I was a little surprised to see that the parish is not even to Mark's liberal tastes, and he also notes the peculiarity of why a priest such as Father Kennedy (who makes comments sounding as if he doesn't even believe in a "real" God anymore) wants to remain within the Catholic fold. This must be a sign that the parish is doomed.
UPDATE:
By the way, it would appear likely that Peter Kennedy, and [one suspects] many of those in the congregation at St Mary's, are non-realists when it comes to belief in God. Non-realism gets a decent explanation here. A key point from that link is this:
We should give up all ideas of a heavenly or supernatural world-beyond. Yet, despite our seeming scepticism, we insist that non-realist religion can work very well as religion, and can deliver eternal happiness.Seems that for non realists, "eternal" gets a just as rubbery a definition as "God". It's basically a philosophy of re-defining away those elements of religion you can no longer believe in.
As I said once at CL's blog, the real fight within Christianity in the coming decades is going to be between adherents to realism and the growing band of non-realists.
2 comments:
I'm genuinely surprised that you are surprised at Bahnisch's distate for the St Mary's Parish. I don't think that this distate is a sign that the parish is "doomed" necessarily. To assume that, you'd have to assume that Bahnisch is genuinely left-wing and that he represents the farthest left that you can go.
(I'll have to leave aside for the moment the complexities and inadequacies of the "left-right" spectrum in this particular case).
Bahnisch has always struck me as fairly conservative. He was consistently effectively opposed to the liberation of Iraq from fascism (and allowed foul abuse of polite dissent from his point of view), he's called public debate over academic work (admittedly politically motivated, reactionary and dishonest) McCarthyist, he's hostile to the idea of strikes, he white-anted spontaneous opposition to the Government's plans to censor the Internet (when a right-wing site like Catallaxy was ready to promote that opposition), he's hostile to strikes and generally shows a distrust of any political movement that moves outside of currently established institutions.
Bahnisch IMO is a classic example of the pseudo-left - people who claim to be left-wing while actively opposing any change.
Re St Mary's: As an atheist who tends towards realism (based on its description in the article you linked to, I don't understand either why Kennedy doesn't just set up an independent church. It would be very successful and he wouldn't have to deal with the Catholic heirarchy any more.
Well, an interesting take on Mark.
His comments indicate that he has been much closer to the Church as an adult than I had assumed. I had formerly guessed that he was a "cultural catholic" only now, but it seems not exactly to be the case..
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