Now, we cannot say why in this case it so happens only Catholics have been singled out. Plenty of non-Catholics and non-Christians are gender critical. We can’t know the motives of the people who have singled them out or why in the more recent furores over SNP election candidates the targets have been Catholic, but Christopher McEleny makes a valid observation – one myself and others have noted. We are right to be suspicious of a creeping anti-Catholicism in the current culture war being waged in the SNP. Now, we must be careful: We are not talking about sectarianism here...
Sin is a Serious Business
What is evident is that no apology or action on the part of the Church will be accepted by this secularist protest movement. It is apparent from much of the discussion on Irish social media over the weekend that what many within this movement demand is nothing short of the complete destruction of the Catholic Church. Many are quite explicit in this demand, and it is not limited to the clerical institution of the Church but extends to la Comunidad Católica in its widest sense; evinced in the wholesale targeting and abuse of “ordinary Catholics” online.
Pope Francis in Ireland
This living on the threshold has taken a toll on us. Since the late 1990s, when the scales were first taken from our eyes, we have had to come to terms with new realities and battle for our faith in new and unfamiliar territories. My own journey, like that of many other Catholics, was one that made it impossible for me to consider myself a 'Roman' Catholic. The hierarchy had been – perhaps forever – tainted. It no longer held the moral authority, no matter what the Church taught, to hold my allegiance. The papacy was no longer the infallible and unassailable Rock it had once been.
Hell Hath No Fury Like a President Scorned
We can’t defend the indefensible. The Church in Ireland and all around the world failed children and vulnerable people. There was – and to a great extent remains – a culture of abuse within the structures of the Church. The sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of children in the care of Church authorities was a terrible wrong, but the scandal was far worse; it was the abuse of power on the part of an ecclesiastical hierarchy that protected abusers and covered up their abuse – often shielding them, by the use of canon law among other things, from civil justice.
Madness and the Outrageous
Morality in our culture is dead. It has been suffocated out of existence as a malady of the mind, a weakness of the intellect, a modern madness; because we have been trained to self-censor and conform to the demands of a herd that has become accustomed to comfort.
“May Every Parish… Every Sanctuary of Europe, Take In One Family.”
These people are not the “Christian Syrians” that the EU would prefer to welcome, but Muslim families fleeing the horror of war in their country, and these people will be joining other Syrian refugees already welcomed to sanctuary in the Vatican.
Rallying Faith in the Culture War
It is now ‘open season’ on any and all forms of religion in culture, in the academy, in the media, and in political life. A new atheism; now the social default, less prepared to engage with the philosophical and theological grammar of religious thought than its classical predecessor, has constructed walls to exclude as much religious expression as it can from the marketplace.
Violence is the Words that we Speak
Follow @UrFhasaidh Words describe our worlds and realities. Words describe and define, and in defining they assume the power to imprison people and ideas within their limits. Words assume a knowledge over the cosmos. They imagine they have control. ‘I am hungry’ defines me, yet the same in another language, ‘Tha an t-acras orm’ threatens … Continue reading Violence is the Words that we Speak
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