Silos and synods

I was at a conference in Rome a few years ago where people from Google explained that Catholic websites tend to punch well below their weight compared to those of other religious groups for the simple reason that they don’t link to other sites; in the digital environment as so often in the world at large today, Catholicism is a siloed landscape. It doesn’t have to be, though. Even just thinking about Irish history, and the kind of lessons we might draw from our most influential period, those centuries between the coming of Patrick and the Viking attacks when we supposedly saved civilization – we didn’t, but we did a lot – it shouldn’t take long for us to realise just how important networks and networking were to ‘the land of saints and scholars’.

That won’t typically be our first thought, of course. We’re far more likely to think of the likes of the island monastery of Skellig Michael. Famously isolated, the stone huts on the pyramidal island are dramatically inaccessible, so much so that they were perfectly cast in recent Star Wars films as Luke Skywalker’s hermit hideout. This very inaccessibility, this remoteness – the monastery is high on a rugged rocky spike that arises from stormy waters that cut the island off from the south-western corner of the Irish mainland – defines the monastery, but can too easily mislead us into thinking that this kind of community was somehow typical of Irish Christianity in its earliest centuries. Anything but!

That’s not to say that there weren’t Celtic monks who went off into the wilderness to seek God through contemplation – the Cambrai Homily, written around AD700, speaks of this ‘green martyrdom’, as distinct from the classical red martyrdom of those who died for the Faith and the white martyrdom of those who left their homelands to become missionary exiles – but we go wildly astray if we ever think of this as the norm. On the contrary: in the first centuries of our recorded history the Irish countryside was dotted with hundreds, even thousands, of monasteries, and while some certainly were discreet centres of contemplation, many others had roles that were pastoral, administrative, scholarly, and evangelising. They were platforms for outreach, and they were linked together.

Clonmacnoise, established by St Ciarán where the river Shannon meets the great road that was the Esker Riada, is perhaps the most obvious of these, but even when we think of the ostensibly remote beauty of Glendalough, we should keep in mind that though St Kevin settled in a beautiful spot in the Wicklow Mountains, he hardly did so in an obscure one; the monastic city that grew up around him is, after all, barely a mile from the crossroads of Laragh. St Cronán is famously described in his medieval biography as having moved his community to Roscrea because people couldn’t find it in its original home. ‘I will not be in a desert place where guests and poor people cannot easily find me,’ he supposedly said, continuing, ‘but I will stay here now in a public place.’

Our early lives of St Brigid show her travelling around the roads of central Ireland by chariot, praying as she went like an efficient commuter, and even helping her people in the building of a road, designed to carry chariots and wagons even across bog and riverside swamps. They describe her too as paying careful attention to how Mass was celebrated in Rome, so the prayers could change in Ireland if they changed in Rome, while contemporary letters from the likes of St Columbanus underline how letters and appeals to Rome were indeed a real phenomenon for the Celtic saints.

Roads, rivers, and letters all served to bind communities together, and communities would be aware too of their familial links – not merely because they’d often be expressions of local tribes and kingdoms, but because they’d be part of loose familial federations, known as paruchia, deriving from particular founder saints and those with whom he or she had studied. These federations could cross the sea, or even straddle the continent. Not that all was harmonious in or between these paruchia, of course – families can be tricky things, after all – but there were links, and the links mattered.

What’s more, the monastic leaders would travel to meet with each and learn from each other, and could come together occasionally in gatherings called synods. One synod from AD 697 begot the Cáin Adomnán, attempting to ban violence in warfare against non-combatants and especially women, for instance, while another, known as the Synod of Patrick, issued more than thirty rulings, including ones banning the receipt of donations from pagans and  threatening excommunication against anyone who believed in vampires!

Coming from the Greek syn-odos, meaning a shared journey or even a common path, synods are things we hear a lot about in Church circles nowadays, with talk of synods, synodality, synodal paths, and synodal ways. In the end, though, we should realise that they are, above all else, antidotes to siloed landscapes, a way of helping give reality and life to the Church as a network of networks. If St Brigid helped build roads across bogs, it must in part have been because without such ways – without such common paths – our monasteries would have been isolated and ineffective. Like the proverbial lighthouse in a bog, they’d have been brilliant but useless.

If synodality does nothing more than keep people talking together and praying together and working together towards common ends, it will have achieved something. Networks matter, after all.

Colonists

I saw yesterday that this year’s Dublin Handelfest is being advertised, and perhaps unsurprisingly I felt that same ambivalent twinge of troubled anticipation I felt last year. The festival is great, with concerts and tours and exhibitions, but too often celebrations of Handel’s Dublin sojourn, like the city’s Georgian architecture or writers like Swift and Goldsmith, go hand-in-hand with nonsense about the eighteenth century as the capital’s golden age.

Such claims only make sense if we only care about our elites, the 3% of the population who could vote and who lived in the houses we admire today. They only make sense if we disregard the vast majority of the city’s population, the mass of urban poor who lived in destitute slums, the thousands of beggars, the thousands of prostitutes, the thousands who died in the freezing famine that killed up to a fifth of the population between 1740 and 1741 in what history would record as the 'Year of Slaughter'. They only make sense if we disregard the regular riots of the urban poor that the army was called upon to suppress time and again. They only make sense if we disregard the fact that the Kingdom of Ireland was what we would now call an apartheid state, one where the country’s Catholic majority were barely tolerated, their most basic rights curtailed and denied, discreet chapels only allowed in Dublin at all when riots were feared after a house where Mass was being celebrated collapsed, killing the celebrant and nine of those worshipping. If we disregard the violence, the robbery, the overcrowding, the typhus, the open sewers.

Pádraig Daly, the Augustinian priest-poet, has a poem called ‘Colonists’, in which he reflects on how we might be tempted to celebrate the domestic glories of those who colonised Africa. It’s not long, so I may as well quote it in full:

What hits you as strongly as the first blast

Of African heat

Is their absolute presumption,

Dividing out a land

Others had wandered since forever,

Erecting fences across the paths of hippo, zebra, lion,

Calling rivers for themselves and their bloated queens,

Corrupting the names of hollows and mountainranges,

Terming the old uncouth,

Patronising,

Slaughtering, 

Teaching servitude.

The beauty they achieved in their houses

And sweeps of trees

Is by the by.

I’m not saying the beauties and glories the elite of Georgian Dublin enjoyed amongst the squalor and sorrow of those they’d dispossessed and oppressed are ‘by the by’ -- we can, after all, enjoy them now. And, in truth, we may as well take advantage of whatever good that shower did. There was precious little of it, after all, compared to the harm they inflicted. But still: let’s not pretend this was a Golden Age; what gold there was shone among the blood and filth of a boot-trodden charnel pit.

Dignity

On the bus back from the airport yesterday I wasted the blue skies and glorious views that were surrounding me and would soon and suddenly be shrouded in an all-concealing fog by spending my time reading a frustrating essay from a few years back, a piece by Edward Feser who I used to rate, with a couple of decent books by him still on the shelves. Entitled 'Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment', it's a long and obstructive piece that seems built in a way that it's hard to engage with in a comprehensive and reasonable fashion. He'd written it in 2019 in the aftermath of the previous year's change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church to the effect that the death penalty should be regarded as inadmissable, and the piece had been reposted the following year after this point was driven home in the papal encyclical Fratelli tutti.

Shorn of the undergrowth and the wood that makes it hard to see the trees, what Prof. Feser is asking can be summed up as follows:

1. Does Pope Francis’s teaching on capital punishment amount to a doctrinal change or merely a prudential judgment? Prof. Feser argues that when the Pope says capital punishment should never be used, he is either making a doctrinal change that contradicts the teaching of Scripture and Tradition, or he is merely making a prudential judgment. Either way, he claims, Catholics are not obliged to agree with him.

2. Do you agree with Pope Francis that life sentences should be abolished? Pope Francis, he says, has frequently said life sentences are objectionable, and are objectionable for the same reasons as are death sentences.

