- The collection last Sunday was €859.00.
Events This Week
- SISTER'S 'THANK YOU': The Columban sister, Elizabeth Doyle, was thrilled with the very generous response to her talks at the Masses last Sunday. She contacted me during the week and asked me to convey her deep gratitude to you all.
- TRÓCAIRE TALK: We are making a special effort today to promote the Trócaire Lenten Campaign. The campaign will focus in a particular way on Rwanda as this is the 10th anniversary of the awful genocide there. As you will gather from the posters around the church, we are running it this year in conjunction with our own Augustinian Hunger Awareness Programme. Eithne Brennan, who works with Trócaire, will speak at the Saturday evening Mass and the Sunday morning Mass. (Unfortunately, she is unable to speak on Sunday evening). Eithne has worked with Trócaire in Rwanda, so she knows of what she speaks!
- CHILDREN'S SUNDAY LITURGY: This project was launched last week and it went very well indeed. In all, 18 children attended. I will be surprised if that number doesn't grow as Lent progresses and as the word spreads. As is to be expected, a few little creases need to be ironed out. And the children themselves are very interested and enjoyed it thoroughly, by all accounts. Thanks very much to the ladies involved.
- PATRICIAN MUSICAL SOCIETY: PMS will present 'KISS ME, KATE' in the Town Hall Theatre all this week (Sunday, 29th Feb. to Sat. March 6th) at 8.00pm nightly. For bookings, call 091-569777.
- CONGRATULATIONS: St. Patrick's National School, O'Brien's Bridge, was officially opened 50 years ago this week, by the Papal Nuncio no less! Inauspiciously, however, classes didn't begin until April 1st! The anniversary will be marked with a special Mass in the Cathedral tomorrow, Monday March 1st at 12.00.
AS I WAS SAYING...
'The Desert' is enormously important, not just for Christianity but for all four of the 'great religions': Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. Monasticism too was born in the desert. Like all great symbols, 'the Desert' is inexhaustible, embracing as it does many layers of meaning. It operates like an onion: as soon as we peels off one layer of meaning, another layer emerges. So the Desert means, simultaneously, a barren, uncultivated place, a place of suffering and testing, the home of demons and devils, a place where God is encountered, a refuge for bandits and lawbreakers, a refuge from the world and a place for prayer and perspective. 'The Desert' embraces all of these concepts, and many more besides. And, from the beginning, Judaism and Christianity regarded it as central to the 'divine encounter'. For example, John the Baptist, Jesus and St. Paul all deliberately withdrew to the desert at critical points in their lives. All three found it necessary 'to withdraw to the margins'.
So this marginal experience, this withdrawal, this need 'to step back', seems to be part and parcel of the Christian journey to God. There are many groups in the Church today who are enduring, not necessarily through their own choice, the 'desert experience'. Some, like people in second unions, have the desert experience forced upon them. But I have also met people who, of their own free will, found it necessary 'to leave the Church', to withdraw to the margins, to shun the sacraments. (I will return to this interesting phrase 'to leave the Church' later). They felt so strongly about some particular issue that they felt that their continued presence 'within the Church' compromised their integrity. Enforced conformity to ideas and ideals which are not sincerely believed in or freely accepted is the prelude to a climate of mental dishonesty: one thing is said in private and another in public. In this climate, people are expected to promote or defend a position, not because they believe it to be true, but because it has been declared to be the 'official position'. The quest for integrity can force many to the margins.
Many of our young people, who are so conspicuous by their absence, may not have made such a deliberate choice. But is it necessary to view their absence from our churches in such a consistently negative way? Perhaps it is a good thing that they withdraw to the 'churchless desert' for a time? That they reflect 'from without'? That they suffer the experienced absence of a caring community? (Ah! There's the rub! Do they?) Perhaps this period of 'pruning purification' is essential if their faith is to develop adequately? After all, how many adults are still walking around with the God of infancy still cradled between their ears?
