The Lenten Pastoral of Bishop Donal Murray
WAITING IN DARKNESS

“Christ be our Light” has been chosen as our Jubilee Hymn. I am glad to hear it being sung so enthusiastically in different parishes around the diocese. It is a song of prayer and praise to Jesus Christ, ‘the true light which enlightens everyone’ (Jn 1:9). In this Jubilee Year we celebrate the 2000th anniversary of the coming of the true light.

In the first verse we describe ourselves as longing for light and waiting in darkness. The words echo the prophecy of Isaiah read at the Midnight Mass of Christmas: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; on those who live in a land of deep shadow a light has shone” (Is 9:1). They also recall Zachary’s prophecy of the imminent coming of Christ: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Lk 1:78,79). The birth of Jesus was marked by light shining in the darkness. The glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds on Christmas night (Lk 2:9); the wise men travelled to greet the newborn King, guided by the light of a star (Mt 2:2).

In the middle of a modern town or city we do not see the stars as clearly as the magi or the shepherds did at the first Christmas. The glow of artificial light, which in so many ways is a great blessing, makes it difficult to get a good view of the night sky.

Our lives are surrounded by many kinds of light. Some, like the love of one’s family or the gift of good health are great blessings in themselves. Others, like wealth and popularity and influence, are more ambiguous. They can provide opportunities to do great good, but they can also be misused. It is important, as we experience these many lights, that we do not lose sight of the light of Christ which gives all of them their most profound meaning.

All of the other lights, which bring joy and warmth to our lives, are fragile and impermanent. Death and illness, partings and disagreements can disrupt relationships. Betrayals, disappointments and misfortunes of all kinds can dash expectations and turn the most promising plans to dust. When we look at the wider world we see problems of violence and hunger and underdevelopment that seem too vast to solve. We see lives in which precious little light ever seems to shine.

The explosion of communications technology has brought us face to face with how unimaginably great are the inequalities in our world. The New Testament images of Lazarus begging for scraps at the rich man’s gate (Lk 16:21), or the pagan woman’s image of the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table (Mt 15:27), strike home uncomfortably when pictures of famine and disaster appear on our television screens. “Longing for food, many are hungry”, our hymn reminds us, “longing for water, many still thirst.”

In spite of the pressures of living in the bustling world of the twenty-first century, we cannot escape the realisation that hundreds of millions of human beings live in conditions which we would find unbearable. Reflecting on the growing contrast between want and plenty in the world, Pope John Paul says,

… moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilisation, which does not allow the human race to break free from such radically unjust situations1.

Any contribution that we can make is tiny in comparison with the size of the problem. The New Testament tells us that this is no excuse. The generosity of the young boy who had only five barley loaves and two fish helped to feed the multitude (Jn 6:9). Jesus said of the poor widow who only put two small coins, “I tell you truly, this poor widow has put in more than any of them” (Lk 21:2).

Jesus tells us that we will be judged by the way we treat the least of his brothers and sisters. When we see the pain that exists in the world, and in our own country, it is hard to dismiss the image of the Lord saying on behalf of the poor and suffering; “I was hungry and you never gave me food, I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink. I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, lacking clothes and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me” (Mt 25:42).

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SIN – PERSONAL AND SOCIAL

When Pope John Paul speaks of the ‘defective machinery’ at the root of the world’s injustices, he is not thinking simply of impersonal structures. We cannot look on the pain of Christ’s sisters and brothers without asking about our own responsibility for the world in which we live. As sinful situations grow and develop, they can reach vast proportions and become somehow anonymous. It can be hard to identify their causes and tempting to believe that they are nobody’s responsibility. But the Holy Father is in no doubt about the origin of these instances of what he calls ‘social sin’:

[They] are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who tale refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of a higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals2.

None of us can claim to be totally free of responsibility that comes from complicity, or failure to act, or believing that it is useless because nothing can be changed. Every time we are unjust or dishonest or lacking in integrity or prejudiced or apathetic or ungrateful we permit and foster sinful structures. On however small a scale, we make our contribution to the accumulation and concentration of sin in the world. There would be something hypocritical about deploring the evils of the world without hearing Christ’s words, “Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone” (Jn 8:7). Our sins are not just private failures. Our individual sinfulness is linked in all sorts of ways with the darkness of the world’s sinfulness.

Our Jubilee Hymn asks Christ to shine through the darkness. He is the light which scatters the darkness of our sins and of all the evil in the world. He was given the name Jesus because he was to free his people from their sins (Mt 2:21).

The Sacrament of Penance, or Reconciliation, invites us to approach Jesus, the light of the world, so that he may scatter the darkness in our lives. The Jubilee Year is a very appropriate time to deepen, or if necessary to rediscover, this sacrament through which the Father of Mercies grants us pardon and peace.

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CONFESSING THE MERCY OF GOD

We often call the sacrament ‘confession’. The word has two related meanings. The first, which we often neglect, is one that was found in older translations of the Bible: “Everyone that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven (Mt 10:32). A modern translation says, “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven”. The word ‘confess’ means to acknowledge and praise somebody.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation is confession in that sense. Indeed, like every liturgical action, it is above all else the praise of God, ‘the worship of the divine majesty’3. It is an act in which, like the Prodigal Son, we return to our Father whose forgiveness always exceeds our expectations. It is a turning around, of our attitudes and behaviour. More importantly, it is a change in ourselves which is an acknowledgement of our Father and, at the same time, an expression of sorrowful love: “I have sinned against heaven and before you’.

