Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

 

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?We always seem to be making lists. It is hard to remember a month over the past decade when you opened a newspaper or a magazine without being confronted by a list of somebody’s favourite something to adjudicate on – the best book of all time, the best films of al time, the best jokes ever told. Indeed, the list is endless. But maybe we should not be too irritated by it. If they make us think a little, help us to judge and compare and reflect on things it’s not all bad.

Some, needless to say, are pretty trivial. Others, however, are more serious and thought-provoking. Time Magazine recently presented us with its current list of the world’s top 100 “influencers” – ranging across the world of politics, sport, literature and entertainment and more. On an even more serious level two political magazines, one on each side of the Atlantic, Prospect and Foreign Policy, are currently surveying who their readers estimate are the world’s top “public intellectuals”. Since it is always worth asking ourselves who is leading the world of ideas – and with what ideas – this is a worthwhile exercise. To qualify for the “competition” you have to be a) alive, b) active in public life, c) have shown distinction in your field, and d) have shown an ability to influence debate across borders. So when all that is taken into account the field narrows considerably and excludes most of us. Nevertheless, it is still very much our business to know who is included.

However, they didn’t bargain for the pitfalls of the world wide web. The word got out that the survey was on and the whole thing when pear-shaped when Muslims across the world effectively hijacked it. The results now report that the top ten public intellectuals in the world are an assortment of Islamic clerics and writers. The whole story can be found on www.prospect-magazine.com . Nevertheless, while the survey is invalidated the question it poses is still a very valid one. Who is leading the world in the realm of ideas?

The last poll taken on this by these magazines made interesting reading and gave us a kind of snapshot of what we might call the intellectual ferment in the world at the time. For some of us, looking at the evolving membership of these lists over the years, there were encouraging signs of improvement in the climate of public opinion which they reflect. For example, whereas in the early years of the exercise the list was peppered with varying shades of Marxist, remarkably now, among the 100 names offered for consideration for selection, there is only one self-proclaimed Marxist.Furthermore, despite the best efforts of militant atheists and secularists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – both of whom were in the top ten last time round – the secularist camp has diminished somewhat and the camp of those adhering to one faith or another is growing.

Regardless of what this poll produces surely the public intellectual who towers above all others in our world today is Pope Benedict XVI? If you measure this in terms of the number of people hearing him, listening to him and whom he influences, or in terms of the wisdom of what he says, then he is out in front on all counts.

This pope speaks to all Catholics as all popes have done over the centuries. All popes have also addressed themselves to men of good will everywhere down through the ages – and have had mixed responses from them. But this pope – and his immediate predecessor, it must be said – speaks to all men of good will with a new emphasis, on the basis of a new common denominator, one might almost say with a new kind of language, the language of Faith and Reason. It may well be that history will look back at the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and see in them the beginning of a new age, the age of Faith and Reason.

Don’t get me wrong. Faith and reason have always been in harmonious partnership in authentic Catholic teaching. But as history looks at it, emphases differ over the ages. I remember a series of history books tracing Western thought down through the centuries. There was one entitled “The Age of Belief”. Another was entitled “The Age of Reason”, and yet another, “The Age of Science.”Can we now add “The Age of Faith and Reason”?

Pope Benedict is tireless in underlining for the world the vital role which both these elements have to play in mankind’s search for a better world through which he can fulfil his true destiny. Man’s journey, man’s search for truth and a proper understanding of that truth, he tells us, “can never suppose itself to be at an end and the danger of falling into inhumanity is never simply overcome — as we see in the panorama of contemporary history! Today the danger of the Western world — to speak only of this context — is that man, precisely in the consideration of the grandeur of his knowledge and power, might give up before the question of truth. And that means at the same time that reason, in the end, bows to the pressure of interests and the charm of utility, constrained to recognize it as the ultimate criterion.”

These were words written by Pope Benedict for a university gathering in Rome, written but not spoken because some die-hard secularists – clearly men of less than good will – objected to the invitation to the Pope to speak there. In that context the words carry more weight than they already had.

“The danger exists”, he concluded, “that philosophy, no longer feeling itself capable of its true task, might degenerate into positivism; that theology, with its message addressed to reason, might become confined to the private sphere of a group more or less sizable. If, however, reason — solicitous of its presumed purity — becomes deaf to the great message that comes from the Christian faith and its wisdom, it will wither like a tree whose roots no longer reach the waters that give it life. It will lose courage for the truth and thus it will not become greater but less. Applied to our European culture this means: If it wants only to construct itself on the basis of the circle of its own arguments and that which convinces it at the moment — worried about its secularity — it will cut itself off from the roots by which it lives; then it will not become more reasonable and more pure, but it will break apart and disintegrate.”

