Much ado about nothing?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Ireland – at least Ireland south of what used to be the border between ‘the North’ and the Republic – will have no say in ‘Brexit’ on June 23. The majority here would probably vote ‘remain’ if there was a choice. However, Christopher Booker’s colum in today’s Sunday Telegraph might give us a few reasons to think that the whole issue is all a bit anachronistic. The world has a habit of moving on and making us all look a bit foolish about the things we make a fuss over. This is what Booker had to say:

Scarcely a sentence in that creepy government leaflet telling us to vote to stay in the EU does not cry out for factual correction. But one is particularly disingenuous – concealing a colossal shift in how we are governed which is scarcely being noticed in this campaign. Among the ways it claims the EU is “improving our lives” is a reference to how, as from next year, “roaming charges will be abolished across the EU”. This will save users of mobile telephones “up to 38p a minute on calls”.
The EU was first asked to abolish roaming charges by a global body called the International Telephone Users Group (INTUG) way back in 1999. But it so dragged its feet that eventually INTUG approached another global body, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD then involved a third global body, the International Telecommunications Union, which used the rules of a fourth, the World Trade Organisation, to ensure that by 2013 roaming charges were being abolished right across the world with the EU right at the back of the queue.

What everyone has been missing, although it should be highly relevant to this referendum, is the astonishing scale on which the making of our laws has been passed up to a global level, to scores of mysterious organisations which then hand down rulings to be implemented by lesser regional bodies, such as the EU.

One after another, groups campaigning to “Remain” have been claiming as benefits of our membership of the EU things which have, in fact, been handed down by this fast-emerging network of global governance. There has been much talk, for instance, of how the EU is playing a key part in ending wholesale tax avoidance by multi-national corporations. But one reason why they have been getting away with this for so long is that the EU had enshrined in its treaty that right to the “free movement of capital” originally laid down by the OECD.

Only when this became an embarrassing international scandal was it taken up by the G20, which is now acting with the UN Conference on Trade and Development to change the rules. Thus the steps being made to address the problem are due entirely to our new system of “global government”, in which the EU is only a subordinate player.

Stronger in Europe, the group leading the “Remain” campaign, claims that, if we were to leave the EU, disabled people would somehow lose their rights. But these are enshrined in the 2010 Equality Act putting into UK law the UN Convention on the Rights of the Disabled which, as the EU’s own website makes clear, must be implemented by all member states.

The BBC was recently having fun with a lamentably inadequate history of all those long-controversial EU regulations laying down the required marketing standards for fruit and veg, such as cabbages, cucumbers and bananas. The point it wanted to make was that Brussels had finally recognised these rules as being “a little bit daft”, and so very sensibly repealed them. 

But what the BBC failed to tell us was that the reason they were all scrapped was that they have now been replaced by new standards handed down from another global body: the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) based not in Brussels but in Geneva.

In many ways UNECE plays a greater part in making our laws than Brussels, over everything from marketing standards to vehicle design. 

One reason why the EU is able to boast that it has been cutting back on its tens of thousands of directives and regulations is simply that it has been replacing them with new rules handed down from higher bodies such as UNECE, the International Standards Organisation, the International Maritime Organisation and scores of others, many also based in Geneva.

Two years ago, in the week David Cameron gave his Bloomberg speech announcing the referendum, I wrote about this under the heading “Forget Brussels: now we are ruled by the giants of Geneva”. But so parochial are the mantras being repeated ad nauseam by both sides of the campaign, that neither has noticed this revolution in the way the world is governed. The implications are immense. It is time we woke up to the fact that, in very significant respects, the EU has become an irrelevance.

Something special, something personal

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters3 Comments
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Then…

A very special reunion is going to take place in Rockbrook Park School on Saturday-week, 30 April. This year the school celebrates the 40th anniversary of its foundation. A very happy birthday, Rockbrook.

