named but who have made a difference to the past few months for me and my family, whether they are other family members, business men or complete strangers. Thank you.

Medical misadventure verdict in Savita inquest

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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The jury in the Savita Halappanavar inquest in Galway, Ireland, today returned a medical misadventure verdict based on systems failures and deficiencies in the medical management of Ms Halappanavar. Among the nine recommendations the jury made was that the Irish Medical Council should draw up clearer Guidelines.

Commenting on the inquest verdict, Dr Berry Kiely of the Pro Life Campaign said:

“We welcome all the recommendations from the inquest, including the call for Guidelines providing clarity for doctors in relation to medical interventions for women in pregnancy, which may result in the unintended loss of the baby,” she said.

Dr Kiely described as “little short of shameless” the manner in which those seeking the introduction of abortion legislation based on the X case ruling have exploited the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar all along, claiming that the failure to bring in such legislation was what led to Ms Halappanavar’s death.

“It is now clear from the facts presented at the inquest,” Dr Kiely stated, “that a number of what the inquest terms ‘systems failures’ and communications shortcomings significantly delayed the moment at which the medical team recognised the seriousness of her condition and carried out the appropriate medical intervention.”

“It is disturbing,” she said, “that those calling for abortion legislation never point out that no medical evidence whatsoever was heard in the X case.”

“The recent Oireachtas hearings, however, heard unanimous and authoritative evidence that abortion is not a treatment for suicidal ideation. Not only that, but the international evidence shows that legislation based on mental health and suicide grounds has invariably led to abortion virtually on demand.”

Dr Kiely acknowledged how difficult and upsetting the experience of the Inquest must have been for Savita’s husband, Praveen Halappanavar. “I hope that the manner in which the Inquest was conducted has brought clarity to the events which led to the tragic death of his wife,” she said.

Adding once more to the follies of four thousand years

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“What are they thinking”, we sometimes cry out in near despair as we look on at the folly of governments and their agents, here and around the world, dismantling and destroying before our eyes the very substance of our social and economic fabric.

The economic fabric is, in most if not all western societies, the patient currently in intensive care. The medical teams are furiously arguing with each other about the treatments being applied to bring the wounded subject back to some level of well-being. The austerity faction has the upper hand but no one is really sure – with the exception of the opposing team – what history’s verdict is going to be on that. We are hoping for the best.

What there is no doubt about in anyone’s mind is what the judgement of history will be on why we got here. Everyone now knows that the folly of greed brought the house down about our ears.

But while we worry and fret over this patient, a deeper and more sinister folly remains rampant and untrammelled in the corridors of the powerful and is tearing apart something which will be much more difficult to restore to health. Every day – and for some decades now – the people entrusted with the care of the common good are putting new measures in place which are one by one destroying the very core elements which sustain our human and social well-being.

Booms and busts have been and will always be, we are told, part of the economic cycle. They come and go and as we muddle through them we learn a little each time – and then promptly seem to forget it again, falling back to some earlier position as in a game of snakes and ladders. But generally our muddling along seems to work out on average like three steps forward and two steps backwards.

With our social fabric the story is frighteningly different. For some reason, probably because the process of collapse is more silent and slow-moving, we are being lead onwards blindly into what a a growing clamour of voices is warning us will be a morass of social dysfunction and disintegration.

How is this happening? Part of the answer may be found in a wise and sobering book by one of the great popular historians of the Twentieth century, Barbara Tuchman. In The March of Folly, she dissects the “wooden-headedness” of the world’s leaders – of every political persuasion, from tyrannical despots to dedicated democrats – in their pursuit of public policy. This is a book which makes sober but certainly not consoling reading and explains something of the riddle we are forced to contemplate in our own day and age.

 A phenomenon noticeable throughout history, she writes, regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggest? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

 Tuchman wrote her book in the early nineteen eighties so she did not have a chance to witness or comment on the economic follies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She did not need to. Her case is watertight without them. From the lesson on man’s folly shown to us in the mythological tale of the wooden horse of Troy, through the follies of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, down through to the follies of any number of empire builders who ended up destroying their own work, to any number in our own day, the embarrassment of the powerful should be assured.