The sincerity of that contrite acknowledgement of God our Father is at the heart of repentance. Even in purely human relationships, the key element in any apology is an acknowledgement of the dignity and worth of the person we have offended and regret at having failed to respect their dignity. The difference, however, is that in approaching another human being, there can often be a real fear that forgiveness might be refused.

In approaching God who sent his Son to be the light which enlightens everyone, there is no such doubt. We are coming to the light which overcomes not just our personal sins but all the evil in the world – the light which banishes the darkness before which we can feel so helpless.

In our preparation for confession, we should never lose sight of the fact that what we are doing is first and foremost an acknowledgement of the unlimited mercy of God. We are praising the light which scatters the darkness of our lives and of the world. The principal focus should not be on ourselves and on our sins, but on the light which overcomes our sins and leads us home to God.

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THE CONFESSION OF SINS

The other, more familiar, meaning of the word ‘confess’ is that we acknowledge our own sinfulness, the ways in which our sin has obscured the light. In order to do that, it is necessary to try to describe the darkness we have brought into the lives of other people and into our own. We need to try to put into words the ways in which we have failed to long for, to welcome and to move towards the truth, the peace, the hope, the light which are God’s gifts.

Confession in that sense can sometimes be very difficult. But there is no healing without honesty. An approach to someone we have hurt which would show no awareness of how we have been in the wrong, is unlikely to be convincing, or to be accepted. In fact, it would be unsatisfying even to the person making the apology.

We need to be honest not because God’s forgiveness is reluctant but in order that our repentance be full and honest. We know from our own experience that a necessary step in facing up to our failings is to be candid about them. The Twelve Step Programme of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar bodies, asks those who are addicted to admit “to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”.

An apology may, initially, be somewhat half-hearted: “If by any chance I may have been in the wrong, I’m sorry.” If one is forgiven generously and without reservation, that reluctant apology is transformed into something wholehearted and full: “I’m so grateful to you for receiving me so well; what I did was terrible.”

People sometimes argue that it is enough to confess to God. In one sense that is true. God’s forgiveness is always generously offered. To say, ‘It is enough to confess to God’, means, however, that one has not fully grasped the wonder of what we celebrate in the Jubilee Year. The infinite God has come to meet us in the human nature of his only Son – in a human life and death, in human words and actions. God meets us in visible, physical flesh and blood.

God continues to meet us in the concrete reality of sacramental signs – bread and wine, water and oil, the promise of faithful married love, the dialogue of apology and pardon that goes to make up the human reality of forgiveness.

The power of God’s merciful love which will overcome evil and renew the whole of creation is beyond our capacity to see: “No human being can see me and survive”, God told Moses (Ex 33:20). To be able to meet and be touched by that healing love in the context of human words and signs, far from being an imposition is a great gift of God.

We ask that the light of Christ may shine in our hearts. Forgiveness is always a very personal thing. “Christ personally addresses every sinner” 4. That is why it is right that the sinner should personally address Christ through an honest confession of sins. During our ad limina visit last summer, the Holy Father said to the Irish Bishops, “The personal nature of sin, conversion, forgiveness and reconciliation is the reason why the personal confession of sins and individual absolution are required”.” God’s forgiveness is like that of the father of the Prodigal Son – a warm, healing and unexpectedly generous personal welcome.

Because our sinfulness is part of the wider sinfulness of the world, because it injures others, because it can hide the light of Christ whose Body we are, the idea that ‘it is enough to confess to God’ fails to take account of the full implications of our sins as harming not just ourselves but others. It also reflects a failure to understand that the light of God’s mercy is not just a private word of forgiveness but is leading us to the new creation where we will share with people of every race, language and way of life.

For those who have freely and consciously committed grave sin, an honest acknowledgement to God and to the confessor will mean openly and honestly indicating the nature and frequency of such sins. In our relations with other people we could hardly hope to be forgiven a really serious injustice without admitting our guilt. Similarly in the human words of the sacrament of Penance we cannot expect to receive forgiveness without admitting to actions which have broken our relationship with God and with the Body of Christ, the Church.

That is why, apart from the most exceptional cases, which are very unlikely to arise in Ireland, this honest confession of any grave sins one has committed is always required for the reception of the sacrament of Reconciliation. If and when the exceptional circumstances have passed, that honest admission should be made as soon as possible when the opportunity arises. This is not because there is something incomplete about the forgiveness of God but because there is something incomplete about the process of our own healing until we have expressed our guilt honestly and fully.

Confession of sins is not meant to be an unbearable ordeal. It is a coming to the light. The confession should not be made in a hopeless or disheartened frame of mind as if the darkness were overpowering and unconquerable. In confession we describe as best we can the darkness which Christ our light is defeating – has already defeated – more completely than we can grasp.

Venial sins do not destroy our relationship with God. They are venial (literally ‘forgiveable’) either because the action or omission is less serious or because the sinner was not fully aware or fully free. As in relationships between people, less serious failures, which do not break a relationship, can be overcome without requiring a formal apology, through acts of kindness and appreciation that are part of the continuing relationship. That is not to say that an apology may not be appreciated and helpful.

Completeness and detail in the description of the nature and frequency of venial sins is not required as in the case of mortal sin which ‘kills’ or destroys our relationship with God. Those who are not conscious of grave sin after a good examination of their consciences, therefore, should not become anxious about achieving what is probably an impossible goal – an absolutely complete list of all their faults. They should confess matters that seem to them to be obstacles to their fuller following of Christ and try to make some realistic resolution to counteract these failings.

