Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil): Willie & Patsy Conneely, (Anniv).
11.00: Fr. Gerard Garvey (Market St.), (Anniv).
6.30: Peter, Margaret & Colm Conneely, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

John Calvin was born in July 1509, 500 years ago. He was born into the Catholic Church, which he abandoned in his teens and fought it for the rest of his 54 years. He provided most of the theological fuel for the fires of the Protestant Reformation sparked earlier by Martin Luther. In short, Calvin presented the most revolutionary challenge to conventional Christianity in its entire history, not excluding Luther. Yet this important anniversary went largely unmarked, even among his Protestant offspring.

So why this contemporary neglect? Why is the 'Great Founder' now ignored? From the beginning, Calvin placed no value whatsoever on popularity! Consequently, both his personality and his theology were quite unattractive. Calvin's God was a scowling deity, holding us over the pit of hell with nothing but his mercurial grace to save us. God had, in fact, predestined you to salvation or perdition, and there was really nothing you could do to change that. (However, living the moral life might provide a slight hint that you were destined for glory rather than gloom, but it was only a hint! There was no great security there).

Catholic writers have certainly never liked Calvin, both for theological and esthetic reasons. As the English Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc put it:

"Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There's always laughter and good red wine.
At least I've always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!"

However, despite this, the strict moral line taken by the Vatican on 'the sins of modernity' would meet with Calvin's full approval. The French reformer specialised in the compilation of long lists of prohibited behaviour, such as sex before marriage, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, drinking and gambling. Calvin supported excommunicating heretics, a practice not unfamiliar to the present Pope.

The Protestant Reformer would be appalled at the debate going on within Anglicanism on gay clergy and same-sex marriages. He would have regarded such practices with horror! Ironically, the most conservative members of the Catholic Church today could count on the support of John Calvin for their stance. However, his disapproval of drinking, dancing and musical instruments, and his efforts to abolish taverns, theatres, holidays and celebrations could prove more problematic!

However, Calvin was not all 'fire and brimstone'. He was a genuine social reformer who promoted the cause of refugees and the welfare of other disadvantaged groups. Geneva, under his rule, introduced the first genuine Social Welfare system where the care of the poor and the destitute was provided for by the state. In fact Calvin would heartily endorse the work of Catholic agencies assisting the poor today, such as Trocaire and St. Vincent de Paul. Today he has more in common with Rome than Geneva, a fact that is possibly an embarrassment to both Churches, and an explanation why his anniversary was all but ignored. So we break that shameful silence here as we wish our dear friend Jean Calvin a happy 500th birthday. We are confident that he will not overdo the celebrations!

-Dick Lyng

A Taste of Heaven

All the big Feasts have been celebrated: Easter, Pentecost, Corpus Christi. It's back to Sundays in Ordinary time. And sometimes they can be very 'ordinary' indeed. When I wish to make an 'ordinary day' better, I listen to music. At the end of the day, around 10 or 11, every now and then I take out my three favourite DVDs. Here they are: Essential Mozart, The Classic 100 Opera Concert, and The Best Opera Album in the World.

I always begin with Mozart. For sheer melody he has no equal. And you can hear him anywhere - in church, on radio or in film. I remember way back in St. Jarlath's College in the 40s seeing a film on the study hall wall entitled A Hundred men and a Girl. It was full of music. And I can still hear Deanna Durban singing Mozart's beautiful 'Alleluia' and the orchestra playing the rousing Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt. Thirty years later, in 1967, the film Elvira Madigan featured the lovely second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21. And then in 1994, one of the most gripping films of all time, The Shawshank Redemption included a beautiful aria from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro - Sull'aria.

Those of you who have seen the film will recall the scene. Andy is all alone in the warden's office. He plays the aria from The Marriage of Figaro - first for himself: and then he puts it through the public address system, and every last man in the jail looked up and stood still to listen to this beautiful aria. And then Andy's friend Red, played by Morgan Freeman, says: I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is I don't want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes the heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage, and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments every last man in Shawshank felt free.

That's the power of music. It can free the body, the heart - even the soul. I believe it can free us from sin and all that is bad in oneself: and take us away from all that is evil in the world. Music is the one thing that cannot, in itself, suggest sin or badness. I also believe it can so lift the soul that it gives us a taste of heaven. Writing in the 17th century, the poet Addison wrote:

"Music - the greatest good that mortals know,
and all of heaven we have below".

It's so true! There is one piece of music that gives me that taste of heaven and makes me want to go there. It is a Beethoven piece from the second movement of his Violin Concerto. As soon as I hear it, I am taken out of this world and sigh for the beauty and peace it creates. And I have asked the executor of my Will to play it after Communion at my funeral Mass.

(This is the text of a homily preached by Fr. Tom Shannon, in Ballinrobe Church, shortly before his retirement on 31st July, 2008. He died suddenly while visiting Namibia two weeks later, on August 14th, 2008.)

THE GOAL OF EDUCATION

A healthy, harmonious society, and even a productive society, is founded on an understanding of the truth about the human person. But nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life.

Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends ... As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

-John Paul II

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