In Passing: The corruption of conscience

When we read between the lines of a non-story in the Irish Independent late last year we found a sad and genuine story about the creeping new penal laws against Catholics in Ireland, returning the country, it would seem, to the dark days of the eighteenth century. We also find in it a story reflecting the current confused state of the conscience of a sizeable proportion of the Irish nation.

The paper reported on what was essentially a non-issue. They as good as said so. It was about the carefully orchestrated process of transferring the property of the Sisters of Charity to the State for the purposes of building Dublin’s new Maternity Hospital on the St. Vincent’s site on Merrion Road. Canon law required that the Catholic Church’s highest authority, the Holy See, needed to sign off on this before it could be a done deal.  

The real story here is that of the sad departure of true servants of the Irish people – but God’s first – from health-care provision. It is a story of new penal laws for conscientious Irish Catholics. Just like our forefathers who would have been entitled to keep their property in the eighteenth century had they been prepared to abandon their religious principles, the Sisters of Charity would have had no problem remaining on the board of any hospital they liked had they been prepared to abandon their moral principles and acquiesced in the termination of the lives of children waiting to be born.

The second related story here, again discoverable by reading between the lines of this report, is one which Irish establishment media refuses to tell because it undermines its own chosen narrative for the Irish people. It is the story of how the new Progressivist Ascendancy in Ireland has worked for decades to corrupt the consciences of the Irish people to the point where they no longer subscribe to the moral principles which have been the backbone of our culture and western civilization for close on two thousand years.

The story of the Sisters of Charity and St. Vincent’s Hospital today is that story in microcosm. Sadly, no one bats an eyelid when they read now that these heroic people are being driven out of Irish healthcare because of their consciences. How did this happen?

The Independent report blandly stated:

The religious order said that “in May 2017 the Religious Sisters of Charity issued a statement confirming that we were relinquishing all involvement and shareholding in St Vincent’s Hospital Group and would be stepping down from the St Vincent’s Healthcare Board”. “Our two sister directors resigned from the board with immediate effect,” they said.

“Since then, they have no part in the ownership or management of the new hospital, nor have shares in the new entity being established to run the two hospitals on the St Vincent’s site.”

Not so long ago the collective conscience of the Irish would be screaming “Injustice” on perceiving something like this being perpetrated in their name. The drip, drip, drip of TV mockery of religion, the exploitation of scandalous behaviour of a minority – a very small minority – of clerics, and the hostility to religious education are among the catalogue of causes to which we can ascribe this degeneration of our Christian conscience.

The overriding truth is that neither our State nor our media want the Irish people to reflect on anything that might trouble their consciences. Conscientious people can be a contrary lot – as a brave cohort of Irish medical personnel are now showing and are proving to be painful thorns in the side of Leo Varadkar, Simon Harris, Peter Boylan and Mary McAleese, to name but a few in the vanguard of the Irish Progressive Ascendancy.

They want – and have been actively promoting for decades – the removal of all remnants of genuine Christian belief and values from the consciousness of the nation. They are seeking to replace it with the egregious and baseless moral principles of what is now bizarrely called “progressivism” – although it has nothing to do with genuine human progress. It is as progressive as Communism was and is.

Before Christmas, in the ultra-popular annual “Toy Show” on national television’s Friday  night entertainment flagship we watched a very carefully managed parade of diversity with the new progressive gender-fluid morality centre stage. It was all presented and, it would seem from the audience reaction, accepted as the new normal. It was classic and blatant media programming of the consciences of the Irish population.

The grip of progressivism on the minds and hearts of a majority of Irish people is now frightening. As a result, encouraged, cowed and then applauded by Irish and Western liberal media, our Government has put on our statute books one set of flawed laws after another. More are in preparation. Any opposition, parliamentary or otherwise, is negligible because of the dumbing down of the moral sense of the people. Shameful scandals have been outrageously manipulated to undermine the authority of the only agency in the culture which still proclaims the perennial moral value of the principles which have sustained our civilization for millennia. Those who dare to protest the new status quo of politically correct morality are branded populists – or worse.

It took the Irish of another time over one hundred years to break free of the draconian laws which had excluded them from public life by a Protestant Ascendancy. At the heart of that act of exclusion was the conviction that because Catholics believed that the Pope was the Vicar of Christ they could not be trusted. Ultimately it failed. The Irish of that time resisted corruption and remained faithful to what they knew was the truth about God and his loving relationship with mankind.

Ireland today has come a long way from the time one hundred and fifty years ago when St John Henry Newman defended the right of the Irish who were resisting the efforts of Liberal Britain to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church. What Liberal Britain failed to do in the nineteenth century, our own Government and our media have now apparently succeeded in doing.

Newman put some questions to Britain’s Liberal leader, William Gladstone, who was leading that particular charge. He was responding to a Glenstone pamphlet which had attacked the Catholic Church for attempting to exercise its apostolic mission. Newman challenged him to “Go through the long annals of Church history, century after century, and say, was there ever a time when her Bishops, and notably the Bishop of Rome, were slow to give their testimony in behalf of the moral and revealed law and to suffer for their obedience to it?”

The Catholic Church, Newman pointed out, had a message to deliver to the world, – not the task merely of administering spiritual consolation, or of making the sick-bed easy, or of training up good members of society, or of “serving tables” (though all this was included in their range of duty), – but specially and directly, a definite message to high and low, from the world’s Maker, the message which it is the very mission of Christianity to bear witness to the Creed and Ten Commandments in a world which is averse to them.

The Irish Government today would be happy if the Catholic Church stuck to merely administering spiritual consolation, or making the sick-bed easy, or training up good members of society, or “serving tables”. However, it would like it to shut up about the Ten Commandments.

The new Progressivist Ascendancy in Ireland today now excludes from healthcare provision anyone who believes that human life begins at conception and that the child awaiting birth in its mother’s womb has as much right to life as any of us.

Most false political doctrines and their enabling unjust regimes have within them the seeds of their own undoing. This one surely has, with all its false manipulative language and bizarre versions of what is the essence of human nature. But unravelling takes time – this time, we hope, not too much time.