NOWT SO QUEER AS FOLK

Ángela Ponce
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I have just read the Vatican's latest tract on transgender and intersex.

Well, I read most of it. I began to run out of steam around the middle and just skimmed the rest of it.

I haven't read anything so stunningly ignorant and incendiary from the Vatican since Benedict XVI's letter on clerical sex abuse to the Irish people.

It is based on the idea that transgender/intersex is a life style choice consciously and freely opted for by the individual. This is a stunning misrepresentation of what is involved for most affected people.

Not only that but it pursues this paper tiger reductio all the way to its absurdum. Consider this extract:

challenges emerging from varying forms of an ideology that is given the general name ‘gender theory’, which “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences

Let's face it. Either we're all God's creation, and theory and doctrine needs to be developed to encompass this, or these people are effecttively criticising God for being asleep on the job.

I am reminded of my mother's Novena to St. Joseph, where some element of the mystical body had clearly been dozing during working hours.

A society without sexual differences. What in Jaysus name is that, and who's advocating it. Now, if they were discussing the Holy Trinity I could sort of understand what they thought they were at.

In fact I considered an alternative title for this post:THE GENDER OF THE SOUL but it sounded too much like the language of this rubbish Vatican document and I dumped it in favour of a more colloquial title.

Let's look at a few more bits of this execrable text.

Over the course of time, gender theory has expanded its field of application. At the beginning of the 1990’s, its focus was upon the possibility of the individual determining his or her own sexual tendencies without having to take account of the reciprocity and complementarity of male-female relationships, nor of the procreative end of sexuality. Furthermore, it was suggested that one could uphold the theory of a radical separation between gender and sex, with the former having priority over the latter. Such a goal was seen as an important stage in the evolution of humanity, in which “a society without sexual differences” could be envisaged.

I am, unfortunately, not an expert in these matters but this sounds to me like a self-serving exaggeration. Again it relies on the free choice thesis. What if I were to describe it as "discernement"? Would that make any difference?

Consider the story of Kailyn Damm. This is not a case of a lightly taken decision, but rather of heroic but misguided resistance at great personal cost. Fortunately after almost a lifetime, the penny dropped and some degree of serenity followed. And this is from a CATHOLIC website.

Are the cretins in the Curia plugged into any of this or do they just babble on, serving up the same old mixture time and again.

the separation of sex from gender. This separation is at the root of the distinctions proposed between various “sexual orienta-tions” which are no longer defined by the sexual difference between male and female, and can then assume other forms, determined solely by the individual, who is seen as radically autonomous. Further, the concept of gender is seen as dependent upon the subjective mindset of each person, who can choose a gender not corresponding to his or her biological sex, and therefore with the way others see that person (transgenderism).

And don't miss the implicit condemnation of LGBTQ+ contained in the above paragraph.

The separation of sex from gender indeed. "radically autonomous", "subjective mindset", "choose a gender etc." - what world are these people living in? You have a God-given mickey, use it. Make more babies - souls to be harvested by the Lord in due course. I grew up with this stuff. I thought they'd have grown out of it since.

What counts is the absolutely free self-determination of each individual and the choices he or she makes according to the circumstances of each relationship of affectivity.

This is the swinging gender, changes with the wind. Nothing stable here.

It strikes me as I read through it that this is an attempted defence of the Creator which just flies in the face of his creation. It is vital for this gang to show that God has nothing to do with this sex/gender dissonance. It is purely the subjective (and erroneous) creation of the individual.

Who actually wrote this stuff? I was inclined to wonder about Benedict, but it is sufficiently illiterate to rule him out. Then there is the Cardinal and the Archbishop who signed it. Useful idiots?

It reads like the shit we would have regurgitated in the diocesan exam had we the vocabulary in those conforming and repressive days of yore. It might have got you a pass in that exam but certainly in no other.

Mind you, it has also taken refuge in throwing in areas of pastoral agreement (non-discrimination, dignity of human person, etc) to give it some pretence of reasonableness.

