ninme

(At least this story isn’t about how they’re saving the Catholic Church… Though I’m sure they’re doing that as well there.)

Times2 - Poles aplenty? Wait till the Turks arrive, by Melanie McDonagh

There is no more conservative individual than the Irish small farmer, and I mean that in a nice way. But my friend’s 78-year-old father, who has a cattle farm, has employed, successively, two Polish farmhands. “He’s a treasure,” marvelled my friend, of the present one. “Works a 12-hour day, six days a week. If he’s not busy he’s looking for something else to do. When they go in to dinner he does the washing up, and sweeps the floor afterwards.”

Awww.

I asked whether it wasn’t possible to get an Irish farm labourer these days. “Well,” she said, “we did have one fellow, very nice but he wouldn’t do any heavy work with a shovel. He wanted to do everything sitting in a tractor.” There, I’m afraid, you have it.

Yep.

As another friend, a priest in Dublin, summed up the Poles, “they’re no trouble”. Or, as I put it crudely, “at least they’re not trying to blow you up”.

Snort.

But if we’re playing Cassandra, can I point out that this is as nothing compared with the likely impact on the labour market and community relations when Turkey finally joins the European Union.

Hah. Just wait till the European Union shares a border with Iraq.

Second item (can’t resist):

No sympathy for death plunge dad

The Greeks, who feel strongly about family values, take a dim view of the actions of John Hogan, who apparently threw himself and his two children over the balcony of a hotel in Crete, distraught at the thought of his wife leaving him. And the inmates of the jail that is probably awaiting him are likely to express their outraged sentiments in ways that would be foreign to Wormwood Scrubs. My husband is Albanian and I am afraid that his initial reaction when he heard what had happened is probably typical of the Balkans. “What an idiot,” he remarked. “Why didn’t he just throw his wife over the balcony?”

Telegraph - The Roman Catholic renaissance is held back by the bishops. By Damian Thompson

For years, it has been possible to draw a picture of a typical bishop. He is a graduate of the English College in Rome who is moderately bright but intellectually lazy. If his political allegiance has shifted since the 1960s, it will only have been from Labour to the Lib Dems (because they are more reliably anti-American). There is a good chance that he will have worked in Eccleston Square, the bishops’ HQ, where lay ideologues promote naïve multiculturalism. Once he has become a bishop, he will form his own mini-curia, issuing hand-wringing press releases about being nice to Muslims.

No wonder the Poles [half a million new Roman Catholics in the country] are not impressed by their new spiritual home. They have petitioned the bishops to provide them with more Masses in their own language. The answer, as often as not, has been no: you must “integrate”. Nothing illustrates more clearly the bishops’ ignorance of the secrets of church growth. London’s mushrooming Pentecostal congregations are falling over themselves to provide immigrants with tailored services.

That’s funny because there’s a whole ton of Mexican/Hispanic Spanish-speaking Pentecostal churches popping up in California.

Loyal priests and lay people, by no means all traditionalists, are furious at this impoverishment of the liturgy. It is finally dawning on them that it is time for root-and-branch reform.

Only one man can set that process in motion: Benedict XVI, the greatest theologian to hold the papal office for centuries.

Woah.

One is hard put to think of a single bishop of England and Wales who shares Benedict’s vision of the Church. Most of them were angered by his election, and his opinion of them is not high. “The English bishops,” he told a visiting priest a few years ago, “are the problem.” Well, Your Holiness, they are your problem now. England could become a showcase for a Catholic revival based on charismatic preaching and glorious liturgy. But, to achieve that, Pope Benedict may have to set aside his new benevolence and display some of his old ferocity.

Well, I would postulate, but RC2’s gone fishing.