Position Papers - November 2017

A review of Catholic affairs

70 years of Opus Dei in Ireland

by Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan

Hollywood Exposed

by Rev Patrick G Burke

Number 513 · November 2017 €3 · £2.50 · $4

Luther and the divorce between faith and reason

by Martin Fitzgerald

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Number 513 · November 2017

Editorial

by Rev. Gavan Jennings

In Passing: The delusions of 21st Century man (Part 2)

by Michael Kirke

Launch out into the deep!

by Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan

Maybe Grandma was Right

by Jennifer Kehoe

Hollywood Exposed

by Rev. Patrick G Burke

Walking Towards Christ from www.opusdei.ie

How To Preach Like The Apostles

by Bishop Robert Barron

Luther and the divorce between faith and reason

by Martin Fitzgerald

Book Review: TK Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot

by Rev Conor Donnelly

Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

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Rev. Gavan Jennings Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann Liam Ó hAlmhain Dick Kearns Eblana Solutions

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Editorial O

ne hundred years ago this November 7 the so-called “October Revolution” took place in St Petersburg (“October Revolution” because Russia only adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918. In the Julian calendar they still followed the date of Lenin’s Bolshevik coup which was October 25.) The centenary celebrations of the event – described by the Minister of Culture as a “national tragedy” –will at best be muted in Russia. It was an event meant to usher in a communist paradise on earth; all it ushered in was seventy years of indescribable suffering for Russia and the many countries around the world which she infected with Marxism.

But this centenary is not only a commemoration of probably the most tragic event of the twentieth century; it is also a lesson in hope. The Marxist paradise never even made it to a hundred; it didn’t even make it to the average span of a man’s life. This event testifies to the wisdom of psalm 37: Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers; for they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green herb.

In the July 1917 apparition, Our Lady of Fatima spoke of an unconverted Russia spreading her errors throughout the world, and with those errors wars and persecutions of the Church, and even the annihilation of various nations. Most importantly, however, these dire warnings ended with the reassurance: “In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

We should remember the words of Mary, and of the psalm 37, when faced with the ideologies which have rushed into the vacuum left by the fall of communism; they too, after their time in the sun, will “fade like the grass”. That is not to say we should be passive before them. All men of good will have to fight tooth and nail against ideologies which seek to destroy such treasures of our civilisation as the right to life, the engendered nature of man and woman, natural marriage, and freedom of speech. But we must do so without fretting, with the “good cheer” Christ spoke of on Holy Thursday: “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (Jn.16:33).

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In Passing: The delusions of 21st Century man (Part 2)

by Michael Kirke

A

British Conservative government minister, Justine Greening, says that gender is virtually meaningless by proposing to let adults come in off the street and change it at will. “Pronoun Committees” on campus warn, “If you fail to respect someone else’s gender identity, it is not only disrespectful and hurtful, but also oppressive.” Does anyone hear an echo, “Committee of Public Safety”?

From there it was but a short step to the guillotine. Mozilla’s CEO was removed from the company he founded because he privately supported traditional marriage – and that was also disrespectful, hurtful and oppressive. It certainly was for

him – but that didn’t matter. A Google engineer is the latest casualty of the thought police because he expressed an opinion of doubtful orthodoxy.

This is just a very small sample from a long catalogue of seemingly mad events which are taking place around us. But they are not mad. They are the result of a cold, calculated dogma that has pervaded our culture. We are, in truth, not a million miles, not even a few hundred miles from the nightmare of Stalinist Russia, where to write an opera (Prokofiev), compose a symphony (Shostakovich) or pen a novel (Pasternak) which was out of synch with the ideology of the State would reduce your

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career to ashes and even endanger your very life.

Eventually, bearing within itself the seeds of its own destruction, the states which embraced it began to crumble and fall. But to the very end Christianity remained its perpetual enemy and number one target for persecution and extermination.

Even in the last decade of its hegemony it sought to assassinate – and almost succeeded – the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

Is there anyone out there prepared to defend mankind from this self-destructive ideology? Yes there is, perhaps too timidly yet, but the principles are sound and if this onslaught of injustice persists then surely the perennial voice of reason will be heard loud and clear.

For seventy-plus years Marxism was a political force in the Soviet Union, backed up by a lethal totalitarian state. In that time the one enemy which it constantly singled out for annihilation was the Christian religion. Wherever Christians were found the grotesque regime’s apparatus first sought to corrupt them. Failing that it sought to crush them. After Soviet Russia led the way a handful of Eastern European followed under its tutelage – or its tanks. China and some Asian countries then joined the monstrous regiment and in the fifties and sixties of the last century the ideology made a largely unsuccessful attempt to subvert Latin America.

Why was this so? Why should the followers of a peace-loving prophet from 2,000 years ago be such a threat to what at first sight might be described as just one more attempt to solve the problems mankind faces in organising this world to meet the daily needs of its inhabitants?

It was so because the vision of humanity held by the followers of Jesus Christ, based on the belief and understanding that this God-man in fact created the world and all that is in it, is radically at odds with that of Karl Marx, his antecedents and his disciples. The essential contradictions inherent in the Marxist vision of man, its utterly

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flawed anthropology, eventually killed it – but not before it left tens of millions dead in its wake.

These contradictions, these flaws, were called out and opposed by authentic Christianity from the moment they first made their appearance. For that reason Christians became the constant and number one enemy and Marxists had to corrupt them or wipe them off the face of the earth. Despite pretences to the contrary, peaceful co-existence for a thorough and clear-sighted Marxist was never going to be an option with this enemy in full bloom.

already divining the selfdestructive excesses of Soviet Communism in the 1930s, adherents of the basic core of Marx’s materialistic determinism articulated a “new improved model” which we now call neo-Marxism. This new manifestation of Marxism, often not even calling itself Marxism, again sees itself confronted with the same enemy – the Christians.

The core materialism which was at the heart of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto is also at the heart of this new Marxism. This is the central error of the ideology which Christians must of necessity oppose. It must set its face against it because it is an error which denies the central truths of man’s nature and essence.

From this central error springs a series of maladies which are now afflicting Western society and which in time will also spread to every other cultural environment on the planet: from it springs gross consumerism; rampant individualism of the “me, me, me” variety – proclaiming absolute freedom

We may feel relieved that this form of Marxism, while not extinct, is now largely moribund.

