Cardinal

Cardinal Timothy Dolan  Archbishop of New York recently said in a  TV interview that the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, was similar to ISIS. That is, that the IRA was fighting a religious war.

His statement has  considerable nuisance value – it reveals  a lack of information and lack of  analysis of what has happened in Ireland. But it has a positive value too, it draws attention to the appalling mis-information being sent from Ireland to people in countries like the United States of America.

The IRA  was consistently opposed by leaders in the Catholic  and other churches. Not only the IRA but Republican  leaders and policies were condemned again and again by them  although the republican movement in Ireland has always proclaimed itself as struggling for an independent Ireland that is secular,  republican and socialist.

Why  did Cardinal Dolan make the statement ?

Possibly he may have got  false information from Ireland. Possibly because of briefing from Irish diplomats abroad,  possibly because of briefing from British officials. There is no shortage of possibilities.

Vatican authorities are content with British government control of part of Ireland, they are willing to help ensure it continues. Information about Ireland goes to Rome through Ireland’s bishops and  Irish diplomats who  traditionally have had a fear of any change of regime in Ireland.

Traditionally the Catholic church looked upon itself as a monarchy ; it felt comfortable relating to other monarchies, although historically  most of the persecutions and degradations it suffered were from monarchies of one kind or  another. Although the church is shedding its monarchical trappings  slowly but unsurely, it keeps a fear of other forms of government deeply in mind. It is hard to believe but it is true that bishops and other prominent members of the church  in France preached collaboration with Germany during the WW2 occupation in the hope  that they might  see the birth of a new world order and because they looked on the WW2 disaster as retribution for having abandoned monarchy !

The fear of socialism is great too. The horror of  Russian revolution, this time in Ireland  is as alive in some Irish minds as the abandonment of monarchy was in French ones. There has never been an official church analysis of what exactly socialism is, although there have been many condemnations of it. And Catholics used vast amount of their spiritual, intellectual and material energy struggling against communism when it was neither necessary nor profitable.

One could argue that the Church’s fear of socialism has come from a love of monarchy and perhaps this is true. It certainly comes from some irrationality which has invaded Irish minds which are usually intellectually strong enough to resist such things.

While  various factors may have influenced Cardinal Dolan  , only a person with a certain kind of rage could have suggested to him that the IRA was fighting a religious war. Fighting for a secular state , a socialist one and a republican one at that, is a bizarre way to fight a  religious war in Ireland. A rational war, yes. A relevant war, yes. But a religious war, no. And it would be interesting to canvass the response of a member of ISIS to whom you would try to  explain that the IRA attacked with bombs but  warned people where and when they were going to explode , fought wars as a last resort not as a  matter of  first principle, and  asked for peace talks as soon as the war began and went on doing so until government was forced to grant their request.

One worry is that if Cardinals think in such un-analytical  and irrational terms, what is to become of the Church ?

APOLOGIES !

This space has been silent for a long time.

For  reasons beyond our control.

Reasons sadly beyond our control.

But we will start trying again.

Many things - and what is happening in Gaza is one of the most horrifying of them- are “beyond our control” and yet tens of thousands of people who think they have no power or control have made a difference there. The many demonstrations and protests and demands by  what are wrongly called “the ordinary people” have caused   changes there which powerful people were either unwilling or unable to make. 

There is  a great lesson here.

We can  still argue that  “the ordinary people “  should not have to go out on  the streets to protest , because  after all we  pay  our public representatives to make our voices heard. They should be doing it  about Gaza and many other things.

But our system requires that what our elected representative will do  is governed by party policy in most cases ;  if our representative does not belong to a political party  he or she is an isolated  individual and we are back where we started.

So perhaps we need some fresh way for  people to  say what they have to say even more effectively.  The social media are moving us towards that.

We have seen that in a situation like that of Gaza and Israel the United Nations is inadequate, various governments are unwilling to do what is required because they have to see what is in their own interests. Peace groups and human rights groups are working not necessarily as units in a whole movement but as units who want to work separately even for similar aims.  Through the social media, the “ordinary people” have called each other together.And tens  of thousands in many countries came.

What else we can do  is not clear . But in any event we need  never accept war as a first resort in  any problem, we are bound to negotiate and negotiate and negotiate again and again rather than go to war. We can be sure that in Ireland many lives could   have been been saved if those who had power and influence had talked with  everybody, not just with those likely to agree with them. The  unwillingness of power people to talk and negotiate in Ireland was responsible for death.