I will be there for the occasion. In 1994 I ended my 16-year association with Rockbrook. They were great and happy years. I look forward very much to the prospect of renewing contact with as many as possible of the former students and their parents whose lives intersected with mine over for a handful of those 16 happy years. They were certainly happy for me and hopefully fruitful for them – and as happy as schooldays can be for schoolboys.

Over the past few years, courtesy of social media, contact with many of those who rubbed shoulders with me from ’78 to ’94 has been touching and at times lively. Although social media can often be anything but social and might be better described as anti-social, this has never been my experience in these exchanges.

LBR (Life Before Rockbrook) for me, as some of you may know or remember, was centred in a late-lamented newspaper office on the banks of the Liffey at Burgh Quay in Dublin, the editorial offices of The Irish Press group. They were also great years and leaving Burgh Quay to take up work in a school was not without regrets. Moving from being poacher – the group’s education correspondent – to being gamekeeper was how the late Christina Murphy described it in her Irish Times article on the school. Leaving Rockbrook after 16 years was no easier.

But I’m a restless soul and an addiction to the clattering keyboard brought me back to where I started in a certain sense. Now the old media is dying – or dead, as in the case of The Irish Press. But the new media of the internet age, badly paid as it is, is perfectly adequate to feed my addiction. Over 500 posts – or fixes – to Garvan Hill and MercatorNet are evidence enough of that, not to mention Position Papers and other outlets for my hallucinations.

One of the consolations of the new media is its semi-permanence – at least until some cyber-war shatters the edifice to smithereens. In the old days there was something dispiriting about walking home in the early hours of Sunday morning, having put the final edition of The Sunday Press to bed, and finding yourself picking up the early edition from the pavement. There, trampled underfoot, was your by-line on the piece you had spent the earlier part of the week sweating over to enlighten or entertain your fellow countrymen. Rockbrook boys never treated you with ingratitude like that, I like to think.

Occasionally the old life of those years on that hill overlooking Dublin and my present life intersect again, most recently just a few weeks ago. Online I made some reference to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and by coincidence a former student of Rockbrook contacted me to say he had just attended a live performance of the same. He spoke of the feelings of gratitude it stirred in him – which I took, I hope not too self-indulgently, to refer to my faltering efforts inculcate some love for great music in young hearts when we were together as teacher and pupil on that hill in South Dublin.

Enough meandering! To those who read this who are Rockbrookinans, I’m looking forward in hope to seeing you on the evening of 30 April.

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…and now

Complicated bedfellows – myth and reality

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Irish President visiting Windsor Castle – it took 100 years (approx.)

There’s no better way, Rowan Light writes of W. B. Yeats’ famous poem, Easter 1916, to understand the history and people of Ireland, or rather of many “ Irelands”.
The poem tells us of Ireland’s 1916 revolt which led to the sundering of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland:

All changed, changed utterly  

A Terrible beauty is born.

