The Irish

oh god

do report back

It is always quite enjoyable. It tends to contain lots of short columns of 'life experience', 'this life', 'isn't it funny', etc, and a letters page in which at Christmas a reader advises other readers to read A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

It also carries syndicated soccer coverage from the Observer and Telegraph.

http://atomfilms.ie/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Irelands-Own.jpg

http://img2.thejournal.ie/inline/3633019/original/?width=382&version=3633019

some Real Ireland gear here, Pinefox.

GiS Ireland's Own front covers is a hell of a wormhole to go down!

oh yes that stuff too

and die hedald for de dubs

It is always quite enjoyable. It tends to contain lots of short columns of 'life experience', 'this life', 'isn't it funny', etc, and a letters page in which at Christmas a reader advises other readers to read A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

That makes it sound like the Sunday Post, but I imagine nowhere near as weird.

I hadn't logged in in weeks and wasn't really thinking about doing so again, but apparently this deeply weird debate about "cultural Catholicism" in an Irish context is the thing that gets me going "lads, lads, LADS", so...

NB these are all quite broad strokes and I recognise some as specific to me and not necessarily applicable to others.

Cultural Catholicism is blessing yourself when you pass a graveyard.
Cultural Catholism is your nana giving you a prayer to St Joseph to help you do well in your exams (and these are something you can buy.) And everyone in your class has one too.
Cultural Catholicism is also praying to St Anthony when you lose something, regardless of beliefor observance, and not ridiculing any suggestion that you do would do so.
Cultural Catholicism is being familiar enough with Mass to know how it goes when you have to go, but being completely thrown by the New Mass (though maybe this is just me).

It's feeling the weird sense of conflict that Leo described yesterday, that knowing that the same Church that educated and helped people is the same one that abused and stole and buried bodies in septic tanks. It's getting defensive whenever a non-Irish person says "why don't you just become Protestant" as though that meant anything, as though your ancestors weren't persecuted for being Catholic, as though it's that easy. As though the comments on British newspapers on Irish topics aren't full of anti-Catholicism, as though that justified everything that was ever done. Why can't you just be rational about this, you know the Church considers you a second-class citizen, right?

It's having priests come round to dinner even if your family never go to Mass. It's interacting with nuns at school. It's burying your dead within a few days. It's the way the news starts a minute late because of the Angelus. It's a million little things that are embedded in us and are totally alien to outsiders and the way we never think about that until it's brought up or have reason to think about it.

It's mocking people you disagree with politically as soup takers

And for me specifically:
- never eating meat on Good Friday even though I never go to Mass & don't consider myself religious (and even though American Catholics apparently don't eat meat on any Friday?)
- sometimes wanting to get married in a Catholic ceremony even though I'm non-observant (and they make you promise to raise children Catholic)

I'm sure there was a third but I might have written it above. Anyway. Probably not helpful.

no no its all good

i mean i recognise all of it, tho im not sure thats all of it but thats all def part of it

i dont do any of that stuff ito the behaviourals, but still think of myself as culturally catholic because even that secondary stuff is the personal primordial basis for who i am kinda thing if thats in any way coherent?

gyac otm

We can all think of Jewish food, for instance; I can't think of Catholic food, outside their Communion thing.

Leaving aside the assertion of "Jewish food" as a single category, the second part is also nonsense. It's less obvious because of Catholic hegemony in many countries but half the pastry traditions of western Europe, food eaten on Christmas/Easter/other feast days, bad dried fish because you need something to eat on Fridays = Catholic food.

Not that surprising as Catholicism had the field to itself, in the West anyway, for 1500 years.

Xxxxp

Did like 80% of that

One thing is the culturally part comes in because of family or being close to people with a shared background

When i travel or lived in a different country/city a long time it’s almost like i never was catholic but i think that is specific to north america, where there are these micro/family size (sub)cultures, unlike a large unifying one

But i read what you say and do think my family fit that mould, not so much the new american generation though

I guess it’s a feeling that people are holding you accountable for things

Calzino, yes, that looks like a magazine that is even (or a lot) further down the ethos I am describing than the newspaper is.

The newspaper features a lot of reports mainly saying 'Ireland is liberal now and the Pope must get used to it' and a long one attacking anonymous liberals and intellectuals for supposedly being anti-Catholic. It is a paper that is always full of opinions.

The one thing I have not seen said much is the thing that would seem more obvious perhaps in other contexts, ie: this Pope is unusual and in lots of ways more interesting and positive than other Popes. The coverage of the Irish visit (certainly BBC, and also the paper that I have read thus far) has tended to ignore that amid representing him as head of Catholicism in general.