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We may live in a secular age, in an age “worried about its secularity” as the Pope says, but if we do perhaps we can now see light at the end of that particular tunnel and hope that this is only a prelude to an age in which the truth now being put before us by Benedict XVI will come into it own and usher in this new age of Faith and Reason.

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Michael Kirke, worked as a journalist with The Irish Press. He is now a freelance writer and the director of Ely University Centre, 10 Hume Street, Dublin 2. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net.

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Bertie Ahern bites the dust. Did it have to be this way…?

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

It was probably inevitable, and perhaps it was the best outcome given all the circumstances. Nevertheless there was something vaguely shameful about the way Ireland disposed of one of its most capable prime ministers since it made itself independent of the United Kingdom nearly 100 years ago. Mr. Ahern – Bertie, as he was familiarly and generally affectionately known to one and all – fell on his sword on April 2nd, succumbing in the end to the relentless attrition surrounding the investigations of his financial affairs by a judicial tribunal.

 

The uneasiness generated about all this stems from two sources. Firstly there is the sense of loss at the demise of a man perceived by most – nationally and internationally – to be good, capable and worthy of respect for what he has achieved for his country and for the European Union of which his country is a part. The resignation of no prime minister in Irish history has attracted the kind of international press coverage which this one did last week.

 

Secondly there is the realisation that this is a victory not for a judicial process but for a relentless media-driven pursuit of the biggest scalp campaigning journalism could ever hope to capture, the prime minister of the country.

 

Ahern protests his innocence. “I know in my heart of hearts I did no wrong,” he asserted in his press conference when he announced his intention to vacate his office on May 6 next. Whether he did or didn’t remains to be clarified by the tribunal in question. The gut feeling of many people is that whether or not he should have resigned was something that could only be answered after due process had been completed and the tribunal judge had pronounced judgement having heard all the evidence and counter-evidence.

 

The problem for the country and for the government of which Mr. Ahern was leader was that in tandem with the work of the tribunal, the media was conducting its own investigations. Day after day, at whatever function – public or private – he or his government colleagues attended, the media tribunal was in session and the interrogation was constant. Culpable or not, in those circumstances, he could no longer sustain his role as leader of the government and saw clearly that the public – whether or not it felt he was guilty – was going to suffer if the work of government continued to be interfered with in this way. He knew he had to go and made what he saw was the responsible decision. I think most people see it that way. I also think most people feel it was a pity it had to happen like this. On the day after the dramatic and surprise announcement the Daily Mail (Irish edition of a London paper) carried the headline which seemed to have a slight tone of remorse about it: “DID IT REALLY HAVE TO END LIKE THIS?”  That was the lead into 18 pages of reports, comment and analysis.

 

The unease is of course double-edged. We know the value of a free press. We need a free press and a press which has the right to ask questions and keep asking questions until it gets answers. However, there does seem to be a conflict of processes. Is there not some better way in which we could manage the parallel running of these processes and if the ultimately more refined process – from the point of view of natural justice – is the judicial one should the other not suspend its activity until the latter has reached a verdict?

 

What is being investigated by this tribunal is of course a real can of worms, opened up several years ago as a result of revelations made in the media that generous donations had been made by businessmen to politicians in sensitive public office. Once the tribunal, established by the parliament, began to ask its first questions the statements being made to it under oath led to more and more allegations. More and more politicians seemed to have received gifts which might or might not be deemed corrupt or corrupting. Eventually Mr. Ahern himself was discovered to have received gifts which had not been publicly declared. This was back in the early 90s when he was Minister for Finance. He maintained that these were received at a time when regulations relating to the declaration of gifts by those in public office had not yet been brought to their current standard. His enemies maintained that this was irrelevant, that he was a government minister and that basic ethical principles were being disregarded by him when he accepted such gifts.

 

Initially he had public sympathy because the gifts were given to help him through a difficult personal situation when he and his wife were separating and the costs involved in this were proving crippling for him. But as often happens in these cases, questions kept being asked and answers given were never fully satisfactory. The issue of tax payment was raised and his negotiations with Revenue to regularise his tax affairs became public knowledge.

