EVENTS THIS WEEK
- APOLOGIES:: I complained here last weekend that so few people attended our recent public meeting on the planned renovation of the church. It transpired later that some people were actually locked out! While there was a 'security element' at play, both the church doors and the priory door was inadvertently locked at the same time! Sorry about that.
- THE RACES: With thousands of other punters, we made the annual pilgrimage to Ballybrit once more. A la Lough Derg, we made three days of it. And, like Lough Derg too, from my point of view, Ballybrit was dominated this year by nightmares rather than racehorses. Once again, the Form Book was studded with understated gems! (of Your Little Daisy it states: 'Shed his maiden tag at Roscommon. More improvement looks likely'!) I had a flutter on fifteen races in all. That meant fifteen trips to the bookies. But unfortunately, it was one-way traffic: not once had I to return to collect. All of which indicates that the burden of blame may not rest entirely on the horses' back! However, not everyone was as methodical or as patient with the bookies as yours truly. On Thursday evening a young fellow grabbed a bookie's bag, containing €50,000 we are told, and made a run for it. Carrying top weight - we must presume - and, in all probability, overtly influenced by the slow pace of the horses he had been watching earlier, he was easily overtaken by the bookie at the back of the stand. He was last seen being led into the Losers' Enclosure by two sturdy cops! We must presume was we subjected to a 'dope test'. Despite that ( or because of it?), and the indifferent weather, it was a great week to be in Galway.
AS I WAS SAYING...
There are few certainties in this life. Yet experience is a great teacher. And our experience of life will have taught us that evolution governs all living things and processes: humanity, animal life, political thought, and religious teaching. Everything develops; all things are subject to change; life and thought moves on. Nothing under the sun remains untouched by change. But, instinctively, we resist change. We fight against the ravages of time. But it is a losing battle, a futile expenditure of valuable energy. However, once we acknowledge that change is inevitable, we are freed to influence the course of that change. But, if we resist or deny change, we will live and die in a time-warp.
But change is more often a friend than an enemy. Up to the 1960s and beyond, the Catholic Church exercised a dominant role in Irish society. It had enormous influence. It dominated education, health and social services (such as they were). It had considerable political clout, as Dr Noel Browne found to his cost. If the hierarchy actively opposed some particular political measure, then it was all but impossible to get it through. Conversely, if the hierarchy desired a particular 'immoral practice' to be outlawed, or at least regulated, then it had only to say so.
Consequently, political debate and episcopal pastorals of the 1930s and 1940 were morbidly preoccupied with 'occasions of sin and dance halls'! While this barren debate was being conducted, the number of agricultural labourers declined from 300,000 in 1911 to 150,000 in 1936. The moral compass had been well and truly lost! Rarely has the Catholic Church contributed so little, as an institution, to the finer qualities of the Christian spirit. As Joe Lee has pointed out, censorship, symbolised the impoverishment of spirit and the barrenness of mind of the risen bourgeoisie, touting for respectability.
However, those days are now long gone and very few Irish Catholics mourn their passing. This change has been good. The Catholic Church as we have it today is a far more humane and (dare I say it) a far more Christ-like institution that the one I was born into. I am not talking specifically about doctrine, liturgy or law. I am talking about a far more pervasive reality: the attitude of the ordinary Catholic. This is what has changed radically in our day. I will take but two examples to illustrate the change that I have in mind:
- The attitude of the ordinary Catholic to extra-marital sex: In the 40s and 50s, young girls were ostracised and, in some instances, banished entirely, if they became pregnant outside marriage. No voice was raised (until the late 1960s) against their patently unchristian treatment. Despite the best efforts of the Cassandras, the attitudes of today's generation to relationships and sexuality are far more healthy and life-enhancing.
- The second example I will use is of an entirely different order: suicide. While suicide is by no means understood, there is an understanding and a compassion surrounding it today that was entirely absent some thirty years ago.
These are just two criteria for measuring the distance Catholicism has travelled over the last 30 or 40 years. Our Founder and inspiration would surely approve!
-Dick Lyng.
THE LATE PETIE CONNEELY
Petie Conneely was born on Inishere Island on June 23rd, 1918. He emigrated to San Francisco in 1947. That journey to America was made with the intention of putting a few bob together to marry Margaret and to set up home with her.