That would be naive. Marxism itself is still with us in an even more insidious form, currently seeking to corrupt but increasingly looking like reverting to its crushing mode once again. Because it is no longer a unified ideology it is even more dangerous and pervasive. Its new suit of clothes was acquired from what we call the Frankfurt School. Here,

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which is no freedom at all. From it also flows the scourge of gender ideology and all that it spawns; finally, the ideology which proclaims the right to destroy human life before birth and force its termination before its natural end.

standards consistent with the group’s religious affiliation. For them, to require members of Christian groups to believe Christ’s teaching amounts to promoting “hateful discrimination”. Most hateful of all of course is the fact that, as governor, Brownback supported Reality Birth Certificates that note biological sex. They consider biological reality and genetic science to be a “deadly” prejudice and an attack on one’s true “identity,” which for them is oh-so-solidly and rationally based on feelings and one’s current whim. Cue Justine Greening.

But making a stand against the materialistic ideology of our time is to rule you out as a candidate for public service. We remember the rejection by the European parliament of Rocco Buttiglione. They haven’t gone away, you know.

Governor Sam Brownback has been nominated by the President of America to join his administration as an ambassador for religious freedom. The so-called Human Rights Campaign, beloved of Barak Obama and the Clintons, which says Christian ministers should be forced to not only publicly approve of homosexuality but endorse it officially with God’s blessing, is outraged. They are outraged because Gov. Brownback has defended the rights of Christian and other religious student groups to have membership

The warning signs are there that a new hegemony of this ideology is already with us. We can now see a new era of materialistic ideology slowly – or maybe not so slowly – gaining ground in the political square, in the halls of learning and in the schools where it is being inculcated in our children.

Last week, Campus Reform reported a lecturer at the University of Michigan advocating the “retraining of preschool children to make them

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less heteronormative.” Defining “heteronormativity” as a culture in which “heterosexuality is always assumed, expected, ordinary, and privileged,” she argues that the issue is especially important because preschools contribute to the “reproduction of inequalities pertaining to gender and sexuality,” such as gender roles and “gendered feelings”.

when we call a woman a man.

This is the “progress” of progressivism. In a similar case in Sweden, a woman manages to grow a beard and calls herself a man. She then gets pregnant by a man who thinks he is a woman and between them they have two children. These children in their turn are deliberately not being told what they are, boy or girl.

They will decide for themselves.

The truth is they won’t. They will be what they are and that is it.

Furthermore, this new materialism is now being voluntarily adopted lock stock and barrel by political establishments in state after state around the world. They euphemistically call it “evolution in their thinking”; they call it getting in step with history; what they fail to do is call it what it really is: indoctrination in an ideology which is errant nonsense.

The probability is that by writing this I am breaking a law. What law it is or in what country I might be prosecuted I do not know for sure. But I suspect that that some law brands me as a “hate-criminal” and I am sure that the time is not far distant when the law will catch up with people who point out the folly and injustice of these ideas.

Since breaking laws incurs punishments they will be punished.

An example of the consequences: working within the laws which our indoctrinated legislators have put in place for our common good, we were told last week that a man has given birth to a baby. We negate the judgment of our sense and the principles of biological science

Do I exaggerate? No. The esteemed University of West Virginia has warned its staff and students that referring to someone by the “wrong” gender pronoun is a violation of federal

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anti-discrimination laws. In a totally different jurisdiction, Dr. Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor in the University of Toronto, refused to adhere to the university’s policies on pronouns, requiring him to refer to students as “ve”,”ver” or “vis”. He was threatened with legal action.

parameters of our own nature.

The Judaeo-Christian response to those wrong turnings was corrective and didactic. We often resisted correction and were slow learners – but seldom if ever did we reject them on the basis of their being unnatural, alien, or foreign to what was deemed to be the very nature of the species. That, with Marxism, has all changed. The JudaeoChristian vision of man and the Marxist vision of man are now radically and fatally at variance.

Mankind is now engaged in a fight to the death. If Marxism is victorious in that conflict then mankind is doomed to selfdestruct. We are very near the Gates of Hell – but Christians do have a promise about that.

From the time of Adam man has known sin. Human history gives an account of how we cope with the consequences of our malice and our weaknesses. It is often a sad story, it is can be salutary, it is sometimes heroic. But this is a different sin. Until modern times mankind’s understanding of our wrong turnings have been, in a sense, within the

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Kirke is a freelance writer, a regular contributor to Position Papers, and a widely read blogger at Garvan Hill (www.garvan.wordpress.com). His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@gmail.com.

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Launch out into the deep!

by Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan

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n October 4, 1947, almost exactly seventy years ago, Jose Ramon Madurga a numerary member of Opus Dei arrived by ferry to Dublin to begin the Work in Ireland.

And he repeated this message over and again throughout his life in word and deed, as for example in his key homily Passionately Loving the World in Navarre in 1967: “everyday life is the true setting for your lives as Christians”, St Josemaria said in that well known homily in the campus of the University of Navarre on October 8, 1967.

I wonder how many times did he repeat to himself the key line from today’s Gospel. I wonder as he stepped of the boat did he think to himself: “Now I Launch out into the deep”?

He went on to preach the by now famous lines:

The Gospel just read was a favourite Gospel text of St Josemaría Escrivá who was inspired by God to found (even though he said he never wanted to found anything) Opus Dei on October 2, 1928, the feast of the Guardian Angels.

Your daily encounter with Christ takes place where your fellow men, your yearnings, your work and your affections are. It is in the midst of the most material things of the

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earth that we must sanctify ourselves, serving God and all mankind.

This I have been teaching all the time, using words from Holy Scripture: the world is not evil, because it comes from the hands of God, because it is his creation, because Yahweh looked upon it and saw that it was good. It is we ourselves, men and women, who make it evil and ugly with our sins and unfaithfulness. Don't doubt it, my children: any attempt to escape from the noble reality of daily life is, for you men and women of the world, something opposed to the will of God. On the contrary, you must realize now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of

work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.

Right now in Ireland this message is needed more than ever. Religion must not become a private pastime, confined to the church building or your own living room.

The love of Christ urges us; it is because we love God and love our brothers and sisters, passionately, our work colleagues, our friends our country that we must bring about the regnum Christi – the Kingdom of God. To do this we must “launch out into the deep�.