 

The whole tribunal process is now a seemingly permanent part of the Irish political system – costing the tax-payer hundreds of millions of euro. The cost is horrendous but by and large the public values something which may help raise ethical standards among its public servants and representatives. One such tribunal is investigating corrupt behaviour within the police force. We are all aware that were it not for media investigations this task would never have been addressed and low standards in high places would continue unabated. Nevertheless, the fall from grace of a man who has done the sate some considerable service – including that of helping bring peace to these islands, is felt by many to be a sad and regrettable event.

 

Playing With Fire

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

How we humans love to play with fire? And how dangerous, even disastrous, our playing around can be? Metaphors wonderfully enrich our language and our thought. How dull our language and our thought would be without them. Yet they are also dangerous, as dangerous indeed as playing with fire if we let them muddle us and make us mistake the image for the reality. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet but anything other than a rose which we might decide to call a rose will get us into very embarrassing situations.  Today we seem hell bent on confusing our metaphors with reality and playing with fire as we do so. The family, one of nature’s and society’s foundation stones, is being messed about with in a way that is akin to playing with fire. We do so at the risk of pulling down our house on top of us. Indeed we have already begun to do so. The family in nature is a real thing. It is not just a nice idea, an image we have dreamed up for our own sentimental reasons. The animal world has no problem seeing this. It is we humans who seem to be getting the whole thing muddled.  In the animal kingdom the male comes together with the female and they mate. All other things being equal, offspring are begotten and for as long as is necessary and in the manner appropriate to each species, the offspring are nurtured to the point where they become independent and can go off and do likewise. Wonderful. It all happens as day follows night. Sometimes, it is observed, there can be confusion. Males mess around with males and get things wrong. This is all fairly exceptional and whatever happens is never set up as a model for future behaviour of the species. Eventually they all get on with the business of life. If they don’t they become extinct. It is the humans, poor creatures, who get themselves into trouble. Part of the trouble comes from their capacity to think and talk to each other, reflect on themselves and use beautiful language to do so. Our current confusion over the nature of family is a case in point. For aeons – and I don’t know when it started – we have been using the concept of family as a metaphor. Family of nations, family of businesses (ASDA is billed in Britain as “part of the Walmart family”), spiritual families, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is when we begin to confuse the real thing in nature with the thing which we are using it to help us describe. Occasionally in the animal kingdom we hear of a lost offspring of two progenitors attaching itself to other members of the species, indeed sometimes across species, and becoming a member of a family. All this illustrates is the power of the real, the natural power of the family rooted in the nature of the animals themselves. It works for nature because it is natural. Misunderstand its true nature, contaminate it with false sentimentality and it will no longer work.  Sadly this seems to be what we are doing. We have been misled by our metaphors. We want to call marriage what are patently not marriages. We want to call families what are patently not families. Which brings us back to the rose. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet. A true family by any other name will work as well. But if we call a potato a rose and send a bouquet of them to someone we love we know what will happen. Equally, if we concoct a ménage of any old kind and dare to call it a family then we will not have a family – and it will not give us the natural outcome that the true natural product will give. Furthermore, while our society may get away with a scattering of such arrangements on an ad hoc basis, it will not get away without dire consequences if we riddle it with them. Some societies are already so riddled. Do we really need to spell out the consequences? They are already there for all to see.  

Try this as a sample. Anthony Reynard was, until last year, part of the senior management team of one of the largest primary schools in the UK. He reflected recently in The Daily Telegraph:

“11 years after Tony Blair proclaimed “Education! Education! Education!” to be New Labour’s priority, schools are opening their doors to more poorly behaved pupils with greater learning difficulties who, in turn, are emerging from a growing number of broken or poorly functioning families.

 “Last year, having agonised over whether to leave a profession I loved, I finally turned my back on a position in a large London primary school. I decided that I had had enough after dealing with the behaviour of a boy who had shot himself with a handgun at home, having struggled to settle a girl who had been placed with her 12th foster parent and ninth school and, finally, having tried to comfort two assaulted teachers, one of whom had been knocked unconscious by a pupil in the playground.

 “It would be simplistic and incorrect to say that well-adjusted children invariably emerge from two-parent families and that maladjusted children are the inevitable product of broken families – we all know there are some very skilled and caring single parents out there. But it is clear to all teachers that the most settled children come from conventional two-parent families.