There is no use saying that must not be allowed to happen again.  It  will of course happen again somewhere. The idea that governments and churches and parties will not talk with opponents for fear of “ giving them status” is arrogant and unworthy. As soon as a disagreement or hurt occurs there  should be negotiation. You don’t say, Lay down arms and we will negotiate – negotiation should be about laying down arms, or dismantling  tunnels, or stopping rocket fire and invasion and always  about giving justice and recognising dignity.  We remember  with shame that repeated appeals to church and political leaders to bring contending parties round the table in Ireland were refused. Churches had nothing to lose, everything to gain. So have governments if they would be wise about it. It is  in their own interest that they agree to negotiate at once rather than fight first.

People who have least power will do whatever they think best, demonstrate, protest write, boycott.  So if governments do not negotiate at the earliest possible moment  they are betraying the good people who feel so strongly about other people’s lives that they are prepared to make a spectacle of themselves demonstrating in the streets while their leaders stay at  home , wondering.

Review

Bill Meulemans worked in Belfast for eleven years  as Professor of Political Science in Queen’s University. Coming from the United States of America , he was , naturally as an academic and a decent person, curious about how an outrageous  political and religious situation had formed around people in Belfast who were also decent and intelligent, including scholars and church people. He set out  and sent his students out to find what it had done to them and why.  What he found is full of interest and contradiction.

Years ago the Department of Political Science in Queen’s was very different. One academic year might be spent by students studying the political philosophy and systems of ancient Greece, the next perhaps a segment of European, American or world social history. Now it was involved , through teachers like Bill Meulemans, in studying what history, religion, politics  do to ordinary human souls and human behaviour at home . For him and for his students and for those who read the results of their studies it proved a fascinating and sometimes frustrating adventure.

For one thing, one had to read the codes correctly, understanding the meaning of words and phrases which could be as tricky in Belfast as learning what words  to use talking to people in the United States or the Middle East where names , titles and even modes of address of the people to whom you are talking can mean the difference between being courteously helped or sedulously avoided.

Bill and his students had to find their way through this cultural fog in Belfast and did so successfully. This present study is not  the result just of graphs studied, numbers assessed, official reports scanned, it is the result of many, many conversations with many people some of whose occupations the reader may learn and some not. But although the conversations and exchanges are with people of so many kinds there still remains in the book an atmosphere of wonderment and such a preoccupation with the sad fact of communal distrust that one could get the impression that this distrust is the only problem. But this is because we are sharing in  a courteous exchange between people who are unsure, hurt, often angry,  struggling with the contradictions in  their  lives, and who most often  say what they feel  but  are afraid to engage with the real reasons why they feel it.  It is as much a study of people’s reaction to distress and manipulation   as a  description of  the aftermath of a   political crisis in a modern European country . How far is the distress caused by selfish government, how far by people’s unwillingness to live together in peace ?  

The author responds : “This book is about what is inside the heads of Catholics and Protestants since the bombs and bullets no longer dominate the headlines. It is about the reason why they are still haunted by their conflicted memories . It is about why many of them are stuck living in the past.”(p.23). One might think this means  Bill Meuleman’s study would be more at home in the Department of Psychology but the history and present situation of the Belfast people he writes about have too often been  a matter of possession of power, wealth, military bases and in the struggle either for or against this too many people have been hurt. Historians often deal with facts other than  real people suffering the real pain of being pitted against each other whether they  want it or not. In N.Ireland there are   people of perhaps sixty different religious groups and yet they have been successfully corralled by politicians  into two groups Catholic and Protestant, as if the disparate Christian groups did not exist, nor did the Jews, Muslims Humanists and others in N.Irish society.

This book by Bill Meulemans will help  readers to understand the effect this has had on the people who have never been allowed to experience the richness of a fully free community.

BELFAST – BOTH SIDES NOW , Bill Meulemans, (Create Space, Charleston, SC. 2013)

Shadows

It is probably the most intense, best researched and  most revelatory book about how governments do the subversive things they want nobody to know about.  

It’s the book Understanding Shadows,The Corrupt Use of Intelligence”  by Michael Quilligan (Clarity Press Inc. Atlanta,Georgia, 2013.

Michael Quilligan is a journalist born in Dublin, long time resident in Holland, expert and much published writer on what governments do with information and what lessons they consistently refuse to learn. And what decencies they violate.

Readers will first  turn to those parts of it that satisfy their particular interests  or curiosity - what really  happened in Ireland, whose interests were served by Kennedy’s assassination, what  lies were told by the Blair administration in its frantic determination to have its very own war, and by what alliances was it ensured that it would be very difficult to have any  war now without the  United States administration either causing or  manipulating it?

To answer these questions, or rather in our  intellectually polluted world , to see more clearly with  the real problems lie Michael Quilligan has devoted years of research in which he shows that intrigue is a matter of everyday governance, not a sudden outbreak of a few people,s bravado, or villainy. Dishonest use of nearly everything is a normal method of government. Dishonest , cynical or cruel use of knowledge is among governments’ greatest sins.