When this same truth dawns on us that we are apostles and are called to sanctify ourselves, our work and the part of the world where the good Lord has put us, when this impresses itself upon our soul, how differently we begin to look at our lives. Life is looked at in a different way: a supernatural way.

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Yes, there is failure. Yes, we are weak and sinful. Yes, we rebel, stumble, and fall. Yet, as St Josemaria reminds us, the Lord in his mercy loves us like a father and invites us to trust him and love him amid every obstacle and challenge.

Because of the spirit of trust which we have as sons and daughters of God, when this takes deep root in our souls, we do not hesitate to confess our sins in the sacrament of penance and in God’s mercy we find true hope. Blessed are all who put their trust in God! There will be in our lives, as there was in the life St Josemaría, misunderstandings and sufferings; there will be difficulties. Indeed, I am sure there are times when you experience the cross in what Pope Francis calls “polite persecution” for holding fast to your faith.

daily labours, when we follow the way of the cross and in his grace reproduce his passion and death, that we understand what it truly means to be the children of God and to really know Christ.

And it is only when we embrace the cross that we become not only true disciples but indeed apostles, sent into the world to lead others to Christ and to the Church.

In the Gospel, we see the disciples who had fished all night to no avail. When Jesus says to them “cast your nets into the deep”, the haul of fish is tremendous, their nets were filled to the breaking point and their boats were even in danger of sinking.

This invitation, indeed, this command, “lower your nets for a catch” is addressed not only to the Apostles and not only to priests and those in consecrated life: it is addressed to every follower of Christ, to every member of the Church, and not just priests and religious.

Yet it is in the cross – the little crosses of everyday – that we find light, peace, and joy! It is when we suffer with Christ and for Christ in the midst of our

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Indeed, St. John Paul II taught that it is the laity who are the principal agents of the new evangelization: “for you daily bring the Gospel into your homes and your places of work and among your friends and acquaintances, in sports clubs and offices, and in every noble human endeavour”.

arises of the things of faith, not being afraid to speak on matters of importance to shine the light of Christ on our world. How much Ireland needs this now!

You can ask yourself now – what more can I do to be an apostle, and then launch out into the deep.

Through our daily prayers and sacraments, our reading of scripture, our penances, getting to know Christ in the little things of each day and raising up our daily work as a prayer to God, doing it well and in that way sanctifying it, offering others the example of what a Catholic Christian life is, speaking to them when the opportunity

As we celebrate this wonderful day in honour of St Josemaria Escriva, on this seventieth anniversary of the Work in Ireland we pray God to grant, “that by St Josemaría’s intercession and example we may, through our daily work, be formed in the likeness of [Christ] and serve the work of redemption with burning love!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This is the text of a homily delivered in Knock Shrine, Co.Mayo on Sept. 30, 2017. Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan is the Roman Catholic Bishop of Waterford and Lismore.

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Maybe Grandma was Right

by Jennifer Kehoe

T

he advice for a long life seems often to boil down to eating proper dinners “like grandma used to make”. That is, cook from scratch and eat food that remembers where it came from. I read an article today by a cardiologist saying precisely this.

Our low fat, low carb, processed ready made diets are doing us more harm than good. He suggests returning to eating the way we did in the past, with dinner beginning with a chopping knife … just like Grandma would have done.

Interestingly, what did our grandmothers have in common?

They were by and large in the home caring for families. They had time and the esteem of

society on their side. By contrast we have an incessant drive to get women OUT of the home, to cast off the shackles of motherhood and into any old menial job so that they can have dignity and the stimulation which the “mind numbing” tasks of home and family can NEVER provide.We have a subliminal attitude that women at home are doing nothing, that they don’t have a job, that they are bored, lacking stimulation and unfulfilled.

Wasting brains and ability. I’ve heard it a million times. Mindnumbing and home are two words which have become inextricably linked, simply by repetition. Personally, not once has my mind ever been numb while caring for my home ...

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many’s the time I felt my brain cells had rotted when I was in meaningful employment.

Can any of us remember our grandmothers as stressed, over scheduled, under appreciated and resentful? Can we remember them as bored, unproductive and consider what they did as a waste of ability? I know I remember both my grandmothers and my own mother as amazing capable ladies whose cooking abilities I could only dream of imitating.

My mother and grandmother were master crafts women, my grandmother able to knit complex Aran sweaters in a few days while holding conversation.

I have tried knitting Aran patterns and have barely managed a line or two without having to unpick my mistakes.

I’m not saying that women who don’t engage in paid work are always considered productive.

Once we are involved in something else ... something separate from the home. In that case we may well be fulfilled. Be it volunteering, study, a cottage business,

writing, blogging …. In those things lie our value as seen from the lofty ramparts of our society.

Women are encouraged to do something ... anything so that they can identify as that thing and not as the “nothing” status of SAHM. But the precise work of the home? Nothing is considered more demeaning, more backward, more “submissive”, more unfulfilling for a woman than making a bed, cleaning floors, hanging laundry in one’s own home for one’s own family. So much so that rarely does a week go by as some article laments how women are still doing this stuff. Mind you, were a woman to start a small business and receive money do for others what she freely does for her family, now that would be contributive to society, that woman would now be a business lady with status and value even though she is doing exactly what she previously did.

Or perhaps we can still identify as the thing we did in a different life, in a distant memory. I remember filling out a birth registration for my fourth child.

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I had LONG given up my old job with zero intention or desire ever to return to it. The lady taking the registration asked what was “Mother’s Employment”. I replied Full Time Parent. “Oh no ... snigger ... we can’t have that!

What were you BEFORE?” So against my will, my child’s birth certificate falsely identifies me as something I wasn’t and which I had no desire to be. All to protect me from the shame of what I actually was.

I wonder if we look back at those home cooked dinners, breads and cakes, at the cosy clean homes we would return to daily and rejoice that those days are gone? Are we delighted that all too often we are so busy and stressed and overworked that the best we can hope for at dinner time is something ripped from a printed box and shoved in an oven? Is that a big life improvement over that of the women who cooked and cleaned with babies in tow and who afterwards sat down to pick up their knitting and who always seemed to be calm and content and spread that to their

families? Do we look back in dismay that children walked to schools and activities because the family had one car, if that, and women weren’t tied to evening traffic leaving little to no time for chopping vegetables or stirring pots? My memory of my mother strongly revolves around kitchens and the aroma of cooking food and chatting to her as she prepared meals or knitted cardigans and blankets for the next baby. My memory of my mother, my grandmother and every other woman in my circle of experience is women who were highly valued, around whom life revolved, women whose worth was never questioned. In a lot of ways they were the ideal. As C.S. Lewis once put it: “The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career” Not so now, my dear, not so.