 “I’m reminded of three different schools I worked for. In the first, children ate in a spotless dining room and were praised for using the correct cutlery by teachers, who were happy to eat their own lunches with them, chatting for 10 minutes before succumbing to the pull of adult conversation in the staff room. In the same school, children routinely opened doors for adults and stood for them upon their entering a room.

 “In a second school, staff had to be coerced to eat with children, who used any implement available, including their hands, to eat. Proper conversation was impossible because of the noise, and teachers would make a bad-tempered exit as fast as they could.

 “In a third school, no teacher would be seen dead in the dining hall, where lunchtime supervisors were sworn at by pupils and the floor looked as if the contents of a pig trough had been up-ended there.

 “What was clear in each of these schools was that the effect of staff intervention on table manners was minimal. The state of dining decorum was quite clearly dependent on what had been picked up at home.”

 Which in turn brings us to fire. It was interesting to read Sir Peter Sutherland some weeks ago commenting on the genesis of the Celtic Tiger, where this wonderful beast had come from and how much longer it was likely to survive. Some say it is the creature of the European Union, some credit our level of corporation tax, some credit the wonderful family of Anglophone nations – there we go again – to which we belong and over which our generous Diaspora is spread. Some credit our superior education system. It was this lat that Sir Peter was probably most sceptical about. At best he thought our education system was mediocre. No, what he seemed to place real emphasis on was the strength and quality of the Irish family and the influence it exercised throughout our society – both in terms of the upbringing of children, the motivational force it exercised and the communities it created throughout our society. Of course it is, was and – if we are careful with it – always will be. Its power is even seen in the strength and cohesion of that very Diaspora with which we identify so closely. But will it last? Are we not really playing with fire as we mistake sentimentality for compassion, as we muddle love and lust, as we meddle with marriage and the family as our legislators – some of them anyway – are threatening to do?  

Michael Kirke, worked as a journalist with The Irish Press. He is now a freelance writer and the director of Ely University Centre, 10 Hume Street, Dublin 2. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net. Other writing can be found on his blog, www.garvan.wordpress.com . 

With friends like this….thoughts on P.C. own goals

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Over the past few years Christmas has become a bit of a battlefield between those who value the customs and traditions we associate with the season and the P.C. brigades. While some of the age-old traditions might seem to be on the losing side, all is not as it might seem. With their blatant excesses the “politically correct” may be their own worst enemies in the long run. The latest that caught the eye was in the school in Britain where little children were singing – hopefully Advent carols – about Mary and Joseph making their way to Bethlehem. They were stopped and told to change the lyrics for fear that someone might be offended.  In the original words they sang, “little donkey, carry Mary safely on her way.” This was far too explicitly Christian, they were told – Mary was the offending word, – and were ordered to change the lyrics to “carry Lucy safely on her way.” With friends like this the multi-culturalists don’t need enemies. They are so devoid of logic and common sense that they inevitably bring down so much ridicule on their heads that sensible people – who are really in the majority when they put their minds to it – see through their folly and begin to think again for themselves. They even begin to find their way back home. This is probably part of what happened over the past few Christmases. A survey just reported on has found that in spite of all the multicultural ballyhoo about Christmas being “offensive” to non-Christians, in spite of all the rampant materialism which invades this most spiritual of seasons, in spite of all the consumption and self-indulgence, Church attendance at Christmas services in Britain has gone up 15 percent since the beginning of this millennium. There are, presumably, multiple factors contributing to this – among them the influx of Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe – but surely the folly about Lucy, added to the follies we read about when schools feel they have to avoid putting on Nativity plays because they might offend non-Christians, must be making people think. Do some of not them say to themselves, “how dare they try to take our valued traditions away from us?” Is it any wonder that parents might decide to bring their children to something which will speak to them of the event which is at the heart of our very civilization? Perhaps there is also in this something of a reaction to the onslaught of Richard Dawkins – and his cohorts –  over the past few years, branding us all as deluded – if not dangerous – dreamers. The great advantage of being challenged is that it makes people think and thinking then may urge them to act. OK, this is just Christmas attendance at a communal celebration of faith. The attendance at services throughout the rest of the year is still in decline. But this is a celebration of when it all started and perhaps it may help a lot of people to start all over again.  Bring it on!