Some might think in such a  world where politicians like Mr Blair are  not politely refused admission to membership of a  Church but rather are welcomed , arms and all, by a Pope, many people would be aghast and would say so, but the success of governmental dishonesty is made possible by the silence of others which implies consent. The pollution of knowledge , or as here , the Corruption of Intelligence, is consented to and therefore thrives in all the countries which have most influence on our lives, the United States of America, Britain, France for example. What Michael Quilligan is doing is revealing the mechanics of where how and by whom it is done.

In Ireland it took a long time to convince even those who were sceptical of British government intentions that the war being waged there was as dirty as it really was. Even yet many people either do not believe it or refuse to discuss whether it was or not. Our world may seem to fall apart when we learn that the  assassin  paid or given immunity for assassinating is really an “unofficial” branch of one’s  own police force through whose falsely labelled activities  governments can claim it was not involved in killing its enemies or even its fellow citizens. But that  is only part of what the corrupt use of intelligence has been about. This book deals  with the rest of it as well in so far as the diligent and honest researcher can manage it. 

For those who want to know in detail how governments create, foster and fight both sides in crises , Understanding Shadows should be read and we should be thankful for it. There are many crimes but one of the greatest is the corruption of knowledge, a sin which some enlightened theologians believe is the only sin named by Jesus Christ as the unforgiveable.

Readers who like sampling a chapter or two to find out whether the author is thorough and informed would do well to select  the chapter Without Grace or Favour . In it they will meet the enigma of people who being good do  what is bad, and how an institution can hang  much materialistic policy on the twin spikes of hidden information and false information and how political and financial interests may be served thereby.

Having done that,  readers will probably peruse  the rest of the book with increasing determination to start their every study of government with the presumption they may well be  telling lies.

No Brainer

The release of 1984  official papers in London shows that an Irish politician said , presumably to somebody who seemed to matter, that I “was the brains behind the republican movement”.

I was flattered by anyone thinking I had either the brains or the ability to be any such thing, but  the statement is nonsense.

If I had received an invitation  to write speeches for Gerry Adams as this politician asserted, I would have been flattered by that request also, and would have responded with the same courtesy as Gerry Adams has always shown  me. But being aware of both the literary and the political abilities of Gerry Adams I  know  that my contribution would have been not only pedestrian and unhelpful but unnecessary.

However, a serious aspect of this assertion is that it is one of many  made to governments in Dublin and London through the years some of which were  nonsense. We know of some of them, there must have been many we don’t know about. The result of such stuff must be that these governments are willingly fed with misinformation which can only hinder those who are looking for rational solutions to problems. The damage done if this means a war is lengthened, must be considered when one is considering the contribution, responsible or otherwise, of those who made the assertions. And their motive for doing it. Another important aspect of the matter is that a simple phone call could have shown how nonsensical and false the statement about the brains was.

Interestingly, a statement of much the same kind was made at, I believe, much the same time by another person, this time a journalist whose sympathies would be rather different from those of the Irish politician  mentioned above. The fact that Dublin and government officials and such people accepted statements of such a character is one of the most frightening things about what they did during the years when people were suffering in Ireland’s northeast. The responsibility  of Irish and British officials both here and abroad for  the lengthening of the conflict in Ireland has yet to be examined , probably because no-one is willing to take the risk of showing what really happened. The idea that nothing good can come from a certain class, or a certain person or party is very much alive in politics , so the official line has to be  that if a good speech is produced it must be a ghost writer who wrote it and if  votes are obtained in elections, it is all due to  impersonation. It used to be said that until poets and other writers took an interest in modern republicanism it would be second class. Then the poets and writers and  artists  did , and suddenly it did not matter any more. It was an interesting reminder that the tactic is as old as the hills – remember the question in the Christian Gospel, can any good thing come from Nazareth?

Spying

Governments always spy. They have traditionally used  , among others ,  ambassadors  and business people  as spies, even though they were guests in other peoples’ countries. The excuse is that everybody does it and therefore….Which in  turn means that their morality is governed by business and politics ( which often is another name for business).

What still surprises us though is the amount of spying governments do. Not content with scraping in  rubbish bins on the ground, they send spies into space. And the result  is sixty million emails spied on per month in one country alone. What other spying is done we can imagine judging by  the technology available .

However there is no  use in  throwing up hands and lamenting. After all we did bring it on ourselves. We did it by saying nothing as one invasion after another was made into our personal privacy. We did not object when the cameras went up in  hotel lobbies, in the streets, even in the washrooms. We did not object when a sacred moment in human life, the moment of birth  began to be  portrayed in television  programmes not to show the sacredness of it but to give a thrill to watchers  of soap operas. There were  a few shudders of apprehensiveness when we saw the first portrayal of someone in  a  confessional box, another of those private moments in life which somebody decided should be private no longer, thus causing us no surprise when the spies bugged the boxes.