The “ terrible beauty” of 1916 is its raw imaginative power, Light writes in a very perceptive and balanced essay on the subject of that revolt and the current commemoration of it in Ireland, just posted on MercatorNet.com. He describes it as “a tabula rasa which provides for the myriad interpretations as presented during the centenary.
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This myriad incorporates: “the duality of republicanism and constitutional nationalism; the rebels of Easter 1916 and the soldiers of the Somme; victims of British colonialism and willing partners in the building of empire; the traditions of the north and south; and so forth. The Easter Rising was as much a conflict between these many Irelands – a foreshadowing of the civil war – than it was a rejection of British rule.”
He finds it very appropriate “that the centenary commemorations were inaugurated by a rendition of Danny Boy, symbolising both reconciliation – a song written by an Englishman beloved by nationalists and unionists, Catholics and Protestants alike – and the shattering of modern life; the haunting lyrics of tragedy and doomed love – ‘tis you must go and I must bide – speaking eloquently of a fragmented people, long riven by violence, diaspora, and history itself.”
He might also have noted some irony in the fact that the music which accompanies this lyric is an old traditional Irish melody – known to the Gaelic Irish as the Derry Air, but to the Unionist Irish as the Londonderry Air. The Londonderry/Derry divide is still a potent symbol of the 17th century colonisation of Northern Ireland, from which Ireland’s still-lingering discontents derive their origin.
This fragmentation, he writes perceptively, “is also symbolic of Ireland today: politically and morally fragmented. The country’s main political parties originate from the two sides of the civil war, and remain too bitter to negotiate a stable government in the national interest. Taoiseach Kenny, the leader of Fine Gael, a party of conservative, Mass-going Catholics, pursues an agenda of gay marriage and abortion liberalisation (One parliamentarian admitted that the rebel leaders “ would have probably been perplexed” by the marriage referendum). Notions of republican sovereignty strain under the increasingly tenuous economic and political union of Europe.”
Finally he asks:
“What then is the significance of the Easter Rising? Clearly, it’s complicated. The centenary tells us a lot about the crisis of modern life as much as the uncertain foundations of Irish nationhood. When people are less and less able to agree on common values, they look for salvation in founding fathers and their Proclamations, Declarations and Constitutions. Modern commemoration is an attempt to claim that space, created by the state but given its imaginative power by the people, for a new conversation, a retrieval, of what it means to be human; to be connected to community and the world around us. If the centenary of 1916 has taught us anything, it is this: what that world will be is up for debate.”
Recalling T. S. Elliot’s The Waste Land we might apply these lines from
The Fire Sermon:

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’

As Light says, evaluating the significance of Ireland’s revolt “is compicated”. For some there was so much ambivalence in this celebration of its centenary that it leaves them uneasy – wanting to commemorate something that had elements of the heroic but also something in which there was a serious moral ambiguity; something that for the majority represented their national myth but for a minority was a symbol of a threatened oppression. Hopefully we can now get back to real life again and recognise that, whether you liked it or did not like it, it happened and cannot be changed. The truth is that Ireland’s fortunes are still intricately tied to the future and the fortunes of the United Kingdom and the new threat to her well-being and prosperity – and the unity of the Island of Ireland – again hinges on what the British are going to decide on 23 June.
Read Light’s full analysis here.
Rowan Light is a post-graduate student in history at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand.

– See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/what-does-the-terrible-beauty-mean/17905#sthash.9trrDTOZ.dpuf

The not-so-little Sisters of the Poor

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

On Monday last, William McGurn, columnist with the Wall Street Journal, wrote a powerful oped piece about the battling Little – or not so little, it now seems – Sisters of the Poor whom he describes as “front and center” in the battle for freedom of conscience in America.

He recalls the Bing Crosby classic “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” where a nun teaches a bullied boy to fight back, even though she herself believes in turning the other cheek.

Today (April 9), when they will be at Notre Dame to accept an award from the Center for Ethics and Culture for their work upholding the worth and dignity of every human life, the Little Sisters have an opportunity to do the same. Two weeks ago, they were in the US Supreme Court battling the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate. Front and centre? Dead on.

Perhaps while on campus, McGurn suggests, the Little Sisters could take a page from Hollywood—and put some fight back into the Fighting Irish. He wrote:

Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) gives a boxing lesson in ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s’ (1945).

The Little Sisters are front and center in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act mandate that requires them to change their health-care plan to offer employees contraceptives, sterilization procedures and abortion-inducing drugs—all contrary to Catholic teaching. The Little Sisters argue the administration is forcing them to choose between their faith and the loving care they provide men and women too old or too poor to care for themselves.

Notre Dame faces the same mandate. There, alas, the similarities end.

At the heart of the government’s case is a phony accommodation for objecting nonprofits. All it wants from the Little Sisters or Notre Dame, it says, is a signed “opt-out.”

In fact, the notice the Obama administration demands is not an opt-out (which the Little Sisters would happily sign) but the legal authorization to have their health plan commandeered. Remember, if the federal government wanted to distribute contraceptives on its own, there would be no Supreme Court fight.