 

 Not too far removed from all that was the spectacular own-goal by the pseudo liberals in La Sapienza University in Rome who made themselves the laughing stock of Europe by insulting the Pope after Christmas. Last time it was Muslims who were up in arms when Pope Benedict quoted a medieval Emperor’s not too flattering question about Islam’s contribution to religion. This year it was the “intellectuals” of  La Sapienza who staged a protest sit-in when the Pope was invited to address the university. His crime? He had quoted – 18 years ago –  an Austrian philosopher who had the temerity to suggest that Galileo’s treatment at his trial was “reasonable and fair” by the standards of the time. The Pope’s office responded with dignity and issued a statement saying that “Following incidents known to all” it seemed best to cancel the event to which the Rector had invited him. “However,” it went on, “the Holy Father will send the university authorities a copy of the address he intended to give.” And what an address! It must have heaped coals on the heads of the silly protestors. He spoke of truth, goodness and the proper relationship between the Church of God and the university in which men sought above all to search for these things in freedom. 

“What does the Pope have to do with, or have to say to the university”, he asked? “Surely he must not attempt to impose the faith on others in an authoritarian way since it can only be bestowed in freedom. Beyond his office as Shepherd of the Church, and on the basis of the intrinsic nature of this pastoral office, there is his duty to keep the sensitivity to truth alive; to continually invite reason to seek out the true, the good, God, and on this path, to urge it to glimpse the helpful lights that shine forth in the history of the Christian faith, and in this way to perceive Jesus Christ as the Light that illuminates history and helps us to find the way to the future.”

 

This, and the 200,000 people from all over Italy, intellectuals, politicians, ordinary people, who turned up in St. Peter’s Square on January 20, to categorically disassociate themselves from the clique who had insulted the Pope and shamed the University, was a perfect response to a shameful folly.

Books and Our Future

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Books are important. Some people feel that the habit, the skill, the pleasure of reading is under threat and that what is threatened is more than just something to pass the time. Britain’s chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks has written: Until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare and the great novels. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourse.”  The implication is that when this set of references begins to disintegrate then the very fabric of the culture itself will begin to disintegrate.  

There is no doubt but there is uneasiness among us about the coherence of our culture today – in both these islands. It is debatable whether or not the weakening of this canon is a factor. But it is worth debating. The increasing dominance and impact of aural and visual media seems to be the main agent in supplanting our attraction to the written word on the page. Can these media give us what the written word on the page gives – a time and a space for reflection on what we absorb? Perhaps. But until we know that what we might be losing can be sacrificed without risk, it behoves us to do all we can to keep the canon of great books, great music and great art which help define what we are and who we are. In this task the educational curricula of the home and the school are the central pillars.

Pullman Having His Cake and Eating It

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The problem with Philip Pullman – well, one of them at any rate – is that he wants to have his cake and eat it. Pullman is the author of a series of children’s books which purport to expose what he sees the myths that make up our Christian faith. The first of these has now been filmed at an estimated cost of €120 million. “The Golden Compass” is probably showing at a cinema near you just now. Pullman wants to be an atheist who thinks that “God” is dead and who thinks that religion has brought nothing but suffering for the human race. However he now has a would-be blockbuster film for children to promote and the promise of a rich harvest of book sales on the back of it. If he doesn’t backtrack from his more militant stance and some of his stated intentions – “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief”, he was quoted as saying in the Washington Post in 2001 – his Hollywood producers and his bank balance may suffer. Undoubtedly there are people out there who either think like him on the question of God and religion and there are probably more who don’t care one way or the other. They won’t mind bringing their children to what they see as a well-made film which is a bit of exciting fun and full of marvellous special effects. However, the market place has a lot more to offer if it is carefully manipulated and this marketplace has a large segment of families to whom the meaning and intention of Pullman are important: the nascent faith of their children is not something that they are going to be happy to put at risk for a bit of fun. The cohorts of Pullman’s legion are pulling up behind him in his defence. Shane Hegarty in the Irish Times took up the issue of Pullman’s critics. Mockery was the tactic used as he lined up the easy targets of those who talk about banning Pullman. He quoted Pullman’s own view of his critics – “oh it causes me to shake my head with sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world”. My goodness. That’s strong. What would he like to do with them? Lock them up, or worse? And this is the man who thinks C.S. Lewis “was dangerous”. Of course, the notion that anyone might suggest that what he writes is dangerous is laughable. It’s that cake again. The trouble with this camp is that they are not really interested in a debate which might help us arrive at the truth. Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Good) , Pullman, et al, do their utmost to stifle debate by setting up easy targets, those they can label as “fundamentalists”. Dawkins and Hitchens take the extreme manifestations of belief and use them as evidence to condemn those who have already stipulated these manifestations as aberrations and heresies. Nicole Kidman, one of the stars of the film has even had to row in with a fluffy sort of defence. “I was raised a Catholic, the Catholic Church is part of my essence” – whatever that means? “I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.”  Poor  Nicole. She shouldn’t say things like that or we might think that “thinking” is not one of her strong points – or that she has not even bothered to read the script properly. In the film, as Mrs. Coulter, Ms. Kidman is the evil emissary of “the Magisterium.” Does she not know that the “magisterium” is the term which Catholics use to identify the teaching authority of the Church? In the end of the day we can’t allow this to be just a battle between those who believe in a world beyond this world and those who believe that this world is all there is – because science can’t take them any further. That makes it too easy for the non-believer since it gives him so many straw men to demolish. It has to be engaged on the level of the truth and the teaching of Christ and the Church he founded.  Apparently Pullman’s next book is going to address the question of whether “people can be helped by something that is palpably not true, is this better than denying the thing that is not true and not being helped.” While this doesn’t sound much like a bestseller it is clear that he has not the slightest interest in honestly asking whether or not something is true. He has already made up his mind and just wants to destroy the “nitwits” who think otherwise than himself.  

