Sally's Journal

An interesting article on the Catholic church.

I found this and quite liked it. It struck me as interesting and has a lot of things in it worth saying.

In other news, I shall not tell anyone how to vote today. So far three different people on my flist have posted very articulate, persuasive and heartfelt LJ entries telling me to not vote Labour/Conservative/Lib Dem, and all of them have contained the subtext (possibly unintentionally) of 'I will think you a bad person if you do vote this way'.

This strikes me as mildly awkward.

I shall, instead, cast my vote in the silence of the polling booth later on and probably never tell anyone which way I voted.

I went to Mass for All Saints yesterday.* It was a very pretty Mass, by the way, with a lot of chanting in Latin. There was also a guest preacher at the church I'd gone to, who's sermon was on All Saints, All Souls, and why Christianity does traditional celebrate a festival at this time of year.

Now, I know everyone and their dog has heard the old line 'the Christians nicked this pagan festival when they weren't looking'. This preacher took a slightly different tac which I found interesting. His line was that All Souls, in particular, comes from Ireland. According to this (very nice, Anglo-Catholic man) there has always been a celebration of this nature in Ireland because (and I quote) 'this is the turning of the year, the time when the boundary between the material world and the spiritual world is less substantial'. Or, in gamer geek terms, this is the time of year when as a matter of almost objective fact, the shroud is a bit lower, so of course that's when people celebrate their festivals of the dead.

Not so much a case of Christianity nicking someone else's festival. More a case of people celebrating at certain times of year because there is a spiritual landscape, there are times when certain things are more likely to occur.

He then went on to talk about St Christina the Astonishing, who hid in an oven to hide from the smell of sin, which was much more colourful, and I should note as well that the local priest murmured to me as I left "that was a slightly heretical sermon", but it did get me thinking. I thought it might be of especial interest to lanfykins considering recent discussions on the Community Which Shall Not Be Named about why various different cultures seem to have very similar festivals at the same time of year.

Feel free to debate, discuss, or just ignore.


*This revelation is made only to set the scene for the rest of this entry. Please try and mostly ignore it.

I just found this article on the rise of Catholicism in the UK.

I post it up here mostly for the gloriously insane nature of some of the comments. My personal favourite was this one:

For more than a thousand years Catholicism was the dominant religion in the UK - until that is Anglicanism sprang out of Henry VIII's codpiece amidst an orgy of desecration, theft and murder.
The passing nature of Anglicanism with its obsessions with homosexuality, women "priests" and moral relativism is at the core of its decline.
Christians want a church that stands for eternal truths. The growth in European immigration and the flood of conversions from Anglicanism will ensure that Catholicism once again becomes the Established Church in the British Isles.
..........And none too soon!

A couple of other comments said much the same thing in slightly less insane language.

Now, it occured to me that on a personal level there's a ring of truth in that. Well, not about the bit where Anglicanism is obssessed with homosexuality, but the idea that there is something special about a church which holds that there are 'eternal truths'. I've always had this odd fondness for churches and religions that don't change, mostly because I've always vaguely felt that if someone out there has discovered a fundemental spiritual truth about our world and that which created it, then surely that truth should have some consistency to it throughout the years. I accept that parts of any given doctrine do need to change - after all, a lot of organised religion is the product of man rather than the divine - but I tend to be slightly nervous of those faiths which determinedly adapt to society in its entirety every time society does another one of its generational shifts in 'how we should all live our life'.

However, I have odd and possibly nonsensical views on these things, and may be wrong.

Opinions?