With the passage of time – just a matter of a little over four months in this case – the sense of bewilderment and disappointment of what looked like a radical change in the Irish people’s understanding and commitment to the values enshrined in marriage and the family has mellowed.

To help us understand that things might not be as bleak as they seemed on the afternoon of 23 May last, the words of the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin, to the Synod of Bishops in Rome yesterday set what looked like a revolution in a more balanced and kinder context.

Dr. Martin made his remarks about the Irish situation in the context of the social culture of marriage, the culture in which he said our young people grow up and the culture which influences their understanding of almost every dimension of marriage and family life.  He made the crucial point that society often uses the same words as the Church does, however with a radically different meaning. He continued:

Many ask what happened at the recent referendum on same-sex marriage in Ireland.   Has an authentic Christian culture of marriage disappeared in Ireland?  It is not as simple as that.   Ireland after the referendum is still marked by a very strong family culture.  The numbers who get married – and who get married in Church – are high and divorce statistics are among the lowest in Europe.  Families are strong and generous. That has not changed substantially.

The referendum was debated within a social culture where people struggle to understand abstract moral principles.  What they do understand is the predicament of individuals whom they wish to see happy and included.  It is a very individualistic culture, but not necessarily an uncaring one. Indeed those in favour of same-sex marriage based their campaign on what was traditionally our language:  equality, compassion, respect and tolerance.

Our young people make their decisions on marriage and the family within the context of a flawed and antagonistic social culture.  It is however not enough to condemn that culture.  We have somehow to evangelise that culture.  The Synod is called to revitalise the Church’s pastoral concern for marriage and the family and to help believers to see family life as an itinerary of faith.  But simply repeating doctrinal formulations alone will not bring the Gospel and the Good News of the Family into an antagonistic society.  We have to find a language which helps our young people to appreciate the newness and the challenge of the Gospel.

Where do we find that language?  Certainly it cannot be a language which reduces the fullness of the Church’s teaching. We have to find a language which is a bridge to the day-to-day reality of marriage – a human reality, a reality not just of ideals, but of struggle and failure, of tears and joys. Even in within a flawed social culture of the family there are those who seek something more and we have to touch their hearts.

Allow me to give an example.   We talk about indissolubility. Most families would not feel that they live indissolubility; they live fidelity and closeness and care in ways we underestimate.  As a student, I worked in a centre for prisoners which held a space for women who had to travel long distances before going to visit their spouses in prison.  These women were not models of respectable society. They would hardly have been able to pronounce indissolubility. But these women never missed a weekly visit.  They understood fidelity, even to a husband who might have betrayed them.  And their visit humanised even for a few moment the life of a man whose hope was low.

What the Irish referendum showed was a breakdown between two languages.  It showed also that when the demanding teaching of Jesus is presented in a way which appears to lack mercy, then we open the doors to a false language of cheap mercy.

A threshold has been crossed in Ireland. There is no doubt about that. Whether, however, it is a threshold to a future of social decline and disintegration depends on the acceptance of a challenge, the challenge implicit in Dr. Martin’s remarks. The Church, and those of good will throughout this island and across western society as a whole, must seek to touch the hearts and minds of all those who are seeking something more than is currently available to sustain their spirit in our flawed social culture.

– See more here.

The Seton home in New York City was located at the site on which a church now stands in her honor.

Today’s BACK STORY from the New York Times:

When Pope Francis visits the U.S. next week for the first time, his itinerary will include stops in New York and Philadelphia, the birthplaces of the only Roman Catholic saints born in the 13 original American colonies or 50 states.

The first, Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton of New York, was canonized 40 years ago today by Pope Paul VI.

Mother Seton was born in 1774, two years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

She started the first Catholic girl’s school in the nation, in Emmitsburg, Md., and the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity.

Mother Katharine Drexel, a Philadelphia nun who spent her life and her share of a family fortune on the network of schools for Native Americans and blacks that she started, is the first saint who was an American citizen from birth.

Mother Drexel died in 1955, and Pope John Paul II declared her a saint in 2000 — speedy, by modern church standards.

In his nearly 27-year papacy, John Paul II signed off on more canonizations (482) than all of his modern predecessors combined.

And if Catholicism is all it’s supposed to be we must hope there are a lot more who could be ‘signed off’.

Courtesy of The Week magazine  we get this intriguing assessment of the Internet and our relationship with it from novelist, Jonathan Franzen.

Franzen detests the internet even though, like a lot of us, he uses it.

In his new book, Purity, he compares it to communist East Germany – equating it to a new form of totalitarianism.

“You can’t not have a relation to, in the case of East Germany, the socialism of the state,” he says. “In the case of the internet, you can ignore it or you can abet it. Either way, you are in a relation to it. And that’s what’s totalitarian.”

Franzen is adamant that social media is not his milieu. Novelists, he told The Sunday Times, spend years trying to get things right. “The kind of person who tweets is someone who doesn’t care about getting it right and is willing to shoot from the hip under a space constraint that doesn’t even allow a subordinate clause… People who give sustained attention to something, let themselves have a full experience and then respond to it thoughtfully – I like that kind of person better.”

The novelist has a talent for riling people, says Emma Brockes in The Guardian. He famously fell out with Oprah Winfrey in 2001, and since then has been involved in numerous spats with feminist writers who accuse him of being the beneficiary of white, male privilege. Franzen doesn’t necessarily disagree – but since he already works hard to champion female writers and to create interesting female characters, he’s not sure what he can do about it, “except die – or, I suppose, retire and never write again”.

There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.
The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.

The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted. The second son said no it was covered with green buds and full of promise.

The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen.

The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree’s life.

He told them that you cannot judge a tree or a person, by only one season and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it’s winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, fulfillment of your fall.

Courtesy of: morningstoryanddilbert.wordpress.com

Bill Haley

Today’s New York Times gives us a briefing that:

Sixty years ago tonight, what’s thought to be the first performance of a rock ’n’ roll song on national television helped kick off the rock era.“Rock Around the Clock,” originally recorded by the band Bill Haley and His Comets, swept the U.S. in the summer of 1955. It was the theme song of the film “Blackboard Jungle.”

The band’s Aug. 7 TV performance, at Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” concert in Stratford, Conn., helped clinch its members’ fame in the U.S. and Europe.

The song also became the first rock single to hit No. 1 on the pop charts. (“Rock Around the Clock” became a hit again when it was included on the 1973 soundtrack of “American Graffiti.”)

“Blackboard Jungle” was notable, too, for being Hollywood’s first serious treatment of urban schools, and for having the first rock soundtrack.

The song was an important influence on the Beatles and other rock performers in the 1960s and ’70s. Rock was said to be in trouble during discomania, but it never died.

So how long will the genre last? Demand is hard to predict, but there’s plenty of supply. As Mick Jagger once said, “There is no future in rock ’n’ roll, only recycled past.”