3. Do you agree with Pope Francis that executing a murderer is worse than what the murderer himself did? In a 2015 letter, Prof. Feser notes, the Pope wrote that the death penalty represents a failure for any constitutional state because it obliges the State to kill in the name of justice, and that justice is never reached by killing a human being. On this point, the Pope noted Dostoyevsky's observation that 'To kill a murderer is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by a criminal.'

Now, the second and third questions can be dealt with pretty easily, and seem to exist here merely to complicate the issue. Putting aside the merits or otherwise of the Pope's opinions -- and both seem utterly defensible, with the key point ignored by Prof. Feser in the third question being that when the state kills somebody it creates a situation where there is blood on a whole society's hands, not just on those of an individual killer  -- the crucial thing here is that these are just opinions, and thus not things Catholics are expected to accept as Church teaching. We might well reflect upon them, and doing so might help us to become better Christians, but still, they're not things we're expected to sign up to. Prof. Feser might ask these questions out of interest, but they're ultimately distractions.

So, that leaves us with question one, and in looking at that it's worth noting that Prof. Feser begins his argument by saying that there are two possible interpretations of Pope Francis’s teaching on the death penalty, with him either intending to revise the relevant doctrinal principles or intending merely to make a prudential judgment about how best to apply existing doctrinal principles to current circumstances. Thing is, this -- and indeed the essay as a whole -- fundamentally ignores what the Vatican actually said when the Catechism was changed in 2019, that being that the change was an expression of doctrinal development.

In a letter explaining the change, Cardinal Ladaria wrote to say the Pope had asked for the Church's 'teaching on the death penalty be reformulated so as to better reflect the development of the doctrine on this point that has taken place in recent times', adding that 'this development centres principally on the clearer awareness of the Church for the respect due to every human life', with St John Paul II's letter Evangelium vitae being of great importance in this development. The CDF head went on to explain that the change was 'in continuity with the preceding Magisterium while bringing forth a coherent development of Catholic doctrine', and as such reflected 'an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium'. 

Curiously, Prof. Feser never even uses the terms 'development of doctrine' or 'doctrinal development' in his piece. This is unfortunate given how Cardinal Ladaria, on behalf of the Pope, had explained the recognition that the death penalty should be deemed inadmissable as a development of doctrine in relation to the Church's deepening understanding of human dignity, and the capacity of our world to realise that dignity. After all, that every single one of us is deliberately made by God in God's own image is as foundational a Catholic teaching that you're ever going to see, and the horrors of the twentieth century have helped underline just how precious that dignity is, and how easy it can be to rationalise its abuse.

I appreciate that Prof. Feser has argued extensively elsewhere that the Church has over the centuries taught infallibly that the death penalty is legitimate, but I'm not sure he does so with a suitable eye to how different magisterial levels operate, or indeed how Church teaching is structured around a hierarchy of truth, where some truths are based on other ones and are illuminated by them. In his article 'Capital punishment and the infallibility of the ordinary Magisterium', for instance, published several months before Church teaching was formally clarified in this area, the general tendency is to disregard the development of Church teaching on human dignity.

It shouldn't be hard to see that Church teaching on the legitimacy or otherwise of the death penalty relates to questions of how we can protect society, which in the end is about how we protect and recognise the dignity of human life itself; the key doctrinal question here concerns the dignity of the individual human being, made in God's image. I'm glad that the Pope, and the CDF -- or now the DDF, I suppose -- have their priorities right on this. 

Explorations

The river Boyne is tidal outside our house, rising and falling as it ebbs and flows with the salty waters of the Irish Sea. The water can drop to a few inches at times, revealing wide gravel beds and even — to the eagle-eyed — the outlines of a few ancient oak canoes, sunk six thousand years ago when the great solar tomb of Newgrange was being built beyond the bend of the river, and now at risk of being trampled and destroyed by the horses that have taken to exploring. It's navigable, though, at least for small boats when the tide is in, and if you want you can even hire traditional skin-and-wood currachs to row along the river now. 

Such a boat, I suppose, would have been used by the monks who sailed along the river at the dawn of Ireland's Christian era when the Boyne was one of Ireland’s main transport routes, and the story goes that a group of such monks were passing by in the late fifth century when they were flagged down by a man who lived by the banks of the river facing where I live now. His wife and he had a baby boy, he said; would the monks baptise him for them? They could not, they said, because the salty waters of the sea were not the fresh living waters needed for baptism. But, they added, God would provide. And so they came ashore, and one took the child, and placed him on the ground just a few yards from the riverbank, and fresh water bubbled up from the ground where he lay, and so the boy Buíthe, or Boyce, was Christened.

Such at least is the story that was told centuries later, in a medieval life from the twelfth century or thereabouts, seemingly based on earlier accounts that told how St Buíthe, for so he’d become known, studied in Wales and on the continent, and set up a monastery by the Boyne, acting as a miraculous channel of God’s power time and again along the way. On one occasion, for instance, he’s said to have parted the waters of the Boyne so he could cross it and prevent the execution of one of the king’s prisoners. He arrived too late, but was able to restore the executed man to life, and then took him to his monastery, where he would henceforth work. That was one of the more curious roles of monasteries in early Christian Ireland — they could be like open prisons where men who would otherwise be hunted down and executed could find sanctuary, as long as they lived like monks.

Buíthe is best known now for the great monastery named after him he founded a few miles inland at Monasterboice. Site of a majestic round tower and two of the most impressive high crosses in the country, it would be a major ecclesiastical centre until it slipped into insignificance when the new Cistercian abbey of Mellifont was built a few miles away in the middle of the twelfth century. Mellifont, it seems, may have taken its name as a nod to the site of Buíthe’s baptism, the ‘sweet spring’ that flowed with fresh water just yards from the salty Boyne.

I’ve known about this for a while now, but it was only today, following an afternoon of errands in town, that I decided it was time to wander about the place of Buíthe’s baptism for myself, setting foot in the field I’ve been looking over the river at for four years.

Off I headed down Trinity Street into Mell, sheltering from a sudden shower in the little parish Church of St Joseph and accidentally joining in Adoration as I did. I couldn’t see any sign there of the sixteenth-century window and Romanesque arch that were discovered there during expansion work at the start of the last century, though, relics of the time it housed a small community of Cistercians after Henry VIII and his lackeys closed the abbeys. They hung on a while, retaining the title of abbots of Mellifont, but never returned to the monastery.

After Adoration, with the rain having passed, I turned down the narrow, hedge-flanked Toberboice Lane in search of the eponymous well, ‘Toberboice’ coming from the Irish word ‘tobar’, meaning well or spring, and the name Buíthe. On the way I wondered where exactly it was that archaeologists had found early Christian graves beside the lane forty years ago, along with two underground storage tunnels and evidence of an enclosure, all pointing to a small monastic community. There were thousands of these across Ireland in the early middle ages, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to find or be in one.

 

The lane ends at a small compound, a printing factory and a repair shop for cars. Nobody knew anything about the well, but I’d looked on nineteenth-century maps and it was clearly there, off the south-west corner of what’s now the repair yard. Had it been covered up? Certainly back in the day it was used to supply water for a local brewery, piping it there through wooden pipes. 

Over the gate into the next field, so, squelching through the hoof-churned mud, and then there! There it was! A small bridge over a cut trench with a little stream of water running along it behind the repair yard, and beside the bridge the trench lined with small rocks, a deliberate attempt at building some kind of structure from where people could draw water back in the day. That was it, so, Buíthe’s well — and our apartment quite visible from it across the rushes and the river. Mission accomplished. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t occur to me to ask for his intercession. Next time, so. It’s surely good to have a local saint in this way.

I was tempted for a moment to follow the muddy horse-churned path between the rushes to the river’s edge, but instead I turned to examine the ruined house I’d somehow not even noticed till this morning. Back in the nineteenth century it was believed that the two-storey house at the end of Toberboice Lane housed an upstairs cupboard that had been used as a priest hole for hiding clergy in penal times; this ruin must have been the house in question, with an upper window testifying to the upper storey. 

