Category: Culture Matters

It was amphitheater stuff

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

Extraordinary though it was, perhaps still more extraordinary was the world-wide response to the news. Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement of his abdication was truly historic. But for Catholics, for whom he has been for the past eight years the Vicar of Christ on earth, it was simply one more act carried out within the context of everything they believe about the nature and character of this office. For everyone else it was a strange and sensational event in a drama which is only half understood – if even that. For believing Catholics it was providential; for others it was a riddle to be grappled with, marveled at, even laughed at and for some an opportunity to grind once again any number of axes with which they have been trying to wound, if not slay, this man since he took office in 2005.

Twitter’s collapse under the weight of all this within minutes of the news breaking was just one of the indications of the reach of interest which the Catholic Church “enjoys”. Although venerated and loved by hundreds of millions, this universal body of believers is reviled by a significantly smaller number whose enmity and disdain is nourished by the powerful elite which dominates the Western world’s media.

It was not just Twitter and the other social media which carried this massive load of news, comment and analysis. Mainstream media, from the ridiculous to the prestigious, lined up friends and enemies of the Catholic Church in general, and Pope Benedict in particular, to do battle with each other. It really was amphitheater stuff. For the most part it was bewildering fare for any Catholic with an understanding of the Church and the office of its Supreme Pontiff.

One of these in particular, written two days after the event, seems to illustrate the phenomenon we are talking of. Ruth Marcus, Washington Post columnist, writing on Wednesday the 13th, used the whole event as a pretext to attack – politely on the surface but somewhat less so under the surface – the Catholic Church’s sacramental theology. Wielding her feminist weaponry she weighed in on the issue of the priesthood and took no prisoners in her attack on the pope and the Church for not permitting the priestly ordination of women.

What Marcus’ view of the Church – as well as what perhaps ninety percent of the entire media output surrounding this story – shows is the apparently unbridgeable gap between the worldview of those who see and subscribe to the existence of the happy marriage of faith and reason and those for whom reason alone is the standard by which to judge everything they see and experience.

Marcus and many more who consider themselves the apostles and apologists of modernity, those who – even while professing to be religious – cannot really comprehend what religion is about, are this kind of rationalist. But as was so clearly defined and explained by Joseph Ratzinger and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, this kind of absolute rationalist almost inevitably succumbs to relativism – and that road leads to many forms of nightmare.

Why do we say “professing to be religious”? Because for them religion  can only ever be a kind of social construct – something made by man for his own purposes, either for his consolation or to help him cope with his vague sense of the divine which will be there if he is in any way reflective.

These two worldviews now dominate Western civilization and in fact have generated two separate civilizations. These now live uneasily side by side but are currently producing all the signs of an impending conflict of dimensions not seen since the first Christians came into conflict with the Roman world, and before that, when the Judaic world came into conflict with the Hellenist forces of Antiochus and his successors.

Reading so much of the commentary generated around the impending event announced this week produces an inordinate sense of frustration in believing Christians. An enormous chasm seems to have opened up between those for whom God is a living Being who really does exist, and those for whom he is at best a vaguely perceived possible solution to some of the more persistent puzzles of our human condition.

For the former it is a theological truth that his essential mode of communication with the beings he has created is through the agency of grace and a gratuitous gift called Faith. For the latter this is nonsense. This renders any dialogue between them very fraught indeed.

Ruth Marcus’ difficulty in coping with the concept of the Catholic priesthood is just one illustration of the kind of impasse that divides these two civilizations. There are many, many more and they seem to multiply with each year that passes. Marcus has no concept, it seems, of what every faithful Catholic believes the sacraments are, what they do and how they came to be. If she did I think she would respect the right to believe and not denigrate that belief as something “backward” to which she then attributes numerous unworthy motives of greed, power, and rigidity. To her they are simply social constructs, now being held in place against the forces of modernity to preserve the hegemony of a male establishment over one half of humanity.

To faithful Catholics all the sacraments are a God-given foundation for their lives on this earth to help them on their way to eternal life. A Catholic – even if he is Pope –  will no more interfere with the sacrament of holy orders, its matter and form, than he or she will interfere with the matter (bread and wine) and form of the sacrament of the Eucharist, or with the sacrament of penance in which a penitent confesses his sins to an ordained priest to obtain absolution from God. Ruth Marcus version of modernity simply cannot comprehend such a system, but is at the same time not really prepared to tolerate its existence without denigration.

Another currently more fraught flash-point in the clash of these two civilizations just now is that of marriage. Divorce constituted the first redefinition of the institution which Christians believe was elevated to the level of a sacrament by the founder of their faith. For a Catholic, marriage remains an indissoluble bond, broken only be death. The arrangements of the state to provide for the legal dissolution of that bond have no real effect on that bond for the validly married Catholic. He or she who becomes the victim of a divorce forced on them remains married. This is incomprehensible to a brand of modernity. Equally incomprehensible to a Christian – as well as to many non-Christians, of course – is the redefinition of marriage now being pursued by some which declares that a marriage bond can be established between two human beings of the same sex. This defies not only their faith but also their rational grasp of human biology.