The mystery she puts before us is why can mankind, elsewhere than in government – and in government she includes all agencies engaged in the shaping of public affairs, like trade unions, representative organisations, and others – accomplish such marvels: inventions to harness wind and electricity, raising earth-bound stones into soaring cathedrals, construct the instruments of music, and so much more, and yet make such a mess of government. She quotes John Adams, the second President of the United States who had just witnessed one of the greatest follies of the 18th century – Britain’s blundering loss of her extension into the North American continent. Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “While all other sciences have advanced, government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”

Indeed, if we look at the United States today and compare it with the achievement of its founding fathers, we would have to question whether its governance is a “little better” or a good deal worse than in John Adams’ day.

No country or state has a monopoly of the commodity we call folly when it comes to public policy. The Chinese state is forging ahead to economic world-dominance while at the same time it is cutting its own throat with a one-child policy which will cripple it in the not too distant future as pampered spoiled brats grow into selfish adult males who will wreak havoc on a limited female population brought about by the whole-scale culling through sex-selective abortion. India, another state promising itself great achievements in the economic sphere, is silently destroying itself with its unlimited sex-selective abortion on demand.

Meanwhile in Europe the old countries which began their domination of the planet a millennium ago are slowly dying under the weight of their self-indulgence, aided and abetted by governments at every turn. Rampant divorce rates are wrecking families. Marriage is being destroyed in the rush to facilitate homosexual self-indulgence in the name of a concept of equality rooted in an utterly flawed anthropology.  Marriage has been further weakened by fiscal arrangements which facilitate cohabitation without commitment. The unintended consequence of this: rampant child abuse – where mothers seek to nurture multiple children begotten serially by nameless fathers.

All of this is fostered in one way or another by governments.

Tuchman qualifies her concept of folly in a way which makes it more than just idiocy but makes it culpable. Idiots can be excused. Culpable fools should not be excused.

To qualify as folly the policy adopted by a government or a representative agency must meet three criteria, she says. Firstly, it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. Judging a past era by the standards is a rampant modern practice which generates its own kind of folly. The injury which is perpetrated by the folly must be something recognised and predicted and warned against by contemporaries. Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available.  Thirdly, to remove the problem from reasons of personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.

The follies we fret over and predict above, as the harbingers of social disaster, fulfil all these criteria.

President Obama and his administration are constantly being warned of the legacies they are bequeathing to their society as a consequence of the destruction of the institution of marriage in which they are currently engaged. The same is true of the Dutch, the French, the British and now the Irish. David Cameron – with his government – is proceeding relentlessly with his redefinition of marriage in spite of a petition from well over half a million of his citizens to stop his folly – not to mention the wise and solemn warnings from the leaders of all the main religious denominations.

In relation to another folly, the world’s legislators were well warned by the teachers of the Catholic Church about the consequences, moral and social, which would follow the generation of a contraceptive mentality by the whole-scale ignoring of its teaching on human life and human sexuality in Humanae Vitae and the provision of contraception services to all and sundry. There are plenty of warnings on record to both the Chinese and the Indians about the folly of the abortion and semi-eugenicist practices which their policies are generating.

The governments of the world’s oldest states, and some relatively new ones, are verifying once again the truth placed before us by Barbara Tuchman and John Adams. Tuchman concludes:

 If John Adams was right, and government is “little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago,” we cannot reasonably expect much improvement. We can only muddle on as we have done in those same three or four thousand years, through patches of brilliance and decline, great endeavour and shadow.

 That is a worrying thought, for the stakes involved in our current follies seem much more serious than any since the follies she listed which lead to the tragic religious rupture of Europe in the sixteenth century. The injuries which mankind will sustain from our current follies will require much more than some geo-political adjustment or economic tweaking to put them right. The consequences may require much more than a bit of muddling on.

Is this how Kenny’s reinvention of himself came about?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Lest Enda Kenny get carried away by the shameless self-promotion and the consequent adulation he received on his recent bout of surfing the St.Patrick’s Day waves of Irish American euphoria, one of that country’s conservative magazines, the Weekly Standard, has given us something of a counter balance.