The fight has been joined for two reasons. First, the Obama administration insists on having these contraceptives distributed through the Little Sisters’ own plan. Second, it has at the same time underestimated the pluck and mettle of these women.

For even with courts ruling against them and the threat of fines of $70 million a year, the Little Sisters consistently refused to bend.

And Notre Dame? Big ol’ shake-down-the-thunder Notre Dame, with its $10 billion endowment? Under pressure, the Irish signed.

It wasn’t the only mixed signal. In July 2013, when the White House announced its final rules for its fake accommodation, most objectors who had their earlier suits dismissed because they were not ripe simply refiled. But Notre Dame dithered, and didn’t refile until just three weeks before the mandate’s requirements were to take effect. When they lost on appeal they signed the form to avoid the fines while the litigation proceeded.

Is it any wonder that some observers, such as the trial judge who heard the case, say Notre Dame’s actions suggest it doesn’t really believe what it claims it believes?

Cue to the more recent announcement from Notre Dame that it will bestow on Joe Biden its Laetare Medal, the oldest award in American Catholicism. Not only does Vice President Biden have a long and loud public record in opposition to Catholic teaching on abortion and marriage, he is the second-highest official in an administration that Notre Dame has accused in court of forcing it to “violate its own conscience.”

Mr. Biden will receive the Laetare at commencement alongside former House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican. In choosing the duo, Notre Dame’s president, Father John Jenkins, says the school is striking a blow against the “toxic political environment.”

Presumably contributors to our toxic environment include the local bishop, who has spoken out against the award. For Notre Dame is doing the one thing the bishops have asked Catholic institutions not to do: give those who act in defiance of the church’s fundamental moral principles “awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

How thoroughly Obamalike Notre Dame has been here, coupling an in-your-face award with the suggestion that anyone who has an argument to the contrary must be uncivil. On top of this, the university gets a prince of the church—Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl—to come out for an honorary degree, providing an imprimatur that effectively big-foots the local bishop and, as the National Catholic Reporter gleefully notes, undermines the bishops’ own 2004 statement on Catholics in public life.

And the intellectual defense of the claim that Mr. Biden’s “genius,” as the Laetare news release puts it, has “illustrated the ideals of the Church”? That there is no connection between a politician and his policy record.

All in all, it’s a sad message Notre Dame sends: Principles are a fine thing—just don’t let them get in the way of a comfortable place in society.

The good news is, the Little Sisters do not punt. And if freedom does prevail over this mandate, it will be in good part because these women put it all on the line when others—far wealthier and better connected—took the road more timid.

Originally at: http://www.wsj.com/article_email/the-little-sisters-vs-notre-dame-1459811818-lMyQjAxMTI2MDA3NTYwNzU2Wj

A call to Ireland to take a stand against genocide

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith Matters1 Comment

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The Irish Government will be called on this evening to formally recognise as genocide the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities at the hands of ISIS. John Pontifex, Head of Press and Information at Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) UK, a leading campaigner on behalf of the rights of persecuted Christians, will make the call at a talk he is giving on the topic tonight in Dublin.

He has just returned from a fact-finding trip to Syria, visiting Christians and others in Homs, Damascus and rural districts plagued by violence, persecution and extreme poverty. In his work with ACN, he has visited Iraq as well as other parts of the Middle East, Pakistan, China, Sudan, Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.

“On trips to Syria and Iraq” he said today, “I have seen with my own eyes the churches that have been repeatedly desecrated by Islamic State, I have met the people driven from their homes and I have also spoken to those who have been kidnapped, their lives threatened. The evidence makes plain the intent of the persecutors to flush out individual sections of society; that is why the Irish government should join with others in recognising the actions in question as genocide according to the definition given under the UN Convention on Genocide. Nor is this genocide only against Christians; it recognises Yazidis and Shiite Muslims as victims too.”

