Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

11.00: Christina O'Holloran, Mary Cahalane, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

It is a truth universally observed that good news should be trumpeted abroad and bad news buried. Politicians do it all the time. Yet today, at the end of Holy Week, with its story which turns many of our presuppositions about truth and goodness upside down, we find that it's the bad news that was made public and the good news that was kept private.

After all, it was during the Sabbath interlude between the crucifixion and Easter morning that the good news happened. At some moment between nightfall on that dark Friday and dawn on the Sunday, something happened in the privacy of that silent tomb. We can't imagine how or what it was. All we can recognise is the impact of it. They had fled from Calvary broken and dejected. Their hero, the man on whom they had pinned their hopes, was executed as a criminal. They went into hiding in Jerusalem. Then suddenly, they are transformed into brave men and women for whom death held no fear.

Within a few decades, a religion which claimed that its Founder had risen from the dead - an unlikely manifesto, it seems - spread throughout the Roman world and far beyond. Eventually it could be seen that whatever happened so invisibly during that short period between Friday night and Sunday morning changed the history of the world.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, witnessed the crucifixion. It happened on the eve of a bank holiday. Jerusalem was full of visitors. It took place conveniently close to the city, just outside the walls. This was by every criterion a public death. Not one solitary sordid detail was kept private.

So the bad news was trumpeted abroad. Love and goodness had been put to death. The man who told the crowds to love their enemies had been abandoned by his friends and jeered at by his enemies. And everyone knew what had happened.

But the good news - whatever it was that happened behind the stone door of the tomb - remained, and in one sense remains, utterly private. At first it was just a rumour among a handful of men and women, a story passed on one to one, until eventually they felt bold enough to go public with it. So the process has continued.

Like Doubting Thomas we too seek 'evidence'. This is not generally a subject for mass conversions, but for quiet, inner conviction. That's how it was, and that's how it is. Everyone in Jerusalem knew that Jesus from Nazareth had been crucified. A few dozen knew the awesome truth of those quiet hours. If death itself was dealt a deadly blow that night, it was a secret victory. Hope triumphed quietly sometime 'before dawn'.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident and President wrote, "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out". That may not seem the case for the poor victims of the earthquake in L'Aquila this week, and it didn't seem the case for Jesus either. But, because of that 'private event' behind the stone door of the tomb, we believe that the story is by no means over. Have a very happy Easter.

-Dick Lyng

HAPPENINGS

New Leader in Westminster

Vincent Nichols was born in Crosby, Birmingham on 8 November 1945. Both parents were teachers in Catholic schools. In 1963, Vincent Nichols was sent to train for the priesthood at the English College in Rome, where he gained licences in philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University. In 1971 he was appointed assistant priest and school chaplain in Wigan.

At the age of 46, in 1992, he was appointed a Westminster auxiliary. As Cardinal Hume's right-hand man and fixer, his fluency in Italian was especially useful and he would accompany the cardinal to Rome. He became a familiar figure in the Vatican corridors of power.

Cardinal Hume made no secret of the fact that he wanted his favourite auxiliary to succeed him and, when Hume died after a short illness in 1999, Bishop Nichols was appointed instead to Birmingham. However, this proved to be a staging post rather than a terminus, since Nichols was named the new Archbishop of Westminster this week.

Renowned for his openness and pastoral concerns, he was also an espouser of liberal causes. But while his stock was high among more liberal Catholics, the decision-makers in Rome were said to be less impressed. His one-time mentor, the Archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock, watched this in frustration. He reputedly took "Fr Vin" to one side and told him: "We can't get you into the hierarchy if you carry on like this. You have to make yourself more favourable to Rome."

Vincent Nichols' critics suggest this explains why he became more overtly orthodox when he became Archbishop of Birmingham. Whatever the truth, he is widely respected as a shrewd political operator, sound administrator and sure-footed media performer. A grit and determination frequently attributed to his Merseyside roots are also part of the mix.

-The Tablet.

Cyrene

Nothing is given. Only the long delay
of affiiction between now
and what is still to be. And yet -

I was following uneven paths along the way
where crowds were gathering, shiftily;
I stepped out of the sun into his
shadow; of all those loitering why was it I
who was chosen?

I hauled the rude beam for him where it weighed
mightily on my shoulder-blades and neck;
if I had wings it would have broken them
but I kept silent, swallowed down my loathing
while he walked ahead, indifferent,
suffering his own indignities.

Sometimes now when I achieve a stillness,
dusk, perhaps, smoke rising like a tree,
or noon, a cock still languidly crowing
at the sunlit limit of the village,
someone that looks like him will disappear
suddenly round the angle of a house
as if he had ever actually appeared
the one on whom the cross of rumour has been laid
and I feel shaken utterly

that we walk clamorously between silences
and have learned little of the scandal of the flesh.

-John Deane

SAYINGS FOR ANY CRISIS

"Indecision is the key to flexibility."

"You cannot tell which way the train went by looking at the track."

"Someone who thinks logically is a nice contrast to the real world."

"Friends may come, and friends may go, but enemies accumulate."

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