And then it goes overboard in its listing and praise of female attributes. That might be all very well for the purpose of this particular document. But just read the two paragraphs below in the light of the church's assertion that it is not appropriate to ordain women.

A further positive development in anthropological understanding also present in writing on gender has centred on the values of femininity. For ex-ample, women’s ‘capacity for the other’ favours a more realistic and mature reading of evolving situations, so that “a sense and a respect for what is concrete develop in her, opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society”. This is a contribution that enriches human relationships and spiritual values “beginning with daily relationships between people”. Because of this, society owes a significant debt to the many women “who are involved in the various areas of education extending well beyond the family: nurseries, schools, universities, social service agencies, parishes, associations and movements”.

Women have a unique understanding of reality. They possess a capacity to endure adversity and “to keep life going even in extreme situations” and hold on “tenaciously to the future”. This helps explain why “wherever the work of education is called for, we can note that women are ever ready and willing to give themselves generously to others, especially in serving the weakest and most defenceless. In this work they exhibit a kind of affective, cultural and spiritual motherhood which has inestimable value for the development of individuals and the future of society. At this point, how can I fail to mention the witness of so many Catholic women and Religious Congregations of women from every continent who have made education, particularly the education of boys and girls, their principal apostolate?”

These sound to me like an excellent recommendation for the ordination of any woman who wishes to put them forward.

I'm sort of running out of steam here and the document tends to be very repetitive when it's not introducing new outrageous material or papering over the cracks with pastoral truisms.

So I'll just leave you with a few more paragraphs, with minimum comment, to keep your blood pressure at its present level for a few moments longer.

In this understanding of things, the view of both sexuality identity and the family become subject to the same ‘liquidity’ and ‘fluidity’ that characterize other aspects of post-modern culture, often founded on nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants, or momentary desires provoked by emotional impulses and the will of the individual, as opposed to anything based on the truths of existence.

These ideas are the expression of a widespread way of thinking and acting in today’s culture that confuses “genuine freedom with the idea that each individual can act arbitrarily as if there were no truths, values and principles to provide guidance, and everything were possible and permissible”

in cases where a person’s sex is not clearly defined, it is medical professionals who can make a therapeutic intervention. In such situations, parents cannot make an arbitrary choice on the issue, let alone society. Instead, medical science should act with purely therapeutic ends, and intervene in the least invasive fashion, on the basis of objective parameters and with a view to establishing the person’s constitutive identity.

Clearly the term "therapeutic" here is intended to be a divinely loaded one.

The process of identifying sexual identity is made more difficult by the fictitious constract (sic) known as “gender neuter” or “third gender”, which has the effect of obscuring the fact that a person’s sex is a structural determinant of male or female identity. Efforts to go beyond the constitutive male-female sexual difference, such as the ideas of “intersex” or “transgender”, lead to a masculinity or feminity (sic) that is ambiguous, even though (in a self-contradictory way), these concepts themselves actually presuppose the very sexual difference that they propose to negate or supersede. This oscillation between male and female becomes, at the end of the day, only a ‘provocative’ display against so-called ‘traditional frameworks’, and one which, in fact, ignores the suffering of those who have to live situations of sexual indeterminacy. Similar theories aim to annihilate the concept of ‘nature’, (that is, everything we have been given as a pre-existing foundation of our being and action in the world), while at the same time implicitly reaffirming its existence.

Wow, "constract" and "feminity", they haven't even proof read the damn thing.

The dialogue between Faith and Reason, “if it does not want to be reduced to a sterile intellectual exercise, it must begin from the present concrete situation of humanity and upon this develop a reflection that draws from the ontological-metaphysical truth”.

They should have listened to themselves on this one.

Further reading:

Tina Beattie's instant response.

A potentially damaging document.

Ángela Ponce

ECCLESIA SEMPER REFORMANDA

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This man is 90 years of age. He is a tough talking revolutionary who has long nailed his colours to the mast.

I attended his talk, to We Are Church Ireland, last evening in the Mercy International Centre at Baggot St Bridge. It was a privilege and a marvellous experience. The man is clearly a saint, though in the course of his talk he was implicitly scathing of instant canonisations.