The US House of Representatives recently voted by 373 votes to nil to recognise as genocide what is happening to religious minorities at the hands of ISIS. The European Parliament voted in favour of a similar resolution late last year.

The talk in Dublin takes place tonight at 8pm and is entitled ‘Genocide: how Christians are being killed and driven out of the Middle East for their faith’. It is being jointly hosted by Aid to the Church in Need Ireland and The Iona Institute. It is will chaired by historian and political activist, Dr Martin Mansergh. It takes places in the Alexander hotel, Dublin 2. Admission is free.

Truly great thoughts…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

  
Today’s Back Back Story, courtesy of The New York Times encourages us to get out and walk more.
“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

That quotation by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was included in a Stanford University study in 2014 that showed how walking can fuel creative thought.

It’s no mystery that walking enhances health. But researchers have found that it also improves the flow of oxygen to the brain, helping with mental awareness and memory.

Today is National Walking Day, and many cities are participating. The annual event was introduced by the American Heart Association about 10 years ago because people, it says, spend too much time sitting in front of screens at work and home.

Regularly placing one foot in front of the other, ideally briskly, for at least 30 minutes a day can offset that inactivity and reduce the risk of obesity, heart disease and stroke. And more good news: Researchers have found that walkers are most likely burning more calories than they think.

There is a lot of advice out there about the types of shoes to buy, how to stretch and the pros and cons of activity trackers.

But no philosophizing is needed to figure out the first step: Get off your behind.

I’m now off for a brisk walk.

A raw deal for some?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

5/4/2015. Easter Rising Commemorations

The symbolism and the irony were striking. This was the day which Irish people gathered in their thousands, probably over one hundred thousand of them, to commemorate the rebellion which Northern Irish unionists saw and resisted as the violent harbinger of Rome Rule on the island of Ireland.

Nevertheless, as Irish Catholics searched through their native broadcast channels for a transmission of the Easter message Rome’s ruler, Pope Francis, to the city and the world, Urbi et orbi, they failed to find one. The message was ignored by the Irish broadcast media this morning. Anyone who wanted to see and hear it had to go to the Internet service provided by that quintessential British medium, the Daily Telegraph.

If the aspirations of those men and women in 1916 was at heart Catholic – and for not a few of them it was an important part of the mix in their hot heads – it has surely now proved to be an abysmally fruitless one. The policy decisions of Ireland’s broadcast media certainly seem to underline the apostate stance now being vaunted by Ireland’s establishment. If the hearts and minds of the Irish people are not quite there yet we cannot say. But if they are not it is no fault of the country’s mainstream media and the sheepish political class which dances to their tune.

On Irish television this evening, at a prime viewing time for young and old, one of Ireland’s national television channels is broadcasting a film called The Queen of Ireland, a transvestite romp fronted by the sometimes-man-sometimes-woman, Rory O’Neil a.k.a. Panti Bliss. Another Irish television channel broadcast its post gay marriage referendum analysis/celebration programme from his/her gay bar in the centre of Dublin last year. This is the face of Ireland’s insurrection one hundred years on. It cannot be said for sure that everyone celebrating on the streets this weekend knows that this may be what is being celebrated. But it is certainly at the heart of the ambivalence of some about the whole elaborate event.

Up north in the six counties of Northern Ireland, faithful Protestant Christians look on and wonder how their forebears go it so wrong. Either way, they are probably thinking, we are better off not to be associated with that lot. They are thankful that they kept their allegiance to a jurisdiction which is tolerant and happy to provide as fair a service as it can to all its citizens – in broadcasting and in other fields . Meanwhile, Catholics in the res publica which comprises the rest of the island wonder, quietly, if they got a bit of a raw deal 100 years ago.

Given their experience this morning, as they searched through their native broadcast channels for the message of peace from the Vicar of Christ in Rome, maybe there weren’t many other conclusions they could come to?