I’m not saying life was idyllic and rosy. Sure, they worked hard, sure times were tough but I think we know enough by now to realise that tough times and

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hard work aren’t impediments to happiness and equally that prosperity doesn’t necessarily equate contentment.

Where has contentment gone?

It took leave of us without us noticing. We’ve been too busy to notice the stealth with which it departed. In retrospect, it doesn’t take much effort to see the effects of it’s loss. Remember homes were places of peace where we would recharge instead of centres of rushed coordination of activities where mothers are reduced to cart horse event managers who might love the idea of sitting down to knit or paint ... or to cook a dinner from scratch, but just don’t have time? Who

exactly has benefited from the downgrading of the role of women at home? It sure as hell ain’t women! Or children, Or health, Or marriages, Or family life. Who has benefited? That’s what I’d like to know. The processed food industry is the only thing I can think of.

No wonder our hearts and bodies are rebelling.

Could it be that Grandma had the right idea. Could it be that the way things were done might possibly have been ... better?

Just a question.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Kehoe is a young mother of six, living in Kildare, Ireland. She runs a blog “Raindrops on my Head,” at http://jenniferkehoe.blogspot.ie.

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Hollywood Exposed

by Rev. Patrick G Burke

T

he Harvey Weinstein scandal is truly appalling. He is, of course, denying the allegations against him. But the fact that it is in the public domain that he reached settlements with numerous women over the years – in other words paid them large sums of money to keep quiet – makes it difficult to treat his denials with any degree of credibility.

It has also emerged that his contracts with production companies contained clauses dealing with how accusations of sexual abuse against him were to be dealt with. They would pay the settlement, and he would later reimburse them, along with a “fine” of a quarter of a million

dollars for the first case, half a million for the second, $750,000 for the third, and a million for the fourth and every subsequent case thereafter. It is hard to explain such things being in the contract of anyone other than someone who was likely to offend in such a way.

But Weinstein is only one man – even though a man who did untold damage to many, many women. His downfall, however, exposes wider issues. One of these is the fact that it has become plain that it was well known exactly what kind of monstrous behaviour this man was engaged in. Victim after victim is coming forward with further shocking revelations;

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and for every one of those there seems to be dozens of stories, all from industry insiders, making it clear that the tales of this man's misdeeds have been told and retold for decades in the Hollywood community. The truth is that they all knew what he was up to. It was, as they say, an “open secret”. And still it went on.

Why? Because he was a powerful man who could damage careers if he were challenged. And all those insiders who knew what was going on put their own interests above those of the women he was hurting. I don’t blame the women he assaulted for keeping quiet. Victims are entitled to their privacy if that is what they want. But the others who knew and did nothing bear some responsibility for those he hurt after they knew what he was up to.

Hollywood celebrities, after all, are well known for jumping on every bandwagon under the sun.

But when it came to serious wrong-doing in their own industry they were strangely silent. This is blatant hypocrisy

when one considers the slew of films to come out of Hollywood wagging the metaphorical finger at others for their alleged moral failings and yet refused to deal with the horrors going on in its own house. The words of our Lord admonishing those who thought themselves to be righteous to first take the beam out of their own eye before speaking of the speck in the eyes of others spring to mind.

The hypocrisy is doubled, and also magnified by a large dose of irony, by the fact that Hollywood regards itself as a purveyor of moral and ethical values in the modern world. It is very open about the way it sees itself as having a major role in “educating” people with the doctrines of this new orthodoxy – a system of values that stands very much opposed to the traditional values of Western society, values rooted in the Christian faith. Every film and every television programme to come out of it has had a fairly overt agenda – to undermine the values of previous generations and promote those of the liberal

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elites, values largely born of the sexual revolution.

It is hard not to see, knowing what we now know, a large element of “grooming” in all this: the fantasies of a totally liberated sexual culture being played out on the big and small screen at the behest of the predators behind the scenes to make it difficult for their intended victims to object to their advances and complain once they were done with them.

With the actual predators, of course, being aided and abetted by a swarm of sycophants who didn’t care what happened to the targets of these men as long as their own careers were advanced on the back of it all.

And let it be clearly understood: most of these Hollywood celebrities and insiders knew.

The settlements, the contracts with clauses specifying how future settlements were to be dealt with, make it clear that it was known. This was, as has been already stated, an open secret. The committee for the Academy Awards, as they were expelling Weinstein from among

their ranks, called it a culture of complicity. But complicity might be too light a word for it.

Facilitation might be better.

Hollywood knew he had done it before. It knew he would do it again. And its response was contracts in clauses and whispered warnings to stay away from the man if they knew what was good for them - to those who were lucky enough to get them.

But that culture, that complicity, that facilitation extended far beyond Weinstein's crimes. For generations the term “casting couch” has been synonymous with Hollywood. Maybe people before now didn't think too hard about what that term meant.

Perhaps they even saw it as consenting adults 'exchanging favours', the powerful mogul helping the wide-eyed innocent get her career started while she shared his bed in return, if not out of love then at least out of gratitude. Well this affair has blown the lid off any sentimental ideas of what the casting couch involves. And what it involves is rape and all kinds of other forced sexual activity, with

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powerful moguls and others within the cinematic industry using their position to abuse others for their own sordid gratification.

So there are surely countless other predators out there. And the victims are not only women, but undoubtedly men also. And children. The legendary Shirley Temple spoke in her autobiography of an attempted assault on her when she was eleven by one of these predators.

Eleven! And the 80s teen-star Corey Feldman has been talking for decades of the paedophile rings that are rampant among the Hollywood elite that particularly target adolescent boys.

No one listened to him, of course. But maybe they’ll start listening now. Not just to him but to all the other victims.

Weinstein may have been the first to be exposed; but he shouldn’t be the last. And maybe the one good thing this man will have done with his life is that his downfall will help expose the rottenness at the heart of the industry in which his predatory behaviour thrived.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Rev. Patrick G Burke is the Church of Ireland rector of the Castlecomer Union of Parishes, Co Kilkenny. A regular contributor to Position Papers, he was formerly a broadcast journalist with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network. He blogs at http://thewayoutthere1.blogspot.ie/

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Walking Towards Christ from www.opusdei.ie

S

everal thousand people, after listening to Christ’s preaching, had partaken of the bread and fish, which he provided so abundantly that a large amount was left over.

