Sacred music – the perfect antidote to consumerism

From The Notebook @ The Irish Catholic

The choir of King’s College, Cambridge is often associated with the Christmas season. For many of my English friends, the sound of Carols from King’s on the BBC on Christmas Eve is the sign that Christmas has well and truly begun. But I associate them above all with the season of Advent.

In December 2003 I was 17 years old, coming to the end of my first term studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge. I was overwhelmed by all the intellectual demands being placed on me and was just about getting used to living as a Catholic in a largely non-believing context. The Anglican chaplain at the college had already spotted me as one of the few Christians in first year, and very kindly invited me to carry a candle in the Advent procession.

I had no idea of the beauty that awaited me. At the beginning of the Advent procession the great chapel lay in darkness. The famous fan vaulting, the straw-coloured stonework, the Rubens ‘Nativity’: all of these treasures were hidden in obscurity. Then, the enormous West Door was opened, and a single light silently entered the expectant darkness, leading the choir whose chant began to fill that vast space. Throughout the next hour, as we moved very slowly from West to East, the light spread as progressively more candles were lit. The choir sang hymns and Latin chant and carols, all unfamiliar to my untrained ear, and all adorning with unspeakable beauty the same themes: expectancy, longing, waiting, hope.

For me, that night was an awakening, at once spiritual and aesthetic, and I have been deeply attached to the music of Advent every since. Just think of the great Advent hymn, ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’, a meditation in song on the prophetic titles of Christ: ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Rod of Jesse’, ‘Daystar’. Consider the raw hunger for God’s presence expressed in lines like: ‘O come, O come Emmanuel,/and ransom captive Israel/That mourns in lonely exile here,/Until the Son of God appear’. And think of the warming hope that answers that hunger: ‘Emmanuel will come to thee, O Israel’.

Atmosphere
The whole atmosphere of Advent music is in diametric opposition to the consumer culture, a culture which cannot wait for Christmas, and wants to pre-empt the feast for a whole two months, co-opting it for the purposes of profit.

If we Christians are really trying to ‘live’ the season of Advent, it’s easy to be outraged by the constant playing of tinny Christmas soundtracks in our shops from Hallowe’en onwards, and it’s easy to waste a lot of energy complaining about this state of affairs.

For my part, I’ve found it’s best to give no energy to outrage, and to invest instead in cultivating an Advent spirit by deliberately and intentionally listening to a great deal of Advent music. Many of my friends do the same, and in the age of the internet, it’s easily done.

You could start by finding a nice version of ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’, then try out some classics: ‘O Come Divine Messiah’, ‘Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence’, ‘Gabriel’s Message’, ‘Creator of the Starry Height’. If you like Latin chant look up the ‘O Antiphons’, the ‘Rorate Caeli’ and the ‘Alma Redemptoris Mater’. If you prefer contemporary music check out Matt Maher’s ‘Love Comes Down’ and Chris Tomlin’s ‘Even So Come’. And if you want to go really high-brow, have a listen to Bach’s ‘Advent cantatas’ and William Byrd’s ‘Vigilate’.

There’s an ocean of good Advent music: let’s open our hearts to its message of hope.

*****

Emmanuel will come
Listening to the right music helps if you want to cultivate an Advent spirit, but just as important is the practice of entering into silence every day. It’s easier said than done, and it’s best to set a limited goal, like starting the day with five minutes of silence, or ending the day by turning all the lights and devices off, lighting a candle, and simply sitting in the presence of God for a few moments.

The neon lights on our streets are shouting: “Buy, buy, buy!” Our best and most subversive response is simply to be: to be still in the presence of God, and to allow our soul’s deep desires reach out to him in hope. ‘Emmanuel will come…’

‘If we believe that we are deserving of a right to life, how can we deny it to others?’

The Irish Catholic - Striping the right to life from terminally ill children would be a truly shocking development, writes Barry Walsh

The use of language matters in any debate, since words have the capacity to cause extreme hurt, particularly when they seek to unfairly marginalise or devalue vulnerable members of society. It is unfortunate then that a most offensive and inaccurate use of language has recently entered the Irish political and media lexicon.