Author and senior editor of the Standard, Christopher Caldwell, in an in-depth and long article entitled “Irish Stew”, examines – among other strange metamorphoses in modern Ireland – the transformation of Kenny. He explores and suggests why the Irish Taoiseach moved in a matter of weeks from being a conservative rural Catholic into “an outright anticlerical politician”  and a comfortable fellow-traveller with the ultra-liberal socialist party to which he has hitched his own mildly right of centre Fine Gael party.

Of Kenny’s now notorious and still, for many, baffling attack on the Holy See and the petulant penny-pinching rupture of the historic diplomatic links between the Irish State and the Papacy, he says it was much more suggestive of Cromwellian England than of twentieth-century Ireland.

The main substance of Caldwell’s article is concerned with the impending debate on abortion legislation in Ireland. That issue, however, he sees as intrinsically linked with the political ramifications of post-boom Ireland.

 The present Irish government, he says, shares a peculiarity with many Western governments (including the American one): Like them, it came to power primarily because it was not in power when the bottom fell out of the world economy in 2008. All these governments claimed a mandate to act with unprecedented force to set their countries’ finances to rights. But the complexity of the crisis stymied them, and they failed to come up with anything in the way of economic innovation. They did notice, though, that the Bubble Era ruling parties had been reduced to a smoldering political wreck, wholly unable to act as an effective opposition. So with a combination of zeal and self-delusion, these new governments clung to their mandate to act forcefully, diverting it from the purpose for which it had been granted—the economy—and towards a variety of long-cherished partisan (or interest-group) projects. Barack Obama passed health reform in the United States.

He sees David Cameron’s  gay marriage manoeuvres in England fitting into the same pattern.

 This, he thinks, is how Kenny’s reinvention of himself came about and led to Kenny tacking in line with his Labour coalition partners on the abortion issue rather than with his own mildly anti-abortion party. The European Court of Human Rights offered him a way to do this with the decision it issued in December 2010 asking Ireland to “clarify” the circumstances in which women could have an abortion under the X case.

 Kenny, he thinks, may have calculated that those he describes as the “scoundrels of Fianna Fáil” were now so discredited by their “wallet-stuffing greed” and their financial incompetence that he would face no viable opposition anytime soon. If so, Caldwell says, he was mistaken. In the months since Kenny embarked on the path for abortion legislation, he notes, Fine Gael’s support in the general public dropped like a rock, from 34 percent to about 25. Left for dead as recently as last fall, Fianna Fáil found itself restored this spring to its position as the country’s most popular party. Twenty-five thousand people demonstrated against Fine Gael in front of the legislature—not as impressive as the crowds that came to protest the Iraq war in 2003 or austerity in 2009, but far more impressive than anything the opposing side could muster.

Caldwell now thinks the expectation that Ireland, after a brief political to-do, will settle into a European-style consensus about abortion is probably wrong. Ireland, he suggests, is more likely to resemble the United States where the abortion issue, recklessly addressed at the outset, has done decades’ worth of damage to the political system.

He interviewed Clare Daly for his article, describing her as “an ebullient, forthright, charismatic North Dublin radical who advanced a groundbreaking abortion bill last year. A veteran of Labour and the country’s small Socialist faction, she has yet to find a party she cannot get herself kicked out of for being too left-wing.”

Daly was very honest with him, in a way that suggests that those introducing the crucial abortion legislation are less than honest. She accepts, recognises, that the change that Fine Gael is trying to pass off as a mere tweak is nothing of the sort. “Symbolically it changes everything,” she told him. “And once you’ve legislated one circumstance, well, then, you’re immediately dealing with fatal fetal abnormalities, rape, incest, blah-blah. That’s why they’re all kicking so much. That’s why they’re going mad. That’s why they have the campaign that they have.”

She means the pro-lifers. I say, rather hesitantly, “So the Rónán Mullens of the world—”

“They know!” Daly interrupts. “They’re right!”

Defending marriage and the family

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The government of the Republic of Ireland currently has a national forum in place to review the constitution of the state. For many this is no more than a trojan horse to allow it to introduce radical legislation which the existing constitution prohibits with its pro-life pro-family and pro-marriage provisions. Submissions to this forum have been asked for and the following is one sent by yours truly. More are needed but the deadline for submissions is tomorrow, Tuesday, 19 March. If you want to defend important provisions of the present constitution, do so in the next 30 hours or so.

