Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Patrick & Nellie Kierans, (Anniv).
11.00 Tom Drinkwater, (Anniv).
6.30: William Morris, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

'Headstrong', the Irish National Centre for Youth Mental Health, published their annual report this week. The study profiled the mental health, habits and background of 97 young people, average age 21, 50 males and 47 females. 25 per cent had been in trouble with the law. 22 per cent had substance addiction issues. A mere 43 per cent were free from symptoms of mental health. 83 per cent believed in God; yet just 11 per cent attended Church once a month or more.

A similar study of any western country will present an almost identical profile for that group. Given the global range of western culture, this is not surprising. So, have parents neglected their kids? Child experts are reaching the opposite conclusion, in fact: parents are over-protective of their kids, hovering over their offspring for 24 hours a day. Hovering so much that experts in the States have dubbed them 'Helicopter parents'!

Apparently, according to the experts, 'Helicopter Parents' fall into three categories - 'Gunship Helicopters', ready at an instant to spring to the defence of their children, or to attack teachers or fellow-students who might upset them; 'Traffic Helicopters', who simply provide guidance for their youngsters, helping them to make wise decisions; and, finally, 'Rescue Helicopters'. The latter should be summoned only in an emergency. Well, it's a colourful list, and most parents will recognise the scenario and even be able to put themselves into one or other of the categories.

Parents need to let young adults make decisions and choices. Maturity will come from experience only, not from supervision. At the same time, choices and decisions have consequences. These consequences may sometimes be painful or even dangerous. Now this is where parents - hovering overhead, as it were - can provide love, reassurance and practical help.

If this is in any way a true picture of parenting, then it can surely be applied more widely, and specifically to our image of God as a 'Father'. Believers have certainly at different times located God in each of the three helicopters. For some he is indeed the gunship God, springing instantly to the aid of those who consider themselves to be his followers, wreaking vengeance on their enemies and blessing their armies. For others, he is the traffic helicopter, a divine guide for life, helping us when the journey is confusing or the way ahead unclear. And then for others he is the rescue helicopter, saving us from the consequences of our disobedience and stupidity, sorting out our problems and difficulties.

However, in one crucial respect at least, the helicopter analogy crashes to earth! Though in a sense God is 'over' us, as our Creator, he is also, and has always been, 'with' us. The Christmas story, so recent and yet so quickly forgotten, is about 'Emmanuel' - God with us. He didn't pop down to earth for 32 years in the person of Jesus and then leave us. Eagle has landed, or, rather, he never went away, thank God!

-Dick Lyng

The Late John O'Donoghue

I first met John O'Donoghue in 1980. I was ordained three years and John was a mere 2nd year clerical student. Even then it was obvious that he had a keen mind, a big heart and a great, loud laugh!

After ordination, he was appointed to Rossaveal. There he made contact with the philosopher, John Moriarty. They may not have always swung on the same gate, but both men faced in the same direction!

I was then working with young people, conducting what could only loosely be termed 'retreats' in Inverin, just up the road from John in Rossaveal. These young people were aged between 17 and 30 years. It was in that context that I met up with John again. I found him to be most generous with his time, and he was always willing to come along and, as he put it, 'address the troops' for an hour or two. And, by God, could he talk! But it wasn't just 'holy noise'. He connected brilliantly with his very varied audience and he could hold them spell-bound for as long as he wished.

From my point of view, it was fascinating to watch his method of operating. He would throw out an idea, find some analogical hook in the life-experience of his young audience, and he would then hang his idea there for all to admire. He would then beat the hell out of that idea for the next ten minutes, inviting his audience to join in the mental gymnastics! He was ready then to begin anew!

Invariably his 'talk' concerned freedom and tradition. But, before tradition could be accepted as authentic, it first had to be demolished. And it is the duty of each new generation to deconstruct this inherited 'cultural jig-saw', as he called it. While they will do the work of reconstruction from that same original material, they must necessarily end up with a new picture, with a new set of images. Only then would their religion begin to make supporting sense to them!

From Rossaveal John moved to Tubingen in Germany to work for his Doctorate in Philosophy. On completing what was apparently a brilliant work, he was appointed curate in Moycullen. At that stage he began to accumulate speaking engagements which necessitated his absence from his parish. Invariably, he invited me to 'stand in' for him on Sunday mornings in Moycullen. I actually enjoyed celebrating Mass there, so there was no great burden involved. Besides, John helped me out of a few sticky situations in my time, and he sometimes found himself celebrating Mass in St. Augustine's.

In the early 1990s, John became increasingly disillusioned with the institutional Church. He wrote very critically of its workings in the Furrow in 1995:

Power is a strange force. Often it seems that it is very needy people who seek power. But the tragedy is that once they have it, they cannot be generous with it. When the centre deadens, the real energy thresholds move to the margins. Consequently, the margin becomes the real, living centre, the heart. This dilemma is at the root of the vanishing credibility of the Church. Its power structures are feudal. It is that of the pyramid - everyone at the bottom labours under the burden of holding up the man at the top. Jesus worked with a totally different notion of power. He advocated the inclusive compassion of the circle not the power of the pyramid.

His death leaves an enormous gap. God rest him.

-Dick Lyng.

Flashing of Theological Antlers

Madam,

In recent years retired Maynooth professor Fr Vincent Twomey has been basking in the reflected glory of his former professor in Germany, Joseph Ratzinger, and even more so since his professor is now a higher eminence.

Speaking of the Catholic meaning of "informed conscience", he is quoted by Patsy McGarry as declaring that "for a Catholic to act against the clear teaching of the Church, once one knows what that teaching is, is to sin" (The Irish Times, December 27th). Apart from the arrogance of accusing a fellow-Christian of sin, Fr Twomey should explain whether or not the millions of Catholics are now in hell who for centuries were told by the Church that for married couples to have intercourse during menstruation was a mortal sin, or were told for 18 centuries that slavery was no a sin at all, until it was condemned as an abomination by the Second Vatican Council.

It is unlikely that Fr Twomey's former professor now has occasion to read The Irish Times, but surely he would be surprised that his former pupil seems not to have read his magisterial comment, as a highly respected and brilliant adviser to Cardinal Frings at the Second Vatican Council, when he summed up perfectly the teaching of the Catholic Church after the council. He wrote:

"Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism." (Joseph Ratzinger in Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. V, p. 134).

If the Holy Father has told his former pupil that he has changed his mind, why has he not informed the rest of us? -

Yours, etc,
Fr SEAN FAGAN, S.M.

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