On Americanisation destroying Irish Catholicism (from an American in Ireland)

Kiwi in IE

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

We're also going through an 'Uber' Liberal phase within our younger population, this is the tail end of the first generation who received free third level education. Pseudo intellectuals with childish ideas.

Do you admit liberalism is a result of education?

lmaopml

Meh! I think sometimes the Americans are better at getting up off their asses at times, even though we pride ourselves on doing so...it's nice to see some inspiration, that isn't about the terrible past, but about the really bright future..that we own, if we just want to.

I like EWTN - I think the little nun with the huge opinion and equally huge heart, and pretty cool mouth too that never gave up...ha! - did one of the best things ever as far as celebration of what the new social media and communication can do!


God bless her! I'm really thankful for her.

Roger Buck

Have just received the Spam warning from Benny Cake and didn't realise I was doing that in this discussion, anyway. Because I was not simply placing links. Most of what I said was not in regard to those links.

Hoever I confess elsewhere I DID do something elsewhere that could be seen as such and I apologise for it).

Paramite Pie, thank you for telling me of your grandmother's experience. I hear this and need to hear it.

You write:

There was no sense of community between the people and the church. There was only fear.

I would like to hear from practising Catholics, with no axe to grind against the Church - is this true?

Was there ONLY fear?

I need to at least try to be humble here.

My parents and grandparents were not here. I did not grow up here. I do not know what you know.

However, I have tried to listen to many elderly Catholics and while I have been told things like this, I have more often been told differently.

I wish there were some over 60, even over 70s posting here.

If anyone from that generation is here, please speak ...

lazygal

Roger Buck wrote: »

Was there ONLY fear?

Yes. My grandfather lived in fear of his donation to the church being belittled from the alter and his brother's suicide being 'discovered', which led to his death being classed as an 'accident' for many years. Stillborn births were greatly feared, as the baby would be in limbo. Both my parents recall the fear of nuns and brothers in school, whose snobbery and elitism outshone any 'christian' attitudes. My grandmother lived in fear of her children being sent to 'industrial schools' when her husband died and then lived in fear of the 'shame' her son's psyhiatric problems caused, meaning he dropped out of the seminary.

No positive stories about religion at all, apart from ceremonies for hatches, matches and dispatches, have come from them.

Roger Buck

Lazygal - I wonder if you are a PRACTICING Catholic - someone with no axe to grind against the Church - such as I asked for?

For I have heard all kinds of positive stories.

If anyone further posts in reply to me, could you please say whether you are practicing Catholic, going weekly to Mass or not?

lazygal

Roger Buck wrote: »

Lazygal - I wonder if you are a PRACTICING Catholic - someone with no axe to grind against the Church - such as I asked for?

For I have heard all kinds of positive stories.

If anyone further posts in reply to me, could you please say whether you are practicing Catholic, going weekly to Mass or not?

Em, you don't control who gets to post. I'll post my experience, thanks.

Sounds like you only want to hear from people who'll back up your 'things were so much better in the olden days, when everyone went to mass and people were kinder' thesis, but that's not how discussion boards work.

Roger Buck

I had no intention to exclude you or your experience Lazygal. I only asked for people to identify their positions.

If you will read through my earlier posts, I think you may appreciate I am reading hundreds of pages from people speaking along your lines.

I am also reading hundreds of pages of the opposite.

It is very important to listen to both sides.

OP you might as well blame electric light, the Late Late Show or the EU as much as America.

A story from my village - unbabtised babies weren't allowed to be buried in the catholic (only) cemetery so they were buried in a mound in the corner of a field. I don't know when the rules were changed but the mound became neglected and overgrown. It is only recently that the burial mound was marked and tidied up.

I don't want to return to a time that forced grieving parents to bury their child in shame in the corner of a field.

nagirrac

For full disclosure I am neither a practicing nor non-practicing Catholic. However I was raised in a Catholic family in Ireland and would be not too far from the bottom end of your requested age range, so this is my 2c. There is a huge distinction by the way between Catholics raised in the Republic and Catholics raised in Northern Ireland, so if you are getting some of your inputs from NI Catholics (based on your location being Ulster), it may not be necessarily typical of the Republic. The RCC did not have a privileged position in NI.