Time, then, to go home, content. Sometimes, in our eagerness to think of where we’re going, and constant cries to be mindful of where we are, it’s too easy to forget where we’ve come from. Today, though, was for remembering, looking backward to inspiration and guidance in going forward. And all within sight of my home.

Pausing to preserve ourselves

I’ve used the ‘take a break’ function on Facebook for the first time today, not even knowing about it before this morning, reducing what I can see from someone I’ve considered a friend for years. Some things he did and then doubled down on some weeks ago left me feeling deeply betrayed and profoundly upset, and though I’m not angry with him, being reminded of it through Mr Zuckerberg's algorithms is scraping at the wound and keeping the grief alive.

I’m not great with trust, to be blunt; people who know me well know that, and know why, and know too how hard I’ve worked to make trusting easier for me than my more instinctive suspicion, such that realising that confidence in a person’s judgement and character has been misplaced hurts maybe more than it should. It doesn't help, I suppose, that it comes no time at all after being let down by others, folk in positions of responsibility and care, who seem more inclined to be guilty of oversight than to engage in the oversight that they're called to.

It’s tricky. We’re meant to forgive; it’s not just that it’s what’s expected of us, but it’s what’s good for us. I don’t think this is about forgiveness, though, so much as about self-preservation; it’s about realising that I’d put someone a pedestal and invested a foolish degree of hope in them, that they’re not very special after all, and that it’s better to keep a certain distance from people we no longer trust.

And maybe, if we’re going to be exposed constantly to the thoughts and ideas and news of others, we should take care to curate such exposure to those who feed us, and those who we feed in turn. If we can’t be sure others will look after our hearts, maybe we should guard them better.

Maybe.

The White Rose of Conscience

 “But we know by whom we were created, and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. Conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil,” wrote Fritz Hartnagel, a young German army officer on the Eastern Front, to his girlfriend Sophie Scholl in July 1943. “We must submit our reason to these mysteries, and confess the Faith,” he concluded at the end of the letter.

Before Fritz had been dispatched to the front that May, Sophie had given him a gift of two volumes of Newman’s sermons – he told Sophie that amidst the horrors of the front, Newman’s writings were “like drops of precious wine”, and it seems that shortly before penning this July letter he had read Newman’s 1838 homily on ‘The Testimony of Conscience’.

Sophie Scholl may well be the most famous German woman at least of the last century, her courage as – aged just 21 – she faced a Nazi guillotine in Munich’s Stadelheim prison on February 22, 1943, having become proverbial in her homeland. With her brother Hans and several other young like-minded Germans, she had realised that the Nazi regime was an abomination and had taken to holding secret meetings, writing down their opinions, and spreading them about.

“She is regarded as one of the greatest Germans ever,” says Paul Shrimpton, author of Conscience Before Conformity: Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Resistance in Nazi Germany. “She’s in their hall of fame, the Walhalla, there are about 200 schools named after her, squares and buildings, and at the end of the second millennium one of the German magazines carried out a survey of the most famous Germans of all time, and I think she topped the bill as the most famous German woman. There are lots of surveys and different things like that which indicate the regard they have for her. Every German girl and boy attending school in Germany, they all know her.”

The courage of the Scholls and their White Rose resistance group is remarkable, Dr Shrimpton tells The Irish Catholic, for both its courage and for how it seemed to epitomise the very best of German life at the time.

“During the Second World War there were two main acts of resistance in Germany – one was the July 1944 bomb plot to assassinate Hitler, and this was the other one,” he explains. “Really what’s striking from my point of view, having got to know them through their letters and diaries and things, is that unlike virtually all the other people who resisted who came from the left inspired by Bolshevik ideology, these are upper-middle-class, highly-educated model Germans.

“When they were being interrogated in court the people dealing with them just couldn’t work it out, because from every angle these were perfect products of the Aryan system: sporting, academic, musical, artistic, everything,” he continues. “So it was a shock – the reverberations went all the way up to Hitler’s cabinet, so in the end Hitler himself was following via his underlings what was going on, and when the trial was taking place, he gave the order that they were to be executed the same day. It struck right to the heart of the Nazi regime.”

In 2010, Dr Shrimpton continues, two articles were published in the German Newman Studien journal arguing that there were significant links between Newman and the White Rose group, and as he followed this up for himself by reading the letters and diaries of members of the group, he was struck by how little attention had hitherto been paid to this.

“All of a sudden I realised that virtually all the people writing their stories had not done justice to the situation,” he says. “They’d skipped over the religious and conscience aspect of them, which was just immense, and really was the only thing that properly explains their actions.”

Indeed, he adds, Pope Benedict XVI may well have had the Scholls in mind when he addressed Queen Elizabeth II during his September 2010 visit to Britain to beatify Newman just a few months after these articles were published.

Recalling how he and the Queen had lived through World War II, the then Pope had said: “Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition to their lives.”

****

There is no direct evidence that Benedict specifically had the Scholls in mind, of course, but as Dr Shrimpton says, their names are known to all Germans today, the links between them and Newman were being discussed in the months ahead of the papal visit, and Benedict’s own interest in Newman was long established.

“It’s completely speculative,” he says, “but on the other hand, when Pope Benedict entered the seminary in 1946 in Germany, his monitor was a Newman expert, working on Newman and conscience, and he kept bumping into people whose major interest at that time was Newman.

“He’s absolutely saturated with Newman’s ideas and he’s actually spoken in Rome on Newman and conscience, including at least one address in 1990.”

Newman’s ideas were the subject of serious interest in inter-war Germany, Dr Shrimpton says. A Jesuit priest and philosopher named Erich Przywara had done important work on the Englishman, for example, and had asked Edith Stein – then a fresh convert – to translate The Idea of a University.

“There were a lot of people who found it answered a big need there, really,” says Dr Shrimpton, maintaining that the most important figure in promoting Newman in Germany between the wars was Theodor Haecker, who had encountered Newman’s writings in 1917 and who in 1920 wrote to the Birmingham Oratory asking for permission to translate Newman’s Grammar of Assent into English.

“He’s the key,” insists Dr Shrimpton. “There were several people, but he was absolutely key, because he writes off to the Birmingham Oratory asking for a copy of the Grammar of Assent, takes nine months to translate it, becomes a Catholic, and then devotes the rest of his life to translating and promoting Newman’s ideas.”

In time Haecker would become associated with the White Rose group, but the Scholls seem to have been familiar with Newman’s thought even before encountering Haecker in person, although it is not clear how Sophie first got to know his writing.

“The first time recorded is when she and Fritz find one of his books in a bookshop, and the Haecker thing came a year or so later,” Dr Shrimpton says, citing how a friend of hers had later described Sophie in 1941 pressing a book by Newman onto her, saying: “What You don’t know him? There’s a wonderful world awaiting you there!”

There could, of course, have been indirect links between Haecker and Sophie at that point, Dr Shrimpton concedes, pointing out how second-hand booksellers at the time would often have had both public and private aspects, with the latter entailing them selling banned books to people who they thought might be interested in them.

“One doesn’t know whether Newman was banned or not, because he was a dead English writer. The living ones were certainly banned – anyone from a country Germany was fighting who was living as an author was banned,” Dr Shrimpton says.

“Sophie got keen on him, and what she was keen on, Fritz was keen on too, and Hans. By chance, you could say, they came in touch through Carl Muth, who was a disinherited journal editor, with all his underground friends, people who were former academics, journalists, writers and authors, who met secretly. What’s extraordinary is the amount of cultural resistance going on, with the adults somehow in parallel with Hans and company. When they meet, it’s the most extraordinary thing.”

This was the context in which Sophie gave Fritz two volumes of Newman sermons as a parting gift when he set off for the Eastern Front, Dr Shrimpton says, adding that after Fritz returned home and met Sophie’s bereaved parents, he himself gave them another book of Newman’s sermons.