www.positionpapers.ie

Time for Vigilance and Action

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

The British Government has warned that parents are “ill-equipped” to keep their children safe from violent and damaging influences on the internet. No doubt the same can be said for parents in the remainder of the archipelago outside the United Kingdom as well. Ed Balls, the Children Minister, made the point that they were ill equipped because they simply did not know what was going on in the web or in computer games. Staggeringly only one parent in 20 – a survey revealed – knew that children give out personal details over the internet. But this, surely, is not a matter of being ill-equipped? It is a matter of culpable ignorance. Good parents who relate to their children will not only know what their children are doing generally and how they are spending their time. They will have some idea of the influences which are going to form their character, habits and attitudes. They will be keenly interested in what they are reading, what they are watching and who their friends are. This is a big part of what parenting is about.The British Government has set up a study group to assess the impact of the internet and violent games on children. All very good – but surely we know already what uncontrolled surfing of the net is exposing children and adolescents to and what the likely effects of that will be. What is really needed is something that will help reduce that appalling ratio of one in twenty to a considerably less worrying one. 

Pity the Poor Stock Dealer?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Archbishop – now Cardinal – Sean Brady gave us all something to think about over the summer months. In relation to his address at Knock when he juxtaposed the island of saints and scholars which we once were with the land of stocks and shares, which we have now become, a friend of mine was a little bemused. He is in fact someone who deals in stocks and shares and wondered if the archbishop was suggesting that there might be something wrong with that – or that this activity might be spiritually less healthy than being a scholar, or that it was incompatible with being a saint.  After working through the implications of what the Archbishop was saying we came to the more comfortable conclusion that the juxtaposition was more rhetorical than real and that the teaching of the Church was quite clear – the call to sanctity is addressed to all men and women following any honest occupation, be it scholarly or otherwise. I suppose the drip drip effect of the daily news on shady dealing, rising and falling share prices for reasons which baffle most of us, political representatives hopping in and out of the pockets of wheelers and dealers, does nothing to suggest that dealing rooms would be a place to look for a modern Irish Colmcille or Columbanus. We concluded that Archbishop Brady was throwing down a challenge to modern Ireland to prove otherwise.

