Submitted by @CatholicArena – The Irish Sentinel
The Islamic takeover of Croke Park will be described mostly in the following types of terms: openness, equality, modernity. These adjectives will mostly be deployed by those who devoted themselves demonically to spoiling Pope Francis’s visit to Dublin in 2018.
That August saw warnings surrounding pilgrims dropping dead from viruses in the air, stacks of bodies being piled on at morgues and a coordinated effort to book tickets for Croke Park and Phoenix Park so that ordinary Catholics would not be able to go and enjoy events. It is cliché at this stage to describe Islam as being driven by ‘carnal men’ as St. Thomas Aquinas stated, not because it is untrue, but because the people who need to hear such a statement haven’t the clarity of humility to observe that.
Modern people, especially Irish people, are willing to overlook such things if they can grasp something else by virtue of bowing to it. With Black Lives Matter, the bending of the knee represents their desire to attain some sense of ethnic or even civic solidarity that they do not find anywhere else. It does not matter that Black Lives Matter are a terror group committed to destroying the nuclear family, responsible for more murders than those against whom they protest, the reward of sentimental pseudo ethnic solidarity is worth it.
Likewise, the 2011 visit of Barack Obama to Ireland represented an opportunity for Irish people to exhibit some of those same emotions, Obama himself looked bemused by the ludicrous hyperbole which Enda Kenny blustered his way through in his speech at College Green that day. The West’s current submission to Islam is from the same emotional and ideological viewpoint. Islam offers some of the things that humanity needs, but that the West wants to proudly derive from a source other than from Christ or from their own historic forms of Nationalism.
Muslims have high birth rates, they place high cultural value upon following religious norms, they have a sense of religious pride that ordinary Westerners need, but for which they have not the humility to find in situated in their own past. When the GAA was formed in 1884, there were still people alive who had seen the days of Penal Ireland. Covert Masses at Mass Rocks, punishable by death. Education was forbidden. The impending encroachment of English sports and culture, particularly prominent in garrison towns, cricket, soccer and rugby. On the horizon too, the spectre of a rise in daily usage of the English language in place of the Irish one, with it an exposure to English modes of thought, English mannerisms, English beliefs.
The establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association could only have been brought about by Catholics, men like Archbishop Croke no less, who knew that Celtic culture could not have been preserved in any respect without the church’s preservation of its art, its games and its buildings. That such a pivotal point in Irish history as that of Bloody Sunday occurred in Croke Park in 1919, was a prescient fulfillment of Croke’s Catholic Nationalist ambitions. Yeats said that ‘too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart’. Yeats did not state what became of the heart when it reneged on its sacrifice and compromised to the will of those against whom it was resisting. For the GAA, the decision to allow rugby and soccer into Croke Park has proven to be a pivotal juncture in the inevitable disappearance of its identity, it is now a semi professional rather than amateur entity with more focus upon making money than preserving Gaelic culture.
The recent miserable perpetual success of Dublin and the draconian lifestyles that players are forced to endure have sucked the life out of a sport that was one the lifeblood of communities, it now has begun to develop much of the same po faced sanctimony that has blighted the once enjoyable sport of professional soccer.
When Muslims gather for their Eid festival at Croke Park, they will revel in the symbolism of the images of domination as much as Erdogan did in Istanbul this week. Ireland’s leftists, mortally ashamed of their Irishness, will revel in this humiliation for Croke’s vision also, just as they did in Dublin Castle two years ago. The humiliation is all ours however. Following the path of England, who have stocked their cathedrals with mini golf and bouncy castles, Ireland is now hoping to fill its sporting and cultural cathedrals with any novelty that might recapture an inverted form of the interest that men like Croke must have had.
As Christians are bludgeoned by followers of Islam everywhere from Mozambique to Nigeria, Iraq to France, the ominous bellows of Muslims from Croke Park will seem daunting. But Christianity has survived the onslaught of Islam several times in history, particularly in Spain, even after centuries of oppression. Secularism however, has never survived or outlived Islam. Islam, for all of its faults, will completely absorb a Western society that does not produce its own children, does not preserve its traditions and does not think about anything other than self-preservation of the individual rather than the collective.
In 1916, Blessed Charles de Foucauld (who lived amongst Muslims in Algeria before being murdered by some), warned of the inevitability of Islam succeeding secular France’s hopeless Republic ‘In general, with some exceptions, as long as they are Muslim, they will not be French, they will wait more or less patiently for the day of the Mahdi [Islamic messiah], in which they will subdue France’. Although we do not seem to be able to rely on the church to give us men like Archbishop Croke anymore, we should nonetheless strive to raise up men who know what it means to be Irish and to see enough worth in our cultural heritage to want to preserve it.
Ireland is currently entering into a terra incognito where our land is slowly dominated by Wetherspoon’s, backstreet Mosques and industrial estate mega churches. Perhaps we need a new GAA, one which does what the current one was established to do. Our culture, ancient and beautiful, is worth preserving. Seceding our age to secularism and by extension the next to Islam, is no more an inevitability than being permanently conquered by Protestantism ever was. The events in the Hagia Sophia this week, the burning of Notre Dame, the beheading of Father Jacques Hamel, these are all indications of Europe’s future.
Yes, there is more to Islam than violence and many of those who practise it do so out of a genuine love for God in the only manner in which they were taught of him, but Islam is only as benign as the rulers who impose it, a glance towards Saudi Arabia’s descent into extremism shows how brutal it can be. A rebirth of the Irish language, of Irish popular devotions such as pilgrimages and Mass Rocks, a continued celebration of the Irish family, these are the tools by which we humbly put right the humiliation of Eid at Croke Park, a little humiliation can be good for the soul. If the world hates us, remember that it hated Him first.