Marcus’ special axe is the feminist one. “The common chord of orthodox religions’ struggle against the tides of modernity involves women,” she writes, “specifically whether to loosen doctrinal restrictions on women.” She goes on to equate a current struggle between Jewish women who want to wear the tallit, a prayer shawl traditionally only worn by men, with Catholic women who want to be ordained as priests. For her it was a fitting coincidence that the latest skirmish in Israel on this issue occurred the same day that Pope Benedict XVI announced his abdication.

 “One of the central questions facing the Catholic Church — one of the stances on which Benedict was most unrelenting and on which his successor is likely to be similarly rigid — is the ordination of women,” she wrote. Most of us would not have thought so, but perhaps if feminism is your big issue then it is.

Marcus thinks that the “rational move”, for a church facing a dire worldwide shortage of priests, would be to expand the pool of potential candidates. This concession to modernity would not be resisted by the faithful, she argues, “because polls in the United States and abroad show strong majorities in support of women serving as priests.” That is precisely where raw rationalism takes you. The Catholic Church has always had and always will have a shortage of priests in relation to the task of evangelization it has been given.

The goal of the Catholic Church is not a numerical one. It is the sanctity and salvation of each individual soul on this earth, one by one. The total headcount is incidental. Had it been otherwise Christ would have watered down his insistence on the Eucharist which caused a portion of his following “to walk no more with him”. Indeed, the rational thing for Christ to have done when he came into conflict with the religious authorities of his time would have been to seek some accommodation with them. He did not, because the truth he told took precedence over the modernity of his time.

She is also wrong about resistance. The “faithful” who would ignore the sacramental truths about priesthood would no longer be faithful. The faithful who live by these sacraments will be, if necessary, the remnant of Israel. They know that to abandon the sacraments, their essential matter and form, is to abandon their faith in Christ.

Marcus, in her opening observations mentions her daughter’s bat-mitzvah at which three generations of women wore the tallit – as did the presiding rabbi. That rabbi was also a woman. From there she goes on to talk of restrictions on women in the Catholic Church. Consider this. A rabbi is, as I understand it, essentially a teacher. The Catholic Church has down through the centuries had many teachers who were women – some of whom are formally recognized as doctors of the church. Among its greatest teachers and spiritual inspirations have been Catherine of Sienna, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Hildegaard of Bingen – and in our own time Edith Stein, Teresa of Calcutta and, dare I say it, Rita Antoinette Rizzo. Who? She who is better known as Mother Angelica. These women, and many like them, had no trouble emerging from the “restrictions” imposed on them by the Catholic Church.

But all this is poppy-cock to the ultra modernist. Modernity itself is not a problem for Christians. Indeed modernity is the air that they breathe and the substance of their mission. They were exhorted by the predecessor of Benedict XVI not to be afraid of it. But modernity divorced from faith and reason is a card of the wildest and most treacherous kind. Christians are challenged to read the world in the light of something beyond reason and with that “something” to redeem it. Faithful to their sacramental life in all its divine dimensions and the message of the gospel, they will. Sadly, those anchored in a world in which faith and reason remain divorced from one another, cannot comprehend the world of these others and if their power permits it they will inevitably ridicule them, marginalize them and condemn them to obscurity – or worse. But these others will still to hear those words, “Be not afraid”, and continue on regardless.

A web of deceit?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Two stories – at least – in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph in London puzzled over the mystery of David Cameron’s strange behaviour in the recent past. Janet Daley asked how Cameron could go from what looked like a possible triumph in his European Union difficulties to what looked like a scuttling of his own party on the redefinition of marriage legislation. Christopher Booker puzzled over the same thing but soon came up with an answer which might well be, for most of us, the solution to the riddle of Cameron’s folly.

“The greatest puzzle about the ‘gay marriage’ furore” Booker wrote, “is why this issue suddenly erupted from nowhere to the top of the political agenda. Why has David Cameron been willing, as one commentator put it, to ‘trash his party’ in pushing so hard for something that, before the last election, he refused to endorse or to include in the Tory manifesto? And why, just as it was provoking the biggest Tory rebellion in decades, was it also prompting a similar row in the French National Assembly?”

Janet Daley, reading the conundrum in terms of keeping Cameron’s political scoreboard, confesses that she can’t keep up.

Was his European summit intervention a triumph over the EU budget, or not? She asked.  And if it was a success, does it cancel out the ghastly calamity of the earlier half of the week? That depends on whether the cleverness and determination of the second half was more revealing of the Prime Minister’s true character than the bloody-minded foolishness of the first. The same-sex marriage question should have been, she said, “on the scale of the country’s immediate problems, an issue of vanishingly small political import had been propelled into a five-star megacrisis of stupendous proportions”.

Was it, as one of Daley’s disgruntled and mystified confidants from the tory back benches said, a silly, off-the-top-of-our-heads gesture inspired by a half-understood observation of the US presidential election. She suggested that it might be a question of “a juvenile crush on the charismatic guy across the Pond.” Barack Obama, the epitome of “cool” in the eyes of star-struck Cameroons, had committed himself to legalising gay marriage – and he had won the election by taking states with largely urban, metropolitan electorates. Ergo, thought the great brains of Downing Street, endorsing gay marriage brings you electoral success in cosmopolitan conurbations of the kind that the Tories need to win, she said.