Rushing to Judgement – Enright on the McCanns

On By Michael KirkeIn Faith MattersLeave a comment

So this is what a society without God is going to be like? We may have got a glimpse of it last in the newspaper coverage of Man Booker prize-winner Anne Enright’s  highly publicised judgements on the parents of Madeline McCann, in which she declared herself among the participants in that international sport – her term, – disliking the McCanns. It made grim reading and left one wondering how we got here. A family is in the throes of a tragedy – a child is lost. Yes, that is all we can be certain about just now. Everything else is surmise and suspicion. But what has happened now is that these parents who have suffered this loss are being set upon and every Tom, Dick and Harry is constructing scenarios of what happened without a thought given to the agony the parents are going through. Judges and juries are ten-a-penny and presumptions of innocence are worthless. That is surely a far remove from the Christian basis on which our rule of law was originally founded. This, inevitably, is what happens when God is jettisoned. But even more frightening was the ad hominemjudgement mooted by Anne Enright. She left aside the question of presumed innocence or guilt and just ploughed into the personalities of Kate and Gerry McCann in a manner which one could only say was deeply disturbing. Ms. Enright is a novelist and those who like her grim fiction are entitled to inflict her pain on themselves if that is what they want to do. Fiction is a great human device for exploring and helping us understand the human condition. In it we create situations and characters who mirror reality. Then we offer a kind of judgement, mete out justice and punishment or rewards appropriately. When a novelist, however, takes two living and anguished human beings and does the same to them it is a totally different matter and is specifically what God in the person of Jesus Christ asked us not to do to each other. Man’s necessary but often sad efforts to mete out justice to his fellow man is but a mere shadow of what the final judgement will be. A recent Daily Telegraph headline was a stark reminder of theis: “Over 30 years after an innocent man was wrongly jailed for killing 11-year-old Lesley, ‘the real abductor’ faces court”. The chilling realisation which came while reading this Anne Enright’s exercise in semi-creative writing was that this is the product of a vision in which no other judgement but ours matters. God is nowhere. This, one thought, is what the world will be like if Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman and Christopher Hitchens – and all the other high-priests of atheism have their way. 

A surfeit of moderation?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

I’m not an islamophobe – at least I hope I’m not – but boy do some things about Islam really scare me. I want to understand these people, there are many things about them and their commitment that I admire, but they really do confuse me.

I live in Ireland and I cannot see any evidence of islamophobia here – they have their mosques, our President recently visited their splendid Islamic centre in Dublin and spoke very warmly and encouragingly to them. Significantly however, I thought, she encouraged them to try to help us to understand them more. We certainly need that help – and it is not always forthcoming.

Not many weeks before that address from the President I nearly choked on my Wheetabix one morning when I read a quote from a moderate spokesperson for the Islamic community here. He was talking about the experience of living in this country and how in general things were good for them. However at times, he said, things can get a little tense – like in the aftermath of the “incidents” in September, 2001 in New York and Washington, and the later ones in Madrid, London and Bali. “Incidents”? I looked again. Yes, that was the word he used. What, I asked, is going on in a mind like that? I can think of a thousand words which I would find to describe any one of those horrific atrocities before I would choose the word he chose. I wondered why – and I am still wondering. Does he really think these were mere incidents in the lives of ordinary people or is he using this word because he is looking over his shoulder to see who among his own people might be listening and weighing up what he is saying, finding it wanting in commitment?

To me there is still a huge question mark over the relative silence among what is described as the moderate Islamic world about the numerous “incidents” perpetrated in the name of the Islamic faith. There are those who deny that this has anything to do with faith but that is naive in the extreme. It may be a perversion of faith but if a 12-year-old boy is put on video slicing off the head of his enemy in a ritual execution, calling out at the same time, “God is great”, religion is at the heart of it. The Daily Telegraph reported: “The film, overlain with jihadi songs, then shows him hacking at the man’s neck, before exclaiming: ‘God is great!’ and hoisting the severed head by the hair.”

Where is the outcry? Why are there not statements of outright rejection coming from around the Islamic world? Why are there not mass demonstrations proclaiming “Not in my name and certainly not in God’s name do you do this”?

Nearer home this week we heard Scotland Yard’s Peter Clark, head of its counter-terrorism command, appealing again for help from within the Islamic communities in Britain to protect the British people against more terrorist attacks. Is the root of this reticence a tacit support for the terrorist or is it the effect of terror itself within these communities?

All this reminds me of an encounter with a student from Eastern Europe 30-odd years ago. He was doing post-graduate work here in Dublin. He was open and friendly in all things until it came to anything which touched on the politics or way of life in his own communist controlled country. He was not a communist but clearly he was afraid to say anything which might be negatively interpreted back home – and he wasn’t taking any risks that anything he might say should reach back home. It wasn’t that his life was necessarily at risk, but he certainly felt that his state-funded studies and his promising career back home were at risk.Militant Islam is an even more ruthless and lethal controlling agent than Communism ever was. That it draws on the great and inherently good power of religious conviction makes it even more lethal.

We must pity the unfortunate moderate Islamist who wants to practice a benign version of his faith. We might hope that one day the inherently false religion which is manifested in the malign version of the militants’ Islam will implode as Communism did. Do we hope in vain? Our hope would be stronger if we could see some of the courage among moderate Islamists that we did among the dissidents who helped contribute to the fall of Communism.