Sunday Newsletter
Masses Today
6.30: (Vigil) Brendan O'Donnell, (Anniv).
11.00: Ellen & Eddie Reynolds, (Anniv).
6.30: Sadie & Walter Joyce, (Anniv)
- Masses for Sunday, March 15th: 6.30: (Vigil) Jeremiah & Mary Bridget Morkan; 11.00: Seamus Breathnach; 6.30: Sean Fahy.
- RECENTLY DECEASED (1): Remember in your prayer Michael Joyce, Mervue whose funeral Mass was celebrated on Sunday last. Michael was at one time a very understanding Manager of St. Anthony's and Claddagh Credit Union. May he rest in peace.
- RECENTLY DECEASED (2): Remember also Brother Fidelis (Seamus) O'Connell, one of the Patrician Brothers who died this week too. Brother Fidelis was born in Kilcullen, Kildare in 1936. He entered the Novitiate in Tullow, Co. Carlow in 1953. He first came to 'The Bish' in Galway to teach Maths in 1958. He left Galway for a teaching post in Finglas in 1968. He would return to Galway eighteen years later, in 1986, where he was to remain until his death. Fidelis had a very serious lung condition for the last 10 years or so. This necessitated a constant oxygen supply. This he dragged behind him on a little trolley, a trait that made him readily recognisable around the city. He passed away on Monday morning last. May he rest in peace.
- COLLECTION LAST SUNDAY: €1,320.00.
- STEERING COMMITTEE: We were due to meet on Tuesday night next, but we found it necessary to bring the meeting forward to tomorrow night, Monday March 9th at 7.30. The first Lenten Session on Mark's gospel (see below) is being held on Tuesday - hence the change. We will devote the greater part of the meeting to sifting through the suggestions and ideas brought up at the General Parish Meeting last week. A lot of work needs to be done there. We will also look at the Holy Week and Easter programmes.
- LENTEN FAST: We gathered the names of five young people last week to participate in the Annual Trocaire Fast. We were aiming for this weekend. However, that gave us very little time to organise and to get sponsorship. We will hold it instead on Palm Sunday.
As I Was Saying...
Bankers, like Sean Fitzpatrick, now function as our 'bogey-men'. Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS fills that role in the UK. The anger of many found expression this week in the graffiti scrawled on the latter's Edinburgh home, 'Scumbag Millionaire!'
Adam Smith, the 'father of capitalism' and creator of the 'invisible hand' metaphor for the free market, was a moral philosopher. In his day capitalism had not yet marshalled mass advertising to create demand. His offspring is now suffering a great crisis. What is at the heart of this crisis?
Smith's theory of 'The Invisible Hand' goes something like this: each consumer is allowed to choose freely what to buy. Each producer is allowed to choose freely what to sell. The market will be self-regulating. It will settle on distribution and prices that are beneficial to the community as a whole. Greed will drive participants to beneficial behaviour. Efficient methods of production will be adopted in order to maximise profits. Prices will remain low in order to undercut competitors. Investors will invest in those industries that are most urgently needed to maximize returns, and withdraw capital from those that are less efficient in creating value. And all these effects will take place dynamically and automatically.
Smith gave a simple example to illustrate his principle: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
Smith assumed naively that this is 'the natural order' of things. But he was not alone in his naivety. His peers would have found support for this view in the lines of Alexander Pope:
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.
However, not all of Smith's descendants were so benignly naive. In the 1980s, U.S. Economist Milton Friedman claimed that the sole responsibility of a business is to produce profits for its owners. And he won the Nobel Prize for his pains! At the same time, George Land, in his book "Grow or Die", compared growth patterns in nature with organizations. Not only is growth expected to be non-stop, so is the rate of increase! The alternative to growth is death, according to Land.
Profits are an essential part of any business. But they are not the ONLY reason business exists. Modern capitalism has evolved into a 'greed machine', a Darwinian means of getting 'as much as possible for as few as possible at the expense of as many as possible'. Corporations are man-made organisms, associations of human beings. Reducing this organism to just one of its components, namely profit-making, made the present collapse inevitable. The 'enclosure' ditty has been given a new meaning:
They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the Common;
But let the greater criminal loose
Who steals the Common from the goose.
The financial world must be well aware of the error of its ways by now. Its colossal mistake lay not just in giving huge pensions to a few, but rather in underestimating the growing needs of the many.
