Sunday Newsletter
Masses Today
6.30: Paddy & Breda Kelly (Bowling Green), (Anniv).
11.00: Stephen Concannon, (Anniv).
6.30: Coleman & Sabina Cooke, (Anniv)
- Masses for Sunday, February 15th: 6.30: (Vigil) Joe Dolan, (Bowling Green); 11.00: Gerry Colgan, Maureen & Kieran, Michael Kieran. 6.30: Bryan Flaherty
- The Sick: Pray for Teresa O'Connor, formerly of St. Augustine St., who is recovering at her home after surgery. We wish her a speedy recovery. Incidentally, Wednesday next, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, is the World Day of Prayer for the Sick.
- COLLECTION LAST SUNDAY: €1,663.00.
- CHURCH GATE COLLECTION: The Galway branch of the Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind will hold their annual collection outside the Church this weekend. They offer guide dogs and training sessions for independent living to blind people and families of children with autism. They rely almost entirely on the public for financial support.
- NOVENA: The annual Novena at the Cathedral begins tomorrow, Monday, February 9th. The theme this year is "A life worth living: Finding the key to happiness". A special event will be the "Novena of Nations" at 4.30pm on Sunday, February 15th. The six daily sessions are at 7.45am, 11am, 1.10pm, 3.30pm, 6.30pm and 8.30pm. As usual, the cathedral staff would very much appreciate eucharistic ministers. If you are in a position to help in either capacity, contact Sean O'Flaherty or a member of the Cathedral staff at 56357, or make yourself known in the cathedral sacristy 15 minutes before the beginning of the particular session.
- STEERING COMMITTEE: We will meet on Thursday next, February 12th at 7.30. We will draw up the agenda for our General Meeting of the 23rd. Again, our full panel is as follows: Gerry Ferguson (Chair), Peter Cunnane, Cathal Cunninghan, Pádraig O Gormaile, Micheál Hayes, Edward Jones, Pauline Staunton, Patricia Lally, Brigid Headon, Niall Coghlan, and Dick Lyng. Resident Friars are always welcome to attend.
As I Was Saying...
This has been a thoroughly bad week for lots of people. An Taoiseach had a bad week with the failure of the Social Partnership talks; Employers' and Trades Union leaders had a bad week for the same reasons; workers have had a terrible week, with unemployment figures soaring towards 350,000; it was a very bad week for Barack Obama who nominated as Health Secretary his friend, Tom Daschle. The only problem was that Daschle owed the taxman $128,000. Last week, Obama seemed infallible; this week, by his own admissions, he 'screwed up real bad! It was a truly awful week for another man who is widely regarded as infallible, Pope Benedict XVI. To make matters worse, the Holy Father shot himself in the foot, not once, but twice! The background is interesting.
In 1988, dissident French bishop Marcel Lefebvre ordained four new bishops in defiance of the Vatican's orders. Among the newly-minted bishops was an English convert from Anglicanism, Richard Williamson. (Some of Williamson's milder views can be read below).
Lefevbre is long dead of course, and the other four have spent the last thirty years in the ecclesiastical wilderness. The only Cardinal who was well-disposed towards them during their 'exile' was Joseph Ratzinger. Their hard line on liturgical matters seemed to strike a sympathetic cord with him. Since his papal election, Benedict has sent consistent conciliatory signals to this group, like the restoration of the Tridentine Mass. It came as no great surprise, then, when he lifted the 1988 excommunication edict this week. But he took his eye off the ball when he failed to examine the track record of that ecclesiastical 'loose cannon', Richard Williamson. Williamson had form! The very day before the lifting of the Vatican ban, Williamson claimed "There were no gas chambers ... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers. There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies!" All hell broke loose. The optics were terrible: a German Pope rehabilitating a bishop who denied the Jewish holocaust!
The Vatican belatedly tried to mend fences, but the damage was done. The Pope is now 81. Who calls the shots? The highly regarded Cardinal Walter Kasper is in charge of the Vatican's relations with Jews. Yet he was never consulted. He first read about it in the papers! Naturally, he was furious. "There wasn't enough talking with each other in the Vatican and there are no longer checks to see where problems could arise," he said. Had Kasper been involved, this debacle would not have happened. But then, perhaps that is why he was kept in the dark.
