Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30 (Vigil) James Cogavin, (Anniv).
11.00: Bridget Gibbons, (Anniv).
6.30: Bridget Lenihan, (Bowling Green), (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

Nelson Mandela celebrates his 90th birthday this week, 26 of which he spent doing hard labour in Robin Island prison. Since his release in February 1990, Mandela has emerged as the world's most significant moral leader since Mahatma Gandhi. As President of the African National Congress and spiritual figurehead of the anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving South Africa towards black-majority rule. And throughout the world he is revered as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. His enormous moral authority is built on the same foundation as Ghandi's: forgiveness and a total absence of bitterness.

As he celebrated his birthday, he broke his silence on a very different type of black African leader, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). Mandela was characteristically mild in his 'condemnation', describing his neighbour's megalomania as 'a tragic failure of leadership'. Even if the great man's words were more colourful and energetic, as they might have been, they still wouldn't end that terrible reign of violence and intimidation visited upon the unfortunate people of that country. Nevertheless, his intervention does remind us of why democracy is important and why Nelson Mandela remains one of the heroes of our time.

Winston Churchill is credited with that saying that 'democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others'. And in places like Zimbabwe, at times like this, we see why. One of the primal human drives is the will to power. It's natural for some to seek to rule others, and once they have power, they'll do all they can, by fair means or foul, to keep hold of it. Half the tears of history flow from that fact.

Yet we are not prisoners of our desires. Alongside nature, we have culture. We act not just out of instinct but out of conscience. Slowly, painfully, homo sapiens has evolved ways of humanizing the will to power. Of these, the most effective is democracy, because it creates accountability. When leaders betray those to whom they are accountable, it provides for the peaceful transition of power.

That is what Nelson Mandela achieved in South Africa. By forgiving those who had oppressed his people, he ensured that one of the great transitions of power in modern times could happen peacefully, without brutality and bloodshed.

Democracy is not in itself a religious value, but it is the best way we know of preserving the religious values of freedom, justice and the rule of law. Judaism and Christianity, in their different ways, temper the will to power by insisting that it respect the dignity of the powerless. God asks us to plead the cause of the oppressed, as Nelson Mandela has done this week.

We believe that rulers and ruled alike are in the image of God. And out of these beliefs came the most revolutionary of all ideas to have humanized power, namely that leadership is not about ruling people but about serving them. Mandela learned that lesson early in life. Mugabe hasn't even begun to understand its meaning. You can be quite sure of this: Nelson Mandela's memory will be cherished long after Mugabe's name is forgotten. Goodness carries its own reward.

-Dick Lyng

St. Paul

The next 12 months have been set aside as the Year of Paul. He is that passionate figure who first taught the non- Jewish world the teachings of Jesus

One vital feature of St Paul is essential to grasp - and it may be that "ordinary" readers (or hearers) of his letters are in a better position to understand than academics, who tend to shift uneasily at this sort of talk. It is that Paul was head over heels in love - there is no other phrase for it - with the Jesus whom he had met. That love drove him onwards for the rest of his life, and made all the horrid things that happened to him, and which occasionally he mentions (have a look at 2 Corinthians 11:23- 29, for example), entirely worthwhile.

That love enabled him proudly to describe himself, in the first line of the Letter to the Romans, as "a slave of Jesus Christ". That same love drove him, like a demented gadfly, all the way round the Greek cities of the Mediterranean basin, preaching about the Risen Jesus. So if you really wish to grasp what is Paul's legacy, what you have to do is to read and re-read (preferably in company with others, rather than on your own) the letters that are attributed to him. Do so with an enquiring and attentive heart, and with an open mind, and allow him to exercise his age-old spell upon you. You will not regret it.

-Nicholas King, The Tablet, June 28, 2008.

MID SUMMER FESTIVAL

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