Sophie’s parents, though Lutherans and despite claims that Sophie shied away from converting to Catholicism at the last because of a concern that it would distress her mother, were not far from unsympathetic to the wise words of committed Catholics. Indeed, in the summer of 1941 they had been particularly impressed by how the Catholic Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, had become Germany’s first major public figure to speak out against the Nazi regime.

****

Over the course of three homilies, Bishop von Galen spoke about the confiscation of Church property as a forerunner to attacks on personal freedom, about the Nazis’ “deep-seated hatred of Christianity, which they are determined to destroy”, and about Germany’s euthanasia programme.

The Aktion T4 programme had been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of mentally ill and physically handicapped people, and condemning this, the so-called ‘Lion of Münster’ challenged the “monstrous doctrine, which tries to justify the murder of the innocent, which permits the slaughter of invalids who are no longer capable of work, cripples, the incurable, the aged and the inform”.

The full text of this homily was delivered anonymously to the Scholl family home in August 1941, with a message urging the recipients to make six copies and pass it on. “Finally a man has had the courage to speak out,” Hans said, also remarking, “We really ought to have a duplicating machine.” Sophie, meanwhile, copied the sermon privately and circulated it herself, while the family discussed the bishop’s sermon at length.

“Magdalena Scholl, the mother, was a nurse or had been a nurse when she met her husband. She knew lots of nurses, though at the time she wasn’t working as one, and had heard that lots of handicapped children were taken off and never came back, and all sorts of people realised that something fishy was going on,” Dr Shrimpton says.

“What von Galen did in his third sermon was to point out to Germans that this could happen to injured soldiers coming back from the front, or people hurt in factories, and that I think struck so deeply that they decided to shut the whole operation down in the west and then transported it to the east and used it effectively in the concentration camps. It had to go underground after that,” Dr Shrimpton says. “You could call it, if you wanted to – in modern terminology – ‘pro-life issues’.”

That Summer the Scholls and their friends began publishing a home-made magazine called Windlicht – ‘Hurricane Lamp’ – through which they tried to find a way to live under a totalitarian regime, with this leading to their meeting the Catholic journalist Carl Muth and his circle.

The following summer, joined by Christoph Probst, Hans’s fellow soldier-medics Alexander Schmorrel and the Romano Guardini-influenced Willi Graf, and the academic Kurt Huber, the ‘White Rose’ group began following in the footsteps of Bishop von Galen and the network of – mainly – Catholic priests and altar servers who spread copies of his anti-Nazi homilies by composing, duplicating, and sharing their own anti-Nazi leaflets.

Theodor Haecker was a clear influence on the group during this period, with the veteran Newman scholar convinced that the Nazi regime was a betrayal of Germany’s Christian heritage.

“He was absolutely virulent on this,” Dr Shrimpton says. “His diary, A Journal in the Night, is one of the great war journals. He was a philosopher, a social critic, so yes he’s commenting on all the events going on, tearing into the Nazi regime again and again against their basic inhumanity but also how they detest Christianity as well at root.”

We know that Haecker read from his translations or quoted from them or summed up the arguments of Newman’s idea on the ‘Patristical idea of the Antichrist’”

Newman was certainly discussed explicitly by the group on at least two or three occasions, judging by people’s diaries, Dr Shrimpton says.

“We know that the night before the fourth leaflet was written – the first three had a lot of Haecker influences – we know that Haecker, for example, read from his translations or quoted from them or summed up the arguments of Newman’s idea on the ‘Patristical idea of the Antichrist’, which is quite a mouthful.

“It starts with the first millennium, and he’s writing as an Anglican in these four sermons given in Oxford in 1838, I think it is, on the idea of Antichrist in the first Millennium. These are Advent sermons, so were presumably preached on for successive Sundays. Haecker thinks this is key to understanding what is going on. They actually fall out, because Hans think Hitler is the Antichrist, but Haecker says, no, no, this is one of the many forerunners of the great evil person, the being who will come in at the end of time,” Dr Shrimpton says.

“It’s very, very powerful stuff,” he continues, noting that on another occasion Haecker was recorded as reading from a collection of Newman’s sermons to the group.

Little surprise then, that Haecker’s fingerprints – and through his Newman’s – have been detected in the pamphlets published by the White Rose, and little surprise too that the Scholls’ lives during the war, cut short though they were, were marked by a profound religious awakening leading them towards Catholicism.

“You can see from their letters and diaries that they were very wary of the institutional Church but were absolutely won over with Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and many, many others, but particular the French Renouveau Catholique,” Dr Shrimpton says, citing also how Sophie and her friends had read George Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest while “Hans ploughs all the way” through Dante’s Divine Comedy.

“And Sophie has attended Mass on quite a number of occasions, and writes beautifully about it. She clearly had lost faith in her own church completely,” he adds.

****

Sophie and Hans were arrested on February 18, 1943, caught distributing copies of their sixth leaflet at the University of Munich, and the rest of the group were swiftly rounded up. Christoph Probst, raised with no particular religion, requested baptism and was received into the Catholic Church on February 22, 1943, the same day he, Hans, and Sophie were executed.

A deep Christian sensibility penetrated and inspired the group as a whole, Dr Shrimpton says, noting how Alexander Schmorell has been “effectively canonised” by the Russian Orthodox Church, which regards him as glorified as a ‘Passion-bearer’, while work is afoot in the Archdiocese of Munich to open the sainthood cause of Willi Graf.

Praising how serious work is being done now revealing the extent to which a serious Christian Faith inspired and drove the members of the White Rose, Dr Shrimpton wryly observes that there are others determined to suppress this reality.

“There are a certain people who want to bury any religious angle and deny it,” which is not facing up to the facts,” he says.

(A version of this was originally published in the special Newman edition of The Irish Catholic on 10 October 2019)

Dubious dubia, or, when you make smoke and claim fire...

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dubia again, not least following Stephen Walford’s most recent article — which I’ve liked a lot, and I thought I’d get some thoughts down. I might be wildly wrong here, of course.

Looking at the dubia letter, the quartet starts with what they deem ‘A Necessary Foreword’:

‘The great Tradition of the Church teaches us that the way out of situations like this is recourse to the Holy Father, asking the Apostolic See to resolve those doubts, which are the cause of disorientation and confusion.’

Are the cardinals really saying that the doubts are the cause of disorientation and confusion? Because that makes sense to me. Mueller, for instance, has denied that Amoris Laetitia itself causing confusion, and said that insofar as there is confusion around the exhortation, it was confused interpreters who were producing confused interpretations.

In that same interview, Mueller also advised that those talking too much about Amoris, including those bishops who he says were interpreting the Pope’s teaching in their own fashion and those who were taking individual tiny passages from the exhortation and looking at them out of context, to start by looking at what the Church itself teaches about the papacy and the episcopacy.

From the first dubium, then:

‘It is asked whether, following the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia (300-305), it has now become possible to grant absolution in the sacrament of penance and thus to admit to holy Communion a person who, while bound by a valid marital bond, lives together with a different person more uxorio without fulfilling the conditions provided for by Familiaris Consortio, 84, and subsequently reaffirmed by Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 34, and Sacramentum Caritatis, 29.

‘Can the expression “in certain cases” found in Note 351 (305) of the exhortation Amoris Laetitia be applied to divorced persons who are in a new union and who continue to live more uxorio?’

I’m deeply uneasy with how this question has been phrased and framed, as in ways it looks like two questions rather than one, and it seems to contain a numerical shift that’s hugely important when it comes to addressing it.

If this is one question, and I’m not sure it is, the question must be the second part, in which case I think the first bit should be treated as a kind of explanatory note, intended to set up a question where we think of an individual in what might be deemed a hard case – a woman or man has remarried and can’t realistically promise abstention from the marital bed without alienating their spouse in such a way that could lead to violence or to children suffering.

On this basis, if we had to answer this ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as per the conventions of dubia, such that we can’t qualify it by emphasising ‘in some cases’ I think the answer would then have to be ‘yes’.

