Parish Newsletter

Masses Today

12.00: Tom & Josephine Staunton.

AS I WAS SAYING.....

You would have to be almost forty years of age now to remember a time when the IRA were not active. You would have to be in your thirties to remember that particular period when the atrocities were at their most deadly: Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, Guilford, Woolwich, Birmingham, La Mon Hotel, Mountbatten, Warrenpoint all belong to the 1970s. Of course, the 80s and the 90s saw their own share of atrocities: Brighton, Enniskillen, Warrington, the Shankill Road, Canary Warf and, perhaps most notorious of all, the Omagh bombings of August 15th 1998. 30 innocent man, women and children died that day and more than 200 were injured. In all, over 3,000 people lost their lives and scores of thousands had their lives blighted either through personal physical or psychological injuries, or else through the murder of family members. The sufferings endured (especially by the people of Northern Ireland) over the last thirty years have been truly incalculable. A whole generation was brutalised, rendered almost insensitive to death and destruction. Yeats ruminated on the same almost one hundred years ago, and he appears to have captured the truth with poetic clarity:

Hearts with one purpose alone,
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
...
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

Obvious questions will present themselves: why did it all happen? How did matters get so badly out of control? And, most difficult of all, was all the death and suffering worth it?

Through all these doubts and questions, one certainty remains: politics and politicians failed the people, particularly in northern Ireland. In the course of 50 years, no effort whatsoever was made to reconcile a fatally divided people. One section of the community was excluded from all meaningful political participation. Furthermore, they were discriminated against in two vital areas of life that affect every human being: housing and employment. It is not that the war in northern Ireland represented any great ideological cleavage between two communities: on the contrary. The Protestant working classes were as socially and politically disadvantaged as their Catholic counterparts. But the political leaders of the day, men like Brookborough, Craig and Paisley, found it to be in their own interests to stress the factors that divided them, rather than promote the factors that united them. Society paid a high price for their political blindness and folly.

All of these days and placenames mentioned above are now infamously blood-soaked milestones on the journey towards the point at which we arrived at 4.00pm on Thursday of this week. I presume 28-07-05 will, in time, be recognised as a far more benevolent landmark, and that it will be recognised and honoured as such in the years to come. "Blessed are the peacemakers" indeed.

-Dick Lyng.

By the way.......

THE FIRST 100 DAYS

So Pope Benedict XVI has completed his first 100 days in office. What have we learned about him? Well, according to the Tablet Rome correspondent, he has revealed himself very surprisingly as a man of humour. He is given to self-deprecating jokes about being German. He has a penchant for designer sunglasses and is given to wearing a white baseball hat! He smokes (an activity which now sadly dates him!), plays the piano and likes cats. In keeping with his lack of pomposity, he has had the triple tiara dropped from his papal coat of arms in favour of the mitre.

Less comfortable in crowds than his immediate predecessor, he has confirmed only one foreign visit so far, to Cologne this month for World Youth Day. He will of course be going home. This trip will be watched closely for his comments on the spiritual perils facing Europe through secularism and relativism, which so vexed him before his election. But it will be watched for more reasons that that: he will visit a Jewish synagogue during his stay in Cologne. This is, after all, a Bavarian pope, visiting Germany in the 60th anniversary year of the end of the Second World War, a war in which some 6 millions Jews were exterminated in Christian Germany. That encounter will followed with international interest.

While in Cologne he will engage in another bit of timely if astute 'fence-mending'. Only last year Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had publicly opposed the entry of Turkey into the European Union. In his view, Turkey, with its Islamic culture, has little to do with Europe, traditionally seen as Judaeo-Christian. When he travels to Cologne in August, he will host young Muslims at the archbishop's residence there.

He is, of course, no John Paul II. The 'glory days' are well and truly over. Ratzinger is no populist crowd-pleaser! He is anything but. He seems to be distinctly uncomfortable with crowds. The fact that he is 78 probably means that he will confine whatever travelling he does to the European continent. Ironically, Europe seem to be the very place where he least feels at home. The 'secularism and relativism' which he judges to be rife there depresses him deeply.

Relativist and secularist it may be, but Europe is enjoying an unprecedented period of peaceful co-existence. The fact that some of the more progressive elements did not carry an explicitly Christian flag should not sour the fruits. To genuine peacemakers, the European Union must represent an absolutely bold, imaginative step in the right direction, a pre-emptive strike again future way, if you will pardon the mixed metaphors! In addition, human rights are enshrined there as never before. Indeed the very Church over which he now rules have some very obvious lessons to learn from the perfidious secularists in that regard! But Benedict is probably right when he contends that none of this can be secure without a spiritual foundation, and Europe is living off a constantly depleted stock of moral capital.

Has he lived up to his pre-papal reputation as 'the Enforcer'? Or, as the Irish Times put it this week, has the Rottweiler turned puppy? He has certainly done nothing controversial, which means that those who rejoiced in his election as evidence of an ecclesiastical 'swing to the right' have as yet no 'hard facts' to shore up their unconfined joy. Long may it remain so! -D.L.

POLITICIANS, HEALTH AND SURVIVAL

It was the English politician, Enoch Powell who declared famously (and unfortunately, with some accuracy): "All political careers end in failure". By this I presume he meant that most politicians succumb to the temptation to stay on too long. There is a lot of truth in that. Rather than retire gracefully, most of them have found themselves dragged screaming from the cockpit when still in full flight. When Mr Haughey was under pressure near the end of his political life, he spoke nostalgically (and in public) about the Chinese system where party leaders stayed at the helm until they are in their 90! That did nothing to soothe the nerves of the 'leaders in waiting', Bertie Ahearn among them! Mr. Ahearn himself has gone on record as saying that he will go at 60! I wonder!

The acceleration of the Charles Haughey's decline in recent weeks, together Miriam O'Callaghan's 'revisionist' documentary, sent one English newspaper into a fit of sombre reflection. The object of his ruminations was 'the life and extraordinary times of Mr. Haughey.' He had been consistently in trouble for over 30 years, the article said. It went on to indulge in a bit of psycho-babble: how did Haughey survive psychologically? Perhaps his was a high-wire act, the adrenaline flowing in direct proportion to the dept of the drop? It charted some hair-raising escapades involving Haughey, which were many. These included the usual litany of scandals: Arms Trial, living the life of a lord without visible means of support, spying on political enemies, the mistress of many years, and so on. This indeed was high-wire stuff! But the writer finally opted for a more mundane explanation: Haughey was simply reckless, and he consistently avoided the consequences of that recklessness. As the Americans would say, Charlie was deeply 'in denial'. The subtext throughout was that 'this would never have happened a British Prime Minister'.

I don't know about that. In the last 50 years the door of Number 10, Downing Street has admitted a parade of boozers and crack-pots. Winston Churchill was gaga years before he resigned; Anthony Eden was addicted to tranquillisers; Macmillan was a manic depressive; Harold Wilson's behaviour threw doubts on the contents of his pipe; Edward Heath, who died recently, declined into 'the longest sulk in history'. He was by the end of his days, apparently, a lonely, tragic figure, consoled only by his two permanent bodyguards and copious draughts of alcohol in his local pub, The Boot. Maggie Thatcher positively quivered with whisky-fuelled mania during her decline. Despite the scepticism of the general public, many of those who occupy the higher political echelons seem to pay a very high personal price indeed. Yet, I was glad to see a few former 'High Flyers' bounding around Ballybrit during the week showing very few of the scars of battle (or bottle!).