As of N O W, to consult the blog, you must click on the following link :
http://www.blindfaithblindfolly.wordpress.com
All of the previous entries have been transferred to this new address.
New blog entries will be posted only on this new website.
I hope you enjoy the new format.
Frank O'Meara, a.k.a. Frank O'Phile
Since the creation of this blog, readers have appreciated the numerous and numinous commentaries submitted by Thomas More's avatar, "Thom". His latest deserves the limelight of front-page publication not only here but in Sydney's "Catholic Weekly" if not the "Osservatore Romano". The least - and the most - I can do is to post it upfront. Readers of it will not receive a Plenary Indulgence, but an embarrassing example of what I have called "Blind Faith : Blind Folly" :
Pope Francis appears to be revelling in his role as leader of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and one can only wish him well in what must be in this day and age one of the least enviable jobs in the world. With 3 million or thereabouts to witness his final Mass on the beach in Rio one wonders if he will eventually rival his now sainted Polish predecessor in popularity. The beach crowd along with the millions who watched the Mass on TV had the added joy of a plenary indulgence - welcome for some no doubt but of doubtful efficacy for others. Pope Francis appears to be a humble and good man who will I believe eventually convene a Third Vatican Council to complete much of the unfinished business of Vatican II and much else.
I am reminded of the World Youth Day held here in Australia not many years ago. It was well attended by enthusiastic people young and not so young from around the world. There were reports at the time that certain businesses in Sydney of a distinctly secular and fleshly nature enjoyed much increased patronage during this period - which merely goes to show, if the reports were correct, that young people continue to do what young people do wherever they are - and one can be grateful for that.
I happened to be dining with friends at a cheap restaurant in Sydney during that week and at an adjoining table there were four youngish Catholics who were here for WYD. We got into a brief conversation because they were under the impression that one of my dining companions was a priest (he appeared to be wearing a clerical collar). I reassured them that he was not a Catholic priest - merely an Anglican one (which was also not true). They asked what the difference was. I explained briefly some of the differences before venturing even more briefly into an explanation of trans versus con substantiation. They interrupted me with the admonition that I would have to speak English - even though they spoke it well as it was their native tongue. It occurred to me that they had very little idea of what they were required to believe. They were nevertheless enthusiastic in their proclamation of their Catholicism. I imagine much the same happened in Rio and will happen again wherever the next WYD is held. Plus ca change - as the French say. Our tables wished each other well but those young Catholics were never to discover that I once claimed, like them, to believe various incredible things before maturing into a happy security in my unbelief
When you come across certain people, living or dead, it's not hard to be humble. The Basque-Irish savant (1810-1897) who lived in a Château in Hendaye a few miles south of my modest 'ouse on zeee beeech in Bidart, is one of those individuals. Like most people, even in France, I had never heard of him. But his story deserves to be told, if only because of his brilliance as an astronomer and scientist, and of the depth of his Catholic faith which was not only untroubled by his scientific knowledge but enhanced by it.
"Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei" ("The heavens declare the glory of God"). Antoine's extraordinary home, which he left to the French Academy of Sciences, consists of three massive wings : a fabulously furnished family dwelling, a splendid small church, inaccurately termed a chapel, and his library which housed tens of thousands of books, incorporating his observation-tower featuring the impressive telescope with which he patiently scanned the skies, stretched out on the padded plank on which he spent every night, when he was not somewhere in Africa, creating, for example, the first maps of Ethiopia. The Latin quotation from Psalm 18 is set in stone on the outside wall of the telescope tower. Antoine never felt so close to the Creator as when he was admiring the wonders of His universe.
If ever you visit the French border-town of Hendaye - perhaps as the starting-point of your pilgrimage to Compostella ... - you must take at least an afternoon to discover Abbadia. The spacious grounds stretch as far as the coast; to the East, you have a perfect view of the Rhune, the Basque Country's highest mountain (905 m). Antoine worried that his patient observations of the stars, on the North-South axis on which his telescope was fixed, were subject to tiny inaccuracies due to refraction. He set out to discover the necessary coefficients to correct the errors by boring holes in the walls of his Château, beginning with his laboratory, and attempting to note variations by peering through this horizontal quasi-telescope, focused on the Rhune. Among the many inscriptions found inside and outside the Château (for example, "A thousand welcomes !" in Gaelic over the front door, along with numerous English, Basque, Latin and Arabic quotations all over the walls, the one above the final aperture facing the mountain is a curious play-on-words in Basque. His experiment in optics was a total failure, and he wanted the world to know it : "Ez ikusi, ez ikasi" - "I saw nothing, I learned nothing". One cannot but respect a scientist as honest as that. Coupled with the fact that he and his wife were fervent believers, such integrity cannot but give pause for thought to an atheist who might expect from such a man a less exemplary dedication to the truth. Along with our Australian star-gazer, the Rev. Robert Evans of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Antoine of Abbadia will remain an enigma and a challenge to lesser minds like mine.