Fear is not a strong enough word, the Catholic church instilled terror in people. If you fell foul of the RCC in Ireland you may as well emigrate, and many did. In my opinion the RCC in Ireland was an example of "power corrupting and absolute power absolutely corrupting". However, I would also argue that by and large Ireland was a good country to grow up in and raise kids in (and still is) and that by and large it was a just and kind society to most. I would attribute this to two factors, the fact that the indigenous Irish had been oppressed for centuries by a cruel and heartless colonical power and thus felt a great kinship with each other, and a genuine Christian outlook that had prevailed for many centuries. I didn't experience it myself but from the older generation I learned that in many parts of rural Ireland in the 20s - 40s there was essentially no money in circulation and significant numbers lived through barter and helping each other out. I did see this in the local farming community growing up where helping your neighbor and being helped in return was the norm. Maybe I was lucky but I genuinely never saw an act of cruelty to another human and saw countless examples of selfless behavior.

There is no question some people were treated very cruelly, largely due to the influence of the RCC, but the state has to also share the blame. However, in my view we have to put this in the context of the time, and in particular weigh it up against what our neighbors in Europe were up to. It would be interesting to know how many homosexuals were actually jailed in Ireland, in a period when they were being rounded up and sent to the gas chamber all over Nazi occupied Europe. While passive discrimination against non-Catholics existed in the Republic, in the NI state governed by our near neighbors, >40% of the population were actively discriminated against in voting rights, education, and employment. The worst abuses in Ireland were what went on in the industrial schools, which were a British "gift" established in the mid 19th century.

I think for balance we have to keep in mind that Irleand was a desperately poor fledgling state that had had its resources systematically raped for centuries, no restitution for which was ever paid for (contrast with what Germany ended up paying in restitution after WWII), in fact in the early decades of the state we were still paying rent for our own land. In that environment it was a society ripe for the influence of the church. Something that is quite ironic on the topic of excommunication btw is that those that fought and died for Irish freedom were subject to the same censure, and the RCC ended up the big winner when independence was secured.

Somewhere along the way Republican ideas got a little lost and the Wolfe Tone inspired ideals of the leaders of 1916 of "religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunites for all its citizens" (unheard of in much of Europe at the time, in particluar in Britain where women could not vote) and the promise to cherish "all of the children of the nation equally" did not fully come up pass. I would argue though that Ireland did not do too badly, given its circumstances, and in particular when you contrast its 20th century history with most of Europe.

A Republic is something worth fighting for and fighting to maintain, maintaining the influence of a church over society is not.

Zombrex

Roger Buck wrote: »

I regularly ask the older generation here in Ireland.

I meet many, many people who say Ireland was much better in the past ...

I have met the opposite too. More rarely.

I'm sure you do, but you can't really draw much of conclusion by simply going on numbers.

After all you might ask 10 Americans if the 1950s were better than now, and 8 of them might say yes and 2 of them might say no. So if you just went based on that you might say well it was a better time.

Of course if you reveal that those 2 Americans are black and that in the 1950s they were regularly the subject to verbal and physical assault for being black, that changes the picture some what. No matter how happy or oblivious the 8 other Americans were to this, the fact that America had institutionalized racism as part of its culture in the 1950s means it cannot be considered a better time that now, even if that only directly effected 2 out of every 10 Americans. Nor no matter how fondly people who weren't effected by this remember the era.

If have to look at the institutions and the cultural/social structures in place at the time, and ask how did they apply to all citizens, not just the majority. Because often the majority do relatively ok in any particular period in time, it is the assessment of the persecution and oppression of minorities that is the ultimate judge of a culture or time period.

Paramite Pie

Roger Buck wrote: »

Paramite Pie, thank you for telling me of your grandmother's experience. I hear this and need to hear it.

I would like to hear from practising Catholics, with no axe to grind against the Church - is this true?

Was there ONLY fear?

My grandmother was a practicing Catholic up until the day she died. My parents are still practicing Catholics and when they told stories of priests in the past they were usually intimidating figures. Nowadays one could go to a priest for advice or a sympathetic ear but the Church was simply unapproachable in the past as far as I can understand. They were often above the Law.

That doesn't mean there weren't genuinely nice priests in the past but I've mostly heard of the bad ones and am told of how far the Church has come in that regard. It was so different then.

My grandmother was born in 1921 so there are few people alive who would remember her era.

You mention you've heard many positive stories, but how many of these people are remembering the good days (community spirit) and not talking about the bad days (school beatings, which were not just done by priests but lay people too).

The older population now must experience culture shock here on a daily basis as the world has moved on. Most people they know/knew growing up are now dead and they struggle to relate to the younger generation (and vice versa). They're socially isolated from the community as their offspring may be living far away, so they will likely have fonder memories of the past than the present.

My Dad says he had the best of both worlds but he'd much rather the modern Church as it is today!