Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil): Peter & Bridie Berry, (Anniv).
11.00: John McGrath & Rory Kavanagh, (Anniv).
6.30: Sarah & Frank Duggan., (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

In the world in which I grew up, All Souls Night was enormously important. On that night, the 'gaining of plenary indulgences' dominated all. The regulation was that you visited your local church, recited three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and three Glorias for the Pope's intentions, and a Plenary Indulgence was gained. When applied to an individual soul, that soul was propelled immediately heaven-wards! But only one indulgence was permitted per visit. So, when you had completed the mandatory prayers, you have to vacate the Church before returning again to gain another indulgence and to liberate another soul! The church was as busy as a bee-hive and, for that one night at least, we all gave St. Peter a break from point-duty at the Pearly Gates!

In retrospect, such naivety was astounding. How did we ever swallow that? However, perhaps in reaction to that crude literalism, that naivety has now given way to a vague skepticism concerning the traditional Christian belief in the afterlife. I strongly believe that this is potentially bad for our well-being because our emotional response to death is inseparable from how we make sense of it. If we struggle intellectually, we flounder emotionally. Perhaps the modern bereavement counsellors are supports, if not actual substitutes, for a weak faith in the Resurrection of the body?

So what is happening? It's not that we cannot talk about death, in the same way that our Victorians ancestors could not talk about sex! On the contrary: death is now almost as hot a topic as sex. As we witnessed at the funeral of singer Stephen Gately, celebrity funerals are as popular as celebrity weddings.

And now to a rather delicate point: the said Mr. Gately had publicly rejected the Catholic faith some years ago. (The option of a funeral service without the Eucharist is available to all Catholics. It is widely used in other countries for what we once quaintly called 'lapsed Catholics'). In providing a 'solemn' Catholic funeral Mass for an avowed non-believer, is the Catholic Church undermining the faith of its own people? Does it matter a damn whether one rejects the faith or not? Is the Church allowing itself be used as a mere back-drop for 'celebrity theatre'? Or does it matter?

I presume that some will raise their hands in horror and ask, 'Who are you to judge?' Fair comment. But here I am not being judgmental. Providing Gately with a Catholic funeral trampled roughshod over the expressed wishes of the dead man.

This is not a question of morality. It is a question of identity. In life Stephen Gately stated, 'I want nothing do to with this'; should 'this' have been imposed on him in death?

The Christian understanding of death is based on our belief in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus. For if God troubled to seek us out by becoming one with us - in the Incarnation - he will not allow death to make a nonsense of that - which is where we come back to Resurrection. It is with that understanding that Christians across the world will commemorate the faithful departed this weekend. It does not change the reality of loss but it can make it more bearable.

-Dick Lyng

Advent Preparation

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

(An Extract) V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies -
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! -
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse, -
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth -
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind! -

-Percy Bysshe Shelley.

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