So what does Daley conclude? That Cameron may be too facile with language and arguments? She thinks that, maybe like a very bright but vaguely lazy student, while he can pull out a gifted verbal performance when it is absolutely necessary – when his political life depends on it – he then slips back into haphazard sloppiness when the crisis is past?

Booker’s analysis ultimately gives Cameron more credit, but if it does it is also more worrying for anyone with a modicum of democratic instinct. Ultimately, as well, it could signal an even deeper crisis for Cameron’s own party for it will be seen as signalling a subtle and sinister subversion of British sovereignty to the creeping hegemony of the European Union and the Council of Europe.

The real story behind this drama goes back to 2010, Booker argues. It has three main players, the Home Secretary Theresa May, our former Lib Dem equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, and that shadowy institution, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, with its controversial adjunct, the European Court of Human Rights.

In March 2010, ministers from the 47 countries represented in the Council of Europe agreed a “Recommendation” on “measures to combat discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity”. Section IV focused on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, guaranteeing “respect for family life”. It proposed that where national legislation recognised same-sex partnerships, these should be given the same legal status as those between heterosexuals. There was no mention of marriage as yet, except in a proposal that “transgender persons” should be entitled to “marry a person of the sex opposite to their reassigned sex”.

Four days before the 2010 general election, the Tory party issued a pamphlet, signed by Theresa May, in which a section on “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender [LGBT] issues” promised that the party would “consider the case for changing the law to allow civil partnerships to be called and classified as marriage”. But this was not in the manifesto, nor, after the election, in the Coalition Agreement.

In June that year, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that, though there was no obligation on countries to recognise same-sex partnerships, Article 8 did not specify that the right to enjoy family life applied only to couples of different sexes. It could be taken as equally applying to same-sex couples. The court proposed that, when a “consensus” emerged among the member states, this could allow the right to same-sex marriages to be recognised under the convention.

Shortly afterwards, Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister, set out new guidelines allowing “religious music” to be used in civil partnership ceremonies. She suggested that this should be regarded as a step towards allowing gay marriages. In September, the Lib Dem party conference backed her call for same-sex marriages to be legalised.

 In December a campaign group, Equal Love, helped a group of British same-sex couples to launch an action in the ECHR asking for civil partnerships to be given full marriage status. They were supported by Peter Tatchell, who told the BBC that banning gay people from marriage sent “a signal that we are regarded as socially and legally inferior”.

The campaign – with much conferring behind the scenes between ministers and gay lobby groups – was under way. In March 2011, May and Featherstone issued an official policy document, “Working for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equality: Moving Forward”. It committed the Government to work “with all those who have an interest in equal civil marriage” on how “legislation can develop”. Furthermore, it committed the Foreign Office and the new Gender Equality Office to work for “full implementation” of the Council of Europe’s 2010 Recommendation, with a target date of June 2013.

In November 2011, when Britain took over the six-monthly chairmanship of the Council of Europe, it put this at the top of the agenda. (Featherstone had already committed £100,000 of government money to creating an LGBT unit in Strasbourg to plan implementation of the policy). Britain was so keen to take the lead that, on March 27 last year, the UK’s representation in Strasbourg organised the council’s first “closed conference” (ie, public not admitted), to agree detailed plans for the June 2013 implementation, with a keynote address from Featherstone. A speech by the British judge, Sir Nicolas Bratza, then head of the European Court of Human Rights, signalled that the court was ready to declare same-sex marriage a “human right”, as soon as enough countries fell into line.

Such are the real reasons that our Government needed to rush through last week’s vote on gay marriage. We are committed to “full implementation” of the Council of Europe’s policy no later than this June (and hence the similar law now being rushed through in France). It has been a brilliant political coup by the gay lobby, aided by Featherstone, May and those shadowy European bodies that, in so many ways, now rule our lives. But why weren’t we told more honestly and openly why it has all happened?

And that is the question which makes this whole issue a much bigger one than the sentimental journeys of some gay people or the sympathies of those who fail to see the importance of fundamental change in the definition of an institution which is at the heart of a stable society and which has such bearing on the welfare of children.  The calculated manipulation of political institutions, the manipulation of public opinion and the deceit at the heart of all this is what should really be disturbing us. If the political establishment is prepared to this in pursuit of one policy it will do it for any policy.

(Posted earlier this evening on Conjugality)

Spin warning – twisters hitting all areas

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

This is an all points spin warning about serious twisters hitting Ireland today – courtesy of the Irish Times. The warning comes courtesy of the Pro Life Campaign at approximately 1600 hours today. Read and judge for yourselves. This is what we – and the unborn – are up against.

Irish Times presentation of latest poll on abortion “grossly distorted”, says Pro Life Campaign

The presentation by The Irish Times of today’s Ipsos MRBI poll on abortion was “grossly distorted”, according to the Pro Life Campaign.

In its analysis of the poll results, The Irish Times states that public support for abortion legislation has risen from 23% in 1997 to 71% today.

Ms Sherlock said: “This is a completely distorted and inaccurate presentation. The 1997 MRBI poll which The Irish Times claims showed only 23% support for abortion actually found 77% of people supported abortion in a variety of circumstances, depending on how the question was asked. However, like the poll published in today’s Irish Times, it made no distinction between abortion and necessary medical treatments in pregnancy.