There seemed to be a grim determination  to seek out and destroy every moment which  centuries of  human delicacy  had  declared sacred,  to eliminate privacy and the  dignity of having one’s own space. We allowed it all to be invaded. And said nothing

We were told, of course , If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve nothing to fear. Nonsense. Those who do nothing wrong probably have more to fear than anyone  else.  

Nobody seems to see the connection between the depersonalising of soldiers by giving them no privacy even in the privy – a strange perversion – and having them watched and noted and recorded on their own  approach to  warehouse, witness box or washroom. We did not object to  millions being able to  zoom in to the exact spot where we lived, did not wonder why we should allow this to be done on  us,  or on a villager in Afghanistan seconds before the drones explode. But then we did not object when the technological advance of splitting the atom  was used to eliminate Hiroshima. Now we have allowed the president of a country  to use our technology – our technology – to enable  his henchmen – and  henchwomen , sad to say – to eliminate someone thousands of miles away whom the  droning president has decided without trial is an enemy of his state. Is it really possible for the  United States of America to  stay united in their  desire to let  this abomination  continue ?

Yes, it is.  Until eventually  the united states  disintegrate just as every empire on the face of the earth disintegrates. To forecast that disintegration , or to wish it for the world’s safety is not being un-American.  It is being so pro-American as to believe that no Washington government for decades has been worthy of the American people.

When Mr Obama was elected we all hoped  the  people would have  a  renewed life in which what we called the American dream would be fulfilled for everybody.  

Our thoughts  are different now. More modest . Thoughts about  curbing this  lust for power rather than  giving more authority to the same people for more of the same.

With a mixture of horror and hope we remember the childhood fable of the Frog that proudly swelled  up so much  that………………..   

Standards

Standards of  international political behaviour are not just falling, they are being deliberately lowered in the interest of those  strong enough to benefit by it..

For many years there has been an honourable  struggle to make war and politics and economics endurable or at least  less  cruel .    

Now we are accepting , even praising, universal spying on person  and nation.

Now we are accepting that a government can fire  explosives  from the safety of its own territory into the territory of another nation with no more justification than saying it needs to.

Now we are accepting  that a government can send armed forces into another nation’s territory to seize whomever it wishes to seize and all the offended nation can do  is “demand an explanation” .  

We are accepting that governments may torture  as a normal way of getting information.

We are giving our consent to the demolition of a whole system of safeguards which  took centuries  and  millions of  lives to make even debatable , let alone effective in law. 

And  while we are doing this we are piously asking :  Why are so many of our people taking their own lives?

How can we ask such a question when we are building up a society in which , for all our pious talk , might really does mean right,  death is  our chosen  acceptable solution for  problems and  international bodies set up to protect our lives  are cynically used by the strongest to allow more of their killings to be protected by law?

Why should any of us  complain ? Most of us  have accepted every bit of it, the drones, the invasions, the torture, the packed prisons, the economic systems which do not just tolerate poverty but deliberately create it because without poverty the systems will not work,  without poverty the wars will  not be waged – although there is a strong push now to make  war using  fewer and fewer people  just as we have invented   trade with fewer and fewer people  to work in  it, trade with less workers and more consumers, war  waged without  masses of people walking to be slaughtered.  But  the nuclear weapons are waiting in the wings ready for  use as soon as the really important people find a safe refuge for themselves, whether on this earth or beyond it. , and so the masses of people can disappear anyway.

Shame on us for  allowing it  to happen.

Right of Conquest

One of the ideas that  helped to shape history but  we could usefully get rid of is The Right of Conquest.

It was believed – or people professed to believe – that when you conquer another people’s land you  own it  by Right of Conquest. It was  a way of  justifying theft and the receipt of stolen goods. It was accepted by Christians in whose Bible  the right of conquest is  glorified, however ruthless it might be. Right of conquest is still with us, but it takes different forms nowadays. Sometimes it is disguised as opening up the way for democracy  for people who are suffering from dictatorships whose badness we , and not they, define.

Historically the theft of other people’s land has been glorified even to the extent of attaching sacred names to stolen territory. Corpus Christi was never meant to be used that way. With a Bible firmly  in hand , or  stored in a locker ready for action when required, it was easy for invading Christians not only to steal territory but even to say God was the reason for it. And God was praised for it too.

One of  our  neighbours in West Belfast , Mr. Gowdy  who in his own words was educated in the university of the Universe – and often showed us great wisdom as a result – used to  sum up a segment of Irish history neatly. When  told that one of the awful things done  in Ireland was that invaders came and stole the land of the O Neills, the great Northern family, he had an immediate and devastating answer : “Yes. And who did the O Neills steal it from ?”