-Dick Lyng
2009 Trócaire Campaign: Somalia
- Khalid Salat Sheikh Ali is a seven-year-old boy from Mogadishu in Somalia. He lived with his mother, father, and five brothers and sisters. Armed groups constantly harassed them. Eventually they started firing rockets, killing a neighbour and her three children. That women was six months pregnant. Khalid's mother, Falis, decided immediately to flee with her children.
- Falis first took her family to a camp in Afgoye, a two-day journey on foot. Eventually, she decided to go to their relatives in Gedo, 500km away. This journey took 15 days on foot. Along the way, they were vulnerable to attack. It was a journey they'll never forget. Khalid, his mother and his brothers and sisters now live in Gedo with very little food and water, and no money. Khalid has not seen his father since they were forced to leave. Once he lived at home with his family; now he shares a single room with seventeen people.
- Although only seven years old, Khalid has survived some of the most traumatic experiences imaginable. But with the help of Trocaire (and you) Khalid and his family can start to reclaim their lives and look to the future with hope. OSA Lenten Programme
Lenten Programme
We will begin our Lenten Programme on Tuesday week, March 10th. What happens is as follows: we will gather and listen via broadband to a 30 minute talk on some aspect of Mark's Gospel (see below for details). The group will then discuss the content of the talk for another 30 minutes. The group will then participate for another 30 minutes in a Q & A session with the presenters via a telephone conference. The programme is as follows:
Module 1: Tues 10th March: What is a Gospel? Why did Mark Write?
Module 2: Tues 24th March: Jesus and the Kingdom Metaphor and Meaning
Module 3: Tues 7th April: Jesus and the Disciples
Various Lenten Offerings
BARNA CHURCH
Fr. Frank Fahy, Ballintubber talks on 'Pilgrimage', next Thursday at 8.30
CROI NUA
The Sacred Heart Fathers, Taylor's Hill are offering a Lenten Lecture Series, called 'A Passion for Life' Wednesdays 8p.m.-10.p.m.
March 11th - Mr. John Lonergan, Governor of Mountjoy Prison
March 18th - Dr. Helen Greally
March 25th - Mr. Padraig Ó Ceidigh
DIOCESAN PASTORAL CENTRE
Monday, March 9th: Fr. Peter McVerry
"The Radical Call of Community"
Monday, March 23rd: Mrs Mary Trench, Tuam Diocese
"Her own Faith Journey"
March 30th: Pauline Logue Collins, Ph.D.Theology
"Wisdom from the Margins"
THE ABBEY CHURCH
Taize Gathering every Thursday during Lent from 8.00-9.00
THE CHURCH AND THE ECONOMY
I have been a priest for over half a century and a bishop for more than 30 years. These have been years of considerable change in the international situation, in our society and also in the Church.
Fifty years ago I think most of the values that the Church wanted to uphold were also those that society itself would have agreed with. I am in no doubt that many still recognise and admire the Church's social and charitable work. But for others the Church, and indeed Christian life, seems to be out of step with "the spirit of the times".
There has been a subtle but deep change in the way the Catholic Church has been perceived by contemporary culture. It is not that it meets with indifference or even hostility - although that is certainly noticeable - rather it is heard with a certain incomprehension.
For Christians, to make their voices heard, it also means that there is the risk of distortion and caricature. Yet I believe that the Church has a perspective and a wisdom which our society cannot afford to exclude or silence. The Church's teaching has the whole human good in mind; that is why it is not simply one lobby group among others.
Faced with the current global and economic crisis, it may seem that the Church's social teaching is the last place to look for ideas. While the Church does not offer a blueprint for economic policy, it does argue that if the market is to serve the common good of all then it demands a strong ethical framework and effective regulation. The worker is not a commodity purely subject to the economic demand or lack of it, but a human being first and should be treated as such. If the economy forgets this, it becomes destructive of the very good it is intended to serve.
Many of the arguments of secularism seek to offer a new and liberated self-sufficient humanism. Yet, I think, they can only end in the death of the human spirit because they are fundamentally reductionist. They have an impoverished understanding of what it is to be human, which means that in the end they have no satisfactory defence against the instrumentalisation of the person. The Church must always be an active agent in the creation and building up of a genuinely humane culture.
-Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.