[1] Although many of them may not have realized what was happening, the miracle had been clear, at least for the Apostles.

Once again they were overwhelmed with astonishment. They had already lived with our Lord for some time, and this was not the first miracle they had witnessed. But this one had been produced through them, in their very hands. They had not been mere spectators but actual protagonists.

Although the miracle itself was entirely due to Christ, he had worked it with their help – with the loaves of bread that they had offered to him and then distributed among the crowd.

The miracle, one could say, had come about to the measure of their generosity in giving the little that they had.

Together with astonishment they were also filled with joy.

Once again they had experienced our Lord’s closeness. This new experience might not seem so striking for people who were already accustomed to living alongside Christ. But how quick we all are to forget the times when we have been touched by God’s presence – and how

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surprised and joyful we are when we perceive it anew!

How often we see clearly that God is alongside us, that he does not abandon us at crucial moments. And we are filled with joy and a sense of security, not only because something turned out well, but also, and above all, because we realize we are living with our Lord.

And yet how often we forget this and give in to the fear that another important matter may not turn out so well – as though God could forget about us, or as though the Cross were a sign that he had turned away from us.

Difficulties After taking leave of the crowds, Jesus asked the Apostles to go to the other side of the lake while he spent some time in prayer.

[2] For people with their expertise, the crossing seemed to offer no particular difficulty.

And even if it did, after what they had just lived through, what obstacle could seem insurmountable?

The boat drew steadily away from the shore, but after some time it began to make little progress. When night fell, the boat was many furlongs distant from the land, beaten by the waves, for the wind was against them.[3] They could not go back, and seemed to be making no headway. They had the impression that the wind and waves – the difficulties – had got the upper hand, and all they could do was try and stay afloat.

They were scared. The miracle they had witnessed just a few hours ago now seemed so far off.If only Jesus were with them – but he had stayed on the shore! He had stayed behind, but he had not left them alone or forgotten them. Even though they didn’t realize it, from the hillside he could see the difficult situation they were in, their effort and exhaustion.[4] On beginning the interior life, we can often notice the progress we are making. As we put out to sea, the shore recedes swiftly.

But as time passes, and we continue to fight and to advance, our progress is not so obvious to

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us. What we notice are the waves and the wind, while the shore seems to stay fixed in the same spot. That is the time for faith and abandonment. It is the time to realize that our Lord has not lost interest in us, and to remember that difficulties – the wind and the waves – are a necessary part of life, the life that we have to sanctify, knowing that Christ is close beside us.

The experience of God’s closeness, of the power of his grace, does not spare us from having to face difficulties in life.

We cannot expect to always feel that he is close by us, nor should we think that, because we are close to God, problems will not weigh us down. But neither should we fall into the mistake of seeing difficulties as proof that our Lord has turned away from us, even slightly or for a short time.

On the contrary, difficulties give us the chance to show God how much we love him, how authentic our virtue is. They give us a chance to show our faith in his closeness, and to make him

present for others through our joy, our work, and the serene acceptance of setbacks in our life.

Turmoil Peter and the others had been battling against the wind and water, and their own inner turmoil, for hours, when our Lord came to their help.[5]He could have done so in many other ways. He could have solved the problem instantly, or appeared among them in the boat without their seeing him coming. But he had other lessons to teach them, and preferred to act in a way that they could reflect upon afterwards. He came to them walking on the sea.

Since it was dark, it was not easy to see who he was. The fact of his coming was extraordinary in itself, but the disciples were already frightened, and fear prevents people from judging events clearly and serenely.

Given the circumstances, their reaction was quite understandable: they cried out in fear.

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Our Lord soothed them: Take heart, it is I; have no fear.[6] He did not calm the wind and the waves straight away, but gave his disciples light to protect their hearts from shipwreck: I know you are going through a difficult situation, but don’t be afraid; keep fighting, and trust in the fact that I haven’t forgotten you, that I’m still close by.

Peter’s reaction was unexpected. Lord, he said, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water.[7] Of all the Apostles, it was nearly always Peter who launched out, for good or for bad. He received our Lord’s strongest rebukes,[8] and he also confessed our Lord with a boldness that carried the others with him at difficult times.

[9] But his initiative now is surprising even for someone as impulsive as he was. Simon would have to get out of the boat and set foot on the choppy, uncontrollable surface of the water.

At a word from the Master, he put one leg over the side, then the other, and he started walking towards our Lord. He wanted to

reach Christ, and was ready to do anything to achieve his goal.

The resolutions we make to be more generous at times of turmoil should not be mere words. Our trust in God should overcome any indecisiveness or fear of putting them into practice. We need to be able to step decisively, even when there seems to be no solid ground to tread on, in order to walk towards Christ. To advance towards God we have to take risks; we have to lose our fear of storms and be ready to put our lives on the line.

As he walked over the water, Peter could feel the wind and waves more strongly than the others. His life depended on his faith even more clearly than theirs, now that he had got out of the boat and was walking towards Jesus. This is the risky situation we Christians find ourselves in. We too are trying to journey towards our Lord in circumstances, both external and internal, that are mostly beyond our control.

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We are more at the mercy of the waves than those who fear to confront the immensity of the supernatural life and prefer the poor apparent safety offered by their own little boat. So there is nothing strange about our realizing that sometimes we are not on solid ground, and are going through turmoil. That is the time to realize once again that we live by faith – not a faith that calms the storms and removes the danger of walking on the waves, but a faith that gives us light amid the turmoil, and explains the violence of the waves.

overcoming their fear, they achieved safety. We end up realizing that the turmoil involved in journeying towards God provides a firmer basis on which to build our lives than the apparent safety of the boat.

By faith [the Israelites] crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land; but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned.[10]Without faith, we are overwhelmed and drown in life’s difficulties. With faith, we do not escape setbacks, but we have more resources to cope with them, and we know that God can make them turn in our favor. The Chosen People must have been terrified to walk across the sea-bed, with the added danger that their enemies might overtake them; but by

Man of little faith. Anyone who reads the Gospel is surprised by these words. One might even wonder: If our Lord reproves Peter for his lack of faith after he gets out of the boat and begins to walk towards him on the water, what would he say to me?