It is very hard to know where to start, his talk was so provocative and challenging, and I must admit in all modesty in line with much of my own thinking, though mine is from the perspective of an unbelieving outsider.

I described myself to the assembled multitude as a gatecrasher, as I did not share their faith but had come purely to meet and hear this remarkable man. All I can say is that it was a party worth gatecrashing, rivaled maybe by only the Last Supper itself.

It is a mystery to me why Gabriel Daly has neither been silenced nor excommunicated when another man in the same mold, Seán Fagan (RIP), was most disgracefully silenced for over a decade and to add insult to injury he was hit with a gagging order forbidding him reporting his silencing. His religious order, the Marists, behaved disgracefully towards him at the time.

Perhaps Gabriel Daly was a more formidable foe? Or, maybe, the Augustinians stood up for him? Or, maybe it was how he couched his language, though that's unlikely. I just don't know.

Anyway, it was a night to remember. I am not going to go through Fr. Daly's talk seriatim. You can read the whole thing here. I will just hit some of the points which resonated with me or on which I would like to comment.

Fr. Daly was introduced by Gina Menzies, who among other things, is herself a theologian and is well known from her appearances on Irish media.

She referred to Fr. Daly's most recent book The Church always in need of Reform on which he previously gave a talk to We Are Church. The title of this post is the equivalent Latin tag.

A central theme of Fr. Daly's talk was the abuse of power by the Papacy and the Curia over a long period.

An example is the Modernists who he came across at an early stage and decided they merited some study. He ended up doing his thesis on them. His conclusion was that they were acting in good faith in pushing much needed reforms of the church and that the then Pope came down on them like a ton of bricks in a disgraceful abuse of power.

He seems also to hold a somewhat similar view of the Reformation seeing Luther as attempting to remedy the outrageous church abuses of his day.

In both these cases the power structure of the church reacted violently, much needed reforms were ignored, and the church continued down a path of maintaining maximum distance from the reformers. This produced a very distorted theology and practice which Vatican II made some effort to reform. But it too was buried by the same power structure in the persons of three Popes (Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI).

I was very interested in this analysis as it chimed with my own ideas in a post I had done some time ago.

In that post I also touched on the Real Presence which is a focal point for the clash between the old and the new regimes, between a misunderstood (literal) version of transubstantiation on the one hand and its symbolic reality on the other. He has expounded his approach to this at greater length in a paper to the Glenstal Ecumenical Conference in 2013.

It is clear that Fr. Daly's view of the Eucharist is one of "communio" or participation and spiritual development (the banner under which the 2012 Eucharistic Congress was held) and he is clearly offended by its being used as an instrument of punishment (presumably in refusing the sacrament to those divorcees in second marriages). Another abuse of power, but not unexpected in the religious environment in which I grew up.

I have a story from a relative whose family way back owned a field. They let the Parish Priest graze his horse there and all was well until they came to a point where they could no longer facilitate the PP. He was not at all pleased and some time later refused to come and administer the last rites to the dying granny. An order priest had to be pressed into service. So as well as abuses of power on a grand scale we also had to suffer the petty abuses.

And that brings us to Pope Francis who is trying to reform the system from the top while seeking help from the bottom up. Fr. Daly was quite clear about, and critical of, those in the Curia who were in open revolt against the Pope. He felt they had to be stood up against and his hope was that this would not split the church. Nevertheless truth was truth and had to be vindicated.

He felt that the action taken by the Curia in silencing a number of Irish priests was a disgraceful abuse of power. The church needed diversity and unity should not be confused with uniformity. Change was part of the church's development, or it ought to be, and for this change to be informed there had to be debate. In this context he expressed his outrage at the Popes, from John Paul II on, banning even discussion of the possibility of ordaining women priests.

While I'm on the subject of diversity I would simply say that the church I grew up in (and ultimately out of) had no room for diversity. Education was by fiat and not from questioning or through debate. It would have done Hasbara proud as this little exhortation from one of its manuals for emigrants illustrates.