DELENDA RELIGIO
Among the millions painting Rio papal last week were Briony and Jesse, a happy couple of Australian married young professionals, whose Catholicism is their life. Briony is my grand-niece and a grand, if petite, lady. Jesse is a giant. Both did the WYD in Sydney and in Madrid. They would not have missed Rio if you paid them. They are gung-ho Catholics.
Briony's grand-uncle is fascinated by such faith in his own family. And impressed by their tolerance of apostates like myself, a tolerance taught them by my niece Patricia and her mother, my sainted sister Betty. They no doubt prayed once again for my conversion, hoping even that I would reconsider my atheism as I witnessed, once again, the faith expressed by the WYD participants and its star attraction, Pope Francis.
The new Pope may well turn out to be the best thing that happened to the Church since the election of his Polish predecessor. We, and Benedict XVI, all knew that John Paul 2's would be a hard act to follow. But the present Pontiff seems destined to reinvigorate if not reform a Church declining in developed countries but thriving in the Third World. He may even convince my Believers on the Brink to reject their doubts, to join him and the billion plus Catholics of whom he is the servant ("Servant of the servants of God") and re-embrace the faith they were tempted to abandon. Rio is not good news for atheists like me.
DELENDA RELIGIO
I read this cynical "phrase assassine" in a French article about miraculous chapels. The point was not to bother revealing to generous Christian souls that shrines reputed for the healing powers of the nearby rivulet were in fact already famous for the same reason in pre-Christian France. Why shoot the goose ?
I could not help thinking of my grandfather and his donation of the marble altar to St Patrick's Kogarah in memory of his son, my Uncle Frank (see "From Illusions to Illumination", p. 18). The enterprising parish-priest, Monsignor O'Driscoll, had more than an Irish gift of the gab. He was a formidable fund-raiser (I was not bad myself in this domain : check out my mendicant preaching in St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney - op.cit. p. 40). It seems that "the Mons" was not content with Michael O'Meara's funding of the altar. The church also needed statues of Mary and Joseph. So he paid a pastoral call on Michael, and during the inevitable libations remarked that Jimma, Michael's brother, who lived across the road in Toomevara Street, had generously donated the wherewithal to purchase a statue of the Blessed Virgin for St Patrick's. Could Michael see his way clear to coming up with the funds for a statue of her beloved husband, Jesus' adoptive father and protector, St Joseph ? Not to be outdone by his brother, Michael of course agreed. When the Mons farewelled his generous benefactor, he crossed the street to visit Jimma. "Did ya know, Jimma me boy, that your brother Mick has donated a statue of the Carpenter-Saint for the new church ?"
Both Holy Family parents were soon installed in the church where years later I would go to Holy Communion every day, and celebrate my First Mass in 1961 with my own brothers, Mick and Jim.
DELENDA RELIGIO
Bastille Day, the French National Holiday, is celebrated in Biarritz by popular music concerts, old fogies dancing to accordeon music, a lot of late-night drinking by younger generations and an 11 p.m. festival of fireworks to rival the best that Sydney can offer. The sound of the aerial explosions is almost deafening, but the beauty of the cascading showers of multicolored incandescent sparks made me think of what happens, on a far more massive scale, in the cosmos. I have never seen the explosion of a supernova, but tonight I got a tiny glimpse of what one must be like. These death throes of dying giant stars must make us wonder about the mystery of the universe of which we are but infinitesmal parts.
The world champion in discovering supernovae is an Australian, born like me in 1937 in Sydney. Robert Evans entered religion, like me, and became a Methodist minister; unlike me, he continued to practise his ministry until his retirement. His life-long interest in cosmology and specifically in the discovery of supernovae - he has forty-two to his credit - has not changed his faith. In a "Cabinet" magazine interview (Fall, 2004), he said : "When a person can recognize nature as part of God's creation which shows His wisdom, beauty and power, then I find it becomes a great way in which the glory of God is displayed." If he were not a Protestant, he would be a Green Catechism Catholic.
A supernova explosion is, in his own words, "like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once." He has spent his life exploiting his uncanny "knack for memorizing star-fields" (his words), by noticing such explosions which other astronomers, with far more sophisticated equipment than his modest 16-inch telescope, missed. But it apparently has not occurred to him to wonder why the God invented by primitive people of the ancient Middle East who knew less about the cosmos than a ten-year old child today, would want such explosions to happen. The Reverend Evans, who appears to be a level-headed, serene, sincere believer, is no doubt the best home-grown example I know of that dichotomy described by John Haswell earlier in a commentary on this blog : the calm acceptance of both the realities of science and the myths of religion.
DELENDA RELIGIO
... but big, astronomically BIG, is incomprehensible. I have already, in the book "From Illusions to Illumination" (pp. 181-187), expressed my amazement at the beauty and size of the universe (not to say the multiverse). Not so long ago in human history, at the time of the composition of the Jewish Bible for instance, people thought that stars were lights stuck on to a celestial dome, a lid over the earth. We now not only know better. We are discovering the literally incredible realities of space, and the mind-blowing fact that many of the phenomena we are finally beginning to perceive, ceased to exist millions of years ago.
