Book : The Best Catholics In The World The Irish, The Church

-Titulo Original : The Best Catholics In The World: The Irish, The Church And The End Of A Special Relationship

-Fabricante :

Penguin

-Descripcion Original:

A compelling account of why Ireland was so very Catholic for so long, and why that changed When Berlin-based journalist Derek Scally visited Christmas Vigil Mass in his hometown of Dublin, he found that like its congregants, the once-packed suburban church where he was an altar boy was quiet and slowly ageing. A collective identity lost, the dwindling power of the Church in Ireland was undeniable.The Best Catholics in the World is Scallys response - an empathetic and engaging voyage into the story of Irish Catholicism. Researched over three years, and including dozens of interviews conducted in Ireland and further afield, The Best Catholics in the World is a lively, original, moving and thought-provoking account of a country grappling with its troubling past and confusing present. Review A great achievement ... brilliant, engaging and essential -- Colm Toibin, An extraordinary story ... At once intimate and epic, this is a landmark book -- Fintan OToole, author, The Politics of Pain An engaging and incisive book that asks what keeping the faith cost us, how it shaped us and what it means now -- Caelainn Hogan, author, Republic of Shame Reflective, textured, insightful and original ... rich with history, interrogation and emotional intelligence Irish Times A highly intelligent, patriotic work Business Post Compelling Irish Examiner Excellent and timely Sunday Times About the Author Derek Scally has written for the Irish Times since 2000. He is based in Berlin. The Best Catholics in the World is his first book. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Talk to survivors of Catholic Irelands excesses, and their allies, and you soon hear a common and consistent refrain: the real risk of today’s attempted remedies repeating, or echoing, the historic abuses they’re supposed to address. Ruling out deliberate malice, as most survivors and campaigners do, one explanation is that unquestioned, inherited bias, combined with the sheer volume of horrors revealed, have impaired the ability to reflect on what it was in Irish society that made these horrors possible.Look beyond the details of abuse and, alongside the phenomenon of silence, there is often a common denominator of confusion. The legacy of the laundries often triggers a wrestling match in minds between guilt and shame. Mastering this past requires that we define our terms.The simplest way I have found for differentiating guilt and shame is this: people feel guilt for what they have done but feel shame for who they are, or how they are made to feel. A religious Sister who bullied a girl in a laundry infringed the girl’s human rights and may feel guilty. The girl who spent years there being told she was filth may feel shame.Guilt is a wrong that can be righted by the wrongdoer - pay a parking ticket, serve a prison term - while shame is what philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called a haemorrhage of the soul’.People often feel guilty about involvement in a negative, controllable event and shame about a negative, uncontrollable event. It is possible to feel guilt and shame for one’s own misdeeds but also for others’.The idea of collective guilt comes into play, researchers say, when a negative event is perceived as relevant to the group and thus individuals within the group. But any feelings of collective guilt depend on one’s own perception of control over the system.Many in Catholic Ireland, for instance, had no control over struc- tures and events and thus feelings of guilt are correspondingly low. Things are more complicated with collective shame, however: this can be experienced irrespective of control over events, when the negative event or behaviour of others in the group threatens the image of the group as a whole, and you as a member of the group.I can still remember my flush of shame in a Berlin cinema almost two decades ago as the credits of The Magdalene Sisters rolled. The laundries were not my