Frequent reception of the sacrament of Penance for those who are aware only of venial sins is a valuable way of growing closer to Christ:

By this means we grow in a true knowledge of ourselves and in Christian humility, bad habits are uprooted, spiritual negligence and apathy are prevented, the conscience is purified and the will strengthened, salutary spiritual direction is obtained and grace is increased by the power of the sacrament itself5.

Generations of Christ’s followers have found it helpful to bring their daily failings and the roots of those failings – in selfishness, or pride, or laziness, or greed – to the light of Christ in the sacrament of Penance.

Venial sins show that we have allowed created things, the gifts of God’s creation, to shine so brightly that they begin to obscure the true light and impede our growth as human beings and as Christians.

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A CONTINUING JOURNEY INTO THE LIGHT

The forgiveness of God does not remove the weaknesses and the distorted priorities that lie at the root of our sins. These attachments and distortions will have to be overcome either in this life or the next. Faced with the overwhelming light of God’s glory it will be all too clear how absurd was the disproportionate importance we attached to these limited and passing lights. The painful process of being separated from these attachments, which had become so much part of us, is the state of purification which we call Purgatory.

In apologising and seeking forgiveness from someone, we acknowledge their dignity and our sorrow at having failed to recognise it. We also acknowledge the ways in which we have offended them. The third step is to show our willingness to do better in the future. The offence has revealed a weakness or a disordered quality in ourselves; we will need to work at ensuring that it will not produce a similar insult or injury in the future. That may be expressed through promises or gifts or by being seen to make a special effort.

The ‘penance’ given by the confessor is an expression of our awareness that the forgiveness we have received is not so much an end as a new beginning. We still have to work at recovering spiritual health, at coming more fully to the light. The penance is “a help to renewal of life”6.

Forgiveness can only be received as a gift; it can never be demanded as a right. In particular it would be nonsensical to think that a creature could demand the forgiveness of the infinite Creator. We cannot forgive ourselves. Neither can we free ourselves from our weaknesses and failures. Only God can forgive sins7:

People are not freed from sin by themselves or by their own efforts, nor are they raised above themselves or completely delivered from their own weaknesses, solitude or slavery; all have need of Christ who is the model, master, liberator, saviour and giver of life8.

At the same time, anyone who has been forgiven recognises the need to show appreciation of the pardon received and to try to ensure that the fault does not recur. The penance expresses that appreciation and is a beginning of that effort. It acknowledges that the change which is needed in ourselves is part of the process by which God forgives us. The change is ultimately brought about not by our effort but by the light which makes us God’s holy people.

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PRAISING GOD TOGETHER

There is a particular value in celebrating the sacrament of Penance according to the Second Rite – namely, communal celebration with individual confession and absolution.

It is no accident that people still receive the sacrament in large numbers in places of pilgrimage such as Knock. That is at least partly because they provide the atmosphere of praise of God, of realisation that we grow more fully into Christ by turning to God and being forgiven. Life is a pilgrimage in which we travel towards the light which gathers us as God’s holy people. In such a setting we more easily see that the sacrament is above all else the worship of the divine majesty. There we more easily recognise the light which heals and attracts God’s people on their pilgrim road.

In Rite Two of the sacrament of penance, we listen together to the Word of God and the homily; we recognise our common need of the light of God’s mercy; we ask the Lord, as our Jubilee Hymn puts it that his light should “shine in your church gathered today”. This provides a similar atmosphere of praise of God and of recognition of our shared.

There are other important values in celebration according to Rite Two. One of the difficulties which people sometimes experience in approaching the sacrament is a certain unease about how to express their sins. Sometimes people have been using the same form of words for many years. They sense that there are other, perhaps more important issues that they would like to express, but do not know how to do so. The examination of conscience which is carried out in such services can be a most useful occasion for helping people to identify and express their sinfulness in a more adequate way.

We are meant to be “servants to one another”, and “light for the world to see”. In the communal celebration of the sacrament, we more easily realise that we are a community trying to follow Christ together. We can grasp that, through our sins, we weaken our participation in the community of the Church and diminish the effectiveness of our witness to the light. At the same time, we draw strength from one another as we admit that we are all sinners and give thanks for the mercy that sets us free.

The season of Lent in this Jubilee Year, and especially the period leading up to Easter should be marked by communal services of Penance in every part of the diocese. I know that priests in recent years have been generous with their time in helping neighbouring parishes to celebrate these services well. I hope that there will be a special effort this Lent to ensure, through the celebration of Penance according to Rite Two, that Christ may be the light shining in darkness for as many people as possible. I hope that pastoral suggestions will be provided shortly.

We ask Christ that his light may shine in the church. Forgiveness of sins, ‘through the ministry of the Church’ restores or repairs our relationship with God. It also restores or repairs our relationship with the Church which we have injured by our sins. Its mission and witness have been weakened. The sign, which we are meant to be in the world, has been obscured.

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THE WORD OF FORGIVENESS

God’s forgiveness is expressed in the sacrament through the words of absolution. These are sacramental words, bringing about what they signify. They are words filled with the healing power of God the Father of Mercies who has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.

Through the words of absolution we are touched by the creative word of God who, at the dawn of creation “said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light” (Gen 1:3). The words of absolution are spoken in the power of the Holy Spirit who renews the face of the earth and who has been sent among us for the forgiveness of sins. Through these words, the light for which we pray in our Jubilee hymn shines in our hearts, in the church and in the whole of creation, which is waiting for the coming of the light of Christ.

