Not even the Soviet Union tried this

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Catholic Voices tells us that the UN watchdog on children’s rights which recently hauled the Vatican over the coals for its handling of sex abuse has today released its recommendations. What is the United Nations up to? Just imagine if this organisation had power to match its arrogance and ignorance. Prepare for Diocletian Mark II.

With breathtaking arrogance, Catholic Voices’ Austen Ivereigh writes, the UN Report tries to change church teaching to bring it line with gender ideologies. In (25) and (26) it peddles the secularist myth that the Church’s teaching that sex is ordained by God for the possibility of procreation within marriage encourages homophobia, and patronisingly suggests that the Holy See condemn all forms of discrimination against gay people — which it does and has done for decades.

The Committee then criticizes contemporary Catholic teaching on sexuality, regretting how “the Holy See continues to place emphasis on the promotion of complementarity and equality in dignity, two concepts which differ from equality in law and practice provided for in Article 2 of the Convention.” In other words, where the Catechism of the Catholic Church fails to comply with the ideology of gender, it must be amended.

Amazingly, the Report also calls (36.) on the Holy See to provide — to whom, it does not say; perhaps via a helpline manned by monsignors? — what it calls “family planning, reproductive health and adequate counselling” to prevent “unplanned pregnancies.” Where this is going becomes clear in (55.), where the Holy See is told to change its teaching on abortion and even to amend canon law “with a view to identifying circumstances under which access to abortion services can be permitted.”

Lastly, the Report even lectures the Holy See on how it should interpret Scripture. In (39d) the Holy See is told to “ensure that an interpretation of Scripture as not condoning corporal punishment is reflected in Church teaching”.

Have we reasons to fear this organisation? In a word, on this evidence, “Yes”.

High tide of religious intolerance beginning to turn?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

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Are the high tides and violent winds which have in recent times been battering the coastal defences of religious freedom beginning to abate? A sign of hope that religious tolerance might be making a comeback is contained in the latest post from the United Kingdom based media agency, Catholic Voices.

It tells us that the Glasgow-based Catholic adoption service, St Margaret’s, can keep its charitable status while continuing to operate a policy that prioritizes married heterosexual couples following a landmark decision by the Scottish Charity Appeals Panel. At the heart of the ruling is a recognition of the charity as a Catholic organization with the right to manifest its religious belief.

Austen Iverigh’s commentary gives the full story here.

Amanda Knox in a wider perspective

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Channel Four’s (British television channel) take on the latest twist in the Amanda Knox debacle – with a 1500 year perspective. Is that a Justinian reference – or should it be 2500 years?

“Italian job: a justice system under the spotlight.

“The Amanda Knox story has come back to fascinate and appal us, thanks in large part to the Italian legal system which is longwinded and complex.
In the latest stage of this tortured judicial journey, an Italian court has overturned the appeal which overturned the first sentence against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. This means that Ms Knox and her ex-boyfriend could each spend another 25 years at least in jail.

“But there is bound to be another appeals stage and then Italy’s supreme court has its final say. In the case of Amanda Knox that will then lead to extradition hearings which may or may not result in the young American spending time behind Italian bars.

“As for Mr Sollecito, he was discovered near the border with Austria this morning, and because he poses a flight risk, the Italian Carabinieri have seized his passport. Apart from the obvious human drama, this story highlights the judicial culture clash between the country that gave us the foundations of modern law 1500 years ago and the country that thinks it has perfected the system in the 21st century.”

An Open Letter to Ireland’s Reform Alliance

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

 

In the aftermath of the Reform Alliance’s first National Conference in Dublin, Ireland, on Saturday 25 Junaury 2014:

To Deputies Lucinda Creighton, Peter Matthews, Terence Flanagan, Billy Timmins, Denis Naughten, Senators Fidelma Healy-Eames and Paul Bradford.

Firstly, congratulations on a wonderful conference – first in a series we hope. It was very well-organised, sharp and insightful. The hopes of your supporters were already high but this raised them even higher.

The media response was so bad it was good. The cynicism and the hostility which oozed from it were so obvious that it only made them look pathetic. It simply shows that they are, apparently incorrigibly, still locked in the closed circle of the group think of the pseudo-liberal establishment.

The reform movement which you have begun is, I think and hope, in the spirit of these paraphrased words which I encountered just this morning and which I immediately read in the context of the mission you have undertaken. This is the spirit which should be in the heart of any citizen who is properly conscious of his social responsibilities, and especially in the heart of anyone engaging actively in the public square. This man’s words are for us all when speaks of a

…mission of being in the heart of the people,…not just a part of my life or a badge I can take off; it is not an “extra” or just another moment in life. Instead, it is something I cannot uproot from my being without destroying my very self. I am a mission on this earth; that is the reason why I am here in this world.