Is there any hope that Christ might one day see a person of faith in me? But if we continue meditating on this scene, other questions may suggest themselves. Was Jesus expecting Peter to walk on the water quite calmly, as though walking on

Insecurity Peter had already taken several steps. When he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “O man of little faith, why did you doubt?”[11]

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solid ground on a peaceful, sunny day? Do our Lord’s words mean that we have to be untouched and unmoved by difficult situations? No, they don’t, because Christ himself was filled with anguish in the garden when facing something objectively fearful.

The goal of our struggle to live by faith is not to make us feel secure in the face of difficulties.

It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be affected by things, that important things shouldn’t matter to us, or that difficult things shouldn’t worry us.

Rather we need to never forget that God never leaves us, and strive to make use of these difficult situations to draw ever closer to him. “It is true that life, which by its nature is already rather narrow and uncertain, sometimes becomes difficult.

But that will help you to become more supernatural and to see the hand of God. Then you will be more human and understanding with those around you.”[12] It was only natural for Peter to feel insecure right from the very

first steps he took. What he was doing surpassed his human capabilities, whether or not the wind and waves were stormy.

It’s no easier to walk on water in calm weather than in a storm. So where did Peter’s lack of faith lie? Perhaps it was not so much in his sense of insecurity as in doubting Christ. Up until that moment his eyes were on Christ; obviously he felt insecure, but he did not worry too much about it because what was crucial, what took up all his attention, was walking towards his Master. But suddenly he focused instead on his own insecurity and lost sight of Jesus. His insecurity, which was natural and reasonable enough, degenerated into fear.

Fears Fear can grip our heart, and make things that initially existed only in our imagination into real problems. Some things happen to us precisely because we fear they will happen: the fear that we will have a temptation, the fear of becoming nervous, the fear that people will lose their good opinion of us, that we will not manage to explain

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something firmly enough, that we will not be able to tackle a problem in the right way.…

How should we struggle here?

By trying to accept that very insecurity, because only thus can we prevent it from becoming the focus of our attention. It shouldn’t matter to us how we feel while we are trying to carry out God's will. Then we will be able to walk towards Jesus through the wind and the waves, without being frightened by the difficulties.

St. John writes in one of his letters: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear… he who fears is not perfected in love.[13] Saint Josemaria liked to translate this as: “the fearful man doesn’t know how to love.”[14]Love and fear belong to different, mutually exclusive orders. They only join forces when love is not perfect.

Fear is a sense of uneasiness at the possibility of losing something one has or wishes to have. Insecurity is part of the human condition, since we do not have perfect mastery even

over ourselves. Therefore we cannot remove all insecurity from our lives. Otherwise the virtue of hope would not exist: where there is absolute certainty there is no room for hope.[15] The order of love, then, should exclude fear, but not necessarily insecurity or uncertainty. Living in the order of love means that insecurity does not degenerate into fear. It means accepting the insecurity, integrating it within a broader vision of things, within our trust in God, without trying to eliminate it entirely, which we will never be able to do. We can never aspire to absolute security.

The insecurity we may experience because of our limited abilities is an opportunity to foster our abandonment in God. Then faith is not seen as a weight but as a light, that shows us the way, that teaches us how to make use of our weakness to open our soul to God. Christians do not hope that God will make them feel sure of themselves, but that their confidence in God will enable them to see beyond their own insecurity. If our view is not

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confined to our own limitations but, without denying them, goes beyond them, we can truly cast out fear and live in the order of love.

take their first shaky steps?

You’re not alone: Mary is beside you.”[16] With our Lady, we learn to trust in God. ——-

A man or woman of faith may be worried, doubtful, nervous, embarrassed, afraid of looking bad, or see clearly one’s own insufficiency. But they accept these sensations without giving them undue importance, not allowing them to dominate their outlook and paralyze them. They don’t rebel against these things, or see them as proof of a lack of faith. They go forward even though they discover points of doctrine they need to understand better, or feel humbled and out of place, and their voice shakes. They have learned not to give particular importance to these things. They have learned to walk towards Christ amid the waves. And if the strength of the wind or sea prevents them from seeing him, they realize they are children.

“Have you never seen the mothers of this earth, with their arms outstretched, following their little ones when, without anyone’s help, they venture to

This article is reprinted from the website www.opusdei.ie.

[1] Cf. Mt 14:20-21 [2] Cf. Mt 14:22-23 [3] Mt 14:24 [4] Cf. Mk 6:48 [5] Cf. Mt 14:25 [6] Mt 14:27 [7] Mt 14:28 [8] Cf. Mt 16:23; Mk 8:33 [9] Cf. Mk 16:15-16; Jn 6:67-68 [10] Heb 11:29 [11] Mt 14:29-31 [12] Saint Josemaria, Furrow, 762 [13] 1 Jn 4:18 [14] Saint Josemaria, The Forge, 260 [15] Cf. Rom 8:24 [16] Saint Josemaria, The Way, 900

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How To Preach Like The Apostles

by Bishop Robert Barron

I

have always loved the Acts of the Apostles and have often recommended it to those who are approaching the Bible for the first time. Filled with colorful narratives, adventure, martyrdom, persecution, journeys by sea, etc., it makes for stimulating reading indeed.

But I love it especially because it shows us the excitement of being a follower of Jesus. Long before there were parishes and dioceses and the Vatican and other institutional structures, there was this band of brothers and sisters who were so overwhelmed and energized by the fact of the resurrection that they went careening around the world and to their deaths with the message of Jesus.

It also features some wonderful exemplifications of Christian preaching, for it relates to us some of the earliest kerygmatic proclamations of the apostles. If we attend carefully to these speeches, we can learn a lot about good preaching, but also a lot about the nature of Christianity. A particularly fine example is the sermon given by St. Peter on Pentecost morning and described in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We hear that Peter stood up with the Eleven and raised his voice. First lesson: all legitimate Christian teaching and proclamation is apostolic, which is to say, grounded in the witness of the first intimate followers of Jesus. Bishops are

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entitled to preach precisely because they are successors of the apostles; priests and deacons are formally commissioned to preach by bishops. This is to assure that what preachers say is not just a matter of private opinion or the fruit of the present cultural consensus, but is rather rooted in the experience of those who knew Jesus personally.

