Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30 Gerard Gilmore, (1st Anniv).
11.00: Patrick & Nellie Lyden, (Anniv).
6.30: Gilboy & Creedon family, (RIP).

As I Was Saying...

A young woman approached me recently with a view to having her 7-year-old daughter baptised. This lady was educated to degree level and had gone to a Catholic school. I asked a few questions. It transpired that her little girl couldn't get her First Holy Communion without a Baptism Cert. This, she held, was 'Church bureaucracy at its worst'. 'The Church is penalising my daughter because of a piece of paper' she complained. (Twenty years ago I was hearing this same phrase in the context of marriage: 'Why shouldn't I sleep with him. It's only a piece of paper!')

I was curious about her relationship with the Church and her knowledge (if any) of same. Then she came out with that phrase which will be familiar to all of us: 'I'm very spiritual but I'm not religious at all.' I got the distinct impression that she would have happily settled for a Baptism Cert without the inconvenience of the Baptism Rite!

But there are thousands like her. A strange thing is happening today. As the number of people participating in our churches is in decline, the number of people interested in spirituality is increasing. We are witnessing a drastic decline in church life right in the midst of a spiritual renaissance. What is happening? A great divide has opened up between those on a 'spiritual quest' and those who are regular Church members, between 'recovering Catholics' and mere Catholics.

The late John O'Donohue addressed this difficulty in a very balanced way. He took issue with those writers who coined the term 'a la carte Catholicism.' It was really used to denigrate those who select from the tradition only what nourishes, challenges, and heals them. Have you yet seen a fellow going into a restaurant and choosing everything on the menu?

One of the difficulties in Western religion is that we are inclined to take current manifestations of the tradition as the whole truth about the religion. I don't think that is a responsible or honourable way to engage with a tradition. 'Tradition is to a community what memory is to the individual: a huge archive of knowledge that is tested over time' wrote O'Donohue.

The questions of the human spirit are perennial, but they come in different forms at different moments in history. We shouldn't equate contemporary manifestations of the tradition with the tradition itself. Sometimes the people who represent a religious tradition at a particular moment will masquerade as the absolute owners of the tradition, but they are not. They are only good or bad servants of the tradition. I don't believe we can simply jump from one tradition to another. I can do Buddhist practice, but I cannot be a Buddhist. Nor can a Tibetan Buddhist come to Ireland and turn into a Catholic.

So many spiritually starved people are passing by the great granaries of the Christian traditions on their way to some New Age or fundamentalist church, and not even looking in the doorways. When the grain is tested, as it is in the great traditions, you get true nourishment, not fast food.

-Dick Lyng

The Late Maureen Kenny

It was great to see such a massive crowd show up for Maureen Kenny's funeral Mass here. Apart from Christmas, we don't get crowds like that here anymore. But she richly deserved that tribute. She has been central to this part of Galway ever since Des and and herself set up the Bookshop in High Street in 1940.

Desmond was a Galwegian, the son of journalist Thomas 'Cork' Kenny who had founded the "The Connacht Tribune" in 1909. Maureen, a native of Mohill, Co. Leitrim won a scholarship to UCG where she studied Commerce. On her first day there she met Desmond, who was studying Arts. And "That," as Desmond was often heard saying "was that." The couple married on graduating.

Initially, they rented two rooms on High St. They set up the bookshop in one room and lived in the other at the back. They had to be very innovative and adventurous in order to make a living. The 'hungry forties' did not abound with affluent bookworms! Circumstances (and survival!) demanded diversification.

Consequently, in the 1950s, they turned their attention to Irish Crafts and Art. Kenny's present Art Gallery has its roots there. Some famous exhibitions were held in the tiny art space. Kenneth Webb first showed his paintings here in 1953; as did Mabel Young, with the exhibition opened by her husband Paul Henry. Among the artists introduced to Galway via exhibitions down the years were Gertrude Degenhardt, John Coll, Peter Fitzgerald, Joseph Quilty, Susan Webb and Mick Flaherty. So paintings had taken their place beside the books from early on.

Maureen was to presided there as a great matriarch for 65 years. She was the hub around which that literary wheel moved. She knew the location of every book in the shop and was familiar with it contents. She was always affable, gracious, and helpful. I found her to be generous too. If I expressed an interest in a particular book, she often told me to take a book home with me for a few days to see if it lived up to my expectations. If it didn't, well no harm done. Simply bring back the book.

She herself was blessed with good health and a lively mind throughout her long life. While the body may have failed in recent years, the mind never dimmed. The first act of her working day was to come into this Church here for the 8.30 Mass. This was her Church and she was interested in everything that happened here. She had a prodigious memory and she regularly enquired about priests who served in this Church through five full decades. Fr. Jackie Power seemed to be her favourite.

Maureen died peacefully on Tuesday, surrounded by her family, just short of her 90th birthday. A long life with good health is a great blessing. But when the health fails, it's time to go! Death will always be ambiguous, though. While we hate to see our loved ones suffer, we are still reluctant to let them go, because they themselves are reluctant to go! Micheal MacLiammoir best expressed this ambiguity one month before he died. When asked if he feared death, he replied, 'While I have myself grown tired of life, death itself holds no attractions.' But the Kenny family down to the fourth generation will draw comfort from their wonderful memories of a valiant woman. May she now rest in peace.

Digging up the Past!

(A former Catholic priest, Dermot Dunne, has been appointed Dean of Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral, a senior post in Irish Anglicanism. He becomes the cathedral's first Dean since the Reformation to have received his training in a Catholic seminary. The appointment provoked a flurry of letters to the Irish Times. Among them was the gem below!

The 'Butler' reference in the letter is to John Butler (1716-1800), who was Catholic Bishop of Cork in 1763. He then unexpectedly found himself 12th Lord Dunboyne, a very prestigious Butler title. At the age of 70 he felt he should provide an heir. He petitioned Pope Pius VI for leave to marry, but was summarily refused. He renounced the Church and married his cousin, but there was no heir. On his deathbed, aged 84, he returned to the Church and, despite family opposition to his will, managed to leave, if not his castle of Dunboyne, at least a Dunboyne endowment, to Maynooth College, County Kildare. The writer, James Good, was himself silenced by a more recent Bishop of Cork because of his views on Humane Vitae. Some people have long memories!)

Madam, - The Rev Joseph Bergin (March 15th) writes from New York to claim that he is "the first Irish clergyperson to become an Anglican priest".

Sadly, he is wide of the mark. One John Butler, Roman Catholic bishop of Cork, beat him to it by about 200 years - and there have been others.

John Butler inherited the title of Lord Dunboyne and (despite his age and dreadful appearance) made the journey to Anglicanism and a wife - to provide himself with an heir.

His little girl did not qualify for that honour, so the title passed elsewhere. However, Butler was smart in another way - he provided himself with a return ticket for his trip from Rome to Anglicanism, and he made use of it on his death-bed, leaving his vast fortune to the Roman Catholic Church.

The Dunboyne House of theological studies was built with his wealth.

Return tickets are a useful insurance - at least clergyperson John Butler found it so.

Of course, many people would claim that he was not much of a loss to either of the churches from which he took his departure.

- Yours, etc,
Fr JAMES GOOD,
Church Street,
Douglas, Cork.

Top

Valid HTML 4.01 Strict