Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

11.00: Bernard & Elizabeth Coyne; (Anniv).
6.30: Michael & Una Beatty, (Anniv).

AS I WAS SAYING.....

Twenty six years ago this week, Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, was shot dead at the altar of a hospital chapel. One week before his death he had promised history that life, not death, would have the last word. "I do not believe in death without resurrection," he said. "If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people." With his obvious premonition of his own impending death, and his unflinching confidence in resurrection, Romero is the exemplary 'Easter Saint', as Bishop Eamon Casey called him at the time. Days before his murder he told a reporter, "You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish."

1980 the war claimed the lives of 3,000 per month, with cadavers clogging the streams, and tortured bodies thrown in garbage dumps and the streets of the capital weekly. Romero was fully aware of what risks he was running; for some years, he had denounced the massive social injustices and the brutal intimidation practised by the government. He knew the efficiency of the death squads he had so frequently castigated from his pulpit. Oscar Romero gave his last homily on March 24. Moments before a sharpshooter felled him, reflecting on scripture, he said, "One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives." The homily, however, that sealed his fate took place the day before when he took the terrifying step of publicly confronting the military.

On March 23 Romero walked into the fire. He openly challenged an army of peasants: "Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God . . . " Romero's murder was a savage warning. Even some who attended Romero's funeral were shot down in front of the cathedral by army sharpshooters on rooftops. What endures yet is Romero's promise.

The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history. In what Jose Marti called the "hour of the furnaces," Oscar Romero, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, Dom Helder Camara, Maura Clark, Dorothy Kazel, Ita Ford, Jeann Donovan, and Ella Baker accompanied those who were in the sights of the men with guns: pillars of fire guiding their people through a very dark night. Because of their witness, we confidently honour the Easter Candle:

Accept our Easter Candle,
A flame divided but undimmed
A pillar of fire that glows to the honour of God.
May the Morning Star which never sets
Find these flames still burning.

These martyrs burned brightly precisely because they all shared an unquenchable faith in the resurrection of the Crucified God. May these stars never set in our minds. Happy Easter!

-Dick Lyng

Items of Interest

The Day that the Lord has made...

It has been said that the Gospels do not explain the Resurrection but rather that the Resurrection explains the Gospels. The Resurrection is not an additional and optional extra to the Christian faith: it is the Christian faith.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazis and executed in 1945. Shortly before his execution, he gave his fellow prisoners an address based on words from the First Epistle of Peter: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish."

In that scene of utter human hopelessness and despair, this brave condemned man acknowledged that while hope was beyond him it was available from and given by God himself. People understandably have difficulty with such certainty, but ultimately it depends upon our understanding of God.

Some people are even tempted to live the lie that they are gods. They place themselves at the centre of the universe and think that if they cannot do something or understand something, it cannot be. God, if he has a place at all, is a Sunday interest or hobby for those who like that sort of thing; he is no more than one of our ideas, powerless. If that were the case, then there would be little hope of any kind for the human enterprise.

That sense of hopelessness is there initially in the Easter Gospel. One can feel the pain and the utter despair-of Mary: "They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb and we don't know where they have put him!" As events unfold, the fact of the Resurrection is slowly and reluctantly accepted. Jesus is alive and is seen and heard. This is not a speculation; it is the discovery of a reality with huge significance for all of us. In all our minds there is this question: at the end of all ends, what awaits us and those we love?

The Christian answer to that question which lies behind our whole life and meaning is this: God awaits us and we know this because of Easter. St Paul tells us that the Resurrection is a guarantee from God that, just as he raised Jesus, so he will raise us and bring us into his presence. "So we do not lose heart. We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things which are seen are transient, but the things which are unseen are eternal."

The Christian faith does not help us to escape from death or even make it easier, but it does assure us that at that moment of our greatest need the God who gave us life does not abandon us. Is this too good to be true, literally? Even the disciples of the Lord set their expectations too low. None of them had any real sense of what Jesus was undertaking. They were reluctant later on to accept the resurrection. We must not make the same mistake.

"This is the day the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it." -Psalm 118.

(Thinking Anew: Irish Times, April 15, 2006)

Galway Augustinians & 1916

As we all know now, the Easter Rising was (initially, at any rate) a minor tremor rather than an earthquake. Galway was one of the few counties, along with Dublin, Wexford, Louth, and Tyrone, which went ahead with the Rising - which took place on Easter Monday April 23 1916- despite the countermand order from Prof Eoin MacNeill.

In Co Galway up to 1,000 Volunteers went into action at the behest of Liam Mellows. He set up headquarters near Craughwell and from there launched attacks on a number of RIC barracks. Travelling by car, horse and cart and on horseback, the Volunteers arrived at Clarinbridge and Oranmore, stormed the police barracks and captured them. They were forced to retreat by the arrival of RIC reinforcements backed up by the military.

In a separate incident in Carnmore an RIC man was shot dead by a small party of rebels. Mellows retreated to Athenry. He held most of his force together until it became clear that the Rising had failed in the rest of the country. Mellows went into hiding and his followers went home. None of the rebels was killed in the fighting. One policemen died and three others were wounded.

Meanwhile, the Augustinian community of two (Fr. Travers and Fr. Frost) were conducting the annual Novena in honour of Our Lady of Good Counsel. Fr. Doyle, Priory of Orlagh, was preaching. Fr. Travers made the following entry in the Accounts Book for April, 1916: "Total debt on House and Hall is £686.7.7. Triduum preached by Fr. Doyle. During this, the Easter Week Rising took place. Still, despite all the excitement, the devotions were well attended."

But, three months later, the Accounts Book indicates a few straws in the wind. An entry for July 2nd points to the direction in which history was heading: "A Solemn Memorial Mass was offered at 11.00 today for the executed leaders of the Irish Volunteers and the Irishmen who lost their lives in the Easter Week rebellions. There was a huge congregation present." An English tourist believed that Galway city was spared due to "the promptitude of the naval, military, and police authorities, and a war vessel in the bay firing in broad daylight at two o'clock on the Wednesday afternoon upwards of half-dozen shells towards the disaffected village of Castlegar!"

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