“The 23% mentioned by The Irish Times was just one of the findings in a multiple choice question that included other categories of support for abortion.

“Five years later, in 2002, when the electorate had an actual choice to make in a referendum, 49% voted YES to row back on the X case ruling. An IMS poll conducted just afterwards found an additional 5% voted NO on pro-life grounds.

“In other words, despite findings like the one cited by The Irish Times from 1997 and the latest Ipsos MRBI poll, when the people have an actual democratic choice, a clear majority rejects abortion.”

Ms Sherlock concluded: “Polls showing high levels of support for abortion are nothing new. Whenever the question suppresses the distinction between induced abortion (that targets the life of the baby) and necessary medical treatments to preserve the life of the mother (where every reasonable effort is made to save the life of the baby), the results show high support for abortion. Such polls, however, significantly under represent the opposition among the electorate and create an inflated perception of the extent of public support for abortion.”

ENDS

Born to kill?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

More of the infuriating madness to which the Late Late Show exposed us was the subject of Charles Moore’s column in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. But as he sees it, all this is not just madness but is also bad and very dangerous.  He wrote:

 Last week, I appeared on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions? in Guildford. We were asked whether we thought women should be allowed to take part in full front-line combat roles in the Armed Services. I said I didn’t think that it would be an advance in human civilisation if women abandoned their traditional association with peace and started killing people as men do.

This did not please the questioner, an intelligent student from the politics department of Surrey University, or her supporters sitting with her. They thought that the only question was the ability of the woman – if she was fit to fight, fight she should, and no one should stop her.

Afterwards, I reflected on the oddity of the situation. It did not seem that the student and her colleagues were particularly interested in military matters in themselves. They also did not seem the sort of people who, in other circumstances, would be at all keen on people killing people. I could imagine them protesting against militarism. Yet here they were, pushing for a woman’s right to kill.

Why? Because of Equality, of course. It gets you into strange situations.

(Read the full article in the Telegraph)

Illogically induced brain trauma

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters4 Comments

I was in the Late Late Show audience last night. The show, on Irish television, is the longest running “chat” show in the world – we are told. I was invited on the basis of my being on the side of traditional  marriage in the forthcoming debate on gay “marriage” which is going to begin raging in this jurisdiction soon.

One homosexual person on the panel, “married” with children, objected to the term gay being attached to their campaign for legislative change. He said that what their campaign was about was “marriage equality”. A strange signal hit my brain cells – like when someone says something entirely illogical but you cannot at once put your finger on the illogicality. Essentially the nerve-ending which was touched was the one which sent a signal to my brain when writing the last paragraph telling me again that when gay is used with the word marriage then that word marriage must be put in inverted commas – because as a compound noun, gay marriage does not, and cannot, exist if marriage is accepted as a bond between a man and a woman sharing rights which depend on their complimentary biological nature.

Marriage in this sense, the sense in which the marriage bond has been understood from time immemorial, has nothing essentially to do with love. A marriage contracted between a man and a woman may be loveless and it will still be a marriage. A marriage without the commitment to share the couple’s complimentary sexual faculties is not in the proper sense a marriage at all.

I thought to myself that there must be some logical formula which can unravel this fallacy? Perhaps this is it?

Current meaning of marriage: “biological man+ biological woman+(children)”. That’s it.

What the “marriage equality” campaign is proposing is the following: “biological man+ biological woman+(children)” = “biological man+ biological man+(children)” or  “biological woman+ biological woman+(children)”.

Is this not patently false?

If you want to see the somewhat unbalanced discussion and experience first-hand the same brain trauma you can check it out at 1 hour sixteen minutes into the show.

In defence of Ironic Man

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“Irony”, Stanley Fish told us in the New York Times (January 28) “is a stance of distance that pays a compliment to both its producer and consumer. The ironist knows what other, more naïve, observers do not: that surfaces are deceptive, that the real story is not what presents itself, that conventional pieties are sentimental fictions.” Fish is taking his fellow critics to task for their love of irony and their mauling of the new movie version of the stage musical version of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, “Les Misérables”. The movie, like the musical, is devoid of irony.

This is a thought-provoking piece – not so much along the lines of his thoughts as along other, perhaps opposing, lines. Fish is essentially defending the musical and particularly its recent cinematic incarnation against nearly all the “serious” critics of the world. Let us leave Victor Hugo’s novel on which the musical is based out of this. The novel is an indisputable masterpiece. The musical bears but the most tenuous connection to it – as any examination of its very extraordinary genesis will reveal.

What Fish has to say about the musical is interesting enough but what is really interesting is what he has to say about irony and the great divide between a life examined through an ironic prism (or is it prison) and a life which is devoid of this sense. Life in the former mode is presented as one in which we encounter and deal with anguish, doubt, uncertainty; life in the latter mode is one of simplicity, certainty and untrammelled feeling. But is it as simple as that? What worried me not a little was the thought that the two main authorities whom Fish quoted in support of the unexamined raw emotional life, Mark Rothko and David Foster Wallace, both tragically took their own lives as their ultimate response to the vision of the world which they embraced. Fish makes no mention of this.

