John Banville: ‘The Catholic Church was a state terrorist organisation’
The Booker-winning novelist on Ireland’s shift away from religious establishment, his tangled love life and finding dark comedy in ageing.
Meanwhile, if his internationalist pretensions now strike him as funny, he’s still no Irish nationalist. “There’s a phrase here – ‘You have to wear the green jersey.’ You have to be on the team. I’ve never believed in that nonsense. When one of the reports came out about child abuse in Ireland, I wrote a New York Times piece saying everybody knew. We knew in the same way that people living beside Belsen knew and didn’t know.
“That didn’t make me any friends in establishment Ireland. If I’d written it in The Irish Times, nobody would have cared. But I went outside the country and criticised it. That was the unforgivable sin.”
Banville bears an abiding hostility to the Catholic Church that dominated Ireland for much of his life. “When I went to Eastern Europe in the 1970s, I thought: ‘It’s Ireland.’ They had the Communist Party running their lives; we had the Catholic Church.” So was he surprised by how quickly its power crumbled from the early 1990s onwards? “Oh, that was amazing,” he replies. “The Catholic Church is no longer a state terrorist organisation.” He also recalls, with happy incredulity, the 2015 Irish referendum that approved same-sex marriage. “Dublin was in carnival. I thought, ‘Am I hallucinating? This is not the Ireland I grew up in.’”
Still, even in throwing off the Church, Ireland doesn’t escape Banville’s scepticism: “Any really grown-up nation would have gone through a period of trauma after the collapse of what they’d believed in for so long. It took us about three weeks.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/author...-festival/
Connecticut Catholic bishops oppose bill to exempt school vaccines from religious freedom law
The chief spokesman for state’s Catholic bishops is speaking out against a proposed exemption to the state’s religious freedom law for school vaccinations.
“It is an attack on religious freedom,” said Chris Healy, executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Public Affairs Conference, the public policy office of the Catholic bishops.
The legislature’s Public Health Committee introduced legislation to carve out that exception at the request of Attorney General William Tong amid an ongoing a legal challenge seeking to reinstate the religious exemption to required school vaccinations.
Healy said while the legislation proposes an exemption for school vaccinations, the enactment of Senate Bill 450 into law would invite more legislative attempts to add exceptions to the 1993 religious freedom law, such as protecting medical providers at Catholic hospitals from discipline for providing counseling or referrals for abortions and other reproductive services that go against church teachings.
https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticut/ar...956806.php
The Booker-winning novelist on Ireland’s shift away from religious establishment, his tangled love life and finding dark comedy in ageing.
Meanwhile, if his internationalist pretensions now strike him as funny, he’s still no Irish nationalist. “There’s a phrase here – ‘You have to wear the green jersey.’ You have to be on the team. I’ve never believed in that nonsense. When one of the reports came out about child abuse in Ireland, I wrote a New York Times piece saying everybody knew. We knew in the same way that people living beside Belsen knew and didn’t know.
“That didn’t make me any friends in establishment Ireland. If I’d written it in The Irish Times, nobody would have cared. But I went outside the country and criticised it. That was the unforgivable sin.”
Banville bears an abiding hostility to the Catholic Church that dominated Ireland for much of his life. “When I went to Eastern Europe in the 1970s, I thought: ‘It’s Ireland.’ They had the Communist Party running their lives; we had the Catholic Church.” So was he surprised by how quickly its power crumbled from the early 1990s onwards? “Oh, that was amazing,” he replies. “The Catholic Church is no longer a state terrorist organisation.” He also recalls, with happy incredulity, the 2015 Irish referendum that approved same-sex marriage. “Dublin was in carnival. I thought, ‘Am I hallucinating? This is not the Ireland I grew up in.’”
Still, even in throwing off the Church, Ireland doesn’t escape Banville’s scepticism: “Any really grown-up nation would have gone through a period of trauma after the collapse of what they’d believed in for so long. It took us about three weeks.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/author...-festival/
Connecticut Catholic bishops oppose bill to exempt school vaccines from religious freedom law
The chief spokesman for state’s Catholic bishops is speaking out against a proposed exemption to the state’s religious freedom law for school vaccinations.
“It is an attack on religious freedom,” said Chris Healy, executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Public Affairs Conference, the public policy office of the Catholic bishops.
The legislature’s Public Health Committee introduced legislation to carve out that exception at the request of Attorney General William Tong amid an ongoing a legal challenge seeking to reinstate the religious exemption to required school vaccinations.
Healy said while the legislation proposes an exemption for school vaccinations, the enactment of Senate Bill 450 into law would invite more legislative attempts to add exceptions to the 1993 religious freedom law, such as protecting medical providers at Catholic hospitals from discipline for providing counseling or referrals for abortions and other reproductive services that go against church teachings.
https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticut/ar...956806.php
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
