Parish Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30 Fr Dan Kelleher, (10th Anniv).
12.00 John & Margaret O' Mahoney, (Anniv).
6.30 Philip & Nuala Christie, (Anniv).

AS I WAS SAYING.....

We were bombarded this week with exam-related material. The Irish Times has five separate writers on the case, including Louise Holden reporting from an exam centre in Tripoli, Libya! In 2004, 57,074 students sat the Junior Cert, and 58,753 sat the Leaving. Over 115,000 candidates in all are involved. Obviously this level of participation in this important social ritual merits public attention. But obsessive attention leads to hysteria. Surely articles on the radio and in the newspapers on 'exam-related stress' are indulging in self-fulfilling prophesy.

This hysteria reached its climax on Thursday last with the Irish Independent carrying as its main banner headline: "Exam Tragedy Fury." The reader could be forgiven for concluding that we had another Beslan on our hands! But the sub-heading, while retaining the hysterical tone, was still strangely reassuring: "Wave of revulsion sparks probe into school bus essay in Junior Cert." So it wasn't a massacre we were dealing, merely an innocuous essay that took on retrospectively a tragic significance. (This is in no way to minimise the frightfully tragic deaths of the five young women two weeks ago.) But the newspaper concerned saw a convenient hook and gladly hung their hat on it. The newsworthiness of the item was dubious indeed.

The digressive exam stories were more bizarre still. Apparently, whole classes of students are going off to the sun at their parents' expense. And then one of the famous Nolan Sisters decided to reward her 16-year-old son with an all-expenses paid trip to an Amsterdam brothel for having completed his GCSE? (What will the reward be in the unlikely event of the unfortunate young fellow passing the exam?) Louis O'Flaherty, former secretary of the teachers union, ASTI, has some interesting points to make concerning recent developments. The main event (i.e. First Communion, or the Leaving) has been relegated to a minor component of a more general 'rite of passage':

We are dealing here with the same syndrome that has turned First Communions into a fashion parade with sun-tanned, coiffed nymphets pouting for photographers, and youngsters measuring success by the money collected. Commercialism has taken over a once-sacred event and turned it into the banal. But who cares? Why should it be any different for the secular Leaving Cert? Has the rite become more important than the event itself? In a booming economy, and with jobs for everyone, this is probably so. But, in a strange way, the rite is beginning to put more stress on parents and students than the event itself ever did.

The Leaving Cert in particular has become a ravenous vortex into which everyone is sucked annually. How about a moratorium on all related articles and programmes for a month before exams? The first ones to benefit would be the students themselves. The proposal merits consideration.

-Dick Lyng.

BY THE WAY...

LOOSEN UP!

Cardinal Ratzinger's old job as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) is American William J. Levada, former Archbishop of San Francisco. The Pope has chosen someone with a background interestingly different from his own, chief pastor of one of the world's most free-thinking (and free-living and -loving) cities. As an American, furthermore, he should have an instinctive feel for natural justice and due process.

The CDF would silence many of its critics if it learnt to slacken the reins, and not to regard every new or unusual theological idea as automatically suspect - or "relativistic", to use the term becoming fashionable under the new pontificate. Dialogue with the modern world cannot be conducted without risk, but the Holy Spirit is at work among the faithful and does not need a bodyguard. Catholic orthodoxy has a robust buoyancy of its own. Unconventional opinions are rarely as dangerous as those in authority seem to fear, and today's new thinking frequently becomes tomorrow's orthodoxy.

The challenge facing the CDF is to foster a climate in which the freedom of theological debate is respected and valued and those who put forward bad arguments are contradicted by good ones, not ordered to retract on pain of penalties. That means building up the vocation of theologian, and regarding theological speculation as a worthwhile exercise for the good of the Church, even when it asks searching questions of the Magisterium.

-from The Tablet, 11 June, 2005.

The Art of Dialogue

The greatest single need in the Church now is for a restoration of the spirit and the structures of dialogue. We have many monologues, no dialogue. The Church is like a dysfunctional family where everyone is talking, no one is listening and, consequently, tensions, problems and frustration multiply. Some of the children leave home because they can't take it any longer, but that does not solve their problem, because they take it with them. In short, we need to re-learn again and again, the art of dialogue.

-Owen O'Sullivan, OFMCap, The Silent Schism, Page 96.