Derek Hanrahan

Credo in unum Deum and all that follows. And also in Limerick and Munster Rugby. Photo: Bridge,Wicklow Town; Railway Bridge Newcastle West.

[Cian McCarthy @arealmofwonder]

Thought this a very uplifting documentary on St. Carlo Acutis, so feel it only right to share ☀️
https://t.co/Ayfyat8IRA

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@MaryKenny4 @IrishCathNews A woman of original ideas. I hope someday she will be read and listened to more widely. And deservedly.

[Malcolm Guite @malcolmguite]

It’s so good when a reviewer ( in this case @SketchesbyBoze ) completely understands both the tradition and the contemporary context in which you’re writing. Result: a really in depth review https://t.co/GJNfSHS5Hb

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@MaryKenny4 One has to remember that way back then the population was tiny in comparison with today’s and life expectancy much lower, so there wasn’t as much sex (not genital sex) or intercourse with others outside the tribe. Plenty intra- but not much inter-……..

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@drsjcostello @newdublinnews Kneecap reprise…….

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@MaryKenny4 Or getting into a shower in an hotel without first checking which is shampoo and which gel….. mind you either will do. My dad bless him used Fairy Liquid 😊

[Girardism @Girardism]

People need to understand that without Christianity modern technology would have been impossible to attain. We must ponder on how we came to live in a world where natural accidents are no longer considered punishments from the gods — or somehow deserved by the poor unfortunates.

This attitude toward the disadvantaged is not at all the norm and yet it is the principal virtue of the modern world.

In ancient society, such people were scapegoats of their community — easy marks for the scapegoat mechanism. They were believed to be truly at fault. Having chanced upon the unifying power of a common enemy, the community would turn to people who bore such unusual marks to save them from the “evil” — which is really their own violence — which threatens to destroy their community.

Oedipus is a perfect example. The myth says he is a foreigner, has a limp, and yet he is made king. At the end of the myth, he is found guilty despite the presence of “reasonable doubt” which the persecutors ignore in their telling of the story, of course — but which we can deduce once we recognize the myth as a persecution text told from the perspective of the persecutors.

The biblical Job is a victim of the same mechanism even if his difference lies in his unfathomable wealth. His supposed friends and his community become one and he the victim of his people.

The scapegoat mechanism is how archaic human societies survived. As Girard says “Religion is the means through which the order and the peace created by the first murder gradually turns into a cultural system. Humanity is the child of religion. In a way, religion is like the placenta that protects the newborn and gets discarded when he's really born.” This is why “sacrifice is the primordial institution of human culture.”

We cannot throw Christianity into the same bracket as archaic religion. Only the Bible defended the victim. Take the story of Job, or of Joseph who was sold into slavery by his cult of brothers and was accused of rape/incest by Potiphar's wife. Or take the Psalms, which Girard says “are the first in human history to allow those who would simply become silent victims in the world of myth to voice their complaint as hysterical crowds besiege them.”

The Christian revelation is ultimately the source of our concern for victims and the less privileged. In the biblical tongue, Greek, the Holy Spirit literally translates to ‘the defender of victims.’

So if today we are so concerned as to invent things that help disadvantaged people, we have the Christian revelation alone to thank. It is the Spirit of Christ that has established this virtue in our world, despite us.

“We have assimilated so much and we're not aware that the substance we have assimilated comes from the Bible,” says Girard.

Moreover, we have gotten to where we are in technology because we stopped burning witches. Once the Christian revelation was underway in human history, the tendency toward immolation is replaced by the quest for other causes for the chaos and the plague. Yes, ancient societies may have been able to build boats and whatnot, but to arrive at the modern world, to do the ‘greater things,’ to go round the moon and back required an external power to wrench us away from the clutches of the scapegoat mechanism.

“[Technology emerges] once human thought, in an attempt to come to grips with the natural world, is freed from the mechanisms of scapegoating. ... If, when a plane crashes, you're content to point the finger at the guilty party, it's quite obvious that other accidents will happen. . . And sooner or later, there won't be any more planes at all!” — René Girard

Therefore Girard says: “We didn't stop burning witches because we invented science, we invented science because we stopped burning witches.” He said that “science took hold because for moral and religious reasons we stopped hunting witches.”

[Mary Kenny @MaryKenny4]

Will there be?