But the Vatican had another shot in its locker, destined for the other papal foot. This week also, Benedict appointed a new bishop in Linz, Austria, one Gerhard Wagner. This genius claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's judgment on the people of New Orleans for their immorality and tolerance of homosexuality! The Vatican deserves all the opprobrium it gets. Benedict's reputation has been seriously damaged.
-Dick Lyng
Parish Happenings
- GENERAL MEETING: Keep in mind our planned General Meeting of Patrons and Parishioners here on Monday night, February 23rd at 7.30. The object of the exercise is: (1) To provide information pertaining to the life of the church and the parish. (2) To furnish a general Financial Report on the Augustinian (Renovation) Project. Are our financial targets being met? (3) A Financial Report on our weekly collections. You will recall that we introduced the envelopes as an option one year ago this month. Cathal Cunningham has monitored their progress throughout the year. He will report to the General Meeting on the impact (or otherwise) of the envelope introduction; (4) We introduced a Child Protection Policy specific to the Church and Parish here in September 2008. We appointed two Parish Child Representatives, Ms. Rosemarie Ryan and Mr. Donal O'Connell to monitor the implementation of this policy. We will hear a report on progress in this area and we will try to answer any questions or concerns you may have on related matters. (5) Finally, the most important aspect of the General Meeting will be the provision of a platform for your comments, questions, concern or suggestions. Towards this end, it would help greatly if you would submit items for the agenda to the Chair of the Steering Committee or to the Parish Priest. Some of you have already done so and we thank you for that. With a view to informing the greatest number possible of this happening, we will be in touch with you all by post during the week after next, the week beginning Monday February 16th.
- A VOCATIONS WORKSHOP will be held on February 20th, 21st and 22nd, 2009. It is being jointly arranged by the Dioceses of Galway, Clonfert and the Archdiocese of Tuam. Contact Fr. Diarmuid Hogan at 091 524853, or Fr. Niall at the Augustinians here.
Richard Williamson
Bishop Richard Williamson (pictured below) was born in England to Anglican parents in 1940. After studies in Cambridge he went to Ghana to teach. In 1971 he was was received into the Catholic Church by Father John Flanagan, an Irish missionary priest working in England. He soon joined the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) and was ordained priest in 1976 by the founder Archbishop Lefebvre himself. On June 30, 1988 he and three others were consecrated bishop by Archbishop Lefebvre also. All were excommunicated by John Paul II the following month. The ban was lifted by the Holy See this week, but he remains suspended from functioning of a bishop and priest.
Bishop Williamson opposes the Second Vatican Council as modernistic and destructive to the Church. He detested the increased openness to other religions, and the replacement of the Tridentine Mass with the Mass of Paul VI. He criticised Pope John Paul II for having a "weak grasp of Catholicism", and also Pope Benedict XVI, whom he considers a "Neo-Modernist" theologian. Only the SSPX members have stayed faithful to the "complete Roman Catholic apostolic faith".
He has opposed compromise between the SSPX and Rome, since the latter is under "the power of Satan". He regards such reconciliation as impossible, and he has noted that some SSPX members might refuse to follow the Society in such a direction.
His views are somewhere to the right of the skinheads of the National Front. He opposes women attending college or university, the wearing of trousers or shorts by women, and has urged greater "manliness" in men. He is quoted as saying: "A woman can do a good imitation of handling ideas, but then she will not be thinking properly as a woman. Did this lawyeress check her hairdo before coming into court? If she did, she is a distracted lawyer. If she did not, she is one distorted woman!"
In a 1997, he denounced the film The Sound of Music as "soul-rotting slush" and stated that "by putting friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children."
Williamson promoted conspiracy theories regarding September 11 attacks, claiming that these were staged by the US government.
Bishop Williamson called Jews "enemies of Christ" and urges their conversion to Catholicism. He claims that Jews and Freemasons have contributed to the "changes and corruption" in the Catholic Church. He has denied that he is anti-semitic, stating that he goes against "adversaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ", that not all Jews are such, and that he also attacks other groups such as Communists and Freemasons.
He has denied the existence of gas chambers and has claimed that not six million but a mere 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps! The Catholic Church needs this unsavoury character in its ranks as urgently as she needs one large hole in the head!
-Dick Lyng.