Post-modern irony seems to me an excessive and misguided expression of a very real perception of the fact that there is much more to the world and the human condition than meets the eye. In some way it seems to mock our folly in not seeing what we should see – but does not want to do anything about it. However, a genuine ironic stance is no more than an approach we take to getting beyond the surface of appearances to the reality underlying them.

The common cultural mode today is one in which we respond with enthusiasm and abandon to the superficial emotionalism of popular entertainment. This is typified by our consumption of pop music, Hollywood film and television, musicals since the 1970s – when Andrew Lloyd Weber and the likes of  ‘Les Misérables’ became the cultural phenomenon of the late 20th century. The parallel emergence of the multi-billion spectator-sport industry is another of its manifestations. All this consumption is devoid of that vital question-mark which distinguishes the response of the thinking creature from the unthinking creature.  We either feel good or bad about something. That is all there is to it. Sentiment is put above all else and when that happens sentimentalism becomes the core value of our ideology. Sentimentalism is, as D.H.Lawrence defined it, the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got. That is the ultimate destructive self-deception.

Since the consumers of these products are in fact creatures destined to think and not just to feel, when they are deprived of the challenge to do so they will not then bother to think. Their culture deprives them of the opportunity to develop that vital habit of being which is necessary for the fulfilment of their true nature. Ultimately this will leave them with a vision of their existence which will appear meaningless. The consequences of that may be the response of Rothko and Wallace, and so many others who have taken the same nihilistic path for the same nihilistic reason.

Does all this help explain in part the apparent readiness of Western societies to embrace euthanasia, abortion, and many other life choices which only make sense when perception itself is limited to the surface appearances of our existence? Does this explain the appalling superficiality of Barack Obama’s presidency and in particular the content of his second inaugural address. His appeal to the superficial and the emotional is relentless. The speech, as fork-tongued as it was banal, paid lip-service to the ideals of the Founding Fathers but the connections between his sentimental politics and their real-life politics were remote. He gushed:

“The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few, or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people. Entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. And for more than 200 years we have. Through blood drawn by lash, and blood drawn by sword, we noted that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half slave, and half free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together… For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

OK, it is just a speech, but as Janet Daly reflected in her article in The Daily Telegraph last weekend, it is a speech which chillingly betrays a fundamental change in the very nature of our democracy. While it was superficial and trite it was no less significant for that – indeed, that its trite message could pass for real political thought and be a harbinger for a new political reality was what was frighteningly historic about it in her eyes. For her it was a coming to America of the same trite political thought which New Labour brought to British politics in 1997.

“The core message was pounded home relentlessly: American government”, she wrote, “is now in the redistribution and welfare-provision business, and this is not (contrary to appearances) at variance with the founding fathers’ conception of a nation that is inherently opposed to state interference and domination over the individual. This is the new credo of American nationhood: the government, not the community or the household, will be the moral arbiter of social virtue. The traditional suspicion of the overweening power of the state is now a thing of the past. Democracy is about electing a government that will be there to protect you from hardship, shelter you from the storm and absolve you from sin. Well, no, maybe not that last one – but the concept of the state as moral saviour is not so remote from this, is it?”

And what has this to do with Stanley Fish? Perhaps this: nurture our society on superficial sentimentalism and feed it nothing more demanding than emotional highs and lows and you will take away our capacity for irony. With our sense of irony gone, and with it the capacity to see beyond superficial appearances, we will have to live with the spectre of a world in which we are represented by people who think in the way Obama thinks. We will see no hope beyond the quagmire of superficial emotionalism and sentimentalism in which they are threatening to engulf us. Our sense of irony at least gives us a gateway to a deeper and truer reading of our condition and some prospect of redemption.

Reason speaks to reason but questions remain unanswered

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

questions

It may be a pastoral letter – from a bishop to his church in a diocese in just one part of the world – but it speaks reason to reason and not just to faith to reason. What is more, it put questions to those who claim to be reasonable. Those questions have been asked before but have not been answered – they have just provoked abuse. The fear of many – and it is echoed in this letter –  is that this abuse will soon become judicial and violent, and the questions will still remain unanswered.

Thomas John Paprocki is the Catholic Bishop of Springfield in Illinois. He has written to the Catholics of his diocese, but his message can resonate around the whole of the Western world which is now in the grip of the campaign for the redefinition of human nature and the institutions society has forged from within that nature to help its own true fulfilment. He writes in the context of the state of Illinois’s consideration of a legislative proposal called “The Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act.”

Without mincing his word’s, Paprocki says, “A more fraudulent title for this dangerous measure could not be imagined. The proposed law is, in truth, a grave assault upon both religious liberty and marriage.”  The bill as drafted would in the first instance, he says, be trying to legislate an untruth.

What is that untruth and why is it untruthful? He explains why, with rational precision, and in terms which can be transferred with very little difficulty to every legislature in the world which is contemplating similar legislation :

The pending bill would, for the first time in our state’s history, redefine marriage to legally recognize same-sex “marriages.” But neither two men nor two women – nor, for that matter, three or more people – can possibly form a marriage. Our law would be lying if it said they could.

 The basic structure of marriage as the exclusive and lasting relationship of a man and a woman, committed to a life which is fulfilled by having children, is given to us in human nature.

