Sunday Newsletter
Masses Today
6.30 (Vigil) Tom & Maureen Lyons, (Anniv).
11.00 Eamon Molloy, (recently deceased).
6.30: Nellie Carter, (Anniv)
- Masses for Sunday, January 18th: 6.30: (Vigil) Joan Kelly (nee O'Sullivan); 11.00: Agnes Margetts & Betty Creasa; 6.30: John Roache.
- COLLECTION LAST SUNDAY, Jan. 11th: €1,751.00.
- OUTDOOR COLLECTION TODAY: This is for the Galway Branch of Cystic Fibrosis.
- THANK YOU: COPE (the old Galway Social Services Group) asked me to convey their gratitude to the congregations at the Augustinian for the €678.00 raised at this Church at their recent church gate collection.
- STEERING COMMITTEE MEETING: We held our first Steering Committee meeting for 2009 on Wednesday night last. It was an important night in that Peter Cunnane handed over the baton after two years of faithful service in the Chair. The parish is in debt to Peter for his dedication, his patience and his selfless leadership. The post actually makes inordinate demands in terms of one's time. Peter was unstinting in this regard. Thanks Peter. Of course, as our Parish constitution lays down, Peter remains a member of the newly constituted Steering Committee.
- GENERAL MEETING: Gerry Ferguson takes over from Peter as the new leader of the Committee for the next two years. We wish him well in this task. So we are dealing now with new beginnings (once again!). We should see this as an opportunity to look again at the way in which the Parish is being 'shepherded'. We rededicate ourselves again to involving as many people as possible, especially young people, for obvious reasons. With this in mind, we plan to hold a General Meeting of all Parishioners and Patrons, that is, those who live in the parish, together with those who worship here, even occasionally. We will hold this General Meeting here in the Augustinian on Monday, February 23rd at 7.30. You will all get a reminder in the post!
- CHURCH UNITY WEEK: Don't forget the Church Unity Service in St. Nicholas' this Sunday evening, January 18th at 7.30pm. Bishop Drennan will lead it.
As I Was Saying...
An alien spy returns to Mars after a brief intelligence-gathering mission to earth. The King of the Martians, whose agent he was, summons the spy for a debriefing: 'How do the earthlings spend their time, and how are they rewarded?' he asks the secret agent. 'The earthlings measure the value of everything and everyone by something called money', replies the spy.
'Do they give everybody the same amount? 'No' comes the answer. 'Well, the King asks, 'who do they give most to?' 'Judging by our latest reports', the agent replies 'a group of earthlings are thinking of giving 100 million units of this money stuff to a fellow earthling who likes to kick a ball into a net as frequently as possible'.
'Does this make them happy?' asks the King.
'The Ball or the money, Sir?'
'Either'
'The Ball, not very often. The money, never!'
'And who do they give the least to?'
'This is amazing. As far as I could establish, almost 80% of earthlings have no money.'
'That's strange', says the King. 'Because your preliminary report claims that democracy had come to earth. That's a contradiction. How do you explain this inconsistency?
At which point the Martian spy threw his antenna up in the air and said, in exasperation, 'But these earthlings are such puzzling creatures! If there is a demand for a product, they produce it, regardless of its worth. Over half the stuff they produce is actually destructive: sugary drinks, cigarettes, advertising, weapons, junk food, cosmetics, much clever but frivolous technology, recreational drugs, 100 TV channels of dross and so on. All of this stuff is destructive, but they refer to this activity as 'the production of goods'. 'Then these people are a very strange people indeed,' said the Martian monarch.
This fanciful reflection comes in a week when Manchester City offered up to €100 million to AC Milan for the Brazilian superstar Kaka. This same week, 300,000 children died from hunger. Since the year 2000, more than 100 million children died from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could have been prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days! [For a more complete picture, see piece below].
This cannot be a matter of indifference to the One who made the earth. Which is why he sent his child to the earth, to challenge us to treat each other more justly. In a disturbing sermon, Jesus holds before us the prospect of ignoring God's pleading. Taking as his picture the foul-smelling municipal waste tip called Gehenna, which lies outside Jerusalem, he warns us that unless we change our ways we shall end up part of a smouldering cosmic rubbish dump.
This image of Hell is so appropriate in a world where one of the biggest ecological threats is the sheer scale of our own waste. Barack Obama has his hands full!
-Dick Lyng
It's a strange world!
- In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty."
- Every year 15 million children die of hunger.
- For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years.
- Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children died from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could have been prevented for what the world spends on its military in two days!
- The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed, one-third is starving. Over 4 million died of malnutrition last year.
- One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5, according to United Nations Food and Agriculture figures.
- The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world's hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world.
- Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. (UNICEF statistics).
- 3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on $2 per day.
- In 2000, the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of 6 elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet.
- In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 2000, 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children.
- The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African- American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants.
- One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.
Church Unity: Is it a lost cause?
{The annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity begins today. This movement will be 100 years old next year. I guess the majority of observers believe that the 'Church Unity' movement is in some serious trouble. There are many reasons for this: among them, retrenchment in the Catholic Church, and the Protestant departure from traditional positions on issues of sex and gender. However, as you will see from this article by Professor Brendan Leahy, not everyone is so pessimistic. D.L.}
In ecumenical terms, the past hundred years have been like a ship pulling out of port and sailing out onto the high seas. The experience has been adventurous: new horizons in sight, hard work and new bonds of friendship established, unexpected winds and storms encountered. The 'heady days' of enthusiastic initial encounters were indeed followed by storm clouds when things began 'to go wrong' whether because of lack of response to ecumenical reports or perplexing unilateral actions of churches {I presume the author is here referring to 'the women priests and gay bishops' issues. -ed.}. In more recent years, however, there's a growing realization that the ecumenical venture is a long voyage; there's no quick landing at our destination. The aspiration for programmed reunification of the churches in the short to medium term is unrealistic. So, at many levels the question has become: what should we now do on this ship that is traveling in a direction we're not quite sure of?
As we reflect on how best to respond to this question, it is important to recognize we are not completely at sea! Cardinal Kasper, Rome's ecumenical chief, has proposed that rather than seeing the ecumenical landscape as one of winter, we might perhaps consider it more a summer scenario. Growth is still happening but it's just not as dramatic as the spring time forty years ago when we saw life bursting into evidence.
Pessimistic resignation to an apparent permanent and inevitable state of things is just not good enough. Nor will it suffice to believe an over-simplistic claim that reconciled diversity without structural unity is a sufficient equivalent to the unity and catholicity of the Church. Continued commitment to hope and work for structural reunification represents a core aspect of the Catholic instinct. Both Popes John Paul and Benedict have repeated that the commitment to ecumenism is irrevocable.
To conclude with the image with which we began, we can say the ship has left the port. There's no going back no matter how long-term the journey might seem to be. Each of us is called to be in our place fully alert to what we can do at this point in terms of receptive ecumenism, meeting in synodal encounter, reaching out through new styles of forums and all of this combined with patience, imagination and perseverance.