Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil) Martin & Kathleen Coleman, (Anniv).
11.00: Bridget & William Mulkerrins; Margaret Conneely (late of Merchant's Road), (Anniv).
6.30: Cait Costello, (recently deceased).

As I Was Saying...

Every age (and every society) has its pariahs, individuals who seem to embody in their own person all that is despised by the 'common man and woman.' There is no doubt but that the pariahs of our own day are sex offenders and child abusers. They really are despised. When imprisoned, they must be placed on a 24 hour watch for their own safety. Even when they have served their time and paid their debt to society for their crimes, they are normally hunted down and chased out of the community by a mindless lynch-mob.

You can be convicted of a heinous murder, serve your time in prison, and, on release, you will be permitted to live out the remainder of your life in peace. But, in the case of sex offenders and child abusers in particular, normal rules do not apply. As far as society is concerned, it is 'open season' on them forever!

How does the Church deal with child abusers? As Christians, what should our attitude be to those men who have 'done the crime and served the time'? The situation is almost impossible. Christian communities are in the business of welcoming outcasts. Jesus, we frequently preach from the pulpit, mixed with the most despised and disreputable. He offered new beginnings to those that everyone else had written off, gave positions of responsibility to some who had proved proved highly unreliable. At the same time, he placed great value on children, presented them as models of how to relate to God, issued the sternest of warnings to anyone tempted to harm them.

How then, do we properly care for those who depend on us to keep them safe, and also stay faithful to the spirit of the Christ to whom there are no hopeless cases?

While public attention has justifiably focused on high profile scandals involving church personnel, child protection programmes have been quietly woven into the life of every parish. This is the one positive by-product of the whole child abuse disaster. With all kinds of practical guidance - from what activities are inappropriate to how you organise the transport - they insist that the child's safety is the absolute priority. That includes keeping some people out: not out of the church, but out of potentially harmful contact with the children. Which might indeed seem to some a denial of the possibility that people can change. But, as one set of guidelines puts it: "We have the right to take the adventurous risk of forgiveness when we ourselves will bear the cost of its failure. We do not have the right to take such risks when the pain will be borne not by ourselves, but by those who are vulnerable and for whom the potential cost is incalculable."

Following the teachings of Jesus, the Church must insist on God's love for every human being, offenders included. This may involve standing between the hysterical lynch-mob and the hunted offender. The sex offender must be as free as the rest of us to acknowledge weakness and failure, and to be assured of mercy and acceptance. But he must also accept that he does have a particular criminal predisposition which, if unsupervised, remains lethal. In the interests of the vulnerable, he must accept sensible but strict social constraints. He might, of course, insist that he was never guilty. In that case, unfortunately, the problem appears intractable. Life can be very untidy.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Some Interest

Cardinal Error in Polish Church

(It probably never happened before: a newly appointed Archbishop announced his resignation at his Installation Mass. The Archbishop of Warsaw had, apparently, worked with the Secret Police under Communism in Poland. A slightly amended version of this article appeared in the most recent 'Tablet'!)

This time, at least it was not about sex. That is almost the only comforting aspect of this fiasco over the appointment of a new Archbishop of Warsaw. The dramatic lastminute withdrawal of Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus has damaged the reputation of Pope Benedict, who at best acted in good faith on bad advice, at worst ignored all the warning signs he should have seen.

Archbishop Wielgus had been less than totally frank about his involvement with the SB, the Polish secret police under Communism. The exact nature of that involvement is still unclear, but his lack of candour was itself a sufficient disqualification. He asked to be forgiven, but had no right then to assume that he had been. So lack of humility seems also to be an issue.

The crisis has further divided the Church in Poland, already split between conservatives and not-so-conservatives (actual progressives, at least among the leadership, are scarce). It has made the Catholic Church look foolish and badly run, with decisions made on the basis of preconceived assumptions rather than on the facts. The Vatican was trying to micro-manage a local Church instead of relying on the judgement of those on the ground with better knowledge. Head office does not always know best.

This bishop was already controversial when his name emerged to succeed Cardinal Glemp. Pope Benedict liked the look of him and decided to back his man, regardless. But it is almost impossible for outsiders - even a Pope - to know the local scene.

Context is everything. The struggle in the hearts and minds of the Polish people, between their faith and the externally imposed Marxist creed, has left deep scars. Who can you trust in a climate polluted by deception and betrayal? The Vatican was in no position to judge how prepared the Poles themselves were to excuse those who collaborated with the security services under Communism. They were in no position to say whether Archbishop Wielgus could ever be trusted and respected as a national leader. But any reasonable observer must have had doubts long before the Vatican was continuing to insist that there was no problem and the trouble was all down to a mischievous media campaign. Where have we heard that before?

Under the Polish Pope, the steadfastness of Polish Catholicism contributed greatly to the downfall of Communism. It was an historic triumph, shared by Polish Church and Nation. The Polish hierarchy had been dealt an almost perfect hand, therefore, but then proceeded to play it arrogantly and badly, squandering its unique prestige by mistake after mistake. Its only strategy seemed to be to try to turn the clock back to 1939, to an imagined golden age of Polish Catholicism. The signs are that Archbishop Wielgus, whose strongest support came from the Church's most reactionary wing, would have continued on that course. His withdrawal therefore gives a breathing space for second thoughts. Whether this providential opportunity will be taken is another matter.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Next Thursday marks the beginning of the Annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (18-25 January). The theme for 2007 is taken from Mark 7:37 "He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak". The event will be marked with a Prayer Service on the 18th of January in Saint Columba's Chapel, NUIG at 19:30.

The Week was first introduced in 1908 by an Anglican and an Episcopalian. It was given a wider remit in the 1930s through the work of a French Roman Catholic, Paul Couturier, who did not believe that it was necessary for all Christians to become Roman Catholics. He taught that "we must pray not that others may be converted to us but that we may all be drawn closer to Christ". His vision was endorsed by Vatican II in the 1970s.

Embarrassed by Religion

A Chara,

Perhaps 90 per cent of us went to church on Christmas Day. (If we had a doubling of the normal rate of churchgoing, which is the norm in the UK, we could be close to 100 per cent). Yet in all the pages and pages and endless radio and TV chats of the "what I do at Christmas" variety I found virtually no reference to church-going.

This raises interesting questions. Are our "celebrities" by and large a bunch of heathen philistines (a real possibility, it seems to me)? Or are they embarrassed to mention church-going in an endeavour to appear whatever is the current word for fashionable? Or are editors and producers living in that new sort of world which ignores the realities of an Ireland in which the vast majority are still religious, and a somewhat less vast majority still choose freely to keep a religious dimension in their lives?

Is a kind of censorious secularism now reciprocating the censorious religious domination of 30 years ago? In a Christmas Programme not long ago RTÉ sent Bosco carolsinging. He sang Jingle Bells!

- Is mise,
Senator BRENDAN RYAN, Seanad Éireann, Dublin 2.

-(The above appeared in The Irish Times on Friday last. By the way, Senator Ryan has been known to worship at the Augustinian here in Galway on the odd Sunday.)

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