The death penalty “does not do justice to the victims, but foments vengeance”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

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“Justice will never be reached by killing a human being”, Pope Francis, quoting Dostoevsky,  tells campaigners for the end of the death penalty.

In this letter to the President of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty, Federico Mayor, he outlines loudly and clearly the Christian case against the state’s taking on itself the right to end the life of human beings as a punishment or a way of doing justice to the victim of a crime. He writes in the letter:

 

The Magisterium of the Church, beginning with Sacred Scripture and the centuries-old experience of the People of God, defends life from conception until natural death, and supports full human dignity in as much as image of God (Cf. Genesis 1:26).

Human life is sacred because from its beginning, from the first instant of conception, it is fruit of the creative action of God (Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2258), and from that moment, man, the only creature God loves for itself, is the object of personal love on the part of God (Cf. Gaudium et spes, 24).

Life, especially human life, belongs to God alone. Not even the murderer loses his personal dignity and God himself makes himself its guarantor. As Saint Ambrose teaches, God did not want to punish Cain for the murder, as He wants the repentance of the sinner, not his death (Cf. Evangelium vitae, 9).

On some occasions it is necessary to repel proportionally an aggression underway to avoid an aggressor causing harm, and the necessity to neutralize him might entail his elimination: it is the case of legitimate defense (Cf. Evangelium vitae, 55). However, the assumptions of legitimate personal defense are not applicable to the social milieu, without risk of distortion. Because when the death penalty is applied, persons are killed not for present aggressions, but for harm caused in the past. Moreover, it is applied to persons whose capacity to harm is not present but has already been neutralized, and who find themselves deprived of their freedom.

Today the death penalty is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime of the condemned. It is an offense against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the human person that contradicts God’s plan for man and society and His merciful justice, and it impedes fulfilling the just end of the punishments. It does not do justice to the victims, but foments vengeance.

For a State of Law, the death penalty represents a failure, because it obliges it to kill in the name of justice. Dostoevsky wrote: “To kill one who killed is an incomparably greater punishment than the crime itself. Killing in virtue of a sentence is far worse than the killing committed by a criminal.” Justice will never be reached by killing a human being.

The death penalty loses all legitimacy given the defective selectivity of the criminal system and in face of the possibility of judicial error. Human justice is imperfect, and not to recognize its fallibility can turn it into a source of injustices.

With the application of capital punishment the condemned is denied the possibility of reparation or amendment of the harm caused; the possibility of Confession, by which man expresses his interior conversion; and contrition, gateway of repentance and of expiation, to comer to the encounter of the merciful and healing love of God.

 

As I expressed in my allocution of last October 23, “the death penalty implies the denial of love to enemies, preached in the Gospel. All Christians and all men of good will are obliged not only to fight for the abolition of the death penalty, legal or illegal, and in all its forms, but also for prison conditions to be better, in respect of the human dignity of the persons deprived of freedom.”

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The full text of the letter is here.

 

Et tu Disney?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

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Christians truly are at a head-scratching moment as they confront the drift of the modern secular world. Drift indeed may be a too gentle a phenomenon to describe what is bearing down on them. It is much more like a deluge and so much so that not a few of them must be contemplating building an Ark. They have wished for better for this world, have worked for its configuration to a model of our species’ true nature but now appear to have their backs against the wall.  They continue living in this secular society hoping for peaceful coexistence with those who do not see our nature or our world in the same way as they do. With each day that passes this hope is challenged more and more.

For decades now there has been concern and debate among believing and conscientious Christians about their representation in the legislative assemblies of the Western world. In jurisdictions stretching from the United Kingdom, through Ireland, France and Spain to the United States and Canada, national and federal chambers have one by one enshrined laws which contravene central moral principles of their faith.

These legislatures have now set out on a path to recalibrate their respective societies according to the fundamental principles of an anthropology alien to much of what Christians both rationally and religiously know and believe to represent the true nature of the human species.Today the political establishment seems to be turning its back on the Christian ethics which for 1700 years have been advancing as the standard behind our laws.

