EVENTS THIS WEEK
- HARVEST SUNDAY: The Parish Steering Committee selected on Sunday, October 13th for our Annual Harvest Celebration. (For history of Harvest Festival, see opposite page). The main focus of our celebration will be the 11.00 Sunday Mass. But the festival will also be marked at both evening Masses. At harvest time we celebrate in a special way 'the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands', as the Offertory of the Mass expresses it. Perhaps you might bring to the church some small token of that fruit, like a cake, a pot of jam, a few buns, a few sods of turf, or whatever you judge to be appropriate. But please! No fish this year!! More on this next Sunday.
- CHURCH RENOVATION GROUP: This group will meet tomorrow night at 5.30 with a specific task in mind. They have been meeting on an almost weekly basis since October 2001. They have done great work in exploring and planning the renovations. But they have taken the project as far as their expertise and competence permit. They are now at the stage where 'outside' professionals will be sought. The brief for those professionals will be finalised at the meeting tomorrow night. However, the overall management of this project will remain with this group.
- EUCHARISTIC MINISTERS: We have six new Ministers of the Eucharist in the pipeline. We are very grateful to them for volunteering their services. They will be commissioned during the 11.00 Mass on Sunday, October 20th.
- CATHEDRAL DEVOTIONS: Each Sunday evening during the month of October there will be a Candle-Light in the Cathedral, commencing at 8.00. During the procession the Rosary will be recited, concluding with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Procession Candles supplied.
AS I WAS SAYING...
Fergus Flood sure opened a can of worms on Friday last. And that was just for openers, a mere interim report! Just wait until the investigation is complete! But then, if it took five years to get through chapter one, Flood, Burke, Lawlor, and indeed the rest of us will be well dead before the final chapter hits the bookshelves. To put it another way, it's doubtful if Flood will have sufficient time to get around to all the crooks! However, Flood will have disrupted the slumber of quite a few.
We were always told that politicians were corrupt, that they were available to the highest bidder. But targeting public figures has always been a national pastime in Ireland. Because the country is such a tiny place, scandal-mongers and rumour-mongers have always thrived here. Traditionally, tales that were already tall were provided with stilts, by taximen, by meter-readers, by postmen, by postmistresses, by 'commercial travellers' (remember them!?), in fact by anyone in a position to move about and to spread a good story. Ireland was notorious for this, 'The Valley of the Squinting Windows' as Brinsley McNamara so well dubbed it. Stories and their telling seems to be part of our makeup. One of the positive by-product of this 'cottage industry' was of course the constant crop of very talented novelists and story-tellers. I presume such a head-count has never been taken, but it would be my guess that Ireland has the highest number of short story writers and novelists per capita of any European country.
But this national trait has a dark, negative side too. As a people, character assassination comes easily to us. And the more prominent the person, the more sordid the story. By his own admission, such unfounded stories forced D.J. Carey to take early retirement. But, on reflection and after some gentle persuasion, he recognised that his detractors simply used his retirement to shore up their unfounded allegations. "Sure what option had he but to retire when........" There have been so many victims of this mean streak the Irish make-up.
However, if innocent people were vulnerable to character assassins before, how much more difficult will life become now! Everyone is damaged and diminished by this corruption. Because not even a rumour monger could have come up with the Flood Report! In the 'Corruption Stakes', fact far outstripped fiction. And we are not talking here about a few isolated individuals from one particular profession. The image of the web rather than chain functions more accurately. Builders bought planners, who bought civil servants, who bought politicians, who bought voters! The money involved was astronomical. And the villain of this particular set-piece reached the third highest office in the land. Where was the moral or ethical voice for the last twenty years? Where are the Bishops' Pastorals on 'Corruption in Public Life'? Or, like their predecessors of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, do they take the view that the only morality that merits attention is sexual? It is said that, in a democracy, a people get the politicians they deserve. Do they also get the bishops they deserve?
-Dick Lyng.
Harvest Festival? Why?
