Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Mary & Michael Joyce, (Anniv).
11.00: Christy & May Deacy, (Anniv).
6.30: Sean Fahy, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

The Sex Education (RSE) programme was introduced to Secondary Schools here in 1995. It aims to help young people to develop a healthy attitude towards their own sexuality. And not before time, most reasonable people will add.

However, 11 per cent of schools do not teach RSE in first and second years, increasing to 20 per cent by third year, 30 per cent in the first year of the Leaving Certificate cycle and 33 per cent by the final year. This poor uptake disappointed many.

Olwyn Enright, FG spokesperson on Education, mused that we are all 'failing young people'. She said all teenagers at school level need comprehensive sex education. "They need to be aware of how their bodies work, so that they can understand the risk of pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections." I pointed this out to a teacher directly involved this week. Her reply was sanguine: 'Don't try to teach granny how to suck eggs!'

Some of you may remember a novel by an English writer, David Lodge in the 1970's called 'How Far Can You Go?' It is a humorous exploration of the dilemma facing hormone-charged young Catholics in their early University years.

At the beginning we meet a group of young male and female students and we follow them to middle age as they experiment with sex, get married, get pregnant, and find their own ways of coming to terms with their consciences. Two of them opt out in different ways: Miles, the aesthete and intellectual, discovers he is homosexual, and Ruth becomes a nun. The others eventually give up the struggle and take the Pill, often with the tacit approval of their parish priest. But, although the contraceptive question is central to the plot, it is set in the wider context of the changes in the Catholic Church which, in the second half of the twentieth century, transformed it almost out of recognition from what it had been up to then. Notable among these changes is loss of the fear of damnation: Hell ceases to be real for the characters by the end of the book. But not death, of course; that becomes more real to them as they age, as it does to all of us.

What would today's young people make of this book? I suspect they would find it incomprehensible. A study last year of 7,500 Irish people between 18-64 found that 6 per cent of them think premarital sex is always wrong, compared to 71 per cent in 1973. It found that 64 per cent now regard abortion as acceptable. More than 90 per cent believe emergency contraception should be available here, with 52 per cent of men and 42 per cent of women believing it should be available without prescription.

Is there any connection between these dramatically changed attitudes and the finding in the same survey that the incidence of sexually transmitted infections has also increased dramatically, by 243 per cent between 1998 and 2003? Yet condoms have been available since the early 1990s.

It is easy to 'rubbish' the naive Catholic world depicted in Lodge's book. But is it not equally naive to believe that more information, or VAT-free condoms, will solve the problem? The problem is much bigger than that, I fear. And it stems from an absence of values rather than a lack of information. Information addresses our rational selves. But whoever claimed that sex was rational? The challenge facing the Church in this area is enormous.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Some Interest

Holy Week Programme:2007

Penitential Services:
Spy Wednesday: 8.00
Holy Saturday: 4.00
Traditional Confessions:
Holy Thursday: 11.00-12.30; 4.00-6.00.
Good Friday: 11.00-12.00; 6.30-8.00
Holy Saturday: 11.00-1.00; 2.30-3.30; 5.00-6.00
Easter Ceremonies:
Holy Thursday:
Mass of the Lord's Supper:8.00
New Minister of Eucharist will be commissioned
Washing of the Feet
(Fr. Niall Coghlan)
Good Friday:
Stations of the Cross: 12.00 Midday.
(Fr. Des Foley)
The Lord's Passion: 3.00
(Fr. John Whelan)
Suffering: A Christian Meditation: 8.00
Music by Mark Keane's group
(Fr. Lyng)
Holy Saturday:
Easter Vigil: 9.00.
(Fr. Dick Lyng)
Easter Sunday:
Easter Mass: 11.00 & 6.30
Easter Monday is a Public Holiday and there will be only one Mass (11.00) in St. Augustine's here. The Mass Office will be closed all day. We will send Easter Dues envelopes to all your homes.

Our Lenten Programme

Tuesday, April 3rd: We will conclude our 'Lenten Sessions' with a common celebration of the Seder Meal with the parishioners of St. Nicholas's Church of Ireland parish. The meal will be held in St. Augustine's. April 3rd is actually the night on which the Jewish People throughout the world will celebrate their Passover. Passover is an eightday long celebration. The highlight of the celebration is the ceremony of Seder performed on the first two evenings of Passover. This year (2007), Passover will begin at the sunset on Monday, April 2nd and will end at the nightfall on Tuesday, April 10th.

Why a Seder Meal? This celebration will demonstrate in a practical manner the the extent to which our Christian traditions, both Protestant and Catholic, are derived from our common Jewish origins.

Practical Considerations: Thirty-five people have already put in their names for this function. Our space is limited. We can accommodate up to fifty people at a push. It is essential that we know the numbers attending well in advance. So we have fixed a deadline in stone! It is: 8.00 on Tuesday night, March 27th. So, if you intend to join us for the Seder Meal on the 3rd of April, give your name either to Patrick Towers or to Dick Lyng by that date.

Sans Teeth...

The last Archbishop of Narbonne (France), Arthur Richard Dillon, was finally laid to rest in his cathedral last week amid great pomp, after an exile of more than 200 years. His remains were returned to France after they were found in London in 2004 during excavations at the St Pancras churchyard where the new terminus for the Channel Tunnel is being built. They included a set of finely wrought gold and porcelain dentures - a French innovation of the time.

Dillon, the son of an Irish Jacobite officer, was born in France in 1721 and became Archbishop of Narbonne, and Primate of France in 1763. After the French Revolution, he refused to swear allegiance to the Republic and fled to London where he died in 1806. The archdiocese disappeared with his departure. The enlightened prelate presided over all manner of public works, such as the construction of canals, dykes, roads, bridges and harbours.

Fittingly, his coffin was placed on a barge which sailed in state along the Canal de la Robine - one of the canals he had had built - to Narbonne, where it was then conveyed, in colourful procession along medieval streets, to the cathedral.

Alas, Archbishop Dillon was reburied without his splendid dentures. They were exhibited in the Museum of London for World Smile Day in 2006 and now form part of a private collection.

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