Cultist attitudes can appear in any group including our own

Cultism:

No group, no religious grouping, movement can escape these attitudes- these tendencies. (Catholic, Church of Ireland etc etc etc – do not name groups but tendencies and attitudes in every group. Not entities, but tendencies and attitudes in every group.

Do you get it?

Faith and culture have become what Joyce called the bind where Caesar and Christ are hand in glove. “There are nets set out to catch us before we are born.”

Joyce is here referring to art, but the sense is of throwing off the black soutaned Christian Brothers for the bathing beauty on Dollymount strand in his “Portrait of an artist as a young man.”

I should say this is generally an Irish cultural problem. Possibly the end of the control of schools, might bring sacramental formation into the parish. Whatever view one takes it isn’t working. In other societies the process seems to work, but not here in Ireland. It is adding to the problem. Even with the problems going on with the Church leadership the census figures reveal that Irish Catholicism is the only game in town. In fact there is evidence of signs of growth….

Joe Coleman, the House of Prayer and all these fringes at the edge, point to the Kingdom being concealed by birthright religion. Born Catholic means we miss the boat and become Cash and Carry Christians. It is not an awakening but a birth rite religion. It is not a rite of Spring, but dead winter. Born into it leaves us with what Conor Cruise O’Brien called, “Two Tribes of imaginary Jews.”

In Clonliffe College there is a mural showing the victory of the Emperor Constantine at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_P0FZfPlSA

Christianity is seen as triumphing through the cross which was used as an instrument of political power. With the withdrawal of British government the Church took over the State.  What we call Contantianism/ Christendom obviously took root in the Irish Church. This temptation to political power instead of taking the cross as a symbol of suffering distorts the gospel. It gives the Church power in one generation and leaves it a widow in the next. The abuse issue is the direct consequence of this policy. The Church needs to separate itself from the state in that it still maintains a Vatican state with Nuncios. The Kingdom is not connected to power, and it is only as we relinquish power that we can serve children.

The clerical dress and the robes of the Roman Gentry disguise a deeply flawed and unhealthy spirituality. Just like in civil society we can have litter law, speeding fines and plenty of legislation. What we have is a failed Church entity with a governmental system which has also failed. No laws since Ferns, but the secularists are trying to milk this one, but they are just short of 1000 atheists and nearly 2000 Agnostics? Secularism will not save us as shown by the search for meaning in all types of alternatives in drugs, pleasure, food, travel, celebrity and sport. The New Age have moved over to the Next Age. The Cultist bankers and the builders of Babel like Skyscrapers trying to reach the sky?

We need a new Patrick to enter our space, and a fundamental Reformation as Nell McCafferty said on Pat Kenny today. “The report like Luther’s theses needs to be nailed to every Church door.”

But remember no one factor will answer this we need a multidisciplinary approach to see the New Ireland coming out of this darkness.

Words fail and political ideology ices the soul…apologise pull out your eyes…….Don’t talk walk.

See commission on Child Abuse: