Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Thomas & Josephine McNamara (Lombard St.).
11.00: Rory Kavanagh, Colm Ferguson, and Maureen Loughnane, (Anniv).
6.30: Laura Carr, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

Twenty years ago this weekend, in November 1987, Ireland was shaken by one of the worst atrocities of the 30-years war. (It would be overshadowed later by Omagh). On Remembrance Sunday, the IRA exploded a 'no-warning' bomb at the cenotaph in Enniskillen while people were gathering to honour their relatives who died in the two World Wars. Eleven people were killed that day, crushed under rubble. A 12th victim, Ronnie Hill, went into a coma two days later. He died without ever regaining consciousness, in December 2000.

The Enniskillen bomb is remembered as one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, but it is also remembered for the forgiving fortitude of one man, Gordon Wilson. His daughter, Maria, lost her life in the blast. In an interview with the BBC, Wilson described with anguish his last conversation with his daughter: "She held my hand tightly, and said, 'Daddy, I love you very much.' Those were the last words I ever heard her say."

To the astonishment of listeners, Wilson went on to add, "But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. She was a great wee lassie. She loved her profession. She's dead. She's in heaven and we shall meet again. I will pray for these men tonight and every night." As historian Jonathan Bardon remarked at the time, "No words in more than twenty-five years of violence in Northern Ireland had such a powerful, emotional impact."

David Bolton, a local social worker, believes that these words saved lives. "It was a very dangerous moment in our history," he says. "God knows where we'd have ended up without his intervention. There was something redeeming about it." Gordon Wilson was in demand as a speaker all over the world, and he took his place in the Senate on Albert Reynold's invitation in 1993. He died suddenly in 1995.

There is no doubt but that Gordon Wilson was a brave Christian. But many of his fellow victims felt that Gordon's 'over-hasty' public gesture of forgiveness trivialised their own private grief. Trevor Armstrong, whose parents also died in the blast, certainly thought so: "It was all about Gordon Wilson and forgiveness. My parents were good Christians who never harmed anyone. I don't forgive the IRA."

Nor does Jim Dixon, who survived the bomb with horrific injuries. "My skull was shattered," he says. "The pain is sometimes unbearable. Like petrol on my eyes. The doctors can do nothing for me." His wife, Anna, was beside him when the bomb exploded. "I was screaming out to God, to no avail," she says. To forgive the IRA would be to go against God. "God never forgave an evil man," says Jim Dixon. "Only a repentant one."

The guns may be silent. But the victims must be heard.

Calls for forgiveness must always respect the great pain endured by all the victims. Gordon Wilson was a great man. But his greatness may have enabled the pain of lesser people to be ignored. That, I am sure, was never his intention. In remembering Enniskillen, we are turning over a stone rather than drawing a veil. Authentic reconciliation will never be purchased at the expense of truth.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Great Interest

John Paul 2: A Brief Assessment

Pope John Paul II will be remembered for his service as a public witness who, by the strength of his personality and intellect - and the scope of his office - was able to command the world's attention. Simply by traveling, as pope, he reinforced the concept that Catholicism is a church of the world, both in breadth and, increasingly, in orientation.

He worked tirelessly to proclaim the truth about human freedom, the common good, and the nature of the human person, and his genuine pastoral stature often carried the day, even when the specifics of this "truth" were questioned. While Vatican watchers will observe that his papacy was a "referendum" on Vatican II (and it was), for rank-and-file Catholics, the spotlight was less on the church in the modern world as a source of "joy and hope" than on John Paul II himself as a media celebrity. In the end, this actor-turned-pope didn't need to render a verdict on Vatican II - he simply upstaged it.

The gift of this papacy has been its public face: the stadium Masses, the youth gatherings, and the worldwide attention for its message. Of course, popular acclaim did not automatically translate into popular conversion: it wasn't hard to find dissent from the church's moral teachings among the crowds shouting "John Paul II, we love you!" Yet the spiritual power of this man was undeniable, evidenced by a genuine engagement with papal teaching on the level of the person, a flowering of lay groups (generally conservative), and, in many quarters, a renewed appreciation of traditional forms of piety.

Notice, though, that this renewal often followed a wheel-and-spokes pattern, a structure that connects the individual believer to a powerful central individual, but one that does little to stabilize the structure in a threedimensional way. The spokes have little relationship with each other. A crowd, even a euphoric and adulating one, is still not community. And 'Church' is primarily about the business of building community, oriented towards God.

-Nancy A. Dallavalle

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