The thing is, I’d be very uneasy with this kind of answer, not least because the question contains a numerical shift. The introductory statement pertains to individuals, and is explicitly singular in nature, whereas the question is a plural question, and pertains to couples, inviting the question of why a couple who both wanted to come fully into the Church couldn’t jointly strive to live as brother and sister?

Saving the kind of precise exception spelled out in my Aquinas, Trent, and Amoris piece in The Irish Catholic, I’m not really sure that couples where either party is divorced-and-remarried could as couples be granted absolution and receive Communion without doing this. And, as such, I think the answer would have to be ‘no’.

In general, I think a lot of confusion around Amoris surrounds people who persist in reading as plural terms that are meant as singular. In this case the issue seems actively blurred. I don’t blame Francis for not answering this one. My answer, if I were him, might well have been ‘define your terms’.

Then there’s the second dubium.

‘After the publication of the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia (304), does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, 79, based on sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, on the existence of absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions?’

I don’t think St John Paul said at that point in Veritatis Splendor that certain absolute moral norms prohibit intrinsically evil acts without exceptions. Rather, as far as I can see, he said it was wrong to claim that the immorality of acts can only be considered in connection with intentions and foreseeable consequences, with the key thing being whether acts are capable of being ordered towards the good and indeed towards God himself. And I don’t think that’s at odds with Francis’ point at all. In fact, and maybe I’m missing something massive, I don’t see how it could be.

So I can see that this would have put Francis in an awkward spot.

Again, if I were him I’d have been tempted to answer, ‘Well, if you’re asking whether we should regard St John Paul’s teaching in Veritatis Splendor as still valid, then yes, of course, but if you’re asking whether we should regard your take on it as valid, well, then we might need to have a chat. Also, what’s with the whole “based on sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church”? That sounds to me as though you’re daring me to say “no”, as though by doing so I’d break with the Church. Was that kind of snarky threat intended?’

Anyway, then we’ve a third dubium, as follows:

‘After Amoris Laetitia (301) is it still possible to affirm that a person who habitually lives in contradiction to a commandment of God’s law, as for instance the one that prohibits adultery (Matthew 19:3-9), finds him or herself in an objective situation of grave habitual sin (Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, “Declaration,” June 24, 2000)?’

I genuinely can’t even see where this question comes from. They seem to be asking whether Amoris gives a blanket excuse such that it would be impossible to say that habitual behaviour is ever a mortal sin.

The Church already teaches that habit can be a mitigating factor – essentially one’s will is less one’s own that it should be – but not that it’s a blanket excuse for all people in all situations, and I don’t see that Amoris even touches that for a second. Nor, for what it’s worth, do I think the Maltese bishops or the bishops of Buenos Aires or anyone else has ever suggested that.

I think the answer here, surely, is ‘Of course it’s possible. Yes. Why on earth wouldn’t it be? Yes!’

And so to the fourth dubium:

‘After the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia (302) on “circumstances which mitigate moral responsibility,” does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, 81, based on sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, according to which “circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act ‘subjectively’ good or defensible as a choice”?’

Right, once again, what’s with this ‘based on sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church’ malarkey? If I was Francis, I’d kick furniture on reading this. It’s so obviously a snarky comment which sets the whole question up for the paraphrase ‘Are you rejecting Church teaching?’

Offensive implications aside, it seems to me that what’s going on here is that the lads are comparing apples with oranges. They’re saying ‘Given what Amoris says about responsibility for acts, is the Church’s teaching on the morality of the acts themselves still valid?’

The Church, of course, has long distinguished between such things as the morality of acts and the extent to which this morality can and should be imputed to the actor: if it did not, the Church would only have one criterion for considering whether a sin is mortal, that being ‘grave matter’; ‘full knowledge’ and ‘deliberate consent’ wouldn’t even be part of the discussion.

As such, my answer to this would be, ‘What? Of course John Paul’s teaching on this is still valid! Yes! Of course! Why on earth are you even asking this? You do know that acts and responsibility for acts are not the same thing, right? And seriously, what on earth are you playing at, asking whether I accept things that are based on Scripture and Tradition?’

Finally, there’s the fifth dubium.

‘After Amoris Laetitia (303) does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, 56, based on sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, that excludes a creative interpretation of the role of conscience and that emphasises that conscience can never be authorised to legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts by virtue of their object?’

I think this is probably a rather better question than the previous ones, but again it’s marred by the snarkily gratuitous reference to Scripture and Tradition and ultimately leaves me wondering why this would confuse people.

Veritatis Splendor talks of how conscience can’t be applied creatively so as to engineer exceptions to the moral law, allowing people to do things that are intrinsically evil. Are intrinsically evil acts also objectively evil acts? I’d have thought they are. I wouldn’t have thought intrinsically evil acts could be anything other than objectively evil ones. Yes?

Bearing this in mind, what Amoris Laetitia says is the following. Some situations are – objectively – not what the Church or indeed God wants of us, and our consciences can enable us to realise this. However, it says, our conscience is capable of doing more than identifying whether a certain state is good or bad: it can also identify whether a certain direction is good or bad. That is, it can do more than name a destination; it can show us the way, recognising that this way is God’s way towards the destination that God wishes us to reach.

I don’t see that this is wildly different from, for instance, Pope Benedict’s comment about how a prostitute starting to use condoms could ‘be a first step in the direction of a moralisation, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants’. In other words, I think, while we’re not talking about choosing lesser evils, we are saying that within objectively sinful scenarios God can lead people by stages towards a way out, and sometimes can write straight with crooked lines.

So, as an answer were I Francis I’d be very tempted, to respond as follows: ‘Do we still need to regard as valid the teaching of the pope who had me consecrated as bishop and who appointed me as a cardinal, and indeed who I canonised as a saint? Yes, yes I think we do. I really can’t see why you’d ask me otherwise. And I can’t see why you’re pointing out that his teaching is based on Scripture and Tradition unless you’re somehow trying to suggest that mine might not be. But anyway, I’m tired. Leave your hats at the door on your way out, please.’

I’m really not surprised that Cardinal Mueller said he thought confused interpreters were provoking confused interpretations and how the dubia cardinals have said their doubts are causing confusion. Given how dodgy these dubia are, these seem fair observations.

Originally published at Mark Shea's blog.

On applications of Amoris Laetitia, and dubious reporting about said...

It increasingly seems to me that there are few more poisonous elements in the modern Catholic Church than the nest of vipers that is churchmilitant.com – there are reasons, after all, while Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput has said it and another site are ‘destructive’, tending to ‘sow division wherever they tread’. Indeed, Archbishop Chaput’s diocesan office is said the site is ‘not interested in presenting information in any useful way’, its ‘sole desire’ being ‘to create division, confusion, and conflict within the Church’. 

Philadelphia’s observation that Church Militant’s ‘reports are not to be taken seriously’ sprang to mind this afternoon as I’ve seen people linking to an article on the site, declaring that, ‘Following a diocesan synod, Bp. Robert McElroy has ordered priests in his diocese to post invitations in parish bulletins welcoming divorced and remarried Catholics to “utilize the internal forum of conscience” when it comes to receiving the Eucharist.’

Supporting this claim, the article linked to one of the parish bulletins in question, and indeed if you read down the article you will at least see the relevant passage, which, in summarising the diocesan synod, says:

‘The delegates spoke movingly to the need for the Church to reach out to divorced men and women at every moment of their journey, to support them spiritually and pastorally, to help them move through the annulment process, and to assist those who are divorced and remarried and cannot receive an annulment to utilize the internal forum of conscience in order to discern if God is calling them to return to the Eucharist.’

The bulletin, in other words, describes how delegates at the synod said they believed the Church should help people to see if they are called to return to Communion. Granted, you might think this imprudent for various reasons, but even so, if you're honest you'll admit that the reality is not quite the same as the headline description. And yet, if you didn't bother to click through, you might think that initial claim was a fair.