So what does apostolic preaching sound like? Peter says, “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Notice, first, the strength, confidence, and edginess of this proclamation.

There is nothing weak, vacillating, or unsure about it.

This is not a preacher sharing his doubt with you or reveling in the complexity and multivalence and ambiguity of faith. This is a man speaking (in a loud voice) about his absolute conviction. And what is he convicted about? “That God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Christos, the Greek

term for Messiah from which we derive the English word Christ, has the sense of anointed, which implies the new David, which means the fulfillment of the expectation of Israel. Good preaching always puts Jesus in relation to Israel, for he makes sense only kata ta grapha (according to the Scriptures). A Jesus abstracted from the history of Israel devolves in short order into a mere religious teacher or teacher of timeless spiritual truths.

And not only is he Christ; he is also Kyrios (Lord). This term had, at the time of Peter and Jesus, both a Jewish and a Roman sense. On the Jewish reading, it designated Yahweh, the God of Israel, for Adonai (Lord, in Hebrew) was the typical substitute for the unpronounceable tetragrammaton, YHWH. Paul, who continually calls Jesus “Lord,” says that Jesus was given the name above every other name, by which he means the name of God. Preaching that leaves the divinity of Jesus aside or in the shadows is,

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therefore, not Apostolic preaching. Now Kyrios also had a Roman sense, since Caesar was called kyrios, meaning the one to whom final allegiance is due. Do you see how edgy and subversive it was to declare that Jesus is Lord, and by implication, Caesar is not? And do you see why those who made that claim usually ended up imprisoned and/or put to death? A twentieth century Anglican bishop memorably expressed the insight as follows: “When Paul preached, there were riots; when I preach, they serve me tea.”

heart. And so they cry out, “What are we to do?” Peter’s sermon continues: “Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins.” Every truly evangelical sermon should be a call to repentance, to turn one’s life around. If it doesn’t lead to contrition and a conviction to change, it has not cut to the heart. Mind you, this doesn’t entail moralizing in a browbeating way, but rather the presenting of the message of Jesus in such a clear and compelling way that people naturally see how they’ve fallen short and want to change.

Notice, next, that Peter is not tickling the ears of his hearers: “God has made both Lord and Christ this Jesus whom you crucified.” He’s not pulling any punches or trying to win friends and influence people. About as bluntly and clearly as he possibly can, he names the sin of his audience. And this is precisely what “cuts to the heart” of his hearers. Trust me when I tell you that abstract spiritual principles, tired bromides, and timeless moral truths don’t cut people to the

Peter concludes: “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” Followers of Jesus are a holy nation, a people set apart. We have renewed minds and wills; we should profile ourselves distinctly against the backdrop of the world. If we think and act like everyone else, we haven’t taken in the Gospel.

Relatedly, if all we hear from the pulpit is what can be heard on talk-shows and in discussion groups and in political conversations, we haven’t heard the Gospel. Finally, we are told

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that, “Three thousand persons were added [to the Church] that day.” I know that everyone and his brother tells us not to worry about numbers and there is indeed truth to that. For God wants us to be, not successful, but faithful, as Mother Teresa said. However, like it or not, the Bible is interested in numbers.

And good preaching, if it is truly evangelical, is meant to draw people into the Church. That they are staying away from the Church in droves today says, I would suggest, something rather negative about the quality of our preaching.

sermonizing in the Acts of the Apostles. If you preach like Peter, they might not serve you tea after every homily, but they will know that they’ve been cut to the heart.

This article first appeared at: www.wordonfire.org.

To all preachers, I might recommend a careful consideration of the kerygmatic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bishop Robert Barron is an author, speaker, theologian, and founder of Word on Fire, a global media ministry. This article has been reprinted with the kind permission of the editors.

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Luther and the divorce between faith and reason

by Martin Fitzgerald

M

any Christians, like those in an Anglican church close to where I live, are inviting people to come and celebrate with them in coming weeks because October 31, 2017 marks the five hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. That was the day Brother Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses against the practices of the Catholic Church on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, beginning a schism from which the Christian West has not yet recovered.

One of the major sources of division between the two Christianities, the Catholic one and the Reformed one, was Luther’s insistence that we are

justified by faith alone and not works. I am not going to attempt to arbitrate the rights and wrongs of the question of salvation here. But it is clear that Luther’s proposition left good works in a very precarious position. If you were not justified by them, why even do them? And yet common sense dictated that it was still better to do good works than bad ones.

Wasn’t it better, for example, to get up and serve people at the table than be lazy and allow yourself to be served? Or to give alms rather than not to?

Unwittingly perhaps, Luther eviscerated good works, stripping them of value except as evidence that you had been

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saved. This put everyday virtues in a bad light, so much so that the idea of virtue is still dangerous territory for evangelical Christians if only at the theoretical level.

Luther’s understanding that original sin has wreaked havoc on our human nature also led him to deny the value of using one’s reason to understand God. Luther’s most famous words in this regard are the following:

Reason, “the greatest enemy of faith” This scepticism about good works is allied to another Lutheran theological assertion; that human nature is completely corrupt after original sin. There are no good works in a human being because of that totally corrupt nature – not just pretty badly wounded nature, as in Catholicism’s understanding of the situation. If Luther’s idea of a completely corrupt human nature is the starting point, a person who exercises herself in good works thinking that they will bring her close to God is like a person digging a hole; the more she digs, the bigger it gets and the harder it is to get out of.

The exercise of works has a practical value, but one would be deluded to think they had supernatural value.

Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God. This is not the only reference to reason as a whore in Luther.

There are plenty of other statements along the same lines often involving the devil, and Aristotle, in the mix. Luther did claim that reason had a vital place in the organization of the world, in politics and economics, for example – that is, practical reason; but the use of philosophical reason in theology was like uniting oneself to someone faithless for a price and not to one’s real wife for love.

Analogously to the problem of good works, then, the more you

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use your reason to approach God, the more you are digging a hole for your damnation. As one contemporary Lutheran scholar says, “Reason is not just insufficient; its fallen nature has placed it in perpetual conflict with the will of God.”1 Reason entices a person simply to dabble in rational or intellectual delights and these will only lead them further and further away from the true knowledge of God.

philosophy, that branch of knowledge most closely associated with reason, was itself regarded as something detached from religion. If Luther thought that his knowledge of God through the Scriptures (faith) was superior to human reason, others began to regard human reason as superior to faith. That movement was called the Enlightenment; the Age of Reason with capital letters.

