CorruptionIn a recent essay, Ian Cawood writes: ‘From the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Frédéric Monier, Mark Knights and Jens Engels, it has become clear that, historically, corruption is that conduct by officials and corporations that public opinion (expressed Read More
CorruptionIn a recent essay, Ian Cawood writes: ‘From the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Frédéric Monier, Mark Knights and Jens Engels, it has become clear that, historically, corruption is that conduct by officials and corporations that public opinion (expressed through elections, petitions, complaints to watchdogs, polling and the media – both factual and satirical) will not tolerate. If the public does not know about the extent of corrupt behaviour (as in many countries around the world with limited press freedoms or plutocratic control of the media), then it is possible to maintain a corrupt regime […]. What is far more troubling is when information regarding the poor standards of governance is widely reported, yet the public chooses to ignore it […]. This is the great danger of identity politics. As long as the political leader or party embodies the dogma that a significant proportion of the electorate supports […], the integrity of politicians and those they appoint, or the societal impact of the policies they implement, are of negligible importance to their supporters.’ This is, as Cawood notes, a deeply troubling state of affairs.
Qui cantat bis oratEach year the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church in North America organises SingCon, at once a festival of sacred music, a liturgical retreat, and a seminar with workshops. I was privileged to be invited to this year’s event, held at St Elias the Prophet Church in Brampton, near Toronto, to give a key-note talk: ‘He Who Sings Prays Twice. How?’ The singing of birds has ceased, or very nearly. Throughout the Western world — and I expect in much of the East, though I’m untravelled there, so will keep from making assumptions — shrubs, trees, and bushes stand as if exanimate, bereft of the trilling jubilation that seemed until recently to voice the world’s soul. A century back, Thomas Hardy could naturally write in a poem: The thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears, As if all Time were theirs Anyone anywhere would at once have known what he meant, even those who lived in coal-mining towns far to the north of Hardy’s Dorset Downs. Even miners whose daily contact with birds was confined to carrying into the bowels of the earth fated canaries, heralds, not of life, but of possible asphyxiation, could have bicycled out into the country on a Sunday after church to listen with relish and reassurance to nature’s symphony. Today our experience finds readier expression in a line by Goethe Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Out in the wood the little birds keep quiet. In a conversation from 2010 with Vadim Jendreyko, in the wonderful documentary portrait entitled, The Woman with the Five Elephants, the great Ukrainian translator of Dostoyevsky, Svetlana Geier picks up on this line from Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied, ‘The Wanderer’s Night-Song’, and asks, ‘But how can we know that they’re there and keep quiet?’ We do know, now. For the little birds are dead, made extinct by exhaust, wasted habitats, or a changing climate, at any rate those that have not made it to some other wood elsewhere in the hope of a slightly longer lease of life and song. The silence that results is uncanny: the articulation in muteness of doleful absence. This muffling of the woods has its parallel in human affairs. I recently came across this observation by the medieval historian Chiara Frugoni, who draws a line of contrast between the urban reality of towns in St Francis’s day and ours: Today, as then, cities have their sounds and smells, but these are generated now in large part by traffic and general pollution. Yet the voices of men keep almost entirely quiet. Nobody sings any more except oddballs and eccentrics; even artisans who until recently accompanied their work by whistling or humming are dumbstruck now, preferring to listen to the voices and music of others, prerecorded; in so far as they speak, it is at most to voice impatience. This statement touches me. It is obviously true. You can listen to the whole talk here.
ExerciseHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 9.16-27: That is how I run, intent on winning. Luke 6.39-42: Can the blind lead the blind? When I think of the Apostle Paul, I don’t spontaneously think of an athlete. I can’t see him running in Chariots of Fire. Paul comes across as a bookish, sedate man. He’d most happily have spent his free time in constructive argument. He would have walked a lot, like everyone in Antiquity did, unless they were filthy rich. But would he have run? This counter-intuitive note adds force to Paul’s choice of an image with which to describe Christian life: ‘All runners in the stadium try to win. I run intent on winning.’ It’s good to be reminded that the Christian life is akin to physical exercise. The metaphor speaks to a time in which anyone who doesn’t go regularly to the gym, or prepare to run marathons, is looked on as a bit of a freak. I find it interesting to see that a near-universal consensus has emerged regarding the desirability of the exercise and moulding of the body in pursuit of well-being and good looks. Imagine what might happen if people would invest similar energy in nurturing and forming their souls, aspiring to spiritual beauty. The world would be transformed. As any exercise App will tell you, the secret to lasting impact is regular effort. It’s better to do something modest every day than to go for a binge-workout every two weeks. This just leaves you exhausted — and might damage your body. On this last day of retreat we may ask ourselves: what’s the state of my regimen of spiritual exercise? A retreat is a golden opportunity to make healthy resolutions. Athletes in the stadium run, Paul stresses, in the hope of winning a prize. What great goods God has in store for our souls, if only we’d equip ourselves to receive them! We can start by noticing the cataracts that blur our interior vision. If a blind man leading another blind man runs risks, what might we say of a blind man who sets out to sprint on a race course? Let’s, then, work out where our blind spots are, and ask the Divine Physician to heal them. Restoring sight is what he does. If we let him act, freedom and confidence of inward movement will be restored to us. Then we shall stand a chance of being truly useful to others, unmarred by that false, blind judgement which the Gospel condemns as hypocrisy. From Chariots of Fire, image on Wikipedia.