Just as our sins are interrelated with the sinful structures that darken the world, so the word of absolution which forgives our sins, is the word of the same Father who sits on the throne and says “I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5). It is a word which addresses not only our inability to heal ourselves but also our helplessness in the face of the injustice and suffering of our own time and of all the generations past and future.

A renewed appreciation of the sacrament of Reconciliation would bring us to the heart of what the Jubilee celebrates:

The merciful Father takes no account of the sins for which we are truly sorry (cf. Is 38:17). He is now doing something new, and in the love which forgives he anticipates the new heavens and the new earth9.

May Christ be our light as we journey towards the new heavens and the new earth. “I am the light of the world”, he said, “anyone who follows me will not be walking in the dark but will have the light of life” (Jn 8:12).

+Donal Murray

The Diocese of Limerick conceived this research project as a Jubilee 2000 project for the diocese.

The project, which commenced in July 1999, will run until September 2000. The project aims to present a brief history of each parish. We detail churches, cemeteries and holy sites in each parish. In the course of our work, we have visited each parish to photograph these sites, as well as gathering local knowledge from the parishioners in each area.

View from Anhid graveyard, Croom

With each parish history, we have included a list of the parish priests and curates. This list has been compiled using the Catholic directories from 1837 to the present day. Information prior to that has been obtained from Begley’s History of the Diocese of Limerick, as well as local histories.

Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain information regarding some of the older religious sites in the diocese. It is our intention, however, that any information that people have about these sites, or any comments they may have about our work can be emailed to us at the following address: heritageproject@eircom.net

9th Century Killulta Church

Who we are:

The research is being conducted by Lisa O’Connor and Matthew Tobin, two 3rd year BA students from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. Both study History and Media & Communications.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who have helped us and contributed to the project since its formation in July 1999.
Bishop Donal Murray

All of those in the Limerick Diocesan Office, including Rev. Michael Wall, Ms Mary Ryan-Mulqueen, Ms Aoife Bresnan, and Ms Eileen Flynn

Liam Irwin for correcting and proof-reading our work, and Rev. Michael Breen, for his computer expertise, both of Mary Immaculate College

All of the Parish Priests and local historians and parishioners in each parish, who showed us the sites in each locality and provided us with valuable local knowledge.

Canon Micheál Liston, for providing books on the history of the Diocese.

Dave Fenwick, who was involved in the project at its beginning

Steve Jacobs for creating our Web Pages

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this work, without all of whom this would not have been possible.

Matthew Tobin and Lisa O’Connor.

European Episcopal Committee for Media / Comité Épiscopal Européen Pour Les Médias

Glasgow Friday 19 May 2000

The title that has been given to this talk sums up the challenge facing me as a bishop and you as spokespersons for Episcopal Conferences. “Communicating the Faith” is indeed the underlying purpose of what we do, but we do it in a world which not only seems increasingly faithless but which seems to have little interest in hearing the faith we wish to communicate.
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAF

That deafness to the Gospel message is reflected in a particular way in the media. Communicating the faith is not the purpose which the media exist to serve. The journalists with whom we deal will be most unlikely to see that as any part of their task. This is so at least partly because their readers or listeners do not see it as part of what they expect or want from their media. “It does not sell newspapers”.

There is no point in expecting the secular media to evangelise, that is to communicate the Gospel for us. So it is important to clarify what we are hoping to achieve in our relationships with the media. Differing expectations lead inevitably to misunderstanding and friction.

Communication is difficult when people do not share a common language, but in that case each of them realises that they are failing to communicate and may take steps to supply translations, as we do in a group like this. A more difficult situation arises when people share a common language but each has got a mistaken impression of what the other is talking about. If one person thinks the conversation is about a character in a play he recently attended and another believes it is about a particular individual in the neighbourhood, there are enormous possibilities for misunderstanding, precisely because they think they understand each other.

For all sorts of reasons, when we speak to the media, we can find that our dialogue is based on misapprehensions. What we think we are communicating may not at all be what the media hears. We may think we are speaking a transforming, fulfilling message about spiritual truths; journalists are interested in what we have to say about the life of a complex institution which they may see as a strange and alien phenomenon. What we regard as being of vital interest may seem to them to be not worth printing. What they see as a great story may seem to us to be utterly trivial. We see ourselves honestly trying to communicate the truth; they see us trying to present an ‘angle’ which will show us and the Church in a good light.

Modern journalism, for many reasons, some good, some questionable, is very suspicious of institutional spokespersons. This expresses a proper refusal simply to print public relations material without any critical reflection. There was a time – this was certainly true in Ireland – when many elements of the media acted as unquestioning mouthpieces for ecclesiastical news and opinion. Of course I don’t think any of us would wish to return to the old, more obsequious, days! One sometimes hears tales of the suppression of embarrassing stories at the request – or perhaps on the instructions – of bishops or parish priests. Lengthy episcopal statements were published in full and without any comment other than fulsome praise. How times have changed!

In Ireland, for instance, important statements are occasionally produced in full by The Irish Times, which regards itself as ‘the paper of record’, but there are no guarantees about what kind of editorial comment might accompany it.

Media people sometimes quote the dictum, “News is what somebody wishes to suppress. Everything else is advertising”, as if it were a self-evident principle. One might question whether the presumption that news consists only in what an institution does not wish to have printed is not itself a recipe for an unbalanced presentation. Why should the point of view of an institution which is deeply involved in an event not be seen as newsworthy? Why should it be thought that only those aspects of the story about which the institution is uncomfortable are ‘the real news’? In any case, the result of such an approach is that both the journalist and ourselves may begin with the presumption that the media will not wish to publish what we want to say. If they do publish it, they will want to do so with a ‘balancing’ critical voice.