They must have taken it partly by armed strength and partly by craft because in Ireland the land used to belong to the people who walked on it  for the very first time, and then by their tribes and  then when  one or more families became powerful gradually  control of the land became concentrated  in them. One of  many  interesting places in Ireland is Newry, Co Down where land was thus brought into the control of local princes, who donated some of it to a monastery ( coming in from outside)and when invaders were stealing monastery lands everywhere ,  the Newry land was stolen. As usual in those days of enlightenment when monasteries were destroyed, their hospital services, their rest and refuge houses were destroyed with them, in the first massive privatisation of medical services ever to happen . Stones of the monastery buildings were used to build fine houses for the new possessors.

What they had done was justified partly by saying they were  civilising natives and partly because God wished such things to happen and largely because  the Right of Conquest was believed and acted upon with vigour in those Christian times. Happily, a lot of the stolen land in Ireland kept its old names and did not have the miserable experience other peoples had of being re-named by the thieves in honour of  St Dominic or the Blessed Virgin once the blood had dried.

It seems  now that this ancient idea of the Right of Conquest is slowly giving place to a more modern  idea, the Right of World Policing. But it is much as usual. The aims are the same, theft of other people’s wealth , the methods are the same and , not surprisingly,  the excuses are the same.  After all, they say, powerful nations have  to civilise the world somehow .And that costs money. And lives. Other people’s  most of the time.  

No Trouble

One trouble about Ireland is that we never get to describing properly what is happening in and to it. We talk about The Troubles when what we  really mean is revolution. We talk about inter- religion hatred when what we mean is antagonism used as an instrument of government. Put it all together and what you get is that  in the northeast corner of Ireland  bad government using racism as an instrument of control led to a revolution.

With that  as a starting point we may reasonably hope to get somewhere , but it is doubtful if Dr Haass will even be directed towards it. He will be told, and will accept that the Irish problem is one of Protestant versus Catholic hatred. It is nothing of the kind. The problem is thoroughly bad government and has been  for centuries. Indeed the Protestant and Catholic populations were so successful in integrating and burying hatchets and living together that artificial antagonisms and pogroms had to be arranged on average every 12 years for a couple of centuries, as one of our perceptive friends, Andrew Boyd has pointed out.

Commentators on most conflicts  tell us  who benefits militarily , financially, socially, culturally from a particular situation . Not so about Ireland, where commentators  lazily or with intent declare that inter-community hatred is the cause of  the problems.  Ireland, particularly the northeast, has suffered  always from that false description . The world was told about the great Protestant-Catholic  blocs wrapt in struggle as if the Jewish people , the Muslims, the Humanists and about 60 different religious groups did not even exist. The result has been an interpretation of Ireland which has very efficiently prevented rational thought about it internationally.

It is time for that nonsense to cease but there is not the slightest possibility that Dr Haass will cause it to cease. From what he has said in public it seems he is locked into the old tired, inefficient model  of sectarian conflict in which what we have to do is get Mrs Mac Awilly to agree with her next street neighbour Mrs O Filigan and all will be well. No word of bad government leading to revolution, as any American commentator would be glad to notice if it were in a  Latin American country. No word of how the Humanists and the Jewish people and so many others have been left out of the thinking as blocs were petrified or if necessary created to suit the only model of  description allowed by government and press.

Control of flags and emblems can be dealt with locally in any society by clear laws and honest policing. Without those all the talking in the world is in vain. The past will be dealt with in time as it has been in other European countries , given  people’s need to survive with dignity and with an adequate sense of the realities of their life but the best way to ensure that happens is to guarantee good government and if good government is not possible in a Irish six county context which was  specially designed to create undemocratic  government then that context has to be changed. The shape of an ungovernable area may have to  be changed to suit modern  reality, rather than imperial needs of the past.

All that needs thinking – and doing – something rational about, but  is a matter not for  a visiting monitor but for a local and international  process of rational analysis and politics.   It is high time we had it.

New York Stops

Do cities ever  get so cluttered they just stop ?  A friend in New York foretold  that  would happen  – “One fine day”, he said, New York will just stop. Dead” . He imagined  a  policeman standing  lonely at a corner in  Fifth Avenue  patiently disentangling car after car in a city which had at last given in,    getting fatter and slower and finally giving up.

Could  cities really stop ? Get so big  they become unmanageable?  A “garbage” strike or even a garbage glitch in New York  now can  be not only inconvenient but disastrous. Or   a  power failure, freezing elevators, machines, traffic lights, when   for a few frightening hours citizens  realise how much they depend on electric current  and  make frantic resolutions never to let it happen again, wondering  what kind of shop  sells generators cheap, then remembering  that unless you keep a tankful of gas ready for action, which most people don’t,  dead pumps will not help much.