 

Notwithstanding the vanity of human wishes, every society in human history – including every society untouched by Jewish or Christian revelation – has managed to grasp this profound truth about human relationships and happiness: marriage is the union of man and woman.

 The bill’s sponsors maintain it would simply extend marriage to some people who have long been arbitrarily excluded from it. They are wrong. The pending bill would not expand the eligibility-roster for marriage. It would radically redefine what marriage is- for everybody.

 It would enshrine in our law – and thus in public opinion and practice – three harmful ideas:

  • What essentially makes a marriage is romantic-emotional union.
  • Children don’t need both a mother and father.
  • The main purpose of marriage is adult satisfactions.

 These ideas would deepen the sexual revolution’s harms on all society. After all, if marriage is an emotional union meant for adult satisfactions, why should it be sexually exclusive? Or limited to two? Or pledged to permanence? If children don’t need both their mother and father, why should fathers stick around when romance fades? As marriage is redefined, it becomes harder for people to see the point of these profoundly important marital norms, to live by them, and to encourage others to do the same. The resulting instability hurts spouses, but also – and especially – children, who do best when reared by their committed mother and father.

 Indeed, children’s need – and right – to be reared by the mother and father whose union brought them into being explains why our law has recognized marriage as a conjugal partnership – the union of husband and wife – at all. Our lawmakers have understood that marriage is naturally oriented to procreation, to family. Of course, marriage also includes a committed, intimate relationship of a sort which some same-sex couples (or multiple lovers in groups of three or more) could imitate. But our law never recognized and supported marriage in order to regulate intimacy for its own sake. The reason marriage is recognized in civil law at all (as ordinary friendships, or other sacraments, are not) is specific to the committed, intimate relationships of people of opposite-sex couples: they are by nature oriented to having children. Their love-making acts are life-giving acts.

 Same-sex relationships lack this unique predicate of state recognition and support. Even the most ideologically blinded legislator cannot change this natural fact: the sexual acts of a same-sex couple (regardless of how one views them morally) are simply not of the type that yield the gift of new life. So they cannot extend a union of hearts by a true bodily union. They cannot turn a friendship into the one-flesh union of marriage. They are not marital. This is not just a Christian idea, but one common to every major religious tradition and our civilization’s great philosophical traditions, beginning with ancient Greece and Rome.

But the Illinois bill, which is seeking to have its cake and eat it, is also deceptive in another important way – as are the proposals of David Cameron’s coalition government in the United Kingdom and every other legislature we know of trying to do to the same thing. It is pretending that this legislation, if passed, will not conflict with the religious freedom of the citizens of any country which adopts its model. Those legislators who are not inherently hostile to religion – and many are – are burying their heads in the sand if they do not recognise that this legislation is going to lead to a denial of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and ultimately to religious persecution.

Paprocki continues:

The pending bill is not only a dangerous social experiment about marriage. It is also a lethal attack upon religious liberty. This so-called “religious freedom” would not stop the state from obligating the Knights of Columbus to make their halls available for same-sex “weddings.” It would not stop the state from requiring Catholic grade schools to hire teachers who are legally “married” to someone of the same sex. This bill would not protect Catholic hospitals, charities, or colleges, which exclude those so “married” from senior leadership positions. Nor would it protect me, the Bishop of Springfield, if I refused to employ someone in a same-sex “marriage” who applied to the Diocese for a position meant to serve my ministry as your bishop. This “religious freedom” law does nothing at all to protect the consciences of people in business, or who work for the government. We saw the harmful consequences of deceptive titles all too painfully last year when the so-called “Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act” forced Catholic Charities out of foster care and adoption services in Illinois.

 These threats do not raise a question about drafting a better law, one with more extensive conscience protections. There is no possible way – none whatsoever- for those who believe that marriage is exclusively the union of husband and wife to avoid legal penalties and harsh discriminatory treatment if the bill becomes law. Why should we expect it be otherwise? After all, we would be people who, according to the thinking behind the bill, hold onto an “unfair” view of marriage. The state would have equated our view with bigotry – which it uses the law to marginalize in every way short of criminal punishment.

He proposes to the citizens of his state, and his proposal con be considered by every reasonable citizen of the world: The only way to protect religious liberty, and to preserve marriage, is to defeat this perilous proposal. Please make sure our elected representatives understand that and know that they will be held to account. We should all do the same when this campaign – as it certainly will where it has not done so already – puts pressure on our democratic representatives to consider similar legislation.

(Also posted to MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog this morning).

Now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it again

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
A mystified David Quinn, Director of the Iona Institute

What is going on? Now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it again. Google has been involved in some sinister censorship – or perhaps they just blundered and then caught themselves on.

Late this morning the Irish Times in Dublin ran an online story that YouTube had terminated, without explanation or prior notice, the account of the Iona Institute, an Irish-based think-tank defending  the family, marriage, education and religion. Without giving any specifics the Institute got an email saying the the account had been closed “due to repeated or severe violations of our terms of service”.

By mid-afternoon the Irish Times story changed: the account was back in good standing again – but still without any explanations being given on the details of its mysterious death and resurrection.