Fr. Daly felt the Irish bishops were a disgrace, not least in accepting the recent appalling translation of the Missal and then the Curia's verdict that nothing could be done about it because the decision endorsing it could not be changed retrospectively.

What a load of cobblers. The Curia were apparently relying on some convenient interpretation of Canon Law in the matter. Fr. Daly made it clear that he was not a fan of Canon law as presently embodied. He conceded that you had to have some rules but the present restrictive structure was strangling change.

I was present at a book launch once where Archbishop Diarmuid Martin referred to Ecclesia Reformata, a slip of the tongue no doubt, and he repeated the English version correctly. Nevertheless you would wonder if the Irish bishops as a whole think the job is oxo.

And don't get me started on the lately departed Nuncio.

I could go on here all night but you'd eventually get bored with me, so I will just make three brief final points.

I see Gabriel Daly in the tradition of John Robinson, whose book Honest to God was a big influence on me. I hope Fr. Daly does not object to this comparison.

Wouldn't it be fun if the Irish bishops held their next conference in Mick Wallace's plaza in Dublin's Italian quarter to the backdrop of a native lay version of the Last Supper.

I met some interesting women at this function. I didn't check at the time but from recollection I think there was a broad gender balance in the audience. I didn't see many young people there, however. Perhaps they have bypassed reform and left the RC church or are happy enough with their current lot. Only time will tell.

This was my first contact with We Are Church Ireland and I must say I was made very welcome and even invited back. When they say the meetings are open that's exactly what they mean.

If you want to get a better handle on the evening itself do read Fr. Daly's paper in full.

Holy Twitterums

It was Benedict XVI who started tweeting, and I commented at the time that the tweets tended to be bland aphorisms. When Benedict resigned, the Pontifical Twitter Account went into "Sede Vacante" mode and only emerged on the election of Francis.

I commented then that I would be watching his tweets, implying that I hoped they would be an improvement on the banal aphorisms coming from Benedict - well, not quite from Benedict himself; I gather, since, that an Irishman was writing them for him.

So I have been following Francis's tweets from the beginning and have already been twice ridiculed for my daily responses on Twitter.

I need to make a few things clear. I don't for a moment think Francis reads my responses. In fact, I don't think Francis even reads his own tweets, much less writes them. I assume they are composed and launched into the ether by some Holy Hack.

So, why do I bother replying.

Well, in the first place, it's a sort of test to keep me alert on these long mornings. I just resolved to try and post a reply to his every tweet that in some way related to the subject being tweeted. This can be difficult as the current tweets, like the previous tweeter's, have descended into equally bland aphorisms.

While I'm at it, and if there is any room left, I then just throw in a reminder that the silenced are still muted and that it would be a singular gesture to #FreeTonyFlannery, who has been greatly wronged by a church that refuses to redefine some of its dogmas to make them intelligible to a modern audience. This it does out of a misplaced sense of the immutability of "tradition" and a fear of the "appalling vista" that it sees before it should it admit to ever having been wrong.

So there. I'm not losing a night's sleep over the Pope's tweeets nor do I spend any time composing replies. When one of his tweets pops up on my Tweetdeck, I just shoot from the hip.

Having said all that, I will be interested to see if this Pope, irrespective of his tweets, does make for a change from his two immediate predecessors. He is certainly more pastoral and communicative in his manner and rumour has it that he favours a more decentralised and collegiate church. Good. The real test will be whether he succeeds in getting the church out of the doctrinal hole into which it is still digging itself.

I love my Local Library

You can't beat a good book burning. It's the next best thing to burning the author, which, unfortunately, is no longer allowed under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Mind you, it is not clear whether the Inquisition (Vatican CDF) subscribes to some of this modern pussy claptrap, as they seem to be still seriously embedded in the business of burning holy authors without any heed to claims for fair treatment under human rights legislation. Of course, the Vatican State is a strange sort of creature in the community of nations. Now you see it, now you don't.

Anyway, when Seán Fagan published his latest book, What happened to sin?, in 2008, a complete rewrite of an earlier 1977 book, all Hell broke loose. The Good Father was silenced and his order, the Marists, ordered to buy up and destroy all available copies of the book (or all of his books, I can't quite get a handle on this one).