But this is not really their biggest problem. The first Christian communities on the planet lived under such regimes, managing a level of coexistence which enabled them to survive, thrive and evangelise – barring sporadic episodes of paranoid persecution. The forces which from time to time set out to destroy them were for the most part inept and dysfunctional. The Edict of Milan in 313 brought the political establishment to its senses and outlawed intolerance against Christians.

Now in the 21st century, through a creeping process in the legislatures of formerly Christian countries across the globe, the notional Edict of Milan has been revoked and the right of Christians to practice and live by the principles of their religion is now no longer being tolerated. This, of course, has happened before, but never in a way in which it is happening now.

Within a few decades of the death of the Emperor Constantine, his successor,  Julian, tried to reverse the Edict. For that abortive attempt he is known in history as Julian the Apostate. Then came the armies of Islam which wiped out Christianity in half the known world, and threatened to do so in the other half. Nearer to our own time the French Revolution sent thousands of Christians to their deaths. Then in the last century the twin scourges of Marxism and Nazi ideology did the same.

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On all those occasions the challenge was met and the threat subsided.

But now it is different. In our age there is a new element. It would seem that the grass roots have been to a degree, transformed. Add to this the sad trend among the political classes of abandoning any pretension to leadership. They seem to be followers of fashion and are now turning their backs on Christian values because that is the way they think the wind is blowing. They unashamedly leave their consciences at the door when they enter legislative assemblies. Christians are being regularly told now that they are on the wrong side of history.

The character of the modern state compounds the problem for Christians. In 313 the Roman Empire may have covered the lion’s share of the known world. Despite, however, the impression of power it has left us with, its totalitarian reach was minuscule in comparison with the reach modern governments have into our lives.  We tolerate this totalitarianism because it is accepted as democratic – up to a point – and is seen to be “in our best interests”.

Is it either? This is now the question that is preoccupying many of us, Christians or not. This question takes us away beyond the Christian-secular debate. Nevertheless, the essential issue, which many see affecting our lives, is at the heart of the predicament of the Christian in the modern 21st century world. A tyrannical populism, driven by ambiguously democratic forces, now seems rampant in the public square. A formerly benign Leviathan, called up to help secure the common good, has now gone native. The threat he poses to the believing Christian is exemplified in the news this week – reported in Time magazine and elsewhere – about big business’ latest foray into the culture wars. Time tells us:

Disney says it will not film in the state of Georgia if a bill, which critics say would effectively legalize discrimination based on sexual preferences, becomes law. Gov. Nathan Deal has until May 3 to sign or veto the Free Exercise Protection Act, which protects faith-based organizations that refuse to provide services that would violate their beliefs—such as performing gay marriages, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Add to this what we remember of the relentless drive of big media and internet corporations which successfully pushed the political establishment to legalise same-sex marriage over the past few years and we have every right to ask what has happened to the democratic process.

The answer may be simple. These unelected corporations in their turn, like the politicians, are responding to a populist new reading of the nature of our species. They are driven by the market and they are reading the bottom line – follow the money.

Christians look on in dismay as all this unfolds. Not only are their values being disregarded. Their personal freedom, their freedom of association and their freedom of conscience is being threatened and increasingly denied. The consciences of the Little Sisters of the Poor, the future of the work they undertook to dedicate their lives to for the love of their God and the good of mankind is now in the hands and at the mercy of eight judges of the US Supreme Court. Should the Court decide in their favour – and I wouldn’t want to bet on it – there will be outrage and cries for their blood.

What Christians see before them is a population subverted by a reading of our nature which distorts and destroys what they see as some of the most precious truths about humanity. Not only has that happened but that same popular will is now seeking to tyrannically impose that vision of humanity on all. Coexistence is not on offer  – and it is not just being denied by Disney.

