We Must be Talking

Major Changes in the Offing        Gerry O’Shea The Greek word peripeteia doesn’t have a clear equivalent in English. For the ancient Greeks it conveyed a major cultural turning point, a time when the body politic pivots from one set of standards or beliefs to something very different. We may be at such a time in American politics. Our whole system of governance is so out of kilter that large numbers of people seem ready for major systemic changes, unlike anything since FDR and the New Deal in the 1930’s. Consider the following indicators of Americans’ serious unhappiness with the status quo. In a recent poll, 44% of voters aged 18 to 21 expressed a preference for a socialist system in America with 42% opting for a continuation of capitalism. Such results would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago at the turn of the new century. These numbers seem to be validated by support for Senator Bernie Sanders, the lone socialist candidate seeking...

The Ideal and the Real in Irish History       Gerry OShea   Every country has a story told by its own citizens that marks it as different, setting it apart in some way from other places, usually highlighting positive aspects of the country’s culture or geography or tradition. For the first sixty years or so after independence in 1922, the Irish story promulgated by church and state was that the country had emerged from hundreds of years of abuse and denigration by a foreign   power, but now that the Irish had their freedom the real character of the population emerged – noble and religious people, living a simple but wholesome lifestyle, very different from the pagan country next door. Eamonn De Valera, who was prime minister for about half of the years we are talking about, added to this positive image of Irish life when he engaged in some idyllic imaginings in 1943, praising the image of “comely maidens dancing on the village green.” ...

The Bishops and Abortion            Gerry OShea Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the outgoing president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops(USCCB) opined recently that the climate change crisis is “not urgent,” directly contradicting Pope Francis who in his encyclical Laudato Si pleaded that saving “the common home” must be a top priority for the church and indeed for all humanity.     DiNardo and a majority of his episcopal colleagues in the USCCB continue to identify abortion as the “preeminent” – their language - issue of our time, meaning that it supersedes all other concerns. These church leaders have mainly pursued a legal remedy to the widespread termination of pregnancy in the United States. Reverse the Roe v Wade decision and they claim we are more than half way to solving the problem.   Archbishop Sample of Portland, Oregon, supporting this perspective, expounded last month about our times being p...

In Praise of Moderation           Gerry OShea To convey their distaste for extremist views scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages used a pithy Latin dictum, in medio stat virtus. They hailed the middle or moderate position on various controversial issues as most likely to represent the best and truest option. In today’s parlance, it suggests that virtuous and prudent behavior does not reside at the far edges of the left or the right but somewhere in the middle. Some readers will remember Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee who faced Richard Nixon in 1972. He was a highly-principled and capable leader, but in those tempestuous days when the war in Vietnam dominated political discourse, Senator McGovern was successfully labelled as an extremist by his Republican opponents.   They claimed repeatedly that the senator was outside the mainstream, that he would concede everything to the communists in Hanoi to end ...

Advantage Biden            Gerry OShea It is early times for making predictions, but still a review of all the polling data, nationwide as well as in various key states, and an assessment of the other candidates’ progress point to Joe Biden as the one with the best chance of getting the Democratic nomination.   I suggest that there are four good reasons why he is favorite and likely to be successful. First, the Democrats are looking, above all, for a winner; they really want the current president out, and the polls show that when faced with a direct run-off against President Trump, Biden consistently fares better than any of his Democratic opponents, winning by as much as ten points nationally and also edging out or matching the president in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michican, North Carolina and Florida. The blue-collar voters who abandoned Hillary Clinton seem ready to leave Trump for the man who is...

It's the Economy Stupid                      Gerry OShea "It's the economy stupid" is remembered as the succinct message James Carville   conveyed to   the Democratic Party workers during Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency in 1992. He felt that the campaign was wasting too much time focusing on esoteric issues of foreign and domestic policy. Instead, he wanted those knocking on doors and indeed the wider national campaign to engage people on kitchen- table issues - jobs, salaries, taxes, education and healthcare. He stressed that these are the real challenges that impact people every day. Carville was certainly not the first to appreciate this approach to a political campaign. When Jimmy Carter ran against the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, in 1976, he highlighted what he called the misery index which he claimed reflected poorly on his opponent. He ...

Catholic Women Today                          Gerry OShea About 700,00 people leave the Catholic Church in America every year. These are not lapsed Catholics who drift away from their religious roots, but members of the church who choose to leave the belief system they were raised with. There are multiple reasons for these unprecedented numbers, but the most important consideration centers on the dismal failure of the church in dealing with women's issues. Talking recently at a symposium titled   "The Women the Vatican Couldn't   Silence" in Trinity College, Dublin,   former Irish president Mary McAleese, who spent six years in Rome earning a doctorate in theology, bemoaned   how "women were deliberately made invisible and programmed to stay invisible" because of church structures that are "designed to create and maintain the invisibili...