The re-definitions of marriage which are being proposed and adopted in some other countries are rendering meaningless the institution as we have known it for millennia.

Firstly, essentially marriage is an institution whose ultimate value to society is the protection and upbringing of children. They will be the losers if the institution is destroyed. It has already been severely damaged by no-fault divorce and it is clear to everyone that by a wide margin children suffer more through divorce than through the effort to sustain troubled marriages.

Secondly, the failure of states to support marriage, and the devaluing of marriage which this has resulted in, has led to widespread single-parenthood. Here again, on balance, children are the victims. This movement, based totally on selfish pursuits, falsely proclaiming itself in the name of equality, is one of the greatest threats to a healthy society which the modern age has seen. Look behind this campaign, denied by some but openly admitted by others (eg in this interview here ) and you will see where it is leading us. This campaign is ultimately going to lead not just to a redefinition of marriage but to the destruction of the institution itself by removing all its capacity to do what it is really meant to do in the first place. Individuals do not need marriage to express their love for each other. Children do need marriage to give each and every one of them the mother and father to which they should be considered to have an inalienable right.

If you have any doubts about the need to defend the definition of marriage as we now know it, look at this descriptive video.

The link for making a submission.

Taking Sinn Fein to task on abortion

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments
Donegal South-West’s Sinn Fein TD – where does he stand on the question of the life of children before birth?

Arthur L. Gallagher posted an interesting piece yesterday. In the light of this one wonders how, west of the “border” in predominantly pro-life Donegal, the good people there have returned two Sinn Fein members to the Irish Republic’s parliament in Dublin? They will soon be asked to vote on legislation which, all signals seem to indicate, will put legal abortion on the Republic’s statute books.

Gallagher reported:
29 women from across Northern Ireland have staged a dramatic protest on the steps of the Northern Ireland Assembly today (Monday 11 March 2013) calling on Sinn Fein to protect unborn babies from abortion. The 29 women handed in a letter to Sinn Fein. A spokeswomen for the group said, “We represent women from all the six counties of Northern Ireland. We are here to tell Sinn Fein’s 29 Assembly members that we want unborn babies and their mothers protected. We don’t want the Marie Stope’s private abortion centre in Northern Ireland. We say to Sinn Fein we will never accept abortion – not in our country and NOT IN OUR NAME.” Sinn Fein are opposing an amendment coming before the Assembly that would make it illegal for private abortion centres – such as Marie Stopes International – to operate in Northern Ireland. The amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill is due to be debated and voted on in the Assembly tomorrow. A “Petition of Concern” to block the amendment is circulating at Stormont, which requires 30 Assembly Members signatures. Director of Precious Life, Bernadette Smyth said, “The attempt to block the amendment is an abuse of the democratic process. Sinn Fein are committing political suicide by supporting Marie Stopes – a private institution which exploits vulnerable women by charging them up to £1900 to kill their unborn babies. Sinn Fein’s support for Marie Stopes and abortion is in direct opposition to the views of the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland who say – “abortion – not in our name!” http://www.preciouslife.com/?va=1&vc=1232

Is this a case of a sad but congenital blindness to a reality they cannot comprehend?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

In the final volume of his masterly trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth, Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, writes of how the replies of Jesus to Pilate in his interrogation “must have seemed like madness to the Roman judge. And yet he could not shake off the mysterious impression left by this man, so different from those he had met before who had resisted Roman domination and fought for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel.”

 

It is difficult not to see similar bewilderment lurking in the hearts and minds of the thousands of media functionaries who were milling around St. Peter’s basilica and the Vatican since that historic day, 11 of February, 2013. In the six or seven weeks since then the world’s media vainly – for the most part – tried to grapple with realities which they were fascinated by but which they simply could not comprehend. Just as Pilate was bewildered by the idea that Christ was a king in the sense that he, Pilate, understood kingship, they were looking at a group of men assembling in Rome to elect the ruler of an entity which they only half understood. Essentially they read it all in terms of purely human politics. As a consequence they missed the entire plot.