I believe that we need to think more clearly about the reasons for and the implications of those incompatible expectations and those suspicions.
A COUNTER CULTURAL CHURCH

The first has to do with a general distrust of institutions in our culture. In the space of a few decades confidence in organisations and their spokespersons has dramatically declined. Scandals in Church and State have led to a situation where the spokesperson is seen as a spin-doctor, attempting to cover up or sanitise some misdeed or guilty secret of the organisation. At an ecumenical conference I recently attended, a prominent Irish religious journalist referred to clergy and, I presume, spokespersons of episcopal conferences, as “God’s spin doctors” not in a passing ironic reference but ten or twelve times in a six or seven minute intervention. It summed up the difference between the way we see ourselves and the way we are seen by those with whom we deal.

The general distrust of institutions and their ‘spin doctors’ means that a categorical denial is often interpreted as clear sign that the institution has something to hide. And not infrequently this has proved to be the case! How often have we heard spokespersons for the nuclear industry tell us after an accident that ‘nothing has leaked out and there is no danger to the public’ only to discover a week later that this is not the truth?

That distrust performs a valuable function in making it difficult for institutions to cover up things that people have a right to know. There are, of course, difficult questions about privacy and about the presumption of innocence and a person’s right to their good name, but these should concern responsible media people and responsible spokespersons alike. Equally, a commitment to honesty and accuracy should motivate both because both see themselves as concerned about the truth.

And yet an atmosphere of mutual misunderstanding and suspicion often prevails. That distrust, which is experienced by all large organisations, is part of the difficulty we face in communicating the faith.

A second difficulty arises out of the fact that the Church is perceived as ‘judgmental’ and that this is out of step with contemporary trends. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain describes a dramatic change in our culture:

To make moral judgements is to be judgemental. Calling a way of life wrong is an assault on the integrity or authenticity of others… So governments are there to treat AIDS, child abuse, homelessness and addiction but not to disseminate a morality that might reduce them in the first place. Something quite revolutionary has happened to our ways of thinking: what I would call the demoralisation of discourse[1].

Part of the fascination with the Church is that it refuses to go along with this trend; it continues to make moral judgements. Perhaps that is why, just as the Latin word ‘nonne’ “expects” the answer ‘yes’, the word ‘Church’ or ‘bishop’ when it occurs in a newspaper headline, seems to “expect” the verb ‘condemns’.

The distinction between describing an action as wrong and condemning the person who does it no longer seems to make sense to many people. To disagree with a person’s choices is seen as denying their integrity. This leads to the contradiction of a society which calls itself ‘pluralist’ but in which differences of view tend to be passed over in silence.

Impossible demands are made on anybody, church spokesperson or politician who speaks on a moral issue. He or she must be free from any moral failure. Anybody who states a moral principle will be accused of hypocrisy unless they have observed the principle perfectly for their whole lives. In other words, to state a moral principle is seen as a claim of superiority over others. There is a particular resentment that the Church should preach morality when some of its clergy and religious have been shown to have committed dreadful deeds, such as the sexual abuse of children.

So the Church is an institution, but it is one which seems even more discordant with the individualism of contemporary culture than most institutions.

The third difficulty is that the Church is perceived as simply one institution among many, like a multinational company or a government department. Indeed the Church is of interest to the media because it is an institution with an impact on society. The Church, on the other hand, insists that its fundamental reality is not to be found on the level of an institution. There is a mysterious, divine reality which is the real life of the Church.

One must admit, of course that this can sometimes be used as a particularly irritating and dismissive way of evading the question – “You wouldn’t understand it; it’s a mystery”. There does, however, come a point at which that answer is true. One can, no doubt, reply to arguments against clerical celibacy, and question false assumptions on the subject. It is not possible to explain it, however, without reference to the underlying mystery. ‘Celibacy for the Kingdom’ is ultimately unintelligible without reference to the Kingdom!
RAPIDLY GROWING FAITHLESSNESS

All of this relates to the second aspect of the title I have been given, “an age of rapidly growing faithlessness”.

The general distrust of institutions points to an important element in this – not so much a loss of faith in God but a loss of faith in the Church and indeed in all the mainstream Churches:

We have not lost faith… Surveys of religious opinion even in an unchurched society like Britain regularly reveal that something like nine out of ten of those questioned declare themselves to be Christians. The vast majority confess to a belief in God. Ours is not a non-believing society but a non-practising society. We have faith but we tend not to observe its public rituals[2].

This is both a sign of hope and a warning of decline. It is a warning because if the first Christians, the three thousand who were converted on the first Pentecost, had viewed their faith as individualistically as people commonly do today, Christianity would never have survived. On the other hand, the fact that so many people believe in God gives some hope for the enrichment and revival of Christian belief. The continued existence of this religious sense is a sign of hope, but it makes all the more frustrating the question of where and how contact can be made with those whose belief is increasingly divorced from any involvement with the Churches.

The fact that the Church is perceived as judgemental obviously points to problems in the area of morality, but, even more fundamentally, it points to a growth in the notion that there is no such thing as objective truth whether in the area of morality or in the area of faith. Pope John Paul has focused on this issue, especially in Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio. He speaks, for instance, of ‘postmodernist’ currents of thought:

According to some of them, the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where everything is provisional and ephemeral[3].

