Quote of the Day
“One factor [behind the abuse crisis] was a poor understanding and communication of the Church’s teaching on sexuality, shown particularly in a rigorist attitude to the body and sexuality. This was mediated in part through the formative influence of Irish Catholicism in the life of the Church in Australia. We owe the Irish an immense debt of gratitude for what they have given us, but for complex historical reasons the Church in Ireland was prey to the rigorist influence that passed from the Continent to Ireland – often under the name of Jansenism – and found fertile soil there. It then passed into the Irish diaspora of which Australia was part. This rigorist influence led to an implicit denial of the Incarnation, which had people thinking they had to deny their humanity to find their way to the divinity. The irony of this is that the Incarnation stands at the very heart of the Catholic sense of a sacramental universe. Jansenism grew from Catholic soil, though it was tinged with Calvinism too. But there was nothing incarnational about Jansenism, and the Catholic Church rejected it, even if its influence has been hard to erase, with traces remaining still. Catholic teaching on sexuality offers deep insights and rich resources which we will need to explore in new ways as we seek to deal with the current crisis.”
– Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Canberra and Goulburn.
Read the whole lying. Along with Diarmuid Martin, this prelate also seems to get it.
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I think pederasts have been among us since the beginning of time.
Ockham’s razor says you don’t need ad hoc psychoanalytic mumbo jumbo to explain it.
How about it’s just plain evil, and the Church ought to get back in the business of recognizing evil exists?
Well, this one in Phoenix DOESN’T “get it”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/opinion/27kristof.html?hp
A lot of what we regard as ‘Jansenism’ was simply Puritan-derived Victorian values – which were not uniquely Catholic nor uniquely Irish (…and neither of the two in origin). John Stuart Mill also discerned “two influences which have chiefly shaped the British character since the days of the Stuarts; commercial money-getting business, and religious Puritanism”.
“Jansenism”. The Oxford Companion to Irish History. 2007.
“Jansenism was viewed with great suspicion by Rome, and 17th‐century Irish synods toed the Roman line. Indeed, while its moral rigorism made it attractive to elements of the Counter‐Reformation church, Jansenism’s theological and political radicalism alienated both local hierarchies and Catholic monarchs. This was especially the case in France and most Irish clerical students there associated with milieux hostile to the movement. Indeed their anti‐Jansenist opinions were singled out for criticism by the pro‐Jansenist journal Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, Irish clerics, in general, being more attracted to Jesuit‐style humanism. The success of the anti‐Jansenist bull Unigenitus (1713) marginalized the movement but it survived as a popular millenarian‐cum‐miracle cult. Neither as a theology nor as a political attitude did Jansenism recommend itself to the Irish Catholic community, either at home or abroad. The frequent claim that Irish Catholicism was Jansenist‐influenced springs from the tendency to confuse Jansenism with mere moral rigorism.”
Dr Thomas O’Connor. Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer – Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth faculty
https://history.nuim.ie/staff/oconnorthomas
author of:
_Irish Jansenists 1600-1670: politics and religion in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008)
_Strangers to Citizens: the Irish in Europe 1600-1800 (Dublin, 2008)
_An Irish Jansenist in seventeenth-century France: John Callaghan 1605-54 (Dublin, 2005)
_An Irish Theologian in Enlightenment Europe: Luke Joseph Hooke 1714-96 (Dublin, 1995)
Healy, John. Maynooth College : its centenary history (1895). Dublin : Browne & Nolan, 1895.
“During the eighteenth century many of the most eminent Churchmen in France were, to some extent, tinctured with these Jansenistic views, even when repudiating the Jansenistic errors regarding the operation of grace and free will. But although so many of our Irish ecclesiastics were educated in France during the eighteenth century, none of those who came to Ireland ever showed the slightest trace of this Jansenistic influence, either in their writings or their sermons. Nor has any respectable authority asserted, so far as we know, that the French Professors of Maynooth were in any way tinged with the spirit of Jansenism.”
Most Rev. John Healy, D.D., LL.D., M.R.I.A
Digby, Thanks for referencing the Phoenix travesty. The author of The Times article is exactly correct about the hierarchy of old men. There is no wisdom in human relationships in the left brain dominated theologian who has been sheltered from real human relationships his entire life and yet he is rewarded and given authority to tell us how to be human in a world he has no direct experiential affection for in his history.
I remain Catholic only because of God’s Grace.