 

The New York Times of 11 March gave us what might be a textbook example of how the application of political language takes you only so far in this drama, and how, when you reach a certain point, if you persist with it, it simply leads you into a dead end.

 

Laurie Goodstein and Elisabetta Povoledo began their “analysis” piece for the Times by telling us that the cardinals who would enter the papal conclave on Tuesday of that week would walk into the Sistine Chapel in a single file. That would be something deceptive, for “beneath the orderly display, they were split into competing line-ups and power blocs that will determine which man among them emerges as pope.”

 

Cardinal Angelo Scola of Italy was, for example, described by Goodstein and Povoledo, as “a top contender for pope among some in the conclave.” Marlon Brando famously muttered to Rod Steiger, his older brother in On the Waterfront, “I could’a been a contender”, meaning a contender for a boxing title. This was not a boxing match. This was not a title fight, not even a contest in any meaningful sense of the word. This was a meeting in which over a hundred men who have given their lives to the service of Christ and his Church were going to look among themselves for the one whom they deemed, in their hearts and minds, would most faithfully and effectively lead and sustain that Church in the mission which its founder gave them.

 

Nothing of this understanding, nothing, was evident in the 1,500 or so words penned by Goodstein and Povoledo on that Sunday and filed to the Times. From beginning to end they read the drama – and a papal conclave is high drama, no doubt – unfolding before them as power bloc pitted against power bloc in pursuit of the control of a political and administrative structure serving an end which to them was very ill-understood indeed.

 

“The main divide”, they said, “pits the cardinals who work in the Vatican, the Romans, against the reformers, the cardinals who want the next pope to tackle what they see as the Vatican’s corruption, inefficiency and reluctance to share power and information with bishops from around the world.” What had all that to do with the billion and more ordinary people who want to follow the teaching of Christ, receive his sacraments daily and weekly and be helped to make their way through this world to a promised eternal life? Serving these people is the sole and ultimate object of this institution and the raison d’etre of those men walking into the Sistine Chapel on the morning of 12 March.

 

The faithful of the Catholic Church throughout the world, within hours of the white smoke appearing, were at peace once again. Indeed, as the smoke appeared, the cheers from the thousands in the square told us that they were once again in the place they wanted to be and that they knew that God’s ordained instruments had once again chosen a shepherd in his own mould to care for all their needs.

 

When the secularist world’s reading of the history and the reality of the Catholic Church is not naively political, it is driven by the media’s own very unbalanced and self-created image of the reality of the institution, its problems and its crises in the world today.

 

The next pontiff, Goodstein and Povoledo said, “must unite an increasingly globalized church paralyzed by scandal and mismanagement under the spotlight in a fast-moving media age (my italics). And among the cardinals, they said, there is no obvious single successor to Pope Benedict XVI, who rattled the church by resigning last month at age 85”. Obvious to whom? The short and decisive conclave showed precisely the contrary. The cardinals, after their days of prayerful conversation and reflection walked into the Sistine Chapel with much more unity of intent and purpose than the watching world imagined.

 

But who really thinks the Catholic Church is paralysed? No one who looks at the phenomenal growth of the Church in different parts of the world could say it is paralyzed. It may be challenged to keep up with this; it is being challenged by the decline of the faith in the old world  – a decline brought about primarily by the growth of materialism, indifference and the lure of hedonism and only very marginally by the weakness its members see in each other.

 

Of course the lure of hedonism has infected servants of the Church. Of course there has been scandal, but there has always been scandal. Two thousand years ago followers of Christ were told “How terrible it will be for the world due to its temptations to sin! Temptations to sin are bound to happen, but how terrible it will be for that person who causes someone to sin!” Holier than thou media is one of the phenomena of our time, and while the abandon with which sinners are stoned from the media’s so-called high moral ground today is occasionally halted by exposures like those at the BBC in the Saville affair, the stones keep raining down.

 

The Church, for its part, has never wavered in its teaching on what is and what is not sinful. It knows all too well that it is populated by sinners but it also knows that its God-given task is to help those sinners to repentance and forgiveness in Christ’s name. It forgives repentant sinners but remains constant on what is sinful, despite pressure from many quarters through modern media to move with the spirit of the age and abandon the Way, the Truth and the Life of which it is the mystical incarnation.