Clearly, a world which lives in the context of total absence of meaning is, by definition a faithless world:

The fundamental conviction of the ‘philosophy’ found in the Bible is that the world and human life do have a meaning and look towards their fulfilment which comes in Jesus Christ[4]

The perception of the Church as one institution among many points towards the great difficulty of expressing the transcendent mystery in the public forum. Sometimes one is asked to do a meditative piece for a specific occasion such as Easter. Some of the more serious newspapers have regular reflections on faith or moral issues. These pieces are very much the exception and one wonders whether most newspapers are read in a context conducive to reflection on the kind of truths such articles express.

In this the media are no different from society in general. Explicit statements of faith are generally seen as out of place. This is the meaning of secularism. It does not necessarily banish God entirely, but it provides a box where religion may have its place, provide it does not intrude on other boxes. Radio and television refer to “the God slot”. A god who would fit into a slot is, of course, not God, but an idol. What the Churches want to communicate is the good news of a God who is present in every sphere of life and every corner of the universe. One can only do that if one points to a God who breaks through every niche and framework into which we attempt to confine him.

A further complication in our dialogue is that neither ‘side’ may fully appreciate how different an institution looks from the inside and from the outside. The very use of the word ‘institution’ usually implies a view from outside. Almost invariably when one hears the phrase “the institutional church” the speaker is not seeing it as something to which he or she belongs, or for which he or she bears any responsibility

One might even describe the “institutional Church” as the Christian community viewed by someone who has no appreciation of or at least is taking no account of, the spirit that motivates and unites the members; it is the community viewed by someone who is leaving out of account any sense of belonging to the community or of sharing its goals. Some of those who view it in this way are members of the Church and even of the clergy, but it is a bit like saying to somebody, “I would like you well enough if it were not for your skeleton!” To see a living being only in terms of the physical structure which gives it shape, necessarily misses what is most essential.

The Church seen as a community, by contrast, is a body, a family, to which a person feels a sense of belonging and loyalty and a commitment to sharing its goals. For such a person, the structure exists only to make possible the inner life of union with Christ. If one loses that perspective, the Church is fundamentally misunderstood:

This is of fundamental importance, for understanding the Church in her own essence, so as to avoid applying to the Church – even in her dimension as an ‘institution’ made up of human beings and forming part of history – criteria of understanding and judgement which do not pertain to her nature. Although the Church possesses a ‘hierarchical’ structure, nevertheless this structure is totally ordered to the holiness of Christ’s members[5].

So, we need to begin by recognising, even in the somewhat exaggerated description I have given, the differing perspectives of the partners in the dialogue.
A PRESS CONFERENCE

To make it more concrete, we might imagine a press conference, in which an unfortunate bishop is to face the press on some controversial issue. All too often, it is a situation where the two ‘sides’ are speaking the same language in the sense that they are using the same words, but, in many respects, are not speaking about the same thing.

The journalists will expect to meet a professional spokesman, fully prepared on all aspects of the issue. They will expect him to be a well-briefed defender of a party line, interested above all in protecting the interests of the institution. They will expect to have to probe and to challenge in order to get behind statements that are economical with the truth, or statements that have been carefully tailored to avoid drawing attention to some aspect of the issue.

The bishop will be wishing he could be somewhere else. Unlike a politician or a chief executive, the bishop, if he has any sense, has never sought this job, never envisaged himself in as such a public person. He will be feeling that, in the variety of concerns and crisis that make up his life, he has not had an opportunity to master the topic as he would have wished. He will not be thinking in terms of defending the power of an institution; rather, he will be anxious to speak well for the Church community to which he feels an obligation of loyalty and he will be hoping that he can do justice to the Gospel message. His biggest fear is that, if he mishandles the press conference or interview, people will be turned away from the truth that it is his responsibility to communicate. In particular he may fear that his priests, who in many ways are disheartened and feel that the tide is flowing against their ministry, will think that they have been let down.

This is obviously a recipe, not for fruitful dialogue but for mutual suspicion and misunderstanding. I would like to reflect on some of the questions that strike me about the implications of these differing perceptions.
A VARIETY OF ISSUES

The issues that arise are of different kinds. Some of them simply concern the institutional dimension of the Church. Where it is a question of accountability for Church funds, for instance, we have no basis for claiming that we should be any less accountable than any other voluntary organisation, first of all to our own members but also to the general public. In such cases the issue of increasing faithlessness or the perception of the Church as a mere institution are not very relevant. We are like any other institution which is perceived as having been secretive and as not having been accountable for its finances.

Other issues arise where we are deliberately trying to speak wholly or partly in the language of the common good, about social issues. Here we should find ourselves speaking the same language – until we come to any points we wish to make about God, or prayer, or Christian faith. Usually when the Irish Episcopal Conference is making a statement about abortion or violence in Northern Ireland, bishops will be insisting that we stress the importance of prayer. They rightly regard this as the most important part of what we want to say. But we know that editors will be likely to see this part of the statement as pious jargon or waffle.

It is important nonetheless that we persist in trying to show the relationship between what we say about these issues and the vision of faith which inspires our statements and our actions. It is important first of all because the idea that religious faith is purely private and with no public implications needs to be challenged. It is important also because this may have particular value for those who share, or at least remember something of, the vision out of which the statement comes.

Other issues are of their nature trivial. Recently, for instance, we have heard reports, from the United States as one might expect, of a new diet, known as ‘The Bible Diet’ which claims to lead people “from the slavery of over-eating, through the desert of temptation, to the promised land of guilt-free milk and honey”[6].

I do not know whether there have been any questions about that particular story, but when it appears on a newsdesk, I imagine that a reporter’s first instinct would be to seek a comment from “a spokesman for the Catholic Church”. Such an approach creates a dilemma. If one responds seriously, one may find oneself providing material for the presentation of ‘religion as harmless fun’. A response from an official spokesperson risks suggesting that such trivia are so close to the heart of the Catholic Church that it wishes to make an official statement. If one refuses to respond, that may create the impression of being uncooperative with the media.