What Christians are now asking is where did this reading of our nature come from? How did it take hold? German author Gabriele Kuby asks all these questions in her book, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom – now translated into English. In summary, her argument is this:

The core of the global cultural revolution is the deliberate confusion of sexual norms. It is the culmination of a metaphysical revolution as well–a shifting of the fundamental ground upon which we stand and build a culture, even a civilization. Instead of desire being subjected to natural, social, moral, and transcendent orders, the identity of man and woman is dissolved, and free rein given to the maximum fulfilment of polymorphous urges, with no ultimate purpose or meaning.

Kuby surveys gender ideology and LGBT demands, the devastating effects of pornography and sex-education, attacks on freedom of speech and religion, the corruption of language, and much more. From the movement’s trailblazers to the post-Obergefell landscape, she documents in meticulous detail how the tentacles of a budding totalitarian regime are slowly gripping the world in an insidious stranglehold. Here on full display are the re-education techniques of the new permanent revolution, which has migrated from politics and economics to sex.

Kuby’s work advocates one viable response, not just for the Christian, but for all interested in the true good of humanity. It is essentially a call to action for all to redouble their efforts to preserve freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and in particular the freedom of parents to educate their children according to their own beliefs, so that the family may endure as the foundation upon which any healthy society is built.

And where does all this leave the ordinary Christian who conscientiously wants to live and practice the mandate he or she considers they have received from Christ and which is summarised neatly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, (900):

Since, like all the faithful, lay Christians are entrusted by God with the apostolate by virtue of their Baptism and Confirmation, they have the right and duty, individually or grouped in associations, to work so that the divine message of salvation may be known and accepted by all men throughout the earth. This duty is the more pressing when it is only through them that men can hear the Gospel and know Christ. Their activity in ecclesial communities is so necessary that, for the most part, the apostolate of the pastors cannot be fully effective without it.

The chances are it will leave them in prison. Kuby’s book enumerates more than one case where it has done so.

But Christian culture is not dead, or even dying. It is taking stock and – although wrong responses are never off the option list which may be presented for action – it will survive and thrive.

From the earliest days of the history of their Faith, the Christian community was assailed by opposing forces, from within as well as from without. It will never, it seems, be otherwise. Each struggle in which they have had to engage has presented new challenges, new issues and new dangers, or at least new variations on old dangers. On every occasion solutions have been hammered out and victory has lead it to new and even richer landscapes. Believing Christians may have to scratch their heads a little more but they do not doubt that they will also prevail in the struggles they face today.

(Updated on 26 March with the following sentence from the original draft. It is in the third paragraph and was inadvertently committed from the first posting:  Today the political establishment seems to be turning its back on the Christian ethics which for 1700 years have been advancing as the standard behind our laws. )

What might have been…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

What might have been…but for an assasin’s bullets, is suggested in a ‘Back Story’ in the Daily Briefing newsletter from the New York Times:

President Obama is the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years.

The milestone gives us a chance to delve into the diplomatic archives.

It turns out that the Kennedy administration explored the possibility of normalizing relations.

In an Oval Office recording on Nov. 5, 1963, the president can be heard discussing a plan to send his U.N. delegate, William Attwood, to Havana for a secret meeting with Fidel Castro. That was two-and-a-half years after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

In September, Castro’s ambassador to the U.N. had told Attwood that the Cuban leader was interested in opening back-channel communications.

Kennedy encouraged Attwood to explore talks — delicately. He suggested Attwood be pulled off the government payroll so that the White House could deny in the event of a leak that official talks had taken place.

Attwood then called an aide to Castro and asked the Cubans to provide an agenda for the talks.

“The ball is now in Castro’s court,” said a top-secret memo summarizing the exchange. Around the same time, on Nov. 18, 1963, Kennedy gave a speech in Miami that signaled the potential for normalization.

Four days later, the president was dead — along with hopes for a new beginning for ties with Cuba.

Your Morning Briefing is published weekdays at 6 a.m. Eastern and updated on the web all morning.