Happy New Year!

A busy year for Catholics particularly in Scotland...

We've had the Cardinal O'Brien 'affair' and his replacement with Archbishop Cushley, a major child abuse scandal at a (now closed) boarding school run by the Benedictines, the continued legislative process to introduce same sex 'marriage', as well as the little matter of an independence referendum fast approaching.

And then we had the resignation of Pope Benedict and his replacement by Pope Francis which has produced enthusiasm among many non-Catholics and some dental grinding among some traditionalist Catholics.

Not to mention the continuing strife in the Middle East, particularly Syria, and its effects, in particular, on the Christian minorities there.

Personally, I've had quite a pleasant year: nothing dramatic happening, merely the slow drip of time washing me a bit nearer to the grave. (We Scottish Catholics believe in preserving the best traditions of Calvinism and in particular a sprightly sense of seasonal jollity and optimism for the coming days.)

But really, my overwhelming feeling as I write this (apart from the immediate concern of  wondering what we're going to have for dinner) is what a great privilege it is to belong to a Church which, quite apart from its supernatural role as the Body of Christ, is the reservoir for much of the best in human culture. We don't always live up to that inheritance intellectually, artistically or morally, but high culture is there and available to the ordinary Catholic in a way that, outside the Church, few beyond the elites will experience it and few of them in a coherent, fully integrated harmony of truth, goodness and beauty. St Andrews Cathedral in Glasgow is not my favourite Scottish church, but even it offers the weekly or even daily experience of a coherent aesthetic space which gestures to transcendent values and which is a rarity in the modern age:

Morally, the techniques of the examination of the conscience, both privately and in the confessional, again offer to ordinary people a seriousness and depth in life that the modern secular world does its best to destroy. And intellectually, the Church offers a view of life that would be recognizable to Stoics, Neo-Platonists and Peripatetics and yet in a way that is livable by ordinary, non-philosophers. (And all this before we come on to the supernatural.)

For many non-Catholics, the Church seems to be viewed as a harsh discipline, borne simply because of an illusory promise of a pay off after death.  It doesn't feel like that inside: rather more like inhabiting a giant space with far too many rooms to explore in a lifetime. I really can't think of anywhere else I would rather live out my life and have my family live out theirs.

Ignore the occasional bits of grit. Being a Catholic is just great.

Happy New Year!

Happy second blogoversary to me!

Well, that's two years blogging then.

Quite a lot happened last year, didn't it? I didn't expect Pope Benedict's resignation; I didn't expect the election of a Pope who would have caused so much of a stir in the Church. I didn't expect Cardinal O'Brien to depart having (sort of) confessed to some sort of long standing homosexual activity...

Oddly enough, I feel relatively unfazed by all this. Perhaps that's because I'm rather thick skinned: having been brought up by a mother who insisted that we should always imagine the worst as this would stop us getting disappointed, as a consequence, every year that we're not visited by Martians armed with death rays and a desire to turn humanity into slaves in the dilithium crystal mines counts as a pretty good one as far as I'm concerned. Moreover, as an adult convert, I entered the Church with my eyes completely open about the evils that Catholics can do: if you think the charism of infallibility rules out a considerable measure of dysfunctionality in the Church, think again.

And how stands Scotia? We'll doubtless get same sex 'marriage' this year and, although the sky won't fall in, another major obstacle will have been placed in the way of people leading a flourishing life. And we'll have the referendum on Independence which might result in an independent Scotland (in which case we'll be struggling over whether we produce some sort of nutty banana republic dominated by fantasies of being progressive and modern; or a modest small nation state which embodies the virtues of subsidiarity and the local) or in the status quo (in which case it may well be a question of whether the unionist parties have enough sense to put into effect 'devolution max' and achieve a constitutional settlement that really might work in the long term; or whether Westminster triumphalism will simply stoke up Scottish resentment and merely postpone a future crisis)...

Anyway, the five most read posts last year:

Gerry Hassan, John Haldane and Hegel

12 Aug 2013

Abortion, pictures and virtue ethics

4 May 2012

The Pope's interview

23 Sep 2013

Living together before marriage

29 May 2012

Liebster award

1 Apr 2013

Let's have a Te Deum (Haydn) to celebrate:

We praise thee, O God :
    we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee :
    the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud :
    the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim :
    continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy :
    Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty :
    of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world :
    doth acknowledge thee;
The Father : of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true : and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory : O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man :
    thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death :
    thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants :
    whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints : in glory everlasting.