Well the Marists jumped to comply with this medieval instruction and, as any economist would tell you, the value of any remaining copies must have rocketed.

There were two sources they couldn't touch, however: those people who had already bought the book, and, a little surprisingly for those of us brought up under Pius XII, copies in the public library system.

Now, in my day, the libraries would have been pressganged into this witch-hunt, and any copies not surrendered by the authorities would have been vanished from the shelves by over-zealous Catholics.

So I got to wondering just what was the current position on Sean Fagan's books in the public library system. I had just got a copy myself of What happened to sin? in my local library, so I checked out the position online.

The sin book was plentiful in the Dublin City Public Library system with 9 copies of the 2008 version, 2 copies of the original 1977 version, and 1 copy of the 1989 reprint, all available. And his other major book, Does morality change? was also there in abundance with 6 copies of the 1997 original and 7 copies of the 2003 version available. And remember, this is only the Dublin City branches.

So the day is thankfully gone when a heretic church could dictate what the public could, or could not, read. Isn't this some progress?

I'll end with the craven statement from Seán Fagan's order, the Marists, presumably aimed at those lucky enough to be able to read those copies of his books which escaped the eternal (man made) fires of Hell.

Why, oh why, could the Marists, or the Redemptorists for that matter, not have a guy like the one below incharge?

Benedictine Prioress Christine Vladimiroff

Pro Vita Sua

Seán Fagan is in his eighties but he writes and thinks like a young man, a wise young man with buckets of experience behind him.

I have just finished reading his book What happened to sin? Originally written in 1977, he has since updated it in 2008.

I really don't know where to start. It is such a relevant and inspirational book that it is hard to see anyone of good faith taking issue with it.

One of his other books, Does Morality Change?, originally written in 1997, was condemned by the Vatican (CDF) on its republication in 2003, on the following grounds (as reported by the Irish bishops):

“the denial of the binding force of the Magisterium [Rome] on conscience”; “the uncritical acceptance of the tendency ‘to substitute a dynamic and more evolutionary concept of nature for a static one’,”; “the effective rejection of the church’s understanding of the natural law (illuminated by revelation)”; “the explicit denial of moral absolutes, specially those concrete acts which are intrinsically wrong”; and “the promotion of a false understanding of conscience”.

I would have thought that these sound more like grounds for praise than condemnation. Of course, they are a hostile presentation of Seán Fagan's ideas by a power-mad bureaucracy that feels threatened by him. They fail to present the inspirational context in which these ideas are put forward, and they fail completely to see that Seán Fagan's thinking could be the salvation of a church which is failing in its duty to its members and which even some of its own highest officials acknowledge is rotten at parts of its core.

I found What happened to sin? the most inspirational book I have read since John Robinson's Honest to God. It is a game changer. Don't be put off by the use of the word sin, and you could even dispense with the divine in its content, and you would still have a programme for good (Godly?) living to bring you in sight of the Promised Land.

I read it as an unbeliever, but with an eye to what its thinking might mean for the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church on the lines promised by Vatican II some half a century ago.

It is a plea/recipe for individual moral responsibility in a buck passing and uncaring world. It debunks the power-enhancing strategems of church administrations over the last decades, centuries even, in favour of person-based moral growth.

It is a disgrace that this man has been silenced, though not very effectively it would seem. It is a sad reflection on the moral pygmies who reported him, those who silenced him, and those, who by their own silence, consent to the outrageous treatment of this holy man.

IMPOSTER

Fr. Tony Flannery took to Twitter on 7th of June 2011 and was happily tweeting away until the 13th of March 2012 when he more or less lost interest and the account lay dormant until quite recently.

Meanwhile, Fr. Tony was preoccupied with his persecution by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or the Inquisition as it was formerly and rightly known).

Then, suddenly out of nowhere, the above imposter made his/her appearance pretending to be Fr. Tony. This turned out to be not a spoof account satirising or poking fun at Fr. Tony, but a real attempt to pretend to be him and in the process discredit him and give the impression that he had lost his marbles.