Perhaps what is needed in these cases is not an official spokesperson, but a satirist! I recall being asked for a comment on the newly published Catechism of the Catholic Church. As you recall, the news agency reports focused on the idea that the Catechism had named new sins, and pointed to the example of pornography. I was inspired to reply by asking people to imagine the picture of a ‘conscientious Catholic pornographer’ discovering to his horror that the Church had suddenly decided that pornography was wrong! I think that was probably the right level of response to an essentially silly and unprofessional report.

What all of these kinds of stories, institutional stories, social policy stories and trivial stories, have in common is that only in the most indirect way does any of them provide the possibility of an explicit attempt to ‘communicate the faith’. Usually, one can hope to do little more than to present the Church as a reasonable, responsible body with something constructive, challenging, perceptive and distinctive to say about human life.

But it is vital to ‘keep the rumour of God alive’. It is important that reminders that there are people in society who believe in a vision which commits them to justice, and which gives them an unconquerable hope, should be heard in public debate. It is important that the Church should present itself not as an impersonal and uninvolved institution but as a community whose faith allows us to regard every human being as a brother or sister whose worth and dignity should provoke “deep amazement”[7] and whose life is of eternal significance.

There is another kind of issue which arises rarely, but which can be an entirely different kind of opportunity for communicating the faith. At a time of great national tragedy, there can be occasions when through reflective articles or good liturgy a glimpse may be given, even in the most secular media, of how a Christian understands death, how a Christian finds meaning even in absurdly tragic events. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this in recent times was the death of Princess Diana.

It may indicate the irrationality of the reactions of society and of the media. After all, it was by no means the saddest or most devastating tragedy of the decade. But it touched questions about the mystery of death and the meaning of life in a way that greater tragedies did not. We saw a largely non-churchgoing society inventing ritual for itself – flowers and candles and even prayers and messages to the dead, including one which read “Dear Diana, why did you leave us? P.S. Please excuse the handwriting”!

There was a society waiting for a word of faith in a way that may not happen again for decades – and even when it does, it will be in an equally unexpected way. I suspect that we might look back on it as a largely lost opportunity to respond to the fact that secular society was actually addressing the mystery of death. It does seem to me, however, that it is an incident which demonstrates that even the most secular society is occasionally open to something that looks beneath the surface. It also indicates one of the aspects of the Church’s life which most fundamentally breaks through the image of the impersonal institution. When people gather in the liturgy, really aware of their mortality, their fallibility, their dependence on one another and on God, they relate in a way which is the complete opposite of the institutional. They relate as persons, conscious of who they are and of the deepest questions of human existence.
KNOWING PEOPLE

In your work you are constantly confronted with the implications of different ways of viewing the Church – as institution viewed from outside or as community to which we belong. A further complication is that while the media people with whom we are dealing see themselves as free spirited individuals, they may be seen ‘from outside’ as part of one of the great contemporary institutions whose influence is continuously growing.

The most fundamental way of breaking down barriers is of course for people to get to know and understand people. That is perhaps the most important and the most exhausting element of your job. It is an area in which church spokespersons and press officers have done enormously valuable work in recent years. In my experience, that is of enormous value especially in relation to local media – local newspapers, local radio and local television – to have good personal relationships with journalists, editors and broadcasters. There are occasions when one feels these can be unfairly critical, but, generally speaking, they are friendly and accommodating. Even lengthy episcopal statements, such as pastoral letters which fill a whole page of broadsheet, are printed in our local paper, the Limerick Leader. This is an area in which we have never done enough.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES

But there is more to be said. Vast new possibilities are opening up for us. We have hardly begun to recognise the potential of the new technologies of communication.

Alongside the massive communications empires of people like Rupert Murdoch, there is a democratisation of communication because of the new possibilities for communication provided by e-mail and because millions of people can and do publish their own website. 100,000 new pages are added to the world wide web every hour. Seven new people log on to the internet every second.

There are possibilities for internal communication. When I arrived in Limerick, I proposed that we should look into the possibility of publishing a diocesan magazine. For all sorts of reasons we decided against it. Now I think that might have been a good thing. Perhaps the day of delivering a magazine to all the parishes by car is past. Maybe the material should be delivered by e-mail so that a diocesan input is available for use in a parish newsletter? Might national and international material be delivered in the same way, so that major issues and events could be dealt with promptly and competently? Could there not also be a two-way communication so that material from one parish could be made available to others?

The use of the internet is another scarcely tapped area. I know that many dioceses and Church bodies – and not least the Holy See – have well developed websites. That is a very welcome development. As yet, however, these mostly take the form of presenting large quantities of data – documents, history and general information.

That may be seen as an institutional way of communicating – simply presenting the information. The enormous potential of the internet lies in the fact that it provides the possibility for two-way communication, for dialogue. In other words, it provides for communication in which the voice of the individual may be heard rather than simply telling the person, “the information is all there for you if you want it.”

At the moment we are working out what would be the simplest method of enabling parishes to publish their newsletter on the parish webpage and to update it weekly. We would hope that this would enable a parish to have two-way contact with parishioners who are temporarily or permanently away from home.

The Church in Europe should surely be able to provide an internet forum where questions could be responded to within a reasonable time and where ongoing discussion with one or a number of questioners might be made possible. This would in time result in a collection of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) which might well be of more interest than large quantities of information.

