Events This Week
- EASTER WEEK: This will be a very busy week in the Church. Perhaps the members of the Steering Committee and Liturgy Group could have a brief gathering in the front room after the 11.00 Mass today and review the preparations for Holy Week. What remains to be done? Are there people whom we still need to contact? When do we hold our rehearsals for the ceremonies? Important items such as this need to be looked into.
- TRÓCAIRE BOXES: Thanks to everyone who took the Trócaire Boxes to your homes for Lent. Please bring along to the Church during this week, or on Sunday next. We will count same and send the money off to the charity in question via the Diocesan Office.
- LENTEN SESSIONS: We finished up of pre-Lenten sessions on Monday night last. They went very well indeed and I think all the participants enjoyed themselves. I am deeply grateful to all who attended.
- DAY OF PRAYER: A day of prayer with Fr Pat Murphy will be held on Holy Saturday, April 19th, from 10.00am to 5.00pm in Suaimhneas, Renmore. For further information, phone: 753515.
- EASTER DUES: You will find the Easter Dues envelopes at the back of the Church. Please put them to the uses for which they were originally intended. Bear in mind that if you are paying your Dues in the parish of your domicile, you are not expected to pay them here.
AS I WAS SAYING...
As many of you know, we prepared for Easter this year with four 'Lenten Sessions' on the enormous topic of 'Sin & Salvation'. Each session lasted for one hour and forty five minutes. We explored the different ways in which sin had been preached, presented and understood in history. We tried to understand how Church teachings on sin deteriorated into legalism. We looked at the rather different direction which contemporary moral theology has taken, and its central concerns. On average, over thirty people attended each session. The numbers attending more than justified the energy expended! Thirty minutes each night was devoted to group discussion. In these smaller, more informal groups, the participants had an opportunity to struggle with the information and ideas presented in the more formal plenary session. The general consensus at the end was that the exercise was really worthwhile in that it addressed a serious 'gap' in the experience of contemporary Irish Catholics. That 'lacuna' or gap is simply not being addressed anywhere in our Sunday sermons are anywhere else.
What is this gap? How did it come about? How can it be addressed? The identification of the gap will very much depend upon who is lined up in the 'Identification Parade' and who is pointing the finger! How often have we heard priests, bishops (and sometimes parents) complaining that 'the sense of sin has disappeared' from the lives of contemporary Irish Catholics. As evidence in support of their pessimistic diagnosis, they will point to a few obvious features of Irish Catholicism as practised today. They will point first of all to the virtual collapse of Confession as it was traditionally practised. In addition, they will draw attention of a closely related development: the great numbers who take Holy Communion at weddings and funerals without feeling it necessary to avail of Confessions beforehand. They will contend that these developments provide irrefutable evidence of the 'death of any real sense of sin'.
If this is an accurate interpretation of the situation, then the remedy is surely obvious: feed the offenders on a strong diet of guilt and sin! Alert them to the all-pervasiveness of evil in their lives and in the world at large! Point to the immanent danger of hell fire and eternal damnation. That will quickly smoke them out of their dens of iniquity with their hands raised above their heads and the white flag of surrender flying meekly!
Even if the above scenario were possible, it would hardly be desirable. Because there is an alternative interpretation. Irish Catholics have woken up. Much of what passed for Catholic morality in the past has been exposed as infantile legalism: exposed not by clerical scandals or ecclesiastical arrogance, but by the introduction of Second and Third level education to the general population. Education provided our people with the language and the concepts for critical enquiry. They asked questions. They demanded answers. When satisfactory answers were not forthcoming, they answered their own questions. This resulted in the evolution of the 'mature conscience'.
So, despite clerical fears, people have not lost the 'sense of sin'; they've simply gained a sense of perspective. But what they HAVE lost is the tendency to equate morality with 'infantile obedience'. People are taking responsibility for their own lives. This surely is the essence of mature Catholic morality. This is to be encouraged rather than criticised! Well done!
-Dick Lyng.
HOLY WEEK AND EASTER PROGRAMME
CONFESSIONS: Thursday: 11.00-12.30; 4.00-6.00 Friday: 11.00-12.00 ; 6.30-8.00 Saturday: 11.00-1.00; 2.30-3.30; 5.00-6.00 PENITENTIAL SERVICES: Wednesday: 8.00 Saturday: 4.00 EASTER SERVICES: Holy Thursday: 8.00: Mass of the Lord's Supper 9.00-11.00: Eucharistic Adoration Good Friday: 12.00: Stations of the Cross. 3.00: The Lord's Passion. 8.00: Meditation in Music & Poetry. Holy Saturday: 9.00: Easter Vigil. Easter Sunday: Usual Sunday programme.
HELPING HANDS
As you may conclude from the above programme, this will be quite a busy week around this place. So we appeal to as many of you as possible to 'come on board' and to help out in whatever capacity you wish. It need not necessarily be in a public role. There are lots of 'behind the scenes' jobs to be done. For example, all sorts of 'seasonal objects' will have to be hauled up from the basement and put in place in the Church. Paschal fires will have to be devised; vessels for holding the Easter water must be hunted down and decorated. And much more besides!
THE AMNESTY
We call your attention in particular to the two Penitential Services (Amnesties) on Spy Wednesday evening at 8.00 and on Holy Saturday afternoon at 4.00. This type of Service attempts to stress the social dimension of sin (as well as the personal) and to place in the context of the Christian community. The Service lasts for about 35 minutes.
Keep in mind also the Reflective Service at 8.00 on Good Friday night. The Galway Gospel Choir will provide the 'Scriptural' hymns and these will be interspersed with appropriate readings and poetry. 'Suffering and the Human Dilemma' will form the unifying theme of the Service.
A RUNAWAY WORLD
Human beings have always had to cope with risk, the risk of plagues, bad harvests, storms, drought, and the occasional invasion of barbarians. But these were largely external risks, beyond our control. But now we are principally at risk from what we ourselves have done, what Anthony Giddens calls 'manufactured risk': global warming, overpopulation, pollution, unstable markets, unforeseen consequences of genetic engineering. We do not know the effects of what we are now doing. We live in a runaway world. This produces profound anxiety. We Christians have no special knowledge about the future. We too are haunted by the anxiety of our contemporaries.
But in this runaway world, what Christians offer is not knowledge but wisdom, the wisdom of humanity's ultimate destination, the Kingdom of God. The globalised world is rich in knowledge. We are drowning in information, but thirsting for wisdom. Indeed such is our anxiety about the future that is easier not to think about it at all. Our offering to the world will be the wisdom of the end towards which we are called, a wisdom which liberates us from anxiety.
-Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.
THE MAN HE KILLED
'Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
'But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
'I shot him dead because -
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
'He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like - just as I -
Was out of work - had sold his traps
No other reason why.
'Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.'
-Thomas Hardy.
SEX AND CHANGE
"All is not yet rosy in the new Irish sexual garden. We are living in "unsettled times", with individuals moving back and forth between the certainty of handed-down Catholic values and the confusion of free-market sexual attitudes. The latter have been powerfully espoused by the media, which has moved from the virtual sexual silence of the 1960s to the saturation of the 1990s."
-Andy Pollock in The Irish Times.
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