Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil) Larry O'Donnell, (Anniv).
11.00: Peg Tierney, (Anniv).
6.30: Winnie Mannion, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

That Wexford tragedy was so unspeakably sad! How could it happen? We are not pre-empting a coroner's report by stating that suicide was involved. A few things need to be said about suicide: it is a sickness, a disease, a terminal illness that takes a person out of life, as surely as does any terminal illness. In essence, suicide is death through emotional cancer, emotional heart attack, emotional stroke.

That's why it's apt to say that someone is "a victim of suicide". Suicide is a desperate, if misguided, attempt to end unendurable pain at any cost, akin to throwing oneself through a window and falling to one's death because one's clothing is on fire. Suicide is an illness, not a sin.

Suicidal depression is very often at the root of the victim's dilemma. The author of Sophie's Choice, William Styron, who died two year ago, was himself the victim of suicidal depression. He provides a compelling insider's report of his personal 'descent into hell' in his 1990 book 'Darkness Visible, A Memoir of Madness':

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it. It kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. This black despair comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. ... and for the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

I'm sure that many faithful neighbours of the Flood family are torturing themselves this weekend over 'what might have been'. But part of the anatomy of the disease is precisely the pathology of distancing oneself from one's loved ones so that they cannot be present to the illness.

Besides, we're only human beings, not God. People die by accident every day. All the love in the world sometimes cannot prevent someone we love from dying. Suicide is a sickness and, like cancer, sometimes cannot be cured by any amount of love and care. Knowing this isn't an excuse to rationalize our failures, but it will give the people of Clonroche some consolation in knowing that it wasn't their neglect on a given day that led someone they loved to behave so destructively.

Beyond that, a proper understanding of suicide should help us all walk more humbly in grace and community. We must resist the bias of the strong who would make the unfair judgment that people who are sick want to be that way. The human heart is exquisitely fragile. Our judgments need to be gentle, our understanding deep, and our forgiveness wide.

-Dick Lyng

PAY-BACK TIME

O Lord, let me be a burden on my children
For long they've been a burden upon me.
May they fetch and carry, clean and scrub
And do so cheerfully.

Let them take it in turns at putting me up
Nice sunny rooms at the top of the stairs
With a walk-in bath and lift installed
At great expense.....Theirs.

Insurance against the body-blows of time
Isn't that what having children's all about?
To bring them up knowing that they owe you
And can't contract out?

What is money for but to spend on their schooling?
Designer clothes, mindless hobbies, usual stuff.
Then as soon as they're earning, off they go
Well, enough's enough.

It's been a blessing watching them develop
The parental pride we felt as each one grew.
But Lord, let me be a burden on my children
And on my children's children too.

-Roger McGough.

OFF THE SHELF: THE BIBLE TODAY

It may have outsold every other book in history and continue to top best-seller lists around the world but, according to a major survey held across nine nations in the northern hemisphere, these days the Bible is hardly ever opened by most people.

Some 13,000 people took part in the survey, commissioned by the Catholic Biblical Federation (CBF). Overall the survey found that despite secularisation in the countries surveyed, the Bible is still considered interesting and true, and in six of the nine countries surveyed, a majority of people believed it had an impact on everyday life. This amounts to a "positive prejudice" towards the book, said Bishop Vincenzo Paglia of Terni, president of the CBF.

The survey polled the general population in eight European countries - Britain, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Russia - as well as the United States.

The study also found that more than half of those polled in Russia, Poland, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom were in favour of children studying the Bible at school.

But the survey also revealed that the Second Vatican Council's call for a wider knowledge of the Bible among Catholics has mostly remained unheeded. It showed that, in the last 12 months, fewer than a third of Europeans, on average, had read a passage from the scriptures: the percentage was 36 per cent in Britain, but fell as low as 27 per cent in Italy and 20 per cent in Spain, and even in Catholic Poland rose only to 38 per cent. This is in stark contrast to results from the US, where three out of four Americans have read the Bible in the last 12 months.

"The US has a different way of living out their modernity from Europe," said Professor Diotallevi, who presented the report. "No one could say that they are not a secular country, but in the Anglo-Saxon world Christianity has managed to remain at the heart of society even during periods of change."

In the United States, just seven out of 100 households are without a Bible, as opposed to more than half in France.

Bishop Paglia reflected that the Bible was the most effective place for ecumenical dialogue and that there no longer existed diversity among various Christian traditions regarding their relationship with scripture. However, the survey also found that most people also considered the Bible a "difficult" book.

-The Tablet, 3 May, 2008.

Witticisms of the Wise

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