18LikesIf all of them who professed it did, actually worked for the poor and oppressed and not spent their lives climbing the greasy pole I'd acknowledge their belief.Originally Posted by LOCALHERO
If all of them who professed it did, actually worked for the poor and oppressed and not spent their lives climbing the greasy pole I'd acknowledge their belief.
Lets be fair about this. There is much wonderful work being done by many who align themselves to the Church...
I cite for example the work being done in the North inner city soup kitchens.
I don't think you are right there. if my memory is correct the first census was in 1831... but I could be wrong. One of the excuses from the british side is that the Irish papists were breeding irresoponsibly. But the figures (I believe) show that this is not the case. Where did you source your figures from?
I've a great deal of respect for most of the religious I've met. But not all. I think of Brother Kevin Crowley and Fr. Shay Cullen, and the countless footsoldiers who look to the poor and not the greasy pole nor the heirarchy. Most are utterly ashamed (I would think) of the horror stories we now know of. In this instance maybe sh1t does actually roll uphill.
They do remarkable work, some of them. I know from personal experience that down my way, the Church were the only ones who gave two sh1ts about the poor. I would like to see them get back to that as an institution and fight back against the callous disregard for human vulnerability that is increasingly common these days.
Whatever way you look at the universe, I don't think it's radical or even unreasonable to conclude that we humans are only equipped to comprehend it through human senses and feelings and/or machines that have been created by human intellect - i.e. that are understandable in terms human senses and feelings.
This being the case, the older I grow the more convinced I am of the wisdom of the 5th century BC philosopher Protagoras, who famously said "Man is the measure of all things; of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not". When I was young I disagreed strongly with this, mistaking it for a value judgement; as I grew older I realised it was just a sane comment on the only observational equipment we can ever have.
Very doubtful of that ever happening... a church in Limerick was bought by an order for 700 large. Surely that would have been of more help to the people they are meant to serve than a house of glorification?
The first nationwide census was in 1821, not 1831. It had nothing to do 'papists breeding irresononsibly (sic).' It was because governments across Europe needed to know what populations were because the nature of the economy was changing and that meant the demands were changing.
BTW the reason there was a large population increase among Catholics was because in the aftermath of the early 1740s famine which wiped out the grain supply people increasingly moved to consume potatoes, particularly a type of potatoes called lumpers. Potatoes supplied a good diet reducing infant mortality. Unfortunately what happened to grain in the 1740s due to severe weather happened in the 1840s with a blight that developed in the US, was bought to France and Belgium in an infected ship load of potatoes. It spread across western Europe, hitting Ireland last. Unfortunately being an island, it pretty much infected most of the country and was harder to shift than in Europe, where it spread rapidly but then died out rapidly. Ireland also had a massive reliance on potatoes - greater by miles than anywhere else. We ate many multiples of the potato intake elsewhere. It was the dominant foodstuff in a scale unparalleled except in some parts of Germany.
There had been a boom in church-building. It was not simply the rapid rise in population (and it was going through the roof) but also Catholic Emancipation, which resulted in a major re-organisation in the Catholic church, the creation of new parishes and massive numbers of churches being built.
I think Martini was right in talking about the aging of the Catholic culture, but wrong about his reference to the rituals. In reality changing old rituals actually is more destabilising them than keeping them. People take comfort in familiarity.
The problem with the Catholic Church is much more fundamental that rituals and cassocks. Its whole ethos and vision is the antithesis of modern attitudes. It frequently ignores or rejects scientific discoveries, psychological and other research. It ignores the lessons of history. It listens more to St Augustine than to the modern world, which means its whole attitude to everything from relationships and gender to power and authority are stuck in a mediaeval frame of mind that 21st century people, who unlike their ancestors have greater access to education and alternative viewpoints and find the fundamental attitudes of the Church on issues nonsensical and contradicted by centuries of thought, analysis and discovery in the days since Augustine and Ambrose. (For example, while it no longer listens to the beliefs of the mediaeval world that said that girls rather than boys developed in the womb through defective sperm or because an east wind was blowing, it still treats as gospel the theories of those who held those views on general issues like sexuality. It hasn't joined the dots and realised that the very ideas it instinctively accepts were coloured by the ridiculous attitudes such as the inferiority of women held by those same figures in the past.)
So it tries to apply mediaeval world views and attitudes to a world that has long since rejected them. That, not the liturgy or ritual, is at the heart of the crisis facing Catholicism. Martini like others focused on the symbols (the liturgy) rather than realising that the problem was with the very foundations of thought he and his colleagues had built their lives on.