Most of us continue, as I am doing right now, to profit from the warmth of our star and the glorious sunshine it is providing on this Summer day at my beach-house on the Atlantic coast in France. No one could give a fig - if they even knew - that the sun's rays took eight minutes to get here. If anyone ever told them about it, they might be impressed to learn that if tiny Pluto were able to send light to our planet, it would take not a few minutes but seven hours to get here. That's when some of us start to wonder about the stars, what is beyond them, and why on earth (!) God would have bothered to create and set this expanding purposeless universe into meaningless motion.
Someone had to, hadn't they ? Well, no. The man in "Porgy and Bess" said it best : "It ain't necessarily so." Atheists don't know why such an enormous universe exists, but non-atheists, if they are honest, should admit that they don't either. Unless you accept what God-talkers, theologians, continue to say - like their predecessors, long before we could even begin to chart the solar system - that a god (whom they invented) made all this just for us puny earthlings to discover and admire. Can you believe that ? I can't.
DELENDA RELIGIO
I have never been a Man for All Seasons. In Australia we used to say that we had only two, the wet and the dry. We may have preferred February to August, but even the latter was never the Winter of any particular discontent. Up Over, here in Europe, I dislike Winter, even hate the bitter cold and especially the treacherous ice on the road we call "verglas". Spring and Autumn are lovely, but I prefer weather like today's, here on my deck above the beach in Bidart which is full of July-August vacationers. It's Summertime, and the livin' is easy : the rolling surf, the 26° temperature, the cloudless sky and the gift which St Francis called "Brother Sun". It makes you think of the Land of Lotus where it's always afternoon. It has all the ingredients for a midsummer day's dream.
The evening news will bring me back to reality, but right now I am carpeying the diem. I know that the blazing sun will go down, even that Summer will end and Autumn will bring on my least favorite season. I will soon have to face, not the beauty of the ocean but the bills, the disappointments, the illnesses, the accidents, the bad news about relatives and friends and the slings and arrows of outrageous geopolitics. But for now I put all that aside and dream my dream that this idyllic afternoon will go on forever. That tomorrow will be just like today. It doesn't get any better than this, but I know it will not last and may get an awful lot worse. When it does, I hope I remember today, and why it was so good. It was not just the weather. It was the friends around me, the good news I got from members of my family, and the satisfaction that comes from achieving this morning what I set out to achieve. All this coupled with the fact that my physical, mental and even financial condition are - for the nonce - A OK.
Some, lucky enough to share such good fortune, might be tempted to thank God for making it all possible. I am one of the lucky ones who know that He had nothing to do with it, any more than with the possible misfortunes that await me. It may be the greatest "blessing" of all : lucidity.
DELENDA RELIGIO
The suicide in Notre Dame de Paris, May 21, 2013, will soon be forgotten, unlike a certain murder in the Cathedral of Canterbrury on December 2, 1170. Archbishop Thomas Beckett died in his empty cathedral at the hand of four knights of King Henry 2. Dominique Venner died by his own hand by shooting a bullet into his brain in front of the Paris cathedral's congregation during Mass. Beckett was a Christian martyr whose loyalty to the Pope provoked his murder. Venner was an atheist whose opposition to the Catholic Church and Christian faith provoked his senseless suicide.
The French right-wing, erudite, reclusive intellectual's gesture will, some fear, be repeated by the inevitable copy-cats who now have another "modus demonstrandi" to match gasoline-soaked self-immolation. Suicide can be justified for all sorts of reasons and executed in all sorts of ways. Venner's was not only inappropriate but pointless, though apparently he wanted to make his own the last words of the Roman general Cato in 46 B.C., who after falling on his sword proclaimed : "Now I belong to myself."
It is hard to see how Venner's act advanced his attack on the Christianity which he denounced for destroying the culture of the peoples of Europe. I cannot imagine any sane atheist suffering from the illusion that there were benefits to be drawn from such a suicide. But taking one's own life is an eminently personal decision, the motives for which are often beyond our grasp. I continue to believe however that the cause of atheism is better served by the patient, if frustrating, efforts of the living, rather than the pathetic gesture of Dominique Venner.
DELENDA RELIGIO
They used to call him, because he had been brought up in Brussels in Belgium as a bourgeois believer, the "Abbé Brel". The lyrics Jacques Brel wrote for many of his best ballads often made reference to the Catholic religion he had long since rejected. Like so many of us, he was profoundly marked by his Jesuit indoctrination, and voiced his resentment in sometimes cynical fashion, but also, as in "Dites, Si C'était Vrai", in gentle, nostalgic terms that express simply regret that none of the nonsense was true : "If only it were true, that He was born in a stable and the three Magi came from far away bearing gold, myrrh and incense, if only it were true, what was written by Luke, Matthew and the two others ...". Wouldn't it be wonderful if the bedtime stories we tell our children, and what they say in their prayers, "you know, when they say 'Our Father' and 'Our Mother' ", were the truth. If all that were true, he admits in this charming recitative, he would say 'yes' - "oh, sûrement, je dirais 'oui' - because all that is so beautiful, if only we could believe it were true."
DELENDA RELIGIO
