Thursday, February 4, 2016

Words and their meaning

At a conference on the family organised by The Irish Catholic, the papal nuncio to Ireland Archbishop Charles Brown said:

Merciful love and the truth of the family, these are the things that we have to hold together.

What exactly is 'merciful love' and how does it differ from 'love'?

What is the 'truth of the family'?

The quote is taken from this week's Irish Catholic.

4 comments:

Póló said...

I think "merciful love" is an expression from James's St. for when something awful happens, like the delph teapot falling to the floor and shattering into a million pieces.

As for "the truth of the family", this is something that the church as assiduously avoided facing for yonks.

The Nuncio is talking through his mitre.

Michael said...

Terrific response Póló. Seriously though, isn't merciful redundant when love is mentioned?

Póló said...

Indeed, and on reflection I can now hear my Granny saying "merciful hour!".

So we'll just have to put the Nuncio down as a fuzzy thinker.

Francis Hunt said...

There's a special kind of unctious "church-speak" which seems to involve always putting in a qualifying adjective; divine saviour, holy father, etc.

One truth of the family, which Church authorities today conveniently forget, is that for the largest part of history the family was firmly regulated to second place - behind the celibate life - in the official teaching and pastoral practice of the Roman Catholic Church. This included the widespread practice of taking children from their families and making them postulants in monasteries and convents. The origin of many diocesan secondary schools in Ireland was as "junior seminaries," where boys from the age of eleven or twelve were encouraged to discover vocations to the priesthood. The discovery of "family values," and the ardent identification with and defence of the same is, historically, a pretty recent phenomenon. I suspect that much of it has to do with an ultramontane (from around Pius IX onwards) attempt to put a religious flavour on the new developing cultural concept of what we would today call the "nuclear family," which actually has its origins in late 18th Century liberal, secular bourgeois circles.

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