The split between faith and reason

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the West inherited from Luther two “thought worlds”: one which, putting reason aside, believed in God relying only on conclusions drawn from Scripture; and the other, putting the “question” of God to one side, relied on the application of reason to human realities. Thus, Luther’s deprecation of reason is one of the factors that gave rise in the West and particularly in the English-speaking world to the split between faith and reason.

It is easy to see how one of the most profound effects of Luther’s approach to reason was a generalized distrust of it amongst the theologians and adherents of the reformed tradition, the theological and spiritual tradition that dominates the Anglo-Saxon world. Luther’s distrust of reason was broader however, than its application to theology.

It was not long before

1

“Luther on Reason: What Makes a Whore a Whore”, Seminary Ridge Review, Vol 18, no. 1, August, 2015, p. 7. I am not claiming that all contemporary Lutherans adhere to this idea. I simply do not know and would accept correction if what I have written is incorrect. But I cannot see how followers of Luther would be able to distance themselves from such clear and repeated assertions.

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From there it was a small step to a supposed conflict between religion and science. The origins of this conflict certainly owed something to propagandist use of the Galileo affair by Enlightenment writers, but at a more basic level, it had to do with the perceived distance between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the universe first insisted upon by Martin Luther.

The consequences of the split between faith and reason were also personal. Many people began to live in two thoughtworlds – one of faith, which purportedly could attain a certain knowledge of God (as a Trinity, for example) and how God wanted people to act (the commandments), and one of practical science.

In the centuries immediately after Luther, the second of these two thought worlds started to prove its worth in the form of the technological advances it spawned. Despite hiccoughs along the way, the world began to become a less cruel place to live in as machines did more

work, medicine cured illnesses and the mysteries of the universe were given scientific explanations. The achievements of science could not be denied.

Luther’s stark separation of the two thought-worlds induced some to think they had to choose between the two. There seemed to be no doubt as to which option was rational.

One of the worst consequences of the two thought world view of society is becoming more and more obvious today: the branding of religious reasons for doing things as not valid in the public square. Religious reasons are, according to the “reason = science” way of thinking, no reasons at all. They do not stand up to the tests of sight and touch. They are beyond measurement and calculation and are therefore alien to what our culture is and ought to be.

‘If it’s religious it can’t be rational’ Another nefarious consequence of the situation I have described is that the rationality of some arguments is obscured for many

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people simply because these arguments align with religious positions. The propagandists for the opposite side of these arguments are very ready to claim we live in a secular society and therefore religious arguments do not count. There are very good arguments, for example, against abortion, same-sex marriage or gender theory, but they are almost always cast as religious arguments. Their opposites are cast as secular (and therefore necessarily rational) arguments and the contentious issues themselves are framed as if there are only two alternatives.

sex is of the same nature as heterosexual sex; a man is not a man but a woman if he feels like one; the only things which distinguish a man from a woman are menstruation, lactation and ejaculation (courtesy of a feminist university professor at a boys education conference in 2005).

As a result many common-sense views that were once regarded as reasonable are regarded as irrational. And, at the same time, we are asked to believe that quite ridiculous things are rational. Here is a short list of the latter: many of our neuroses are caused by our incest longing (thanks Mr Freud); even though we use the term natural justice, we don’t really mean there is such a thing; humans cannot possibly make a commitment for their whole lives; homosexual

As Chesterton said in the 1930s while observing the directions supposedly serious philosophy had taken us,

In other words, what we are really seeing is that reason severed from an understanding of God loses its way. If we begin by saying reason cannot access God, in some way at least, we end by saying that we cannot access reality.

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The great march of mental destruction will go on.

Everything will be denied.

Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it

will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

Augustinian monk who railed rightly against some serious defects in the status quo of his time, but I wonder if he had his time over again, whether he would label reason a whore.

It is unfair to lay all of this mental destruction at the feet of a sixteenth century

ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR

Martin Fitzgerald is a teacher at Redfield College, in Sydney. This article first appeared on MercatorNet.com.

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Book review TK Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot

A book review by Rev Conor Donnelly

F

ascinating behind the scenes stories of the political events of the late 60s and early 70s are a particular attraction of this book. It also develops the economic history of the nation since the foundation of the state in and through the life of Dr Whitaker. You see his key role in the peace process of Northern Ireland as well as how civil servants function and their role in serving the government.

Expertly written by Anne Chambers, it takes on the style of a thriller as it answers many questions of those of us who grew up in that period and had little or no knowledge of what was really happening.

How civil servants on both sides of the Irish Sea and in Northern

Anne Chambers Doubleday Ireland 2014

Ireland came together unofficially to forge the future is intriguing. Names like James Callaghan, opposition spokesman and later UK Prime Minister, was involved and his holiday in West Cork is mentioned. A surprising closeness and respect is revealed by the interaction between these people which may have seemed the last thing to be expected. The prevailing sentiment was that British citizens were distant, uninterested in Ireland and that few would even dream of holidaying here.
 In his role as Secretary of Finance, the leading position in the civil service, and later a Governor of the Central Bank, he

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played a pivotal role in guiding the economy through turbulent times.

“Let us remember that we are not seeking economic progress for purely materialistic reasons but because it makes possible relief of hardship and want, the establishment of a better social order, the raising of human dignity, and, eventually, the participation of all who are born in Ireland in the benefits, moral and cultural, as well as material, of spending their lives and bringing up their children in Ireland.”

The Irishman of the century is described as the personification of integrity, service, and commitment while leading a

simple personal and family life.

He becomes a model to imitate.

At a time when some ridicule the value of morality and its origins, his professional life speaks reams about the fruitfulness and importance of professional morality in all situations. Lack of it was the hallmark of the period after his incumbency and every citizen felt the pain.

It is as if his very presence connects them to a time and a society motivated by a caring and more ethical set of principles.

A good question to ask is where that type of society comes from?

The need for ethical training could be the greatest message to learn from his passing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fr Conor Donnelly qualified as a medical doctor in University College Dublin in 1977 and worked as a house physician and surgeon for one year at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. He was ordained a priest in 1981 for the Prelature of Opus Dei. He obtained a doctorate in Theology from the University of Navarre, Spain in 1982. He is at present the chaplain of Kianda School for Girls, Kenya.

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