He writes of the need for us all to

… regard ourselves as sealed, even branded, by this mission of bringing light, blessing, enlivening, raising up, healing and freeing.

If this vision of the world and its people were to become a reality then might we not see

All around us … nurses with soul, teachers with soul, politicians with soul, people who have chosen deep down to be with others and for others. But once we separate our work from our private lives, everything turns grey and we will always be seeking recognition or asserting our needs, we stop being a people.

This, surely, is the key to integrity in public life which has been lost – not only in Ireland but in a great swathes of all Western democracies. If, on the contrary, he writes,

 we are to share our lives with others and generously give of ourselves, we also have to realize that every person is worthy of our giving. Not for their physical appearance, their abilities, their language, their way of thinking, or for any satisfaction that we might receive, but rather because they are God’s handiwork, his creation. Appearances notwithstanding, every person … deserves our love. Consequently, if I can help at least one person to have a better life, that already justifies the offering of my life… We achieve fulfilment when we break down walls and our heart is filled with faces and names!

These are in fact the words of the new “hero” of Eamon Gilmore and David Norris, none other than Pope Francis. You can read these in a secular context – almost, and certainly as Gilmore would – or you can read them in a religious context. It doesn’t matter. They ring true in both and I would say that for the vast majority of the people who came to support the Reform Alliance on Saturday they are at the heart of their hopes for a new politics in Ireland.

The practical policies and suggestions which were emerging on Saturday were interesting and valuable but they will only really be different from anything that has gone before if they are grounded in this spirit, in this vision of a mission of true service to our people. If not it will be back to what you have all thankfully set your faces against, a return to the “perpetuation of party politics”.

Over 1300 attended from all over Ireland

Hope and the Reform Alliance in Ireland

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
Looking forward, not backwards: Senator Fidelma Healy-Eames and Deputy Lucinda Creighton

John Waters’ despairing column in today’s Irish Times  about the ‘promise’ of a new politics in Ireland has a certain quality of ‘negative capability’. I would like to think that this is what he wanted it to have. The Reform Alliance is, I hope, not about dreams people might have had in the past but is about the framework within which we will build our future in a wider world.

We can sit and curse the darkness or we can crack a match and look for a way out. To do that we don’t have to have the answer to every question. In fact we don’t have to have an answer to any of them. We only need the determination to look for them, the honesty to tell it as it is and the courage to break the chains of deceit which bind us in the present system. One of those chains is the mythical Irish dream which John Waters uses as a foil to highlight the folly of our contemporary delusions.

We can only start from where we are. But where we are going to must be a new place, a real place, not some mythical past created by an Irish “genius”. Let us be less insular, let us be human first. It is not terribly important that we are Irish. What is important is that we have a human community to organise, and organise together. The tragedy of our present state derives from the deficiencies in our humanity which we have indulged – greed, weakness, cowardice, dishonesty and disloyalty. These are the first things we have to recognise and set our face against. The rest will not be easy but it will follow if we grasp this stinging nettle. “Fare forward, travellers!”

Another warning from history

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

A new book about Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and their role in the horrors associated with the events which led to the creation of Bangladesh is frightening. A Times Literary Supplement (10 January, 2014) reviewer writes of it:

Bass (the author) deploys White House recordings, including several new transcripts, to excellent effect, and although the bigotry and small-mindedness of Nixon and Kissinger are widely understood and known, the book contains enough material to make the reader sick. As Bass recounts in one instance, “Nixon bitterly said, ‘The Indians need – what they really need is a – . . .’ Kissinger interjected, ‘They’re such bastards.’ Nixon finished his thought: ‘A mass famine’”. The bigotry and rage are not limited to Indians, either (‘they’re just a bunch of brown goddamn Muslims’, Nixon says of the Pakistanis).*

There are three great realms of intolerance in this world – and probably always have been: cultural intolerance, religious intolerance and racial intolerance. Of the three, racial intolerance is the most irrational, blind and obnoxious. In these utterances of this supposedly wise and powerful duo we have all three mixed up together.

This is naked evil. There is no other way to judge it. A commandment forbids that we judge as evil the men who uttered these words and harboured these thoughts. But if this is the consequence of the political philosophy of realpolitik then that is an evil philosophy and we must call it such.