A city grows  , so it needs more money to look after more people, so more people are encouraged to come in and pay more rates and taxes . People need shops and cinemas and theatres and  sports arenas and then they need  more people to fill them  because of rising costs and profits and they all need trams and roads,underpasses and overpasses, roundabouts and swings .  That means frayed nerves and irritable complaints that you can’t even get a road mended without a traffic pile-up  half a mile long, appointments are missed and road rage is no longer an affection of speeders but one afflicting those who can only move slow metre by agonising metre. Cities  get  over-crowded,some  thrive on it for a while ,  thrive in spite of it  – and some seize up from it. That has always been the way ,we human beings just must have cities, crowded cities, and yet  no people on earth have found the secret of managing the growth of cities so that they don’t seize up on them.

The Roman emperor Nero, nearly 2000 years ago,  was blamed for solving the problem of over-crowding, pollution, traffic congestion , bad housing , refuse pile-up and much else in Rome in his time – by sending out his slaves one day to burn down about half the city. Guilty of arson or not,  he blamed the Christians for the fire  , played a tune on his lyre, recited a poem or two  and rebuilt the city to a fine plan which would have done credit to a sane man but  was miraculous for an irrational  one like him. 

So when crawling along in slow moving tailback queue  on a city approach road , let’s be glad and rejoice – if we lived in ancient times, things could be a lot worse.

Wise President

If Mr Obama is wise

and if  the pressure groups behind him are not overpowering,

and if those  in the USA who really want  the  world not to disintegrate will now stand up and say so

and if the United States really wants to  survive for this century as a real union,

then there will  be no military intervention in Syria.

                      But perhaps

                          all that is asking too much.

Earth Renewal

Why are there so many public pronouncements and so much public argument about the morality of what we do in private life  and so few about  the morality of what governments and big business and  armies do ? A lot of talk about gay marriage – or gay people – and little about drones and invasions, and banks tempting us to spend beyond our means ?

There is one explanation that Christians might  find unwelcome .  Jesus Christ  made clear what his followers should do – renew the face of the earth, change its habits, obey law but don’t let law overcome generosity; the world needs changing and you can change it – it will need  vigour and wisdom that are superhuman, even  divine, certainly,  but it can be done just because that superhuman , divine vigour and wisdom are  available. So these Christians set out into the broad world happy and willing, full of confidence in the  divine power they had inherited. And  some of them believed the world as they knew it was going to end soon and therefore their task was to make sure it was renewed soon and  fit to end gloriously.

Then they got a taste of Corinth. And Rome. And Athens ;  of sailors in  Mediterranean harbours wary not to be caught in the cargo investment scams or lost in leaky boats, Athenians who said, We must talk to you again sometime, but declined to talk now, Galatians who still fought with each other  even after they became Christians, the power of emperors and kings who could kill with a word not because people were bad but because they were good. These Christians  did their best to renew the face of the earth, but did many of them  lose courage and narrow their view not of what should be done but of what could be done with such a world plagued as it was with so many things going wrong,   and worse,  so many things wilfully made to go wrong?

If the conversion of the world in so short a time was too daunting , though, the ideal of personal perfection was still there and Christians held on to it. Some went to desert places to achieve personal holiness – it was as if they had taken a long sad look at the world and said, All I can do for you is go away  and pray for you. For them the concept of retreating from the world took the place  of staying in with the world , to become  holy apart rather than  with common effort. The scholar Jerome looked for a deserted place, translated scriptures and urged intense personal holiness, he was one  retiring Christian genius among many.

Looking at what is happening today one can understand their dilemma. And in any case , conversion of the world begins with the conversion of oneself.  That might explain why some Christians  seem to be afraid of  what they call a “social gospel” and who sometimes rebuke their fellow Christians with being more concerned with  social action than with individual beliefs. Right through the history of Christianity there runs   the idea  not only that there is  a struggle between good and evil out there in the markets and  harbours and even  in homes, but there is a struggle inside each person and perhaps that should be dealt with first. Or only. Whether early on with Manichaeism or later with Jansenism or now with the idea of the world, the flesh and the devil winning , this war between good and evil has to be waged, it is said,  between the spirit and the flesh in each person . And therefore….where do we start? Perhaps, though,if  the war starts  there it may end there  too, and the face of the earth may stay unrenewed. Maybe. Maybe.

On the other hand, it is an old lesson in old Scriptures that even an angry God will spare a whole city if there is even a handful of good people in it. And that thought must have made many a tired Christian heave a sigh of relief and leave off despairing.  

Clearly it still does.

Feile

One of the events in Féile an Phobail ( The West Belfast People’s Festival) was a discussion open to anyone wishing to speak.

About God. Or about No God if they so wished.

The Reason?