I have reproduced four of the imposter's sixteen tweets above to give an idea of the subtle way Fr. Tony was being undermined. The imposter gradually accumulated 12 followers, among which myself and the CofI Bishop of Cork (forgive me Bishop if I'm wrong). These followers believed they were following Fr. Tony. I certainly did. But I got a bit suspicious as it was clear that Fr. Tony either was losing it or there was something else going on here.

If you look at the tweets above (reading down from the top) you'll see an innocuous introduction (5 Feb) followed some days later (11 Feb) by an endorsement of Hans Kung for Pope, an evangelistic lauding of the theme of LOVE in capital letters, and a serious poke at the CDF. This is followed a month later (11 Apr) by an implication that Fr. Tony is thick in with the Freemasons, and finally a tweet (11 May) in which Fr. Tony outs himself as a political activist, a brother of Frank Flannery who is and was for many years prominent in Fine Gael, and threatens the Church authorities that if they excommunicate any of those in Fine Gael, he will go on hunger strike.

This refers to Church disapproval of the stance taken by Enda Kenny and Fine Gael in the abortion debate. The Government have decided that they are obliged to legislate for limited abortion following a Supreme Court constitutional decision a good while back. Various clerics have made threats of excommunication and Cardinal O'Malley of Boston has even refused to appear on the same platform as Enda Kenny whom he sees as "aggressively promoting abortion". There is also an implication, lurking in the background, that Fr. Tony may have had something to do with Enda's anti-Vatican speech in July of last year.

The threatened hunger strike must be the first between meals hunger strike in history.

Needless to say, when Fr. Tony became aware of this he was alarmed and appealed for help through the website of the Association of Catholic Priests, of which he is a founder member. He was immediately well advised by contributors to that site, following which he took up the matter with Twitter, who have now suspended the imposter's account.

I am pleased to see that Fr. Tony has now returned to tweeting about very serious matters, like the state of the Galway football team, and, if you want to follow him, his account is shown below.

Spiritual Harassment

As Pope Benedict said "many people now think the Church is a collection of prohibitions, but it is not."

The above is from an interview with Bishop John Buckley of Cork and Ross and is quoted in an article reproduced on the website of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP).

When I read the sentence, I didn't know whether to fall off my chair laughing or just feel that these ACP guys must have needed a lot of paste to keep that one from falling off the wall.

How many priests have now been silenced for attempting to discuss forbidden topics? How many nuns are being investigated by bishops for unorthodoxy? Nuns, who have put their lives on the line in taking the social justice agenda of the Second Vatican Council to some of the poorest areas in the world, being investigated by bishops, whose own orthodoxy has been to shuttle paedophile priests around parishes under their control, and for which orthodoxy they have neither been investigated nor punished.

You can get details of the above in another article on the same site and also find a link to the full investigation by the National Catholic Reporter of the attempts by the CDF to bludgeon American nuns into submission.

Recant, recant ...

Pray, a minute's silence please for Roy Bourgeois, who has been unceremoniously ejected from the Catholic Church and Ministry for following his conscience, a course formerly recommended by the pre-Pontifical Ratzinger.

The saga is summarised in a post on the ACP site, and if you already feel strongly enough about the matter, or wish to have your conscience pricked, you could do worse than spare a half an hour to read Roy's book.

It is both a biography and an apologia. It is an inspirational and deeply moving read and a very clear statement of the irrefutable case for the Roman Catholic Church acknowledging women's vocation to the priesthood.

It speaks for itself.

I am silent.

Tweet Three Hail Marys

The Pope has urged priests to make use of modern means of communication.

The Reverend Father above has clearly taken him at his word.

Whatever about the Vatican itself tweeting away into the ether, we should heed the old tag Festina Lente when it comes to using social media at parish level and particularly in the confessional.

The implications for privacy, for the seal of the confessional, and all that sort of stuff, will have to be fully explored.

Vatican News on Twitter
At present the Vatican itself tweets a news service (above), but it appears the Pope is soon to have his own personal twitter account.

Benny will be keeping an eagle eye on this development.