Whether all this was a glitch or whether the furious cyber activity on Twitter which followed the Iona account’s demise caused Google to re-evaluate its censorious move we may never know. All attempts to prise information from the search engine have so far failed. Watch this space – but don’t hold your breath.

The only reason that David Quinn, the Director of the Institute, can give for the unilateral decision to terminate the account is that Google disapproved of a video which they have run on YouTube explaining the nature of marriage.

That they should have taken offence at this still mystifies him. There are many such video’s on the channel and why this one, not in any way offensive –  just soberly factual – does not make sense to him. Whatever the story, “all’s well that ends well”. Whether the Google gremlins behind this are likely to strike again we will have to wait and see.

Blind and shameless collusion in abortion news coverage

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

We are of course rejoicing at the success of the phenomenal pro-life demonstration in Dublin on Saturday. It was achieved in the face of what one could only describe as a media blackout of the event in the weeks leading up to it. It must surely have given both the conscientious and the crowd-following public representatives something to think about. The conscientious will have had their convictions reinforced by the platform speakers who sent out loud and clear statements and illustrations of the crime that the killing of the unborn is. For the populist crowd-followers it gave evidence that pro-life people power is on the move and for them this is a chilling signal that their cosy parliamentary seats might also be on the move.

More than 25,000 people from all over the country gathered in Merrion Square to protest at the coalition government’s proposal to legislate for abortion within the jurisdiction of the Irish Republic. Abortion is currently prohibited under the terms of a constitutional amendment passed overwhelmingly by the people 30 years ago. An estimated 150 pro-abortion demonstrators presented themselves at the venue as well.

But we are also once again confronted with the story-within-a-story. The story of the shameless bias of the media which spells out one fact over all others: the majority of those in the positions of influence in the media in this country are openly and unapologetically campaigning for the pro-abortion cause.

If anyone needed confirmation that there is collusion between the Irish media – orchestrated, one suspects, from behind the closed doors of sub-editing rooms – and the international press one has only to scan the reports of the Vigil in the newspapers over the following days. It did not make the front page of a single broadsheet on Monday. The Irish Times reported on it without the slightest allusion to its significance. Even RTE managed to rise to using the term “game-changer” in its Saturday evening report. That this surprised us speaks for itself. Can you imagine what we would have been reading and listening to had such numbers turned out for a pro-abortion rally? Try. You won’t find it very taxing.

How did Independent Newspapers report this the following day? The opening paragraph of a report attributed to Sarah Stack and the Press Association was this:

PROTESTERS for and against abortion have staged separate rallies in Dublin as each side step up their campaigning. The Pro-Life Campaign urged people to stand up for “the right of the unborn child” at its Unite for Life Vigil but were (sic) accused of going against legislation that would save the lives of women. Note that “right of the unborn child” in inverted commas.

The Government, we were reminded, has committed to legislate and introduce regulations to allow abortion if there is a real and substantial risk to a woman’s life, including the threat of suicide.

The report then entered even-handed mode when Pro-life spokeswoman Caroline Simons’ words were reported. She told the crowd, the biggest Dublin has seen for a decade or more, that the Government’s argument that abortion is needed to treat threatened suicide in pregnancy was demolished at the hearings on abortion held in the parliament over a week ago.

“The psychiatrists who addressed the hearings were unanimous that abortion is not a treatment for suicidal ideation”, Simons said. “But there is evidence that abortion increases the risk of future mental health problems for a significant number of women.

“The facts are simple. Where a pregnant woman’s life is at risk, Irish law and current Irish medical practice allows doctors to intervene to ensure women receive whatever treatments are necessary to safeguard their lives, even where this unavoidably results in the death of the baby.”

But that was as even-handed as it was going to get. Separately, Stack then told us, – without mentioning the number protesting – that pro-choice campaigners staged a counter-demonstration nearby and said pro-life groups are protesting against the introduction of legislation that would save the lives of women living in Ireland.

“They’re protesting against legislation that the majority have voted for in a referendum. They’re protesting against a supreme court decision. They’re protesting directly against what the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) says Ireland needs to do to protect the human rights of pregnant women,” a spokesperson for this group complained about the 25, 000.

Then came the red-herring inbthevform of a report of a two-day-old story about the opening of an inquest into the death of Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar on October 28 after she suffered a miscarriage. The international media has – with the help of its Irish fellow-travellers – sat in judgement on this and has decreed that Savita died because she was refused an abortion. On the information currently available there is absolutely no basis whatsoever for that conclusion.

Stack’s report then goes over the background to that case – all in the context of the demonstration in Dublin. No mention is made of the multiple statements made by gynaecologists, and by speakers at yesterday’s demonstration, that there is no evidence that an abortion need ever be resorted to as a solution to a complication which might arise in pregnancy.

Stack then proceeded to report on the formation of a new pro-choice group, Abortion Rights Campaign, being established in the country.

She reported that Clare Daly TD said the campaign is not a sprint but a marathon. “We’re here for the long haul,” she said. “In the meantime, we want the immediate introduction of legislation for the right to safe, legal abortion when a woman’s life is at risk, including from suicide.

“We also want the simplest, broadest legislation that includes the right to abortion in the case of fatal foetal abnormality. We will keep the pressure on until we get this.”

