Notes: Thursday, October 14, 2010

A good question from Ms Farrelly

In the Herald today:

Fine's insistence that boys and girls are born with identical brains does not explain how an un-gendered mind, fully steeped in boy-type context, can reach adulthood with the life-or-death conviction that it is actually, profoundly, female. How could that happen? [http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/gender-and-feminism-a-guilt-trip-20101013-16jyv.html?skin=text-only]

Interesting opinion piece by Mr. Sheridan

in today's Australian. An excerpt:

Like World Youth Day, the canonisation of Mary is one of those fairly rare occasions when popular Catholicism breaks through the gatekeepers of official culture in Australia and commands some mainstream attention.

Christianity generally is massively under-regarded in Australia. More people go to church every Sunday than go to football, but the media coverage is hardly commensurate.

I cannot recall seeing Pell on ABC1's Q&A, yet there is a Muslim representative on about every fourth episode of that show. There's certainly nothing wrong with having Muslims on the show, but it's almost as if there is a policy that any mainstream Catholic Church leader is ipso facto boring, not to be listened to or simply not a suitable person to participate in the mainstream media.

This is a sign both of a kind of immature provincialism in our culture and a serious ongoing prejudice against orthodox Christianity of any kind.

There is, of course, specific anti-Catholic prejudice, of the kind seen in the ridiculous treatment of Tony Abbott on ABC1's Four Corners when he became leader of the Liberal Party.

This kind of prejudice used to be called the anti-Semitism of the intellectual and its tired persistence in Australian culture is sad, not only because of the unfairness of the prejudice but because of the consequence it has of the media missing so big a part of modern life.

[...] Of course, all the great secular dictators have taken the church seriously and understood it is one of their most formidable opponents. This is partly because the universality of the Catholic Church transcends all national borders.

Adolf Hitler planned to abolish the papacy and set up a separate pope in every country he ruled. ...
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/attack-on-christianity-will-undermine-society/story-e6frg6zo-1225938377118]

That last sentence came as a surprise to me, though; I hadn't heard about that before. Also, while Protestantism might have been 'foundational' for "secularism", Catholicism certainly wasn't, and only hopped on that bandwagon in recent decades i.e. with Vatican II.

Msgr. Hart contra Mr. Pead (and vice versa)

This comment in a thread at AQ brought to my attention an interesting pair of letters to Christian Order regarding the late-2003/early-2004 scandal over Knights of the Southern Cross/Freemason co-operation and fraternisation:

http://www.christianorder.com/features/features_2004/features_apr04_bonus.html

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Feast of St. Callistus I., Pope, Martyr, A.D. 2010