It’s funny how people get things so wrong when it comes to San Diego’s current bishop. 

Only the other week, Ross Douthat was talking in the New York Times about what he calls ‘the teaching document recently produced by San Diego’s bishop, the Francis-appointed, beloved-of-progressives Robert McElroy, following a diocesan synod convened to discuss the implementation of Amoris’. 

He then proceeds to quote from – as he had linked to – Embracing the Joy of Love, a document Dr McElroy issued in May of this year, just a month after Amoris Laetitia had come out, as he makes clear in the opening line, and most certainly not after the diocesan synod that took place at the end of October.

There’d be a lot less craziness in online Catholicism if people only took the time to read things properly.

After Brexit, what now for the North?

I was troubled last night to read people expressing delight at the huge queues at polling booths across the UK. Such a massive turnout, seemingly, was a triumph for democracy. I wasn't so sure. There's far more to democracy than just casting votes, and those who act as though democracy is something that happens but on rare occasions and purely in the privacy of the polling booth do a disservice to democracy. 

If democracy is to mean anything -- if our votes are to mean anything -- we have to participate in an informed way. I was pretty sure that wasn't happening: how valuable are votes cast on the basis of a mythical £350m a week, or to ward off Turkish accession, or in the belief that EU laws are made by unelected bureaucrats, or that there's no way to remove the European Commission from office, or because of the belief that British fishing collapsed when it joined the EEC, or any of a host of other lies? 

The 'Leave' campaigners lied and lied egregiously throughout the Brexit referendum campaign, and did so tapping into decades of popular poison from the British press, and if lots of people who've long felt disenfranchised and ignored should have been willing to go along with this kind of stuff, well, maybe that should have been expected.

I've less sympathy for others, for those who take the pains to be informed of things they care about, but who on other issues prefer instead to listen simply to those whose political views conveniently tally with their own judgments and to shout down calls for them to inform themselves as mere elitism.

So for those who make much of their pro-life credentials, and who dismissed my concerns and those of others about the lives and livelihoods of those in Northern Ireland being actively endangered by a vote to quit the EU, here are just a handful of things they might look before they next put themselves forward to speak as Catholics or pro-lifers, or even just look in the mirror.

Not for nothing has The Irish Times said, "Of all the things that could happen to an Irish government short of the outbreak of war, this is pretty much up there with the worst of them."

Then there was The Guardian a couple of days back, observing that, "Great Britain may be able to weather a Brexit, but Northern Ireland simply cannot."

Lucinda Creighton may not be everyone's cup of tea, but she had a point when she said the other day that, "Brexit poses the greatest threat to the Northern Irish Peace Process since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998."  

For a more cautious take, unsurprisingly from a pro-Brexit paper, The Telegraph warned, "The scenario of the UK leaving the European Union, when a majority of the population of Northern Ireland have opted to remain (and especially if there has been a decisive vote in favour among the nationalist community), may exacerbate tensions, fuel demands for a border poll on Irish unification and challenge the durability of the peace process."  

Then we have from the Centre on Constitutional Change the observation that "a British exit from the EU risks undermining the very self-determination and national sovereignty that its adherents believe it will bring about", continuing, "This is because it risks shattering the fragile balance and stability of the UK by threatening the peace settlement in Northern Ireland ".  

Onetime MEP Brendan Donnelly wrote from the London School of Economics, meanwhile, that "it is clear that much potential exists for the destabilisation of Northern Ireland through a vote to leave the EU on 23 June", continuing, "The Good Friday agreement is under more strain from a currently low level of sectarian violence than is sometimes appreciated".  

At the Euractiv site, Paul Brannan hammers this home when he says, "with politics in Northern Ireland already on the brink of breakdown and the Good Friday Agreement in jeopardy, a UK EU exit threatens a total collapse of the peace process".

And for those who think Britain can keep the show on the road, as though it's taken seriously as an honest broker and was never known as 'perfidious Albion', The New Statesman points out: "Funnily enough, the same people who don't trust Britain to administer the peace process would also be unhappy with the EU leaving that process."

I could say more, but that'll do for now. Words seem unlikely to do any good now the die is cast.

Final Week Brexit Thoughts II - The Threat to Northern Ireland

About a week or so back Catholic Voices hosted a debate in London in which two speakers gave impressive speeches on why the UK should remain in the European Union and two argued in similarly impressive fashion to the effect that the UK should leave the Union. 

Better-humoured, more honest, more thoughtful and broader-minded than almost all engagements I've read or witnessed on the topic, the debate on the motion "This house believes that Catholic values are best served by remaining in the European Union" was nonetheless striking for a complete absence of references to the single most Catholic part of the UK, that being Northern Ireland.

According to 2011 figures, 40.8% of the Northern Irish population is Catholic. This stands in stark contrast to England and Wales, for instance, where, if Steven Bullivant is right, just 13.7% of the population say they were raised Catholic, with a mere 8.3% of the population holding to the Faith now.

I appreciate the Brexit debate is really an 'Exit' debate in that the discussion is primarily driven by English concerns and will be decided by English votes, with the lesser partners in the UK at best hoping to tip the scales if an English vote is finely balanced, but I think that English voters should at least give some thought to how their votes are likely to affect things beyond England.

Northern Ireland's bishops have, of course, warned of the dangers of a Brexit to the North, and their concerns seem shared by Northern Ireland's Catholics. A Millward Brown poll in early June found that 70% of Northern Catholics were in favour of the UK remaining in the EU, with a mere 12% advocating that the UK quit the Union. A more recent Ipsos Mori poll has shown just 56% of Catholics in favour of remaining in the Union, though again a mere 12% seem to back a Brexit. 

Dividing countries the hard way

Such low support for withdrawal from the Union is understandable in a region where the UK's only land border is to be found, and where there has never really been a traditional border: for centuries, after all, Ireland was united under one form or other of British rule, and even after the Irish War of Independence it was possible for people to cross back and forth without a passport. Under the UK's 1949 Ireland Act Irish people are not considered aliens in British law, and the soft and porous nature of the border has been vital for the North's economy. It's not really surprising that people in the border counties especially might not be looking forward to this ending.

Of course, it's far from obvious that a hard border will be imposed between Ireland and the UK within the island of Ireland. Given the realities of Irish roads, about 200 of which cross the border, and how farms and fields straddle the boundary, it's hard to see how any border within Ireland, even one policed by border guards and soldiers, could bar from the UK anyone really intent on crossing over. And given that immigration fears are utterly central to Britain's EU debate, this is a question that needs pondering.

Cameron engaged with this in the Commons last week, when he answered a question from the SDLP's Alasdair McDonnell by saying that following Brexit there would have to be a hard border. "Therefore," he said, "you can only have new border controls between the Republic and Northern Ireland or, which I would regret hugely, you would have to have some sort of checks on people as they left Belfast or other parts of Northern Ireland to come to the rest of the United Kingdom."

I suspect that in practical terms a functional EU/non-EU border would have to be not in Ireland but between Britain and Northern Ireland, thus splitting the UK and making the Northern Irish second-class citizens, as the alternative would be bringing in checkpoints on dozens of Irish roads with soldiers patrolling the lands and minor roads between them, all of which would be likely to require the kind of security apparatus likely to fire up the republicans again, inviting a return to the kind of protracted low-intensity civil war that previous blighted the North.

Impoverishing the Six Counties

Even aside from the technical issue of the border, there's a high chance that a Brexit vote would impoverish Northern Ireland. Farm subsidies are regional expenditures, and it's striking that Northern Ireland's farmers receive four times the amount of EU subsidies than do England's ones. 80% of Northern dairy produce is exported, and when pondering this people need to remember that no part of the UK exports a higher proportion of its exports to other parts of the EU than does Northern Ireland. Any kind of border would hurt that, as would any imposition of tariffs and any hindering of the currently free trading arrangements. Tariffs on dairy imports to the EU, it's worth pointing out, average 36%.