She did not say what everyone knows, that the pro-abortion campaign wants abortion on demand, and knows that prime minister Enda Kenny’s “restrictive” legislative proposal is the best way to get it.

The entire report devoted about 150 words to the demonstration by 25,000 people while the cause being promoted by the pro-choice group got the lion’s share of attention with over twice that. Shameless. Admittedly another report, seen online, by two reporters from the group’s newsroom did carry more of the content of what was said at the demonstration. But it was not much more and it also laboured the Halappanavar case which in the end of the day may have nothing at all to do with abortion and be revealed as a sad case of a woman dying from the effects of an infection.

For some serious coverage of the demonstration a more balanced report can be read here. See this short YouTube video for an atmospheric snapshot of the event.

All this is happening in Ireland while conscientious Americans are mourning the more than 55 milion lives sacrificed on the twin altars of, on the one hand, false compassion, and on the other of selfishness and self-indulgence. This is the toll of lives taken over the 40 years since the US Supreme Court conceded the right to life of the unborn in Roe V Wade.

Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, keeps telling his people that he is not entering the same road as this. He offers no plausible reasons for this assertion, no reasons at all in fact, but instead moans about receiving abusive letters among which are some which suggest that he is “worse than Herod” who slaughtered the Holy Innocents. Well, he may not be worse than Herod. But if he presides over the passing of legislation which will lead to the intentional killing of babies in the womb, even one baby in the womb, then he will bear responsibility for that act and will join a significant number of public representatives who are running Herod a close scond. Is there any other moral reasoning which will deny that? These babies are the new Holy Innocents.

The US picture is truly horrendous. Since that fateful decision by nine men on the Supreme Court in 1973, there have been approximately 55,772,015 abortions that have destroyed the lives of unborn children. Looked at another way, that is 1,392,500 abortions each and every year, 116,191 abortions each and every month in all 50 states. The math breaks down to 26,813 abortions each and every week nationwide. And every day, that’s 3,820 abortions.

Almost 4,000 children have died in America from abortions each and every day since.

“No light, but rather darkness visible”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The tower of babel…an new incarnation?

Rod Liddle’s brilliant summing up (Spectator) of the latest tea-cup turbulence in the Northern Isles begins with the spoon which started it all:

‘Women … are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’
— Suzanne Moore

He then continues suggesting that “One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries.”

Sulphur might be more like what we will smell. How these people hate each other?

“Please let that day come quickly,” Liddle continues. “In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves.”

I don’t really think this is very enjoyable. It is in fact, one of the saddest sights on earth because it is a horrific reminder of how our civilization is being dragged into an abyss of fear, hatred and utter contradiction of everything beautiful and reasonable.

Suzanne Moore’s quote comes from a piece she wrote in the New Statesman. For Liddle the row it caused simply gives an insight into the metro left’s bizarre psychosis. “That anodyne sentence above, which is presumably meant to express the pressure women feel to conform to a particular body-type, was taken amiss by Britain’s vibrant community of transsexuals. They eviscerated Moore for doing what I just did and referring to them as transsexuals rather than transsexual people, but also stuck the boot in by suggesting that the writer was mocking their gender, was perhaps bullying them. Undoubtedly, they asserted online and later in print, this was evidence of deviance — not sexual deviance, but deviation from political correct orthodoxy; Moore was revealing an inner hatred of transsexual people. And she was cissexist. Now there’s a term. Have you heard it before? I hadn’t. It is a wonderful day when we can stumble across a new hate crime of which we might all one day be accused: cissexism is the suspicion that transsexual people’s ‘identified gender’ is somehow less genuine than that of people born to the gender in which they remain. Are you guilty of cissexism? You bastard.”

All that was bad enough while it was raging in the egg-cup of the New Statesman’s followers. But then the storm spread futher afield when Moore’s friend Julie Burchill jumped to the defence of her ideological soulmate in The Observer newspaper. Liddle quotes one very witty commentator’s online description of the effects of this intervention: ‘Julie Burchill poured oil on troubled waters. Then she put some seabirds in the oil. Then she set fire to the oil.’ Burchill described the transsexuals as ‘screaming mimis’ and ‘bedwetters in bad wigs’.

But this is also where the whole thing gets sad and worrying because a government minister intervenes, none other than one of those behind David Cameron’s push to destroy marriage. See how it all fits?

Lynne Featherstone tweeted in defence of all transsexuals and describes Burchill’s article as ‘bigoted vomit’ and suggested that both she and the editor of the Observer, John Mulholland, should be sacked. Is it any wonder that the press is worried about the implications of the Leveson Report for a free press – threatening to put control of media in the hands of such as Featherstone? She is the minister for International Development. What is going on?

If this case is anything to go by the press is already knuckling under to the PC-gay-transexual mafia which seems to control Westminster. “How did Mr Mulholland respond?” Liddle asks, and gives the worrying answer: “Did this titan of the press, this staunch and stoic defender of freedom of speech stand by his columnist? Um, not exactly. He instead apologized for having run Julie Burchill’s article and within the hour the piece had been expunged from the joint Guardian-Observer website, no trace of it remaining. But in making his apology Mulholland did say that the Observer supported freedom of speech and did so terribly bravely sometimes. Just, er, not this time.”