Back now to the notion of 'leaving the church'. The Church is a broader reality than we are often led to believe. And it surely must include those who are enduring the 'desert experience'. People do not 'leave the Church'; rather, they take the Church with them. For far too many, 'the Church' is equated with the hierarchical model. This is the quasi-divine pyramid: the Pope, the Cardinals, the Bishops, the priests, right down to the local church mouse! But, however hierarchically it may be governed, the Church is not a pyramid where God only speaks to the apex and the base eventually gets the message! The Church is a community where God communicates with every member who is prepared to listen, and where every conviction is vital for the health of the whole body. Those in the desert are as central to the Church as is the Pope.
-Dick Lyng.
TABLE D'HÔTE CATHOLICISM
Edward Schillebeeckx, in his book, Church: the Human Story of God, notes how non-believers 'often tell Catholics that if they have criticisms of the Church, the Pope and other Church leaders, they ought to leave their Church' . There are, as he has good reason to know, fellow Catholics who speak in the same way. The exhortation to leave the Church is often supported by some such analogy as conformity to the rules of a club. Clearly, and not surprisingly, Schillebeeckx does not think much of the quality of the argument or of the effectiveness of the club analogy, which he dismisses as 'a downright category mistake' . More significantly he goes on to point out that a Church, unlike a club, is an 'interpretative community'.
The same stricture might be passed on the phrase 'a la carte Catholicism' - an analogy which is even cruder than that of the club. It likens Church membership to the ordering of a meal in a restaurant. One eats a la carte where one is free to choose from the assorted items on a menu. The alternative, of course, is to opt for the table d'hôte, i.e. the set menu in which all the culinary decisions are made by the management. People who use the a la carte analogy should be pressed to give their version of the table d'hôte which they wish to impose on others, and why they think the management should have the power to impose it. After all, one phrase implies the other.
In short, the interpretative character not merely of faith and Church membership but of all human thought-processes is simply ignored: there is only one way of understanding Church doctrines and laws - the interpretation of 'the Church' . This view invokes the old artificial contrast between 'private' interpretation and 'the Church's' interpretation.
As so often, everything turns on what is meant by 'Church' . In the minds of those who have recourse to the a la carte analogy, 'Church' means authority and the governmental structures through which authority operates. This, however, is only one, and by no means the most important, way of understanding Church.
-Gabriel Daly, OSA.
TRÓCAIRE IN RWANDA
The child on this years Trócaire box, Josienne (12) hails from Rwanda. She is one of the survivors of 1994 when an estimated one million people perished during 100 days of genocide. This extermination campaign, sparked off on April 7th, was aimed at annihilating the Tutsis- one of three tribal groups in Rwanda. Moderate members of the Hutu majority were also targeted in a killing spree which was organised by the extremist Hutu regime. Josienne's father and her three siblings were murdered in a Church during the genocide. She and the remaining members of her family - her mother and two brothers - survived because neighbours hid them from the killers. Her family is one of thousands to benefit from Trócaire's development programme in Rwanda.
Trócaire responded to the 1994 crisis in Rwanda and has implemented an extensive range of rehabilitation and development activities since then. Its work is co-ordinated from its Country Office in the capital Kigali.
Since 1994, Trócaire has constructed 233 new homes for genocide survivors and has rehabilitated and re-constructed 29 primary schools. Trócaire has also rehabilitated and provided teacher training for 15 secondary and technical schools. A unique Trauma Counselling Service was set up to support some of the psychologically damaged people. Resources were invested in rebuilding the health care services and the decimated Justice system to allow the trials of genocide suspects to proceed. Agricultural training was organised for widows and child headed households as well as income generation programmes. Peace building programmes have also received significant funding.
Today, 120,000 people are still in prison awaiting trial. Some 40% of the people of Rwanda are living in poverty. An estimated three out of four children experienced a violent episode during the genocide. Today, 70% of the population is under the age of 14 years.
-Trócaire chairman, Bishop John Kirby
The Storm
You have been too long absent;
we have been drifting on a violent ocean
while our children dig our hearts out
with their indifferent, probing, fingernails;
you have been too long silent; we have thought
to go down into the wilderness of sand
to take our place among the beasts
and unsouled things, to know at least
their peace; I drift on a violent ocean,
the one I love drifts with me, my eyes
are turned on her and hers on me until -
at times - I have been willing to believe
absence and silence are the oars to grasp
till you come, chiding, striding on the waters.
-John F. Deane.
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