The EU has played an absolutely crucial role in the Northern Irish peace process, of course, with John Hume detailing in his 1998 Nobel Prize acceptance speech how he had been hugely inspired in his work for peace by his European experience.

"I always tell this story," he said, "and I do so because it is so simple yet so profound and so applicable to conflict resolution anywhere in the world. On my first visit to Strasbourg in 1979 as a member of the European Parliament. I went for a walk across the bridge from Strasbourg to Kehl. Strasbourg is in France. Kehl is in Germany. They are very close. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and I meditated. There is Germany. There is France. If I had stood on this bridge 30 years ago after the end of the Second World War when 25 million people lay dead across our continent for the second time in this century and if I had said: 'Don't worry. In 30 years' time we will all be together in a new Europe, our conflicts and wars will be ended and we will be working together in our common interests', I would have been sent to a psychiatrist."  

"But it has happened," he continued, "and it is now clear that European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution and it is the duty of everyone, particularly those who live in areas of conflict to study how it was done and to apply its principles to their own conflict resolution." 

"All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality," he said, continuing, "The European visionaries decided that difference is not a threat, difference is natural. Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace - respect for diversity."

"The peoples of Europe then created institutions which respected their diversity - a Council of Ministers, the European Commission and the European Parliament - but allowed them to work together in their common and substantial economic interest. They spilt their sweat and not their blood and by doing so broke down the barriers of distrust of centuries and the new Europe has evolved and is still evolving, based on agreement and respect for difference," he said, before declaring, "That is precisely what we are now committed to doing in Northern Ireland."

Fine words? Sure, but accurate ones too, and not merely has the European project, with its dedication through most of its history to peace-building through calling people of different communities to work together, inspired peace in the North, but it has underpinned it too. 

As the Ulster Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson wrote the other day, "I will always remember when, in October 1994, just as the loyalist ceasefire was announced, Ian Paisley, John Hume and I met with then European Commission president Jacques Delors. He shared our optimism that Northern Ireland would move to a new beginning away from violence and pledged EU financial support. And he was true to his word -- weeks later, £240m of European funding for peace-building in Northern Ireland was approved. By 2020, Northern Ireland and the border region of the Republic will have received more than €2bn in PEACE funding alone.

PEACE funding only makes up one part of the money the North draws down from Europe, Nicholson continued, and the truth is that the EU has largely rebuilt Northern Ireland since the ceasefires began. Northern Irish prosperity, and Northern Irish peace, in no small part depend on the EU.

(Of course, the EU has done a huge amount in general to support those parts of the UK furthest from London; whether London lets them languish and runs the UK for the benefit of the English South-east you can mull over for yourselves.)

Explicitly undermining the Good Friday Agreement

Those who might doubt that a vote for Brexit is a vote to destabilise Northern Ireland should look too at the Good Friday Agreement, which explicitly rests on the fact of the UK and Ireland being "partners in the European Union".

The North-South Ministerial Council envisages the Northern and Republican governments working together -- at a local level, for those who doubt that subsidiarity matters to the modern EU -- on a range of such necessarily EU-related matters as agriculture, the environment, tourism, transport, and the management and oversight of EU programmes through Ireland's National Development Plan and Northern Ireland's Structural Funds Plan.

It's hard to see how this strand of the agreement can work if Northern Ireland is no longer in the EU, and since the Northern Assembly is explicitly described in the agreement as "mutually interdependent" with the Council, it looks as though withdrawal from the EU could endanger the entire Northern settlement.

And that's not even getting into how under the agreement everyone in Northern Ireland is entitled simultaneously to be citizens of the UK and Ireland, such that following a Brexit they could -- on the face of it -- both be citizens of the EU and non-citizens of the EU. I'm not sure how how much thought's been given in the Brexit camp to Schroedinger's Ulstermen.

Overall, a Brexit vote is a vote to risk instability, poverty, and civil war in Northern Ireland. It's not really surprising that the Northern bishops and the vast majority of Northern Catholics are opposed to it. It baffles me how many in England seem not to care in the least about this. 

Island of Merciful Liberation

The glorious weather that baked Lough Derg during the first week of the pilgrimage season was a stark contrast, according to the sanctuary’s Prior, Fr Owen McEneaney, to that experienced last summer. “We had rather inclement weather with very low temperatures – almost zero temperatures – at night and heavy rain,” he says, “but just being about the place today and yesterday, it’s a very different experience.”

While he says “the Lough Derg experience can be enhanced by the fine weather” and observes that “there’s a great buzz about the place” he stresses that bad weather tends not to deter the island sanctuary’s regular pilgrims.

 “The stay on the island can be a lot more pleasant in good weather, that’s for sure,” he says, “but it’s a much deeper experience for many of them, and if the pilgrims come back each year, I think a lot of them see it as their annual retreat.”

Many such pilgrims often aren’t able to take more than a couple of days off, he says, sometimes even having to fight hard to get that time, but with prior experience of the island they know to trust and value the pilgrimage experience. Such regular pilgrims, he says, tend to see the summer as incomplete without their three days on Lough Derg, such that once Easter has passed they tend to look forward to the pilgrimage, making space for it in their lives.

Not that everyone on the island is an old hand at Lough Derg; Fr Owen says that over the first few days of the new season he’d spoken to several of the island’s first-time pilgrims. Explaining why new pilgrims come, he says: “Some of them, perhaps, out of curiosity, they’ve heard about it, but perhaps it’s more their friend, their work colleague, their relative, their family members saying ‘I think you should give it a try’.”

Now in his third season looking after the sanctuary, but with experience of working there as a priest in the 1990s and having first done the pilgrimage himself after his Leaving Cert in the late 1970s, introduced to it by his mother who herself had been a regular pilgrim, he says that regardless of whether pilgrims are experienced or new to the island, the same processes tend to be witnessed among them.

“When you notice the pilgrims coming on any particular day – and some of them have travelled a journey – they go the dormitory, they take off the shoes, and they come up the island, heading towards the basilica to begin their stations, moving at a great pace because their bare feet have just touched the paving stones, but as the hours pass even on that first day, I notice them beginning to slow down, as a rhythm takes hold of them,” he says.

 “And when they move on to the penitential beds, and it was particularly noticeable yesterday and the day before, a large number of people were all just circling the beds and each praying away, mindful of each other and each making sure not to bump up against one another, you could almost see them moving towards a still centre in themselves,” he continues.

“For some of them that would be a very troubled centre, but supported I would feel by the other pilgrims around them and having a sense, of course, that when you take off the shoes you’re walking on holy ground – this island was made holy by the thousands upon thousands of pilgrims who have come here.”

Tentatively describing the island as “an uncontaminated place”, Fr Owen maintains that the Lough Derg experience is very much in line with Pope Francis’ vision for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, noting how “the mercy theme has been carried in many of the liturgies”, and pointing both to the Door of Mercy which the papal nuncio, Archbishop Charles Brown, opened in May and to the basilica’s threshold stone bearing the biblically-inspired words “I am the door, enter and be safe”.

“One element that has been very clear,” he says, “is that Lough Derg – St Patrick’s Sanctuary – has always been a place that has welcomed people in terms of coming to unburden themselves and particularly in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. This is not new for us.”

Describing how the sacrament is celebrated on the morning of the three-day pilgrimage’s second day, he says “pilgrims have the time to come and if they wish they can bear their soul in the knowledge that they’ll be well-received – welcomed – but it’s more than the welcome the priest will extend, it’s the mercy, the forgiveness, the love of God.”

Given this, Fr Eamonn Conway’s new book, Lough Derg: Island of Quiet Miracles, is aptly named, Fr Owen says. “It’s no exaggeration to say we have been humbled as priests celebrating the sacrament here on the island in the morning time, humbled by just what happens before our very eyes.

“You can see people just experiencing that transformation as they name something that has been a burden to them,” he continues, “They may have come in the past intending to name it, but didn’t manage to do that, but when the time is right, they do.”