[Declan Ganley @declanganley]

Well that's an angle I suppose. Meanwhile the more accurate one is they stood up for freedom of religion, for truth, the creed, the Gospel, the liturgy and the Eucharist. They did not follow the ravings of a serial wife killer and adulterer whose foundation for his 'reforms' was his pelvis. Nor of the later regicide that was the closest thing to the Taliban that ever afflicted Christianity.

They supported the legitimate Stuart line, in battle, while others supported the largest enemy landing fleet (much bigger than the Spanish Armada) in British history and the imposition of a puppet of the parliamentary quislings propped up by the Dutch Blue Guard (the Pope in Rome was on the same side as the Dutch at the Boyne, not the Irish Catholics, but don't let that get in the way of your 'Rome' narrative).

Irish Catholic bayonets and muskets still were instrumental in the defeat of Bonaparte, and countless other engagements but maybe you have better insights than their then overall military commander, Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington.

They were deprived of their legal rights, to own private property, to formal education, to government appointments and military commissions, to public practice of their faith. They were dispossessed, starved and ridiculed but every single one of them had more integrity, more dignity and most certainly more courage and character than their critics and persecutors. Think about the 'brilliance' of those that supressed that much human potential. And now, they can look at that Church that Henry built, and feel pity.

On the topic of stupid, you won't know this but were it not for the spectacular stupidity of anti-Catholicism, Britain would probably have had the steam engine up to a century earlier than ended up being the case. Think about the opportunity lost there.

As for Irish republicanism, when you use the word 'several' in front of the word 'centuries', you are applying 'several' to what is in fact 'two'. Irish republicanism was founded by a protestant but again, don't let facts confuse you.

The fact that the integrity of Irish Catholics, to the traditions and faith that all these islands were built on, was something despised by others on these islands, was the greater loss to all these islands than it was to Catholics, who, if Christianity is to survive on these islands, will be by far the greater part and backbone of it two hundred years hence.

And by the way, with noble exception today's Irish so called Republicans for the most part, despise practicing Catholics following the Catechism even more than you do.

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@NorannV Long life, prosperity and happiness.
A blessing:
May their house be always too small to fit all those who love them; may their roof never fall in and may they never fall out.

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@CatholicHerald The Strange Unknown (St Josemaría Escriva); the Mystery of Mysteries (St. Augustine)

[The Catholic Herald @CatholicHerald]

It is not difficult to see why Ratzinger continues to attract new readers.

Unlike many 20th-century theologians, he wrote with unusual clarity. His subject was often the relationship between Christianity and modernity: whether faith remained intellectually credible in a scientific age, whether reason could sustain itself once detached from religious foundations and how Christian belief might be lived within increasingly secular societies.

https://t.co/L3pZGCCzEo

[Jonathan Pageau @PageauJonathan]

Mythological Thinking: The Crossroads of Psychology and Theology (Hillsdale talk) (link below)

This is a talk I did at Hillsdale College in March 2026. I explore mythological thinking as a way of understanding how facts become meaningful. Facts do not present themselves to us neutrally. They are always organized by care, relevance, attention, and story. I look at examples from Genesis, Icarus, Spider-Man, the Tower of Babel, and modern science to show how myths preserve deep patterns of human experience. Rather than treating myth as fiction or primitive explanation, I argue that myth reveals the structures by which we perceive reality, understand purpose, and connect psychology with theology.

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@callanable Often it’s a failure of or poor quality supervision…….

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@danschwartz88 When I visited Auschwitz I had a revelation: I saw it & the people as real like never before, because of the colour: red brick, blue skies, green trees, brown wood, windows framing natural scenes; I saw some of what they saw and I could connect with them; they came alive for me.

[John McGuirk @john_mcguirk]

A message for Gript Media readers and subscribers.

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@MichaelPTKelly A lot of small children are brought to see Taylor Swift concerts (she is some performer and many of the lyrics of her songs worth thinking about); some are dressed a bit tacky and indoctrinated into a commercially driven venture offering a package of ephemeral beliefs and dreams.

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@jmasseypoet A good analyst……. Works over time, but you must be committed to the process, at some level; not a quick fix. Churchill called it the Black Dog. Do you know you are forgiven?

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@NorannV Saving the hay……. Reminds me of hot sweet tea, buttered bread in a field smelling of dry hay and curney cake (fruit cake with currants).

[Derek Hanrahan @DerekMPH]

@PaulTreyvaud @KeithMillsD7 @irishdailymail @GeorgeLeeRTE If it was raining and he said it was raining I still wouldn’t believe him…………..