anne's dispatches from sydney

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Now I understand why North Americans always would talk about convicts when they asked me about Australia.

The reason is that they are working from their own understandings of their realities. The fact is that the influence of the puritan religious settlers  in  North America is profound. Reactionaries of all stripes, including 'Catholic' Jansenites, and many puritan protestants settled what is now Canada and the US. (Also utopian idealists- but that is not what I'm talking about)

It means that Catholicism in Quebec is particularly disapproving of the body- because that is what the Jansens were like- and hence there has been a great reaction against this attitude. (ie people's main stereotype of catholicism is that it is reactionary and anti- sex); I went to a sociology post-doc presentation about a study here that showed that people who identify as "Catholic" on the census have rapidly changed their behaviour relative to the Church since the 1960's (-Much more than other Catholic regions of the western world)- he traced it to the local handling of the Papal encyclical "Humanae Vitae"- and the condemnatory behaviour of local priests towards couples who used contraception. Now, Catholics have the same number of partners in their lifetime, same  rate of de-facto relationships, and same divorce rate (50%) as people who identify as "no religion". People have a perception that the commitment required by the Church is something that is distant to their own understandings and hard to apply to their own lives- 

Reaction breeds reaction- so that's what you get.

posted by: anneinchaosland at 15:02 | link | comments |

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