Masses Today

6.30: John Burke, (Anniv)
11.00: Pakie & Lilly Flannery, (Anniv)
6.30: Michael O'Connor, (Anniv)





AS I WAS SAYING...

I spent the last week in Rome, for reasons of pleasure rather than serious business, unfortunately! I was in St. Peter's Square on Sunday morning last as the Holy Father created five new saints. (Lest I be accused of name-dropping, let me confess immediately that I can't now recall even one of their names!) But what did remain with me was the overwhelming concern with security everywhere around Peter's.

Every individual who walked into the square on Sunday morning was subjected to electronic screening, a massive operation by no means confined to those attending the canonisation Mass. The Pope himself, apparently, refuses to wear a bullet-proof vest under his cassock, or to cut back on his motorised tour around the square after each audience. It was a bit unnerving to think that, almost 25 years ago to the day, he had been almost fatally wounded by a man who claimed to act in the name of Islam. A lot of water (and blood, unfortunately) has flown under that bridge since then.

The intervening 25 years have witnessed a resurgence of a particularly fundamental brand of Islam. Some writer have spoken in terms of "a clash of civilisations." This theory was first put forward by the Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in an article in 1993. He argued that the Cold War had been a clash of ideologies: democratic capitalism versus communism. Future global conflicts would not be between ideologies but between cultures - or civilisations, as he called them.

Between Islam and the West he saw a whole series of struggles. The war in Bosnia, at its height when he was working on his theory, was a typical case. Kosovo would be another. In each one, the opponent to militant Islam was not just Western, but Western and Christian. So the conflict becomes not just a clash of civilisations but a clash of faiths.

It is a very simple and appealing theory. And a very dangerous one. As Huntington's critics have pointed out, the most numerous victims of a small core of Islamic extremists are in fact Islamic moderates. Terrorism against Western targets is really a by-product of this internal Muslim struggle for power. So western powers should be putting all their weight behind the moderates, not turning them into enemies.

There is another more promising approach. Though Islam and Christianity have at times been at war, it was from contact with Islam in the Middle Ages that Christian Europe renewed its knowledge of medicine, architecture, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics and so on. Thus Western, Christian, civilisation owes a great deal of its energy and inspiration to Islamic civilisation. Christianity itself was profoundly influenced by contact with Muslim teachers.

The two are still much more interdependent than Professor Huntington's theory suggests. They really do worship the same God - and the same gods. Twenty years ago young people in Iran hero-worshipped Ayatollah Khomeini, the radical Muslim revolutionary. Who is their favourite now? Believe it or not, an Englishman called David Beckham. And who is the most sturdy critic of western aggression? Pope John Paul II. It doesn't sound much like a different civilisation to me.

-Dick Lyng.




EVENTS THIS WEEK






INTO THE FUTURE

It is clear that being Church is being community. Being a Christian is not a sort of personal experience of a mixture of human kindness and generic values of goodness. It is not simply a personal philosophy of life. It is all these. Being a Christian means belonging to the Church and the Church is the successor of that community which Jesus formed around himself with the task of bringing his name and message to all parts of the world and to every future generation.

We cannot be solo Christians. We must be Christians in community, but a special community which is communion with Jesus and with one another.

Some of you may by now be thinking that I have brought an interesting text with me this evening, but the wrong one! I was not supposed to be speaking about parishes, but about clustering and grouping.

I have tried to impress on you that before we can talk about structures, we must know what the Church of tomorrow will look like. It will be the Church as it should be, or else it will be irrelevant. It will be the community where all those dimensions of Church - faith, worship and prayer, service and mission - are lived out and celebrated. In a world in which the natural community is no longer in many cases an effective vehicle for the transmission of the faith, we will have to form our own communities.

When we speak of basic Christian communities we think of Latin America and Africa. Beginning today, when you think of basic Christian communities, I want you to think about Dublin. How can we in this diocese establish real communities in which faith is formed and lived, in which people pray and worship, in which the love of Jesus is practised and which reaches out to all.

I have no concrete model, because there is no one-size-fits-all model. There will be various models. No individual model, no individual spirituality, no one strategy or structure has a monopoly role in the Church. We need to be open to new models, diverse models. We may not find ourselves totally at home in some models, but others might!

This does not mean encouraging exclusiveness or sectarianism among movements or ecclesial groups. Parish must become the primary place in which these various communities will come together in communion. The parish will be a community of communities. It will be that place open to all, where all will come together, with different talents, with different charisms, with different individual God-given capacities and bring them to the one table, the one sacrifice which embraces, nourishes and saves. Christian community is a community of the committed, a community where every true talent is recognised, enhanced and blessed.

It is my experience that the parishes which have remained closed in on themselves, where there is no conversation, not even among priests, are those where the signs of tiredness are patently evident. We must find out what can be best achieved in structures below or above parish level. Parishes must be open to experiment and to welcome experiences which may be unfamiliar or are not to the current Parish Priest's liking!

-from policy statement Archbishop Martin, 20-05-04.




AUGUSTINIAN CHURCH PROJECT TEAM

We the Project Team are pleased to inform you that we have completed another phase on the project. This involved submitting a planning application for the development at the Augustinian Church & Priory, as previously communicated, which occurred on the 18th November 2003. We worked closely with the Planning Authority during this phase and consequently have satisfied the Planning Authority with the information provided which has brought this phase to a conclusion. We have now entered the next phase and will be in a position to communicate the outcome of this phase in the coming weeks.






BATTLE FOR THE HUMAN HEART

"Children appear the unintended victims of two enormous forces at large in the world. One is economic, the other technological. The ratcheting up of competitiveness in the global market place means that today's generation of parents has to work harder and longer to maintain the same standard of living as their parents. Consequently they have less time to spend with their own children. Mobility means that fewer families have relatives nearby to help with day-care, and too many families live in neighbourhoods where they are afraid to let their play outside unsupervised.

So today's children spend much time on their own. One way they fill that time amounts to an unprecedented experiment with the world's youth: never before in human history have so many children spend to much time staring at a video monitor. Whatever is on that monitor, it does mean they are not out playing with other children. And the way we have passed on social and emotional skills is in life: from our parents, relatives, neighbours and peers. This transfer of basic life skills simply does not happen as well as it used to."

-From "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman.
Home