Parish Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30 John Joe Conneely, Market St. (Anniv).
11.00 Richard & Jean Byrne, (Anniv)
6.30 Mary Collins, (Anniv).

CHIEF RABBI JONATHAN SACKS.....

On 27th January, 60 years ago, Russian troops entered the little Polish town of Auschwitz, and saw sights we still find it difficult to comprehend. It was their first glimpse of the final solution: the planned extermination of every Jew in Europe. It's hard to sense the sheer scale of the destruction. On 11 September 2001 history was changed by a terrorist attack in which 3,000 people died. During the Holocaust, on average 3,000 Jews were killed every day of every week for five and a half years. And not just Jews: the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, gypsies, gays, murdered because they were different; not like us.

Even now, 60 years later, it is hard to begin to conceive the scale of the tragedy, carried out by the European nation that had produced Goethe, Kant and Mozart and prided itself as the epitome of enlightened civilisation. Had Germany not been defeated, each of the 11 million Jews in Europe would have been murdered. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was decided, more than half of the participants had doctorates. So much for the power of civilisation to civilise!

'Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it!' In the tribal genocide in Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus with machetes in the space of 100 days! Apart from genocide, the Holocaust and Rwanda had two things in common. First, they were preceded by deliberate dehumanisation: the Jews were deemed "vermin" or "lice"; the Tutsis were "cockroaches". In this way mass murder could be justified as a kind of sterilisation, a necessary, if painful, operation to restore a nation to its health.

Each year we weep for the victims. But at today's memorial ceremony we'll be thinking about another group: the survivors. We tend to take survival for granted. You walk through the valley of the shadow of death and you continue. But there are times when survival takes courage. After the flood, says the Bible, Noah became drunk. Looking back at the destruction of the cities of the plain, Lot's wife was turned to salt. There are sights that break the will to live. How did the people liberated from Auschwitz and the other factories of death carry on, knowing what they knew, seeing what they saw? For me getting to know Holocaust survivors has been a living tutorial in what Paul Tillich called the courage to be. For sixty years they've carried the burden of memory. The victims knew that an attempt would be made to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and their last message to the living was: remember us. We're being robbed of life; don't let us be robbed even of our death. And so the survivors have told their story, not in hate or the desire for revenge but the opposite. In Judaism we remember for the future and for life. The word zakhor, remember, appears in the bible 169 times. We hold memory as a sacred duty: because what we remember, we can avoid. What we forget, we can repeat.

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, says the Bible, so that you will always cherish freedom. Remember death so as to sanctify life. Memory is the moral tutor of mankind. Forget, and you allow other genocides to happen: in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur. The survivors kept their faith with the dead but they've also taught us, the living, that the road that begins in hate ends at the gates of hell. That is why we must never forget.

( -Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks delivered the above talk on Thursday last to mark the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz.)

EVENTS THIS WEEK

BITS & PIECES

AS I WAS SAYING.....

So, our eagerly awaited Planning Permission came through eventually. Or, to be entirely accurate, the appeal against our being granted Planning Permission by the Galway City Council on May 13th last was rejected by An Bórd Pleanála this week.

Throughout this whole episode, our Project Team (the group charged with 'driving' the project) have been scrupulous in their efforts to keep everyone informed about developments, and to insist on ACCURATE information being placed in the public domain. Towards this end, they produced the 'Project Journal' . This little journal will be published on a regular basis until such time as the church is completed. Through this Project Journal, we have attempted to meet the contemporary demand for 'accountability and transparency' . Nobody will be able to say with honesty, 'I never knew that was happening!'

While the Planning Permission was being sought, a number of misleading items appeared in the local media in connection with the project. The Project Team decided to ignore these 'distractions' . Instead, they opted to place their full confidence in the professionalism and objectivity of the planning process. Last Tuesday's decision vindicated that course of action.

However, others were not so scrupulous! The 'City Tribune' ran an article in last Friday' s edition titled 'City Church Wins Planning Battle For Revamp Work' . So far, so good! Having accurately outlined the various items covered in the planning permission, the article went on to state: "The Board did rule against plans to remove the existing altar rails and gates." Later in the article this same point is reiterated. What purported to be a direct quote from the Board's 'official' document went as follows: "It is considered that the proposed development, with the exception of the removal of the altar rails and gates, would not impact negatively on the character of the Augustinian Church..."

The Board made no such ruling! Where did that 'misinformation' originate? What cause (or whose cause?) is being served by putting this wrong information in the public domain? To whom does the 'grinding axe' belong? The necessity of a Project Journal should now be more obvious than ever. Tolle lege! Tolle lege! And keep it as an accurate record.

-Dick Lyng.

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