Catholic blogs on homosexuality

After a welcome lull in the 'excitement' about same sex 'marriage' in Scotland, the publication of the  Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill has livened up the debate here again. The fruits of that have been seen in some of my recent posts and in the letters columns of newspapers. Frankly, given the near unanimity of the political classes here in favour of its introduction, it's going to happen and the only question is how the debate is conducted (anything too bloody or too much of the triumphalist 'let's slap the homophobic bigots down' and it's certainly going to impact on the independence referendum) and whether there'll be anything like a serious attempt to provide protection for dissenters (see eg  A Grain of Sand's comment on the Faculty of Advocates worries in this area (the full response by the Faculty can be found here as a PDF)). Anyway, no doubt more of this in due course....

In trawling round the internet for inspiration in angustiis, I've come across a number of blogs by orthodox Catholics who identify as homosexual. These aren't blogs by the 'queering the Church' crowd who think that in some way they're going to change 2000 years of Catholic theology and philosophy, but blogs by people who are both serious about their religion yet honest about their struggles to live and think it out. There are others, but the following US blogs at least deserve a wider audience this side of the pond. There are doubtless some posts in them I wouldn't endorse: there are even some posts on this blog that I wouldn't endorse. But I found them compelling reading.

Mudblood Catholic: In his own words:

I am a gay Catholic nerd. I have trad tastes (going to an Anglican Use Catholic parish) and I love music and literature, ancient, medieval and modern. I have a degree in Classics, and get paid to snark across an espresso bar.

Beatus Homo: Again, in his own words:

I am a gay, celibate Catholic man who is seeking to provide a comprehensive analysis of natural law as it applies to sexual morality, especially homosexuality. I hope that my personal experience with this issue can help readers better understand the underlying philosophical issues at hand and the significant difficulties homosexuals face. 

(Some of the combox discussions on this blog are particularly good.)

Sexual authenticity: Melinda Selmys has been quite a public face in the US Catholic world for a while now (I first came across her on EWTN where she struck me as both particularly smart and pleasingly acerbic.). In short? Atheist lesbian becomes Catholic mother. But that doesn't do justice to her. Perhaps this description of her struggles with her first book provide a better introduction:

We worked quite a bit to get the back-of-the-book text into a form that would suggest that this wasn't the standard sappy-clappy ex-gay conversion testimonial. For some reason, though, this standard keeps cropping up in various places.
For example, the first time that I did a radio interview to promote the book, I was strangely disappointed at the end of it. It took a couple of minutes thinking to figure out why; then I realized that I had been somehow or other guided into giving that standard testimonial. The "I felt God calling to my heart, and then He made me straight. Ain't Jesus wonderful!" story. Blech.
I'm not sure why, but for some reason Catholic publishers, radio hosts, etc. seem to be under the impression that modern Catholics want to hear this kind of rubbish. There's a sense that the streamlined, perfect, all-to-easy, glowing reparative therapy tale is going to be "edifying" to any poor sodomites who happen to tune in.
The reality, of course, is quite different.

Happy blogoversary to me!

                                             It all started with a creepy clown....

One year ago, I started this blog with the above picture and a post that ruminated on the difficulties of getting the Church's message over in a society where the ordinary, decent person's view of Catholic teaching and spokesmen was that they were 'bizarre and a little scary'.

My blogging was born out of two related impulses: first, I had recently been spending (imprudently) large amounts of time defending Catholic views in (predominantly) Scottish comboxes around issues such as the Pope's visit and the introduction of euthanasia, and I wanted to provide a more stable platform for the expression of such arguments; second, Scotland and the UK as a whole were obviously entering into a period where Catholicism was going to be under increasing public attack. My main emphases were going to be the tradition of Catholic philosophical thinking and a  focus on external challenges to Catholicism rather than internal ones.

Well, anyway, here we are one year on. Many thanks to all of those who have interacted with me online in some way (including the Catholic Herald troll who gave the most enjoyable (and possibly accurate) assessment of my contributions to public debate as 'faux intellectual claptrap'). As a 'review of the year', here are the top five posts judged by viewer numbers. Happy reading, and I look forward to your company over the coming year!

1.

Living together before marriage....

2.

Borgen, marriage and deontology...

3. 

F is for Fake (and Feminine)...

4.

Gerry Hassan, Cardinal O'Brien, and the future of Scotland...

5.

Tom Holland -part deux...