Actually it features at least 3 articles attacking liberals, as 'the new PC priestly caste' who have replaced the old Catholic order.

turnout is in

<25% the forecast

At Phoenix Park?

ya

130k vs 600k

a very small turnout compared to what was expected alright

Jewish culture not a good analogue for whatever pt is attempting to be made about a non-religious culture of catholicism fyi

Jews have a shared language, food, music, literature, film etc. that is largely (in some cases completely) separate from theology. i could go into this more but typing on my phone is annoying

yeah

i think Catholicism has tended towards homogeneity in the cultures/nations it inhabited such that you would struggle to unscramble the egg that way

FWIW Outis's point is roughly the same one I was trying to make, albeit from, in my case, a distance from both religions and limited knowledge of them.

'HUGE crowd'

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/pope-visit-ireland-crowd-phoenixpark-13142619

An estimated 500,000 people

...assembled in Phoenix Park to listen to an estimated 200 popes.

Our buses are lined up and we’re ready to take people home from the Phoenix Park @TFIupdates #PopeinIreland #Popeinthepark pic.twitter.com/TDH0sQWtOH

— Dublin Bus (@dublinbusnews) August 26, 2018

that mirror article is hysterical. someone really had fun putting that together.

It was probably written last Friday, straight from the itinerary handed out before the visit. The 500,000 crowd estimate was probably put together months ago by the planners.

Well they supposedly "sold" 500,000 tickets but bundles of them were bought up by protesters

thats a sourpuss online catholic warrior narrative

everyone wanted to be there was there

I know...

like, take every no vote, presume half dead since, checks out

(and even though American Catholics apparently don't eat meat on any Friday?)

The only time my coworkers refrain from meat on Fridays is during Lent. On the other hand, when I was growing up, the school lunches on Friday were always meatless.

"Rimnheh"?

Probably Drimnagh. I'm guessing that the journalist didn't ask his interlocutor to spell it and had to take a wild stab at it later on while transcribing the recording.
"Rimnheh" sounds like something you'd encounter in a H.P. Lovecraft story.

or a gay tmi thread

hurrahhh

"thats a sourpuss online catholic warrior narrative

everyone wanted to be there was there

― flaneur brayin (darraghmac), Sunday, 26 August 2018 18:45 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

There were tickets available at the gates to the park, and a mate of mine who I met at the Stand4Truth thing said he'd been offered multiple spare tix by punters as he walked against the tide and into town.

Francis needs to get a wee press-stud sewn under that cape.

his coat this mornin was p badass

RTE’s reverential coverage of the Pope’s visit was not journalism. It was propaganda for an institution that has been criminally complicit in the rape and buggery of children around the world and is the prime institutional carrier of mysogyny and homophobia.

— Vincent Browne (@vincentbrowne) August 26, 2018

atta fuckin boy vincent

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/28/christian-brothers-ireland-child-abuse

he'd get on well with my uncle Jim, the only person in my family to have an interview in the graun!

the text on the link the pinefox posted has been completely changed hah

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/pope-visit-ireland-crowd-phoenixpark-13142619

Pope Francis is an anagram of 'profane pics'.

makes you think.

Eating at a family restaurant and i see a happy go lucky priest say hi to old fat typical lads all making a ruckus and my immediate reaction when i see him is to greet him and cross myself

Bless me father for they are twats

I thought of an example of 'Catholic culture'.

Martin Scorsese.

do we not then need to extricate the italian-american and add the irish?

is there for the purposes a case for studying the irish-american?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman_(2019_film)

D-Mac, points taken.

I think I was just still trying to think of what a 'Catholic culture' might mean, absent national references and (as per my own search) not primarily an ecclesiastical matter, and this seemed one of the clearest living cases - an artist (not a priest or theologian) whose work is not mainly 'about' Catholicism, priests, churches, etc, but which one can I think fairly plausibly see as 'imbued' with it, reference to it, etc.

Presumably Graham Greene was a good case also.

If the claim is then that 'Irish Catholic culture' is a different matter then to be sure these are irrelevant to its field.

Separately I agree that Irish-American as a case of Irish is always a fair topic. I watched Richard Harris in MAJOR DUNDEE (1965) this week and his US Confederate prisoner, facing the gallows, with an Irish accent, seemed to me a version of an Irish rebel prisoner of 1867 or so.

an artist (not a priest or theologian) whose work is not mainly 'about' Catholicism, priests, churches, etc, but which one can I think fairly plausibly see as 'imbued' with it, reference to it, etc.

Sounds like Muriel Spark to me. Both her and Greene converts, of course - which may be a different kind of 'Cultural Catholicism' from Scorcese's, who was born into it.

thought- does 'roman' trump italian/irish for what we're trying to get at? think theres a case that it does