Masses Today

6.30: Seán Berry, (RIP)
11.00: Petie Conneely, Merchant's Rd (1st Anniv)
6.30: Seán Cooke, (Anniv)

AS I WAS SAYING...

"History was written on the back of a horse" according to the proverb. But history was often unwritten too from that precarious position, and fortunes unmade! Yet we can never seem to get enough of it.

This week will again see many of us up there at Ballybrit, pressing notes into the bulging bags of the equally bulging Bookies. A mere six minutes later will find us repeating an equally familiar ritual: the torn ticket thrown to the winds for fear of mixing beaten dockets with future winners!

Kipling got it just about right in his poem on human folly:

As it will be in the future,
it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain
since Social Progress began:
That the Dog returns to his Vomit
and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger
goes wobbling back to the Fire! ...

However, it would be quite wrong to blame the animal for human folly. In fact, as we shall soon see, the horse has done more for the human race than vice versa. The domestication of horses had a profound impact on our way of life. Suddenly, travel beyond the limits of one's own two legs became possible. People now began to explore, and to conquer. The dog may be man's best friend but it was the horse that built civilisation!

Most human activities can be categorised as war, travel, work, or leisure. The horse has been indispensable in all four. The emergence of the horse-drawn chariot (about 1800 B.C.) was as terrifying to contemporaries as was the atomic bomb to the people of the 1940s. Yet another 800 years elapsed before man figured out that a mounted horse could become a formidable fighting force. There is nothing obvious about horseback riding. Man and horse are not naturally made for each other, as a good many jockeys will discover this week! Reins, leg aids, the type of seat, all these had to be invented, as did the equipment. In reality, it was not until the discovery of the stirrup in the 8th century that the full potential of the animal as a war-horse was realised. The next technological invention was the horse collar, an import from China. This enabled farmers to take advantage of the horse's great speed and strength. The consequences were enormous. Massive tracts of land now fell under the plough for the first time, resulting in a population explosion around 1000 A.D.

As soon as humans learned to ride, they realised they could chase bigger and better game for the table or for sport. Persians and Greeks were the first to stage horse races. Both peoples took an active interest in horsemanship as a discipline. The Greek historian Xenophon (430 B.C.) left us a treatise named The Art of Horsemanship, the oldest surviving text of its kind. The instructions contained there could be profitably read by the jockeys at Ballybrit this week. So, as you cheerfully pump your money into the bookie's bag, console yourself with the sure knowledge that the horse owes you nothing!

-Dick Lyng.

EVENTS THIS WEEK AND LAST

IN PRAISE OF THE HORSE

"Are you the one who makes the horse so brave?
And covers his neck with flowing mane?
Do you make him leap like a grasshopper?
His haughty neighing spreads terror.
Exultantly he paws the soil of the valley,
and rushes the fences with all his strength.
He laughs at fear; he is afraid of nothing,
He recoils before no sword.
On his back the quiver rattles,
The flashing spear and javelin.
Trembling with impatience, he eats up the miles;
When the trumpet sounds, there is no holding him.
At each trumpet blast he neighs exultantly.
He scents the battle from afar,
the thundering of the commanders and the war cry."

-(Book of Job, 39:19-25)

The Critic as Carnivore

What would all the critics do
if all the poets died?
Alexandria could not hold
all the volumes they' d write.

What would all the critics
do if poets were not born?
Kindergarten could not hold
its hundred, thousandth moron.

The critic is a sporting man,
he dabbles some in verse:
'If they can do it, so can I!'
- except he does it worse.

Critic wanted: please apply
with hate as your credential;
competence is not required
but hindsight is essential.

-Michael Hartnett

A MIXED BAG

A National Pastoral Plan for Ireland is needed now more urgently than ever. However, before we embark on any long-term plan, we would do well to remind ourselves that we belong to a divided Church. Unless we learn to deal seriously with our differences, the future will hold no more promise than the past.

Perhaps 'divided' is too strong a word. But we are certainly no longer dealing with the old Roman Catholic monolith of the past. In fact there are several - perhaps as many as seven? - constituencies or churches that would identify themselves as 'Catholic' . They have emerged from the turmoil of the past thirty years.

Here is a possible categorisation:
  1. The Enthusiasts: people who find deep meaning and satisfaction in a variety of devotional practices centred on the Holy Spirit, Divine Mercy, Our Lady, Padre Pio and so on.
  2. The Religious Right: people with a great commitment to preserving or restoring what they consider to be basic Christian/Catholic values in our society.
  3. The Institutionists: people who are convinced that the Church can only be at its best in a tightly-disciplined, hierarchically-ruled organisation.
  4. The Middle-of-the-Road: people who go to Sunday Mass, say a few prayers and are generally supportive of Church teaching and practice.
  5. The Liberationists: people who are searching for alternative ways of being Church, based on action on behalf of justice.
  6. The Indifferent: people who can take or leave the Church.
  7. The Alienated: people who have put a distance between themselves and the Church and whose attitude swings from anger to apathy and back.

Our greatest urgency now is to find people who can build bridges, who can bind these groups into a unity.

-Fr. Ray Brady (a priest of Kilmore diocese)

SECRECY

The argument put forward to justify secrecy is that the Church should not wash its dirty linen in public. But this often means that the linen does not get washed at all. The duty of the press is to publish the truth about an institution that claims to be 'an expert in humanity' . Journalists are often reproached for insisting on the negative aspects of the Church instead of singing its praises.

But, by their nature, the media deal with the extraordinary: bridges that collapse, not those that stand firm; priests who marry, not those who remain faithful to their vows; bishops who are in favour of contraception or the ordination of women, not those who toe the party line. When journalists single out a controversial phrase from a sermon, they are accused of 'distorting the truth' ; but a newspaper, which has a limited amount of space, naturally reports the remark that stands out from a text of pious platitudes.

-ALAIN WOODROW, Unfinished Journey (ed. Austen Ivereigh, London/New York, Continuum), p. 221

MEMORABLE QUOTES

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