Monthly Archives: May 2017

Another Cardinal Offence

29 Monday May 2017

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What is it with these old churchmen?
‘It seems the Vatican- China deal is not proceeding . That’s good !’ This is not a statement from some battle-scarred old Stalinist commissar, veteran of the Long March you will be interested to know , but from Cardinal Zen. This belligerent 85 year old has intervened, and not for the first time, into the infinitely delicate and complex negotiations which may yet help to bring the Eucharist to the millions in China seeking spiritual sustenance. That is his contribution. It is difficult to follow exactly what his problem is , a constant difficulty with the older person .
Sometimes, if we understand him correctly, he seems to be against any kind of agreement with the Chinese Government seeing this as a betrayal in some way of those who were and still are being persecuted ,.The fact that they put themselves in this situation in the hope of ultimately bringing about the kind of agreement , and China back into the Church, he is moaning about seems to be too difficult for him to grasp. The ‘Catholic Herald’ however suggests another solution, and we quote: ‘What seems to rile the Cardinal most about the proposed deal is that he and other bishops from China have been left out of the discussion. ‘ We haven’t space , but a look in his Wikipedia might be instructive.
Interestingly, he was made a Cardinal by who else-no not him- but Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. And he has emerged once more from retirement, like the celebrated cuckoo from the clocks in his native Black Forest, to suggest with as much sense as the cuckoo , that we all stand by Cardinal Sarah, he who is so keen about which direction one looks when saying Mass. Our Latin is rusty, but it would have been nice to tell him that if the heat was so bad, why does he not stay permanently out of the kitchen. He would have understood the Latin , naturally. But why can’t he understand that he could simply be confusing people, and that nobody in 2017 really cares what he thinks ?
What happened to all the finger-wagging about humility, and accepting God’s will to which we have often been subjected so unnecessarily ? Do these not apply to these bothersome and infinitely tedious old men ? Retire them? Can we not sack them?

Theology and the Ya-Yah-Yi-Yah-Yah Approach

07 Sunday May 2017

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The Hungry Forties were a long time ago. From the Highlands and Ireland many thousands came to Glasgow. There was certainly a slightly later visitor to my family who, pointed at the Anderston tenement, assumed we owned all of it and not just the room and kitchen. I’ve heard this was a common mistake, especially by those straight from black houses and mud cabins.
But some of us have done quite well. I’ve heard rumours there has been a Catholic doctor in Glasgow since then. And maybe even a Catholic lawyer ! It’s obviously a Loch Ness monster kind of thing but there’s a silly rumour going about that Highland and Irish Catholics have reached every academic height that can be reached, here and elsewhere , not to mention their commercial ability. No, really. People have said that !
If we can accept universal literacy and the rest of it for the poor Paddies and Cheuchters, why do we have to accept without saying something about the nonsense which has appeared in the Catholic Press re the numbers of Catholics attending Mass ?
It’s apparently a wonderful thing that there are or will be more Catholics than other denominations attending church. At a time when Islam is on the march, that’s irrelevant. The Incarnation, on which Christianity is based , is just an international sporting entity, and at the minute the Catholic Church is winning in terms of points, or goals, or strokes or cups or whatever the hell athletes are competing for nowadays.
To be logical , and I’m in alien territory here, when there’s only one Tridentine priest left and no ministers left, we’ve won?
I tried again this year to watch in its fullness ‘The Passion of the Christ’ by Mel Gibson, but could not do so. This brilliant film, I suggest, is probably as near as we will ever get to a spectator’s view of what the Passion and Death of Our Lord looked like. It is in its way a tribute to the Incarnation, and a very powerful one.
But in Catholic Glasgow, the blazing reality of the Incarnation is being reduced to whatever sporting gibberish’s adherents use to signify win or loss.
The Incarnation, in other words , is reduced to backcourt peever, or kickabout, or, God help us, the confrontations of professional sport
So there are more Catholics than Protestants now in church on Sundays . As we used to say in the James Dean era- waow!