Meanwhile, we were there already with our own version of Catholicopoly ,,,

Play the Game
... and with a suggestion how a lot of that cumbersome cyberstructure wiring could be dispensed with and the Mystical Body function as one.

Peter Rocks

In these difficult times when women are definitively barred from the priesthood for all time, I would like to offer this newly discovered picture of Peter reassuring the two Marys that this would not be the case and telling them to go forth and bear witness.

Can you really look these three disciples in the eye and say the Vatican is correct in its ban and neither of these two ladies merit ordination.

The location was one of the holy halls of the capital city and the period as recent as the beginning of the second Vatican Council.

The Holy Ghost haunts the oddest of places, does he not?

Prohibitus Loqui (in pectore)

Here's the deal.

Only the Pope knows; so the guy/gal ("dissident") carries on as before; the Pope knows, in his heart of hearts, that he's silenced him/her; so everyone is happy.

It is surely time to resurrect that fine Papal practice of doing things In Pectore now that we are back to the age of persecution, nihil obstat and imprimatur. The old system of censorship was very resource intensive with its huge Index Librorvm Prohibitorvm and all the clerks required to keep it up to date and everything.

The new old way would be better. Wouldn't cost a penny and would economise on scarce clerical resources ('scuse the pun) in these days of exponentially declining vocations and falling replacement ratios.

So what's with the picture, I hear you ask, as your febrile brain tries to make the connection? Well, I liked the tones in the painting; it is pertinent (and indeed, pert); and it is arguably less offensive than my original choice which was to put the Pope's head on a picture of the Sacred Heart. The logic would have been more apparent but the offence all the greater.

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That All may be One

The Borg

Guilty as charged

It is fitting that we remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer today,
on the 67th anniversary of his execution by the Nazis.

A Protestant martyr for the faith.

The Empire Strikes Back

Hover the cursor over the helmet

Under one Roof

Logo of the 2012 Congress
As BULLS has happily been restored from the bowels of deletion, this blog will no longer need to inherit the mantle nor keep the home fire burning. However, I have taken a fancy to the very nice template and to the blog's quirky title, so I have no intention of giving it up.

So now we're left with a blog in search of a mission.

As the 2012 International Eucharistic Congress is to be held in Dublin in June, I think I'll devote this blog to following it's progress, at least until then. And is not the title so appropriate for such a mission?

There are lots of interesting aspects to this upcoming Congress:

• how well will it be attended, and with what degree of enthusiasm, compared to its 1932 predecessor?
  
• to what degree will the State be involved in what is essentially a private function?
  
• after the closure of the Irish embassy in Rome, following the standoff between the State and the Vatican, is there any chance the Pope might risk a visit to the Congress, and if so, how would he be received, by the State, and by the people?
  
• will the RC Church, now on the verge of bankruptcy, be able to raise enough funding to put on a reasonable show?
  
• how will the Church handle the participation of its "separated brethern", particularly when it is the "real presence" itself which divides it from other Christian Churches?
  
• how will the "dramatis personae" be constructed. Front of house bishops à la Casey and clerics à la Cleary will have to be carefully avoided.
  
• will it become clearer at Congress time whether Dublin's Archbishop Martin has full Vatican backing in his efforts to modernise the monolith, or not?
  
• What role will the Nuncio play, given his ambiguous roles as an official diplomat on the one hand and a purely apostolic functionary on the other.
  
• will the choice of specific papal legate to the Congress give any indication of how the power struggle is progressing inside the Vatican?
  
• will the Congress exacerbate the divisions within Government over the closing of the embassy in Rome?
  
• will there be anyone from the State sector available to kiss Bishops' rings or will the whole sector get a stiff "belt of a crozier" at the appropriate moment?
  
• will there be any special indulgences allocated for participants in the Congress and, if so, will these be in any way related to financial contributions?
  
• ditto in relation to masses?

In short, will we end up with the Pope's head on a coin or on a plate.

Stay tuned. Who said we didn't live in interesting times?


Logo of the 1932 Congress

Some further thoughts from last Summer.

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