I don’t know if there is anything as genocidal as these remarks on record from the administration of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which presided over the Irish Famine in the 19th century. I don’t think so. That these words should come from the mouths of an elected representative of a civilised people, and his learned and widely admired aide, is truly shocking. The prevailing laissez faire economic philosophy of the 19th century is offered as an excuse for government neglect of the starving Irish. It is a weak enough excuse. But what can excuse the racism, the callousness and the arrogance of these two – and how many more – in the middle last quarter of the 20th century, in living memory.

The grounds for disillusion – even disgust – with the political class are hard to cope with. Is it really true that “all power corrupts”? It seems that we should worry much less about absolute power than about power in its more ordinary manifestations. This is where the real rot lurks.

What is the antidote to this poison? Our only hope of escape from this evil would seem to lie in the spirit of these words:

People in every nation enhance the social dimension of their lives by acting as committed and responsible citizens, not as a mob swayed by the powers that be. Let us not forget that ‘responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation’. Yet becoming a people demands something more. It is an ongoing process in which every new generation must take part: a slow and arduous effort calling for a desire for integration and a willingness to achieve this through the growth of a peaceful and multifaceted culture of encounter.**

That is an excerpt from the Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, recently given to the world by Pope Francis whom the incumbent successor of Richard Nixon is due to meet shortly. We can be sure that the White House has by now dealt with the dreaded leakage problem which opened the world’s eyes to what went on in the mind and heart of Nixon and his advisers. We may have mixed feelings about Edward Snowden and his ilk but there is an upside as well as a downside to their approach to ‘open government’. Do we really think that we now enjoy a purer, selfless and more just exercise of political power than we did half a century ago? We would be naive to think so.

In the modern state, even in states which proclaim themselves of the people, for the people and by the people, our only hope of integrity, honesty and dignity is in remembering and living by those words, ‘responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation’.

*THE BLOOD TELEGRAM: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. Gary Bass, 475pp. Knopf. $30.
**Excerpt From: Francis, Pope. “Evangelii Gaudium, Apostolic Exhortation”, 220. 24-XI-2013.

Religious hostilities have increased in every major region of the world

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The share of countries with a high or very high level of social hostilities involving religion reached a six-year peak in 2012, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. A third (33%) of the 198 countries and territories included in the study had high religious hostilities in 2012, up from 29% in 2011 and 20% as of mid-2007. Religious hostilities increased in every major region of the world except the Americas. The sharpest increase was in the Middle East and North Africa, which still is feeling the effects of the 2010-11 political uprisings known as the Arab Spring.1 There also was a significant increase in religious hostilities in the Asia-Pacific region, where China edged into the “high” category for the first time.

Read the Pew report here.

Who is really spurning the Reform Alliance?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment
Independent deputies, Shane Ross and Stephen Donnelly

Shame, again, on the Irish Times for a headline overloaded with hostile prejudice. How did polite refusals like those of Stephen Donnelly, Shane Ross and others become a “spurn”?
“Senior Independents in Leinster House”, the paper told us this morning, “are set to spurn an invitation to attend the first Reform Alliance conference, dealing a blow to the effort by the dissident Fine Gael group to expand its political base.”

“TDs Stephen Donnelly and Shane Ross, and Senators Katherine Zappone and and Feargal Quinn, have all said they will not attend the event in Dublin on Saturday week. Neither will they be joining the alliance.” wrote Arthur Beesley. The independents in question should be on the phone to complain to him.

What Mr Donnelly, who had expressed an interest in attending the event, said yesterday was that,while he would not go along. “I wish them the very best and I think anything which challenges the the cartel that is Irish politics is welcome,” Spurn? Doesn’t sound like spurning to me.

Mr Ross, TD for Dublin South, for his part said he would be delighted to discuss any ideas with the Reform Alliance but not in a “formal atmosphere” that would be interpreted as giving “formal support” to the group. That sounds very reasonable and fair. Again, I don’t hear any spurning there.

Mr Quinn said he had not been invited to join and had no intention to do so. “I intend to retire from the Seanad at the end of the current term – otherwise, I’ll get a divorce,” he said.

It seems to me that all the spurning is being done by the Irish Times itself. Could it be that there is a conflict of interest between the Reform Alliance’s agenda for open and honest politics and this formerly great newspaper’s agenda for molding its own kind of Ireland?

About changing structures

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Does this resonnate? Who wrote it? When and where?
“Solidarity is a spontaneous reaction by those who recognize that the social function of property and the universal destination of goods are realities which come before private property.
“The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.
“These convictions and habits of solidarity, when they are put into practice, open the way to other structural transformations and make them possible.
“Changing structures without generating new convictions and attitudes will only ensure that those same structures will become, sooner or later, corrupt, oppressive and ineffectual.”