Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Philip Carberry, (Anniv).
11.00: Thomas Talbot, (Anniv).
6.30: Vera Leoffler, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

How can it be that the lives of dozens of young students were suddenly cut short by a gunman on a university campus? It's a tragic obscenity. The footage of the massacre brought to mind Edvard Munch's famous painting, "The Scream". The painter had said of the genesis of his masterpiece, "I stood trembling with fear as I sensed an endless scream passing through nature." The picture portrays that scream and we saw it again on the faces of some of the survivors as they were later interviewed on TV. As one of them relived the horror on camera she might have been Munch's model.

In any massacre, there are always elements of the irrational. The most immediate question for many will be why it happened. And I doubt whether the video posted to the media by the killer, Cho Seung-Hui, will be of much help. A long time ago the sociologist Emile Durkheim discovered that suicide notes do not always reveal the true motive, but may often be a distraction.

It would be a pity, however, if it were the irrationality of Cho Seung-Hui which remained the only mystery. There is another which deserves to be celebrated as much as the gunman deserves to be condemned. When we talk of someone 'getting in the way', we normally have in mind a person's obstructiveness, not their heroism.

But presumption of nuisance cannot be levelled against Liviu Librescu, also of Virginia Tech, not a student but a professor. He and his family immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1978. They moved to Virginia in 1986 for his sabbatical, and they never went back. A survivor of the holocaust, he became a leading aeronautics academic in the USA.

He was teaching when disaster struck. He told his students to jump out of the window, while he threw himself in the path of the attacker. He, a man of 76, got in the way of a killer less than a third of his age whom other lecturers feared.

Mr Librescu was a Jew who died confronting someone not of his faith and in defence of students who did not all share his religion. His actions contradict the insidious assumption that Jews are essentially protective of their own kind.

One hopes that Mr Librescu will remain, for many who hear his story, as an exemplar of that truth which a first century Jew once uttered: "Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends."

The United States, it seems to me, has spawned a culture that gauchely celebrates those who ruthlessly kick obstructions out of the way to get to the top. A by-product of this process has been their infamous 'gun-culture'. Is it too much to hope that the example of this one brave man might encourage others to get in the way of whatever threatens humanity? Or to hope that, for every one Cho Seung-Hui, there are ten Liviu Librescus? In the interests of humanity, may this brave man's name be cherished long after the name Cho Seung-Hui is forgotten.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Some Interest

Good Counsel Triduum

Begins on Monday, April 23 Rosary, Sermon & Benediction Each Evening at 7.30

Preacher: Des Foley, OSA

Mass of the Feast on Thursday, April 26th at 11:00

The explosion at Windscale

Houses we stinted ourselves to buy,
Gardens carefully tended,
Fences dividing up our patches of permanence
Are all made useless.

The bread we eat poisons us,
We drink contamination from our taps,
Our hoarded wines
Are full-bodied and toxic.

Our rivermouths are blocked
To halt migrating smolt.
Our visitors move in awkward oversuits
Like travellers on the deserts of the moon.

The peoples of the world patrol our seas
So no unsuspecting stranger wanders near.

-Padraigh J. Daly.

Gun Law

It is almost too easy to hold American gun law responsible for American gun crime. The ready availability of firearms is undoubtedly one of the reasons why a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed more than 30 university members - fellow students and academic staff - before turning his weapon on himself. But it also has to be noted that the pro-gun lobby is saying that if more students carried guns, he could have been stopped sooner. Indeed, selfprotection is the most common reason why Americans buy guns in the first place.

The national frame of values encourages an individualism, even atomisation, within American society that may relate to the Puritan origins of the first colonial settlements.

Some American commentators speak of a streak of paranoia in the national personality, and a tendency to suspect conspiracies in high places. Guns are no less prevalent in the hands of ordinary people in peace-loving Canada and law-abiding Switzerland, but gun crime is low in both places. But neither the Swiss nor the Canadians have a national culture that emphasises the sense of individual competitiveness, of "each against the whole", that characterises America, nor a film industry that glamorises gun violence.

-(from The Tablet, 20.04.2007)

EASTER LITURGY MEETING

Holy Week was marked by great activity here in the house and in the Church itself. We had eight functions in the Church within the space of five days! Invariably, we find ourselves every Holy Week asking one another, 'Does anyone remember what happened last year?' or, 'How did this part go last year?' Even from this relatively recent perspective, its all a bit of a blur!

On Tuesday night last we decided at our meeting that we should really get together and have a review of our Holy Week ceremonies while we are still in a position to remember what happened. So we will gather on Wednesday week next, May 2nd at 8.00pm to review the way Holy Week was marked in the Augustinian this year.

This meeting is open to all who attended the ceremonies. We would of course be particularly interested in hearing from those who were themselves involved in any way whatsoever, be it in preparation or execution. This is an 'Open Meeting' where all will be welcome. I will remind you again of this next weekend.

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