Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: May & Patrick O'Donnell, (Anniv).
11.00: Patrick & Ellen Morgan (Anniv); Pascal Leahy (Month's Mind).
6.30: Carl Straszewski (1st Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

We were exposed to the romantic misfortunes of yet another celebrity couple this week. It's all getting to me! A wonderful antidote to all this rubbish is Julian Barnes' 1989 novel, 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'. It opens with an account of Noah and the Flood and it closes with an off-beat vision of the Hereafter. Each chapter has a different narrator, providing a different, unconventional view of history.

At the end of Chapter One, we discover that a woodworm has been the narrator. He and his six siblings sneaked aboard the Ark unknown to the Patriarch. Woodworm aboard the Ark! Oh Horror! They escaped undetected after the Flood to continue their undermining mission in 'the renewed world'. Even after the Flood, there is very little security!

The woodworm has a lot to teach us in this culture obsessed with fame and celebrity. This obsession verges on the religious. Celebrities are worshipped and treated like gods. Cups they've drunk from, or clothing they once wore, are sold on the Internet as holy relics, worthy of veneration. And at the upper reaches of the celebrity tree some are deemed to have entered into immortality itself. Their names will live forever. Little wonder so many of our children desperately want to be famous.

And yet, for all the glamour of this religion, there is something empty at its heart.

Chapter 10 of Barnes' wonderful book pictures heaven as a dreamlike state in which dreamers "get the sort of Heaven they want". He will live on forever and have everything his heart desires. He can eat whatever he wants, have imaginative sex with whomsoever he wants, and he plays a round of golf in 18 shots every time! In his dream, he gets everything he wants just by wanting it. This, in a sense, is the fantasy of modern celebrity.

And yet at some point this endless round of satisfied desire comes to seem utterly futile. "They can't believe their good luck at first," says the proprietor of heaven, "and then a few hundred years later, they can't believe their bad luck. They're stuck with being themselves." These 'saints' are so bored that they opt to die off a second time!

Too many people think of Christianity as offering a similar version of this immortality. In popular piety, Christianity is just another calculation about what's best for me - a cosmic life insurance policy: believe and you'll live on forever and ever. In fact, authentic Christianity is something quite different.

Jesus calls his followers to forget themselves, to transfer the centre of interest in their lives from self to God, to love others more than they love themselves. People in this condition are not focused upon what's going to become of them. And that's precisely why, as St Paul puts it, death loses its sting.

This is the very opposite of the celebrity desire for immortality. For my life is small and petty when it's centred on itself. True joy lies in the other direction. Beyond self-absorption there opens up another world entirely. The great religions of the world supply many colourful descriptions. Yet in its everyday form, it goes by simple names like love and compassion. These qualities are eternal, surviving even the woodworm!

-Dick Lyng

Items of Great Interest

"Quotable Quotes...."

One Man's Brush with the Latin Mass

I don't think there need be too much consternation concerning the 'reintroduction' of the Latin Mass. Some years ago, the late Cardinal Hume designated certain churches in the Archdiocese of Westminster as places where the old rite could be used on Sundays.

St Dominic's Priory here was one of these churches. When it began, it was fairly well attended, but after a few years was phased out through lack of numbers. We were fortunate here as several of the brethren knew how to celebrate it. But there were difficulties.

We managed a Missa Cantata every Sunday and at Easter a Solemn High Mass. There were complaints because we did not wear birettas and we were told that members of the Latin Mass Society stayed away because we did not use the old liturgical calendar. Had we done so, there would have been serious difficulties. For instance, on the Solemnity of the Assumption, the old calendar celebrated the 'Mass of the Dedication of a Church'. There is, however, in the 1962 Missal a Mass for the Assumption -Missa Signum Magnum in Coelo.

Even so, when we used this, the server left in protest. Can it seriously be thought that at a time when people are staying away from Mass, they will come to Church to listen to a priest whispering Latin with his back to the people? When the novelty has worn off, the numbers are likely to drop, though doubtless there will be a solid core who prefer it.

(Fr) Denis Geraghty OP
London NW5

COLOUR CODED

More than a year after some African-Americans scrutinized the blackness of the nation's first black president, America's Catholics are now wrestling with the same questions to determine who was the nation's first black priest.

The debate emerges as the Archdiocese of Chicago seeks sainthood for the Rev. Augustus Tolton, long hailed in Chicago as the first black clergyman to serve in the U.S. Catholic Church.

A rival for the title is Bishop James Augustine Healy, who was ordained in 1854, the year Tolton was born.

But Healy, the son of an Irish- American landowner and a mixed-race slave, was light-skinned enough to pass as a white man. And in many cases, he did.

GOD INTRUDES AGAIN!

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled "Atheism," populated by works by Hitchens, Dawkins? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, post-metaphysical, even post-historical era, has the God question broken out anew?

Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists? I don't really think we can. Certainly the New Atheists' disdain for religion did not sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. While some of the debate took its cue from there, 9/11 was not really about religion, any more than the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. In fact, radical Islam generally understands little about its own religious faith, and its actions are, for the most part, politically driven.

Assured since the fall of the Soviet bloc that it could proceed with impunity to pursue its own global interests, the West overreached itself. Just when ideologies in general seemed to have packed up for good, the United States put them back on the agenda in the form of a peculiarly poisonous brand of neo conservatism.

Like characters in some second-rate piece of science fiction, a small cabal of fanatical dogmatists occupied the White House and proceeded to execute their well-laid plans for world sovereignty. It was almost as bizarre as Scientologists taking over 10 Downing Street, or Da Vinci Code buffs patrolling the corridors of the Elysée Palace. The much-trumpeted Death of History, meaning that capitalism was now the only game in town, reflected the arrogance of the West's project of global domination; and that aggressive project triggered a backlash in the form of radical Islam.

-Terry Eagleton

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