Even those few non-Christians who visit the island “just blend in and experience it and make their own of it”, he says, but for Christians the island truly represents a much deeper reality. Describing how he makes a point of bidding farewell to departing pilgrims as they leave the island on the third day, he says, “They’ve had a night’s sleep, they have completed the pilgrimage, and that in itself would engender a good feeling, but I know from being here these three seasons and again in the past, it’s a spiritual reality, a spiritual encounter for many of them who would see it in terms of meeting with the Lord Jesus.”

( A version of this was first published in The Irish Catholic newspaper of 9 June 2016)

A Reluctant Transformation

Back in 1841 one Caesar Otway, a traveller in Mayo, wrote in scorn of a lake in the area, saying it compared to his mind with Donegal’s Lough Derg, a place, he said, “where superstition disgraces what nature has made but ugly”.

It’s hard to imagine a more unfair comment in respect either of the lake’s beauty or the value of the three-day pilgrimage for which its Station Island is famous, and perhaps if the aforementioned Anglican had tried the latter he might have taken a very different line.

Though curious, I was a somewhat reluctant pilgrim to the island, having agreed to do the pilgrimage last year only after two of my colleagues here at The Irish Catholic came back from Lough Derg invigorated and bubbling over with stories of their experience. Since then it loomed ever nearer in my calendar, with my ambivalence about the pilgrimage not fading as the date drew closer. That in the end it was set to fall immediately after a week’s holidays seemed a rather cruel joke; yes, of course I’d be enjoying myself in my time off, but did that really merit such a penance?

Getting to the island by public transport couldn’t have been simpler, Bus Eireann taking me from Dublin to Enniskillen where I and other pilgrims from around the country boarded a shuttle bus to the lakeshore, there to collect tickets and a leaflet before stepping onto the fast ferry over to the island.

It wasn’t long before I was settled there, my bag on my dorm bed and my shoes under it, as I headed barefoot towards the penitential beds to get a look at what the island really involved. Astounded at how many pilgrims were already doing circuits of them, I went into the basilica with my leaflet to make a start on my first station.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that first station as contrived as I did difficult: kneeling, standing, walking, with one prayer here, three prayers there all adding up to 94 Our Fathers, 157 Hail Marys, 27 Apostles’ Creeds, and one psalm, all barefoot and especially on the first two penitential beds on ground that was far from easy to walk on, even in fine, dry conditions – it all felt like a devotional obstacle course, and one that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

That said, over the last few years one thing I’ve learned to do is to trust processes, and with 1,500 years of history behind it, there’s clearly something special about the Lough Derg exercises, so as I tried to balance when kneeling on irregular rocks, quite literally clinging to the Cross to stay upright, I embraced the devotions. They’d make sense eventually. They did.

The second and third exercises were slower, more solitary, in a sense easier, even if I was plagued by midges, and the four stations conducted within the basilica through the night posed other challenges again – exhaustion and hunger meant that these exercises took on a trance-like quality.

Between exercises there was a startling warmth and camaraderie, with pilgrims gathered in the Flood Room next door to chat, support each other, tell stories of the island and their lives, and gain some manner of sustenance from cups of hot water, often flavoured with sprinklings of salt and pepper. Pilgrimages are so often imagined as dour and puritanical things, but only by those who’ve never been on one or even thought of how Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was inspired by the banter and storytelling of pilgrims making their way to the tomb of St Thomas Becket.

Morning came, and with it Mass, where exhausted heads struggled to stay upright, and then a Reconciliation service and Confession, transformative for so many over the years, before I began my eighth station. Circling the basilica as I said decade after decade of the Rosary I called to mind so many people – friends, family, the newly born and the long dead, those I’ve wronged and those who’ve wronged me, deliberately recalling them as best I could before tackling the penitential beds.

It took all I had to manage the prayers at this point, fatigue mingling words and setting them to unexpected and unlikely rhythms, but eventually I finished my station and spent the rest of the day, the Way of the Cross aside, listening to other pilgrims tell me why the island matters to them so much.

Sleep couldn’t have been more welcome that night, with a horde of pilgrims sighing with gratitude as the vigil candle was extinguished and they raced off to bed.

And so on the third day on the island we rose again, and as we joined in the Mass delighted and alert, it began to be obvious why the Apostles’ Creed seems so right for the island’s exercises: in its line “he descended into Hell” it hammers home the reality of Easter and the time between Our Lord’s suffering and his resurrection. The final station was almost impossibly beautiful, as this time I didn’t even need to think of who I wanted to pray for as face after face appeared in my mind, not as a pell-mell confused rush, but serenely, one by one, prayer after prayer, unbidden and unrepeated.

When I left the island I was smiling like everyone else, and as I’d been told, it was less with relief than with gratitude. Will I be back? I’m not saying no.

(A version of this was originally published in The Irish Catholic of 9 June 2016)

Webwatch: Marginalised men in a feminised church?

Cardinal Raymond Burke, newly appointed Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, has stirred things up again with an interview for The New Emangelization, arguing that “the radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalised”.

Over at Patheos, Kyle R. Cupp says that “If women pursuing their rights, fighting systematic oppression and marginalisation, and gaining influence in the Church makes men reluctant to become religiously active, that speaks poorly of these men”, who, he says, need to grow up but won’t do so if fed overly romanticised notions like the “powerful manliness of the Mass”. 

Furthermore, he adds, “pushing back against the service and influence of women in the Church, particularly by catering to immature men with unrealistic ideals of masculinity, will do women no favours”.

Simcha Fisher, also at Patheos, warns against “making the mistake of assuming that all the most notorious bad fruits of Vatican II are actually feminine.” Citing a host of issues, she says “these things are no more authentically feminine than porn is authentically masculine” and concludes that we “ought to be able to talk about what does and does not belong in the Mass without pitting men and women against each other, or reducing each other (or ourselves!) to offensive stereotypes of masculinity and femininity”.

Writing for The Catholic Herald, Madeleine Teahan points out that “the problems that Cardinal Burke identifies are an obstacle for women as much as they are for men”, and that a serious problem in his analysis is that he paints men as “passive victims of radical feminism, bad liturgy and poor catechesis”.

“It’s as if,” she says, “they are a sex who are done unto; totally enfeebled and powerless to fight back”. Observing how many Catholics are taking the initiative and deliberately seeking out decent catechetical and spiritual instruction, she says such initiative requires and builds maturity, and should be expected from both women and men.

***

Paris-based Paschal-Emmanuel Gobry, having followed the ideas of the philosopher Rene Girard, used the story of the woman caught in adultery to argue that the exposing of our natural scapegoating tendencies offers our best hope for avoiding internet outrage and mob, violence turns in The Week to tragic events in his home city.

Explaining that he was raised to hate Charlie Hebdo as a magazine of France’s anticlerical left, he describes how he came to admire Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists and comments on how many of those criticising the magazine from an Anglophone standpoint simply don’t understand French humour. 

He hails how, following last week’s attack, a sorrowful André Cardinal Vingt-Trois, archbishop of Paris, sent a message supporting Charlie Hebdo’s right to mock his faith. 

Admitting that few of the Cardinal’s predecessors would have done likewise, he celebrates how, in Vatican II, the Church recovered what he describes as its “more authentic Christian teaching, accepting religious freedom and pluralism”.

Maintaining that his faith has made him “a man of Enlightenment liberalism”, Gobry says attacks on people with whom he disagrees on almost everything are attacks on his own most cherished values.

The tragic events in Paris have sent others back to Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg Address, with Tim Stanley writing in the Telegraph that, although Pope Benedict did not say so explicitly, one of his points was that “Europe cannot speak to Islam because we find ourselves talking two completely different languages – one of aggressive secularism and the other of aggressive religiosity”. 

Andrea Tornielli, writing for Vatican Insider, points out that though the Regensburg Address invites Muslims to use the language of reason, its purpose, as much as anything, was to remind Europeans of the language of faith.