You will notice that we are celebrating the Harvest Festival Sunday, October 13th. The 'harvest celebration' will be familiar to many of our older readers versed in rural ways. The harvest was a communal effort. When the final sheaf had been saved, the celebrations began. It was a communal celebration, since the harvest had been a communal effort. The celebrations consisted of dinner, drinks and much barn-dancing! For some reason, the practice of celebrating it liturgically never entered the Catholic tradition in Ireland. I wonder why?
The practice of a ritualised 'harvest celebration' has deep roots in antiquity, predating even Old Testament times. The Old Testament writers, like the prophet Isaiah, associated the harvest festival with 'great rejoicing':
They rejoice before you as at harvest time,
As men make merry when dividing spoils. (9:2b).So why this omission, this great gap in the Irish Catholic tradition? This gap is all the more surprising in a predominantly agricultural society. The English Anglican Church on the other hand, despite its industrial environment, has established the Harvest Festival at the heart of its liturgical calendar. The Church of Ireland has followed the same path.
However, the modern Roman Missal does contain a 'Harvest Mass' with its own special prayers and readings. But this is not a 'new-fangled' development. Because the old Tridentine Catholic Missal also contained a Harvest Mass. So, within the Catholic tradition, the Harvest Mass was always recognised and provided for. But, in Ireland at any rate, it has never been promoted or availed of!
There are a number of possible explanations for this strange oversight. I can think of three possibilities:
(a) In England, industrialisation threatened to break the bonds between the people and the land. The Harvest Festival represented an attempt to keep those bonds alive. Industrialisation wasn't sufficiently intense here in Ireland to pose a similar threat. Hence, there was no real need for a Harvest Festival.
(b) It is also possible that the Harvest Festival fell victim to the good old Catholic principle: if the Protestants are promoting it, it is by definition suspect and best avoided! (Did not the scriptures fall victim to that same principle?)
(c) The 'harvest dance' was an intrinsic feature of the Irish harvest celebration. From the foundation of the state until the 1960s, the Irish bishops had a phobia about dancing, (or, more correctly, a phobia about post-dance activities!) In 1925, Bishop O'Donnell, deploring the craze for dancing among the women of Galway, had some wise words for the fathers of these miscreants: "If your girls do not obey you, if they are not in at the hours appointed, lay the lash upon their backs. That was the good old system, and that should be the system today!" In this atmosphere, the bishops may have concluded that the liturgical celebration of the harvest could well be misinterpreted as condoning other activities (i.e. dances) closely associated with the harvest celebrations which they abhorred. While the Harvest Festival would not be condemned, it certainly would not be publicly condoned or promoted. The Church of Ireland had the floor to themselves!
David Norris
"There is a danger that Ireland may lose its soul as we move from being an unthinking Catholic country to being an unthinking materialistic country. That would be a great shame. There has been vast changes in my life-time, from the time the place was literally crawling with priests and nuns. You couldn't take a walk to Sandymount without meeting half a dozen of them and all those wonderful nuns with their coifs and wimples.
They're gone, evaporated, vanished. I think that we're the poorer for it. I have always gone to Eucharist in St. Patrick's. I loved the music and the ritual but both are quite variable. Either the music can be superb or else it can be absolutely bloody awful. In terms of ritual, I like a certain elegance. I like the wearing of the copes and all that sort of stuff. But they have gone. The new Dean has locked them up in a cupboard and instead of the wafers, which he regarded as too Roman, we are now reduced to wholemeal brown sliced bread. You get crumbs, which I think is awful! I battled to save the vote on candles in the side aisles, and this awful new liturgy, the product of illiterate minds. And this "Peace of the Lord be with you. And also with you. We will now exchange a sign of peace"....I will not! I stick my hands in my pockets and just say "Merry Christmas", "Jingle Bell" or whatever you're having yourself, but I do not touch strangers!"
-David Norris in 'The Irish Soul in Dialogue'
"Quote, Unquote........ "
- "The army ages men sooner than the law and philosophy; it exposes them more freely to germs, which undermine and destroy, and it shelters them more completely from thought, which stimulates and preserves." -H. G. Wells.
- "An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead." -Nancy Mitford.
- "If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless." -Darryl F. Zanuck.
- "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." -Oscar Wilde.
- "History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other!" -Arthur Balfour.
- "Irish Americans are about as Irish as black Americans are African." -Bob Geldof.
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