It might be thought wiser that this should not be the official website of episcopal conferences or of dioceses, but these might provide links to it. If five or six theologians or scripture scholars in each of our countries could be persuaded to give a couple of hours a week to this project, I am sure that a most useful service could be provided.

I speak as one less wise in all this area, but I think we should be looking carefully at what possibilities for newsgroups and chatrooms and virtual classrooms might offer for communicating the faith.

In countries like Ireland and Britain, where up to now, there was no legal possibility of having a Church radio or television station, the live streaming of radio and television programmes as well as previously broadcast programmes, are becoming increasingly possible on the net.

The fact that even so forward looking a document as Aetatis Novae only eight years ago does not, as far as I can see, even mention the internet, shows how rapidly things are changing and opportunities are emerging.

I recall that some of these points were made by participants at the European Synod last October:

The new media give an opportunity to the Church to shift from an informative monologue to an interactive discussion.

The Internet needs to be not only a place of information, but also a place of formation, a ‘missionary territory’. It is a place in dire need of evangelisation and evangelisers, and thus should not escape the attention of those Christians with the specific charism/mission of evangelising the media.

The mainly ‘passive’ non-interactive presence of Catholic institutions on the Internet is quite insufficient. The many new technical possibilities of dialogue with countless numbers of people should be taken into serious consideration as a helpful and effective tool of preaching.

The success of prayer sites on the Internet shows that it can provide a strong alternative to the ’culture of death’.

In the light of all this, perhaps the task of communicating the faith to our world is entering a new era of possibilities. Maybe these new possibilities have an important part to play in the new springtime of evangelisation to which Pope John Paul has frequently pointed.

+Donal Murray

Notes

[1] SACKS, J., The Persistence of Faith, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1991, p.42.

[2] The Persistence of Faith, p. 97.

[3] JOHN PAUL II, Fides et Ratio, 91.

[4] Fides et Ratio, 80.

[5] JOHN PAUL II, Mulieris Dignitatem, 27.

[6] Praise the Lord and shed the pounds, The Sunday Tribune, 16 April 2000.

[7] JOHN PAUL II, Redemptor Hominis, 10.

Just three years after Ardagh had witnessed the funeral of it’s patriot William Smith O Brien the local Fenian Movement attacked the police station in Ardagh. It was March 5th 1867. The attackers gained entry to the ground floor by battering the door with a sledgehammer and cartwheel. The four policemen withdrew upstairs.

Stephen Ambrose from Dunganville with hatchet in hand mounted the stairs but was shot by one of the police. He fell wounded into the kitchen bleeding profusely from an arm wound. After a few minutes the attackers withdrew and eventually disbanded and went into hiding.

Stephen Ambrose’s brother Bob, who took part in the rising, was later ordained priest for the Diocese. He returned to Ardagh as curate in the 1880’s and played an active part in the Plan of Campaign on the side of the Glensharrold tenants. He is also regarded as one of the leading lights in the founding of Ardagh Co-Operative Dairy Society (1891)

With the help of Edward O Brien (son of William, the Young Ireland Leader) over twenty local Fenians were rounded up and arrested. However after a three month spell in Limerick gaol the Ardagh boys were released on bail.

They were never subsequently brought to trial. Edward in credited with securing clemency for them.

Local history remembers the following as some of those who took part in the attack on the local barracks in Ardagh in 1867;

Founding Of Ardagh Co-Operative Dairy Society (1891)

Ardagh C.D.S. was founded in 1891, one of the very earliest of Ireland’s creameries which owed their inspiration to the preaching of Horace Plunkett. At a local level the founders numbered among their ranks Edward O’Brien, the local landlord and a Protestant, and the Rev. Bob Ambrose, the local Roman Catholic curate. Despite their widely differing social, political, religious and economic background, they put aside any differences they had in the interests of the common good of the area.

Despite some initial teething troubles Ardagh quickly became established as one of the foremost creameries in the country. It also quickly established a reputation for producing top quality butter. This became especially true in the 1940′s when it won no less than three Reed Cups in a row from 1942-1944. The Manager at the time was Jim Fulham and the Butter maker was Bill Nash. Above all the co-operative was a focus for the community in general and farmers in particular.

A complete History of Ardagh Creamery
is contained in the book:-
Ireland’s Co-operative Heartland
by John Hough, B.A. H.Dip in Ed.,
Ardagh, Co. Limerick.
Telephone: + 353 69 76595.

n September 1868, a young man named Quin was digging potatoes at the south-western side of a Rath (fort) called Reerasta, beside the village of Ardagh and near the Carrickerry road. When he reached the bank close to a thorn bush he found the surface soft, and driving his spade down between the roots of the thorn, he found it strike something hard. He cleared away the earth and found a beautiful cup now known as the Ardagh chalice. In the cup there was a smaller one made of bronze and five fibulae.

There is nothing known of the history of this precious relic of a lost art, or how it came to be buried in the Rath. It is suggested that it is one of the valuable cups that were stolen from Clonmacnois, in the year 1125, by a Limerick Dane, who was captured and hanged the following year.

Tradition says that Mass used to be said in the Rath where they were found, in the penal times. The chalice may have been used on these occasions to distribute communion to the multitude that assembled there. Perhaps when the alarm was given, and in the hurry of the moment, the chalice were hidden to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. This would be supported by the condition in which they were found, there being no case or covering to protect them suggests that they were buried in a hurry. The priest or person who placed them in the earth, may never have had an opportunity of returning to the place to retrieve them.

The Ardagh Chalice is on display at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.