To get step by step to the point where people can speak their minds and be treated with courtesy at all times , in all places, about anything and everything.

And also, although people are sceptical about this, because neither those who believe God exists nor  those who believe God does not exist are using their best arguments in public discussion. But they should. A look at the books shows it, and listening to radio and television discussion about religion underlines it to the point of exasperation.

Why the fuss about best arguments? Flabby arguments do nobody any good.  There are strong – and dignified – arguments to be made for so many things but if we discuss only the flabbiest of them our  intelligence and mental work get flabby too, because we don’t  need anything better. But given a strong, dignified and able opposition or questioning , the strength and validity of our own arguments get sharper and sharper. Without  questioning and objection, we  may get away with a lot but some day when faced with a really questioning mind and someone who really wants to know what we are on about, we may have nothing to offer, whichever side we are on.

It was a mistake for political parties and churches – and even, unhappily, universities – to try to ignore or get rid of  inquiring minds. Human beings are inquiring beings, it is part of our nature , whatever is there we want to know about it, and whatever is not there we don’t want to pretend is there. Nobody in his or her senses wants to believe in something or someone that  doesn’t exist.

However, we have a problem. Every time  people get to the point of discussing real issues, in politics, economics, religion for instance, somebody else creates a diversion. it may be a parade here, a false crisis there, a diversion into a side issue or a side street, a tactic  the ancient Romans knew about and used cunningly, just enough bread and more than enough   circuses to keep  people occupied and not too serious.  We too have had  all that on an international scale. The Cold War and the War Against Terror were and still are part of that scene. We think ruefully how much intellectual vigour , how much worldly wealth , how many lives we   spent  at the behest of leaders who brought   us on such crusades. As if  wrongdoing  in one system meant an  opposing  system just had to be good, or as if like a modern Don Quixote, you  could wage war  against an Ism and make believe it was not against  people .

Maybe we  don’t like the idea of “giving a platform” to our opponents, but we may  be doing both them and ourselves a favour. One of the many good things Féile an Phobail has done is show we have nothing to be afraid of  from listening to other people’s ideas.

In this as in most things we need each othe

Children's President?

One can question the wisdom of bringing hundreds of children into the Waterfront Hall in Belfast to celebrate President Obama.

One should question it.

However,  those of us who believe in  the principle that “Parents are the first and principal teachers of  their children” have to bow to the decision of parents to do it. But because there are plenty of examples of children being shielded off from politicians who were the elected representatives of the people and  were trying to bring a peaceful settlement to our politics,   now we have to work out the reason why children should be brought out of school and into a gathering where praise would be given without question to a man who has more power than he needs and, many people believe, less responsibility than  needed to use it wisely.

At present  torture is  being used not just secretly, shamefacedly, but as a normal part of information gathering by governments. We have abandoned the principle that a person is innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. We have approved the principle that if anyone anywhere  is deemed a threat to  another state’s  security – not by what he or she has done but by what he or she may do – a government making that judgement  without public trial and proof, can send in a missile controlled from a thousand miles away and destroy  a neighbourhood. In Beirut ? Belfast ?  Larne?   Tubbercurry ?

What we have agreed to would have been beyond belief only a few short years ago. But that we have assented to all this and much more is undeniable after the Waterfront scandal. A new and sinister word to make people  forget  Watergate : Waterfront.

From now on they  can say , We have Waterfronted our children………….

We have been lectured about integrating our schools. Religiously of course. Washington governments racially integrated their schools because they had to, not because they coolly decided that was the humane thing to do. Washington governments have created more wars than  even a British administration could do  in so  short a time. The fact that they lost  the wars did not deter them from creating more. Meanwhile  we do not know how many of their  own people are hungry and even starving , because they will not tell us. They will however send a President here to tell us  how the world should work – or whether it should work - and how we should create peace by the simple means of changing our own way of life , not  uttering even a word about how governments work. The presidential speech could well have been made in a world in which all governments, except one, do  wrong and in which it is the duty of children to make a new world out of one that  adults have already ruined and show all the signs of ruining again.

A new meaning for the Biblical saying  “And a child shall lead them…”, now according to the Waterfront bible children are  expected to lead them because the adults have given over  responsibility t o them. Without power of course. That  is sacred and strictly controlled.

Greater  reason for wonder than the event  itself -  a Pied Piper event - in the Waterfront Hall  was the approval of it by educators and parents. We may be depressed by much of what governments do, but even more can we be depressed by how many people approve of it.

Schools can hardly complain though if  educationalists cease to be recognised as  teachers of political reality. Or moral politics.   