 

The Church certainly has to find new ways of more effectively managing the challenges it faces but it is far from paralysed. As for the Church being rattled by Pope Benedict’s abdication, that is about as far from the truth as you could get. The pilgrims, 200,000 of them, who came to his final audience in St. Peter’s Square on 27 February were not rattled – and they represented millions more. Surprised, no doubt; puzzled perhaps, for a short time; but ultimately profoundly grateful for a magnificent example of humility and wisdom which in the end could only be interpreted as coming from one source, his prayer and the grace of him whose vicar he has been.

 

And that is the missing link in all the volumes of deliberations we have been absorbing from the world’s media in the days and weeks since 11 February – as the world in its very limited wisdom tries to work out the “madness” of the Wisdom of Catholic Church.

Perhaps we might hope for some change in all this now following the new Holy Father’s words of encouragement to 5000 journalists on the Saturday following his election?  Pope Francis was nothing if not positive when he offered

“A particularly heart-felt thanks… to those who have been able to observe and present these events in the Church’s history while keeping in mind the most just perspective in which they must be read, that of faith. Historical events almost always require a complex reading that, at times, can also include the dimension of faith.

 “Ecclesial events are certainly not more complicated than political or economic ones. But they have one particularly fundamental characteristic: they answer to a logic that is not mainly that of, so to speak, worldly categories, and this is precisely why it is not easy to interpret and communicate them to a wide and varied audience. In fact, the Church, although it is certainly also a human, historical institution with all that that entails, does not have a political nature but is essentially spiritual: it is the people of God, the holy people of God who walk toward the encounter with Jesus Christ. Only by putting oneself in this perspective can one fully explain how the Catholic Church works.”

  “Christ is the Church’s Shepherd, but His presence in history moves through human freedom. Among these, one is chosen to serve as his Vicar, Successor of the Apostle Peter, but Christ is the centre, the fundamental reference, the heart of the Church! Without Him, neither Peter nor the Church would exist or have a reason for being. As Benedict XVI repeated often, Christ is present and leads His Church. In everything that has happened, the protagonist is, ultimately, the Holy Spirit. He has inspired Benedict XVI’s decision for the good of the Church; He has guided the cardinals in their prayers and in their election. Dear friends, it is important to take due account of this interpretive horizon, this hermeneutic, to bring the heart of the events of these days into focus.”

 Might we hope that those words would be printed out and pinned up over his or her desk by every journalist planning to write authoritatively about the Church in future? Without the perspective given in that message they will continue to write little better than worthless nonsense.

Pro-aborton fifth column strikes again?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

What a strange report by LORNA SIGGINS in today’s Irish Times.

“Expert highlights legislative vacuum faced by obstetricians”, the headline tells us. We wonder what exactly she is highlighting and how revealing her apparently alarming observations might be. All we are told, however, is this:

 A leading US expert on treating high-risk pregnancies has said that the legislative vacuum in which Irish obstetricians have to work is “an enormous problem”.

 Prof Mary E D’Alton of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York said the lack of legal clarity here on circumstances for terminating pregnancies was “very unsatisfactory”.

 Basically that is the end of the story. We are given no further details as to how this “enormous problem” manifests itself. In the rest of the story she seems to be congratulating Ireland on doing such a good job in the field of maternal care.

I would love to see the copy submitted to the news-desk by Ms. Siggins. Perhaps I’m wrong, but my suspicion is that the cabal of pro-abortion subeditors in the Irish Times got to work again to plug their own line for abortion legislation in Ireland. I wonder is Professor D’Alton (above) a willing or unwilling instrument in their campaign?

Is this what they call free speech?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

In response to Mickey Harte’s expression of his views on the current Northern Ireland abortion debate, the Belfast Telegraph reports that South Belfast MLA Anna Lo issued a message urging Mr Harte to stick to the day job.

“He has expertise in GAA and I have a lot of respect for him. But really I think he should keep to his own field,” she said. “He should stick to GAA.”
Shameless!