Right QuestionsHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 8.1-13: A man may imagine he understands something Luke 6.27-38: Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate. ‘A man’, writes Paul, ‘may imagine he understands something, but still not understand anything in the way he ought to’. That statement speaks to our time. For us, now, ‘understanding’ has to a large extent become a subset of the imagination. We fancy something, make some sort of projection, then fashion our ‘understanding’ accordingly, carefully sifting, selecting and deselecting material in order to underpin our chosen hypothesis. Artificial Intelligence, in which many place a confidence I can’t see is warranted, is a terrific ally in this endeavour. It humours us, ever ready to collate ‘evidence’, such as it is, that corroborates points of view on which we’re already fixed. This is seductive: we like to be affirmed and proved right. But if we are in any way committed to a search for truth, for the real, the tendency is deadly. Growth in understanding presupposes critical questioning. The ancient Greeks knew this. The Socratic method of probing enquiry was until not long ago the paradigm of education in the West. That is no longer so. As a result we’ve grown less resilient in response to opposition. Faced with people who do not agree with us, we increasingly sulk, threaten, or fly into a rage. Paul’s formation was Rabbinic, not Socratic. But the Rabbis were great questioners as well; indeed, part of the Rabbinic approach was to work out which questions were licit and helpful, which were not. Paul points towards this kind of enquiry when he says there is a way in which we ought to understand things. The believer asks questions already knowing the final answers. They are given him in Scripture, in the teaching of the Church. The believer’s concern is to discover how the answers may most helpfully be applied to his own time’s specific predicaments. That’s our task, yours and mine, right now. It is the Church’s task to formulate the right questions about the uncertain, menacing times in which God has placed us. By sticking to that task we may plausibly help our contemporaries see the direction in which they ought to be going. Our questions will at times provoke. So we must be prepared to face the reactions evoked above: the world’s bad temper, intimidation, even fury. That’s nothing to get too excited about. We must carry on regardless, careful to observe the terms prescribed in the Gospel for Christian engagement with the world: even as we speak the truth to it, we must love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who abuse us, asking the Lord to pour out his compassionate blessing on all. Can I see the wood for the trees?
Time Growing ShortHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 7.25.31: Our time is growing short Admittedly, there’s something a bit weird about reading an epistle written two thousand years ago that tells us: ‘time is growing short’. What can Paul have meant? He was a man immersed in the concrete business of living. We know that from his letters and from Luke’s account of his career in Acts. Constantly travelling, teaching and exhorting, tent-making, resolving quarrels as well as igniting them, scourged and stoned, living with ‘danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren’ (2 Cor 11.26), Paul knew the density of time; he also made provision for a long-term future. Why else would he have bothered to criss-cross the Near East and Greece, planning trips to Rome and Spain, spending himself to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth? His reminder that time is short is not a summons to the fatalist passivity that doomsday prophecies, secular as well as religious, are apt to produce, however. He urged people to work hard, to build and edify, plant and water; at the same time he’d have them know that no present project, however noble, has a claim to lasting finality. There is, quite simply, a passing-away imprinted on the nature of all enterprise in this world. We must learn to give our free consent to it. Paul does not want us to stop engaging in human pursuits. He tells us to engage in them in such a way that eternity will somehow shine through them. It’s in this sense those who have wives should live as if they had none, those who buy and sell should live as if they owned nothing, and so forth. The believer must do what he can to build up the earthly city, yet stay conscious that this city will fall. Further, all we construct now we must one day leave behind. If we nurture this consciousness while building, the leave-taking that must inevitably come, sooner or later, will be less of a wrench; there’s also a chance that we’ll build with greater grace, honouring the work for its sake rather than imposing ourselves on it, trapped in the wet cobweb of vanity. We shall know, then, the joy and freedom of the beatitudes, the rich blessing that comes from being poor. Relieved of having to make too much a mark in the present, from at all costs tagging everywhere, we’ll have our eyes set on the kingdom of heaven, where an eternal name awaits us, written on a white stone that alone can reveal to us the sense before God of everything we’re busy with in this world. View from Kananaskis.
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September 15th - Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows: O God, who willed that, when your Son was lifted high on the Cross, his Mother should stand close by and share his suffering, Read More 2 Comments
Today is the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary On this day we celebrate the wonderful meanings attributed to the name 'Mary', known to symbolise loving motherhood, serene grace, peace and mercy. As we celebrate today, I invite you Read More 4 Comments
Today we remember St. Ciarán the abbot, one of the twelve Irish disciples who studied under St. Finnian 🙏 When Ciarán left for his studies, his family sent their favourite cow with him as a gift for the monastery he would Read More 7 Likes
World Youth Day 2027 in Seoul, South Korea The Diocese of Cloyne is now accepting expressions of interest for its pilgrimage to World Youth Day 2027 Please email Fr. Eamon Roche at worldyouthday@cloynediocese.ie to express your interest, even if your interest is Read More 5 Likes
Happy Birthday Our Lady ❤️ Mother of God and Our Mother! ‘Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much, You can never love her more than Jesus did’, -St Maximilian Kolbe Pictured an image of Our Blessed Mother in Read More 5 Comments