CELIBACY OF CLERGY

If a priest wants to marry, the church cannot forbid him, it is a human right recognised  by the church. What it can do, and does, is forbid him to act as a priest if he marries. This could be challenged in ecclesiastical courts but  then in civil court because church courts if these exist for such a purpose would give an unfavourable judgement He could then go ahead and marry with whatever civil formality is available. The church’s own principle is that if any humanly made law can be obeyed  only at the cost of serious inconvenience or hardship it ceases to apply so a  priest  can marry civilly or with the help of sympathetic other priests. No church law has been broken. If objection is made that no cleric can proceed against church officials in civil courts without episcopal consent, this also is a humanly made law and should be governed by the same principle.

The real issue is one of unjust discrimination.

As the  Church laws now stand, if a priest marries he stands to lose his chosen way of life which has been recognised as a special vocation by the Church, he loses also social standing  and livelihood. 

Whatever about Irish courts, if  the case of a church forbidding priests to marry or forbidding priests to minister if they do marry were to go  to European courts  this could probably result in a declaration that such discrimination is against human rights. British people and the British Catholic Church may find this difficult  because  religious discrimination  is licensed at the highest level of government in Britain, affecting members of the British royal family who if they become Catholic  lose their positions. That is, treating  legally enforced clerical celibacy as a matter of discrimination and civil rights has political repercussions. On the other hand, it is hardly likely that Catholic Church authorities would be willing to risk creating such political problems and this might induce them to move towards changing  the enforced celibacy rule.

The issue of discrimination becomes  clearer in  England where some priests are deprived of ministry if they are married, others are not  if they have come via the Anglican priesthood. Two parishes side by side, one with a married priest, the other with a priest forbidden to marry is easily seen as not only unjust but illogical.

All this underlines the need for priests who wish to marry to act courageously, openly  - and carefully – having assessed the possible reaction of their parishioners etc , and the support or opposition to be expected from fellow  clergy. Open discussion then is  necessary and helpful. There is a precedent for it in discussions which happened in Holland for instance   while Vat 2 was in session ; these   even questioned whether the Church could annul marriages or create invalidating impediments- as far as such discussion is concerned, what has been done manifestly can be done!

Probably there was never  a time when  so many inducements to sexual intercourse were not just available but were imposed on people – through film, T.V., plays, books etc.,etc. St Paul wrote that if we wanted to avoid “evil” or temptation we should have to leave the world altogether and this is true now more than in his time. We  tried to avoid a lot of , not only sin, but sexual attractions by putting up a barrier, physical, intellectual or spiritual, between them and priests but that is becoming less and less possible.  Irrespective of whether such things  are right or wrong, moral or otherwise,  it means greater stress than ever on priests  who are bound to celibacy by law. This is not a compassionate situation; this  law was made in circumstances dramatically different from ours . So the original obligation imposed by this law is very different now from the obligation imposed in past times. The law is the same, but  present circumstances make keeping the  law quite different. Demanding a change in the law is then not only  logical but  even required in order to make law operate justly. We are in danger of imposing  morally impossible  burdens on priests which grow rather than diminish in time and this is expressly condemned by Jesus Christ.  The number of priests becoming smaller means that more and more priests are required to live lonely lives. We recognise  a  divine principle that it is not good for a person to be alone unless there is an overwhelming reason otherwise.  Priests  lonely  in an increasingly antagonistic or indifferent world are in a danger which grows with  time. Refuge in a priestly community or in any community does not solve the difficulties which are deeply spiritual and personal. It is easy to say such difficulties should be and can be sublimated – but   we have  not yet devised a real theology for “secular” priests, as our seminary programmes have shown, and we have to create a fresh theology of the vows of “poverty” and obedience” as well as that of “chastity”.

It is  difficult to defend the present discrimination as between RC and Anglican priests in English parishes.Clearly there is no  inability inherent in  the married state of priests, so it is absolutely and alone a matter of church law. And this church law allows one set of married men to minister as priests but not another who may be living in the adjoining parishes ! Every law should  be positively justified; unnecessary laws should not be passed or continued. They should not be passed for the sake of control but should deal with and reflect a serious threat to a community or a serious good to be achieved. It could be argued that neither of these  applies – if a great good can be achieved by celibacy that great good can be more greatly achieved by voluntary rather then imposed celibacy  in modern circumstances.   Can abstinence be imposed on people and keep its potency or worth?  Under law it becomes  a matter of obedience rather than of self-giving. And if law oppresses any of our people then it should be changed unless it serves some other very good purpose. Legally imposed celibacy is not necessary for priests, it is discriminatory and in modern circumstances dangerous. 

In some future time we shall have to face not only the effects of  changing   the celibacy law -  including  financing families,pensions etc. -  but also the effects of the law as it is at present.  For example at present we  refuse  to  allow priests to acknowledge women as their wives with whom they have a loving relationship. The church recognises its  duty to “regularise” sexual situations among  others , why should it have difficulty doing so for priests ?

But that is another day’s work.