While in San Francisco he worked in Holy Cross cemetery. In later years, he would entertain family and friends with a rich stock of stories he gathered from that time. Many were connected with the funeral rituals carried to America by west of Ireland emigrants. Apparently, it was a common practice to bury a bottle of whiskey with the deceased relative. It was an obvious sign of how greatly you were prepared to inconvenience yourself for the sake of the departed friend. However, according to Petie, it was not at all uncommon for those same relatives to return to the cemetery later in the week and to pressurise the cemetery staff into exhuming the bottle of whiskey. Having adequately fulfilled its ritual role, the bottle of whiskey could now be utilised in the manner which the creator intended.!
In 1952, a friend persuaded Petie to visit the casinos of Las Vagas. Petie was never a gambling man but, on his first and last visit to the casino, the machine spat out one thousand shiny silver dollars! This was in 1952. With that money Petie made his way home, married Margaret and set up home in Merchant's Road. On his return, he worked as a fisherman on Galway Bay. He was later employed by the Harbour Board and he retired from that post exactly twenty years ago.
Eleven years ago, Petie suffered a debilitating stroke. Ever since he was nursed at home by Margaret and the family. He bore his illness with great patience and dignity. A far bigger blow to him was the loss of his beloved son Colm so tragically three years ago. It was fitting that we remembered both of them publicly at Petie's funeral Mass.
I visited Petie at his home with Holy Communion every First Friday. He always welcomed me with a big open smile and you knew instinctively that his welcome was entirely genuine. His family and friends will miss him greatly but they will be consoled by the knowledge that his suffering is now over. May he now enjoy the peace and rest he so richly deserves.
SIMON COMMUNITY
It was on a rain-sodden, windswept, winter's night in London that I first met Anton I Wallich-Clifford, the founder of Simon Community, who died 25 years ago on July 30th, 1978. I was penniless and homeless. I was carrying a suitcase with all my worldly possessions. I was part of the desperate army of night-walkers who just barely managed to survive by taking one step at a time in the uncharted world of the homeless. I knew I was on a very slippery slope.
On entering the house of hospitality, I knew instinctively by his striking humanity and aura of gentleness that Anton was a very special man, and as time passed and I got to know him better I found out why.
I was offered accommodation on a settee for the time it took to organise publishing my first book of poetry. At the end of the daily efforts there was always a hot meal and a welcome rest.
The residents of the house on Maldon Road were an assortment of fascinating people. There was a frail Englishman, possibly from Manchester, with an angular, smallish, bird-like head and torso. There was an 18-year-old Turkish student, with a big bush of black curly hair and eyes like raspberries, who was more or less impossible to understand. There was Cyril, a classic study of a senior citizen always about to get fully out of his depth but not quite doing so.
Then there was Lynn, a blonde, attractive girl in her mid-twenties who knew her way unescorted around the West End, maybe too well for her own good. Tempers sometimes flared. But at the centre was Anton the pragmatist, the businessman, and the serene saint, at times ruffled and beleaguered by the effort to make ends meet.
On occasions, I escorted Anton on his daily visits to Mass. These were to me quite inspirational moments. During the sign of peace in the Mass Anton seemed to arrive at a plateau of fulfilment, such was the warmth of his regard for his fellow travellers. Late at night He explained to me how the idea of the Simon Community germinated in his mind. After he was demobbed from the RAF where he served during the war he worked as a probation officer in Bow Street magistrates court in London. All his clients were, to varying degrees, in dire straits of desperation, moving from one crisis to the next, and always looking for a bed for the night. He saw a chance to make a difference, to gain respite for these lives jammed between the devil and the deep abyss of no man's land.
Anton worked, cared and suffered for prostitutes, drug addicts, ex-convicts, pimps and all those who were burdened; and he loved them all. The last time I saw him was when he came to see me while visiting Dublin late in 1977. On occasions we would talk on the phone. His death after a short illness came as such a shock. But what a great and glorious thing he achieved when with simple faith and integrity he succeeded in lifting the-burden of the homeless and heroically lightening their load.
-from John McNamee, Irish Times, July 28th, 2003.
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