This has occurred thanks to a campaign which is gathering steam to amend our Constitution to introduce abortion in the case of what are described as fatal foetal abnormalities.

Most people would presume, not unreasonably, that what are being referred to here are conditions which render life outside the womb impossible for the child, with death being instantaneous at birth. Abortion in such circumstances is presented as uncontroversial and almost a humane response to the suffering of parents and babies alike. But is this correct?

In 2012, the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG) published a study titled Fatally Flawed? A Review and Ethical Analysis of Lethal Congenital Malformations. Its authors included British and Australian experts in this area, including Australia’s foremost expert on prenatal testing.

The study was comprised of a comprehensive review of the medical literature in this area, reviewing 75 separate studies. In doing so the authors compiled a definitive list of 26 distinct disorders which can be diagnosed in the womb and which are described as being “fatal” or “lethal” in common parlance.

However, in their conclusions, they found that “none of the malformations that are commonly described as being ‘lethal’ are in fact lethal in the strict sense. Prolonged survival has been described in all of the conditions listed.”

They also found that in their short lives, babies born with several of these so-called “fatal” conditions have gone on to “experience awareness of those around them, hear and respond to sound, and to learn and remember”.

Treatment

A separate study published in the US in 2015 reviewed almost 2,000 cases of Trisomy 13 and 18, two of these “fatal” conditions. It found that when clinicians pursue aggressive treatment after birth, 12% of children diagnosed with these conditions live to beyond their fifth birthday.

Just last month, Tracey Harkin wrote in the Irish Independent about her beautiful daughter, Kathleen Rose. She was diagnosed with Trisomy 13 in the womb, and yet she recently celebrated her ninth birthday.

So why are these conditions routinely referred to as being “fatal”? The damning conclusion of the BJOG study is that, apart from cases of misdiagnosis, such terminology is often used “to make it easier for women to come to terms with termination of the pregnancy” and, shockingly, where “practitioners are aware that death is not inevitable, but believe that survivors will not have a life that is worth living”.

In other words, a condition is referred to as ‘fatal’ in order to make the option of abortion more palatable to parents who are faced with such a diagnosis. The authors stress the importance of terminology in these situations, saying that “in counselling, language can corrupt both the inner logic of the clinician’s decision-making process and the counselling of families facing difficult decisions”.

This research was not produced by or on behalf of any religious or pro-life group. It was conducted by widely renowned experts and published in the internationally respected Journal of the Royal College of Obsetricians and Gynaecologists in London.

And that brings us to the use of the word “abnormalities”. Why has it become acceptable to refer to children diagnosed with serious conditions in the womb as being “abnormal”? If children or adults fighting a terminal illness were to be described by politicians or as a matter of law as having an ‘abnormality’, there would surely be storms of protest.

So these repeated references to “fatal abnormalities” is insulting, as well as being inaccurate. And yet, politicians, the media and a large section of the Irish medical profession continue to use this phrase.

In fact, groups campaigning on this issue not only defend the use of this inaccurate terminology, but have intervened in the media to insist on its usage.

The CEO of the Irish branch of Amnesty International recently wrote in protest to The Irish Times to insist that this “accepted” terminology of “fatal foetal impairments” be used, on the basis that “it is a term which the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women uses”.

So in other words, the views of a politically-appointed UN committee ought to trump expert medical opinion.

This issue has caused genuine concern across the Irish political spectrum, not least in my own party, Fine Gael, which has a strong pro-life ethos at its core.

In spite of this, a view has gained traction at a high level in Government in recent months that it may be possible to amend the Constitution to retain the general right to life for unborn children, but to allow abortion in the cases of children diagnosed with so-called “fatal foetal abnormalities”.

Conundrum

On one level, this proposal is a legal fiction, since it will be impossible to formulate a constitutional definition for something for which medical science cannot diagnose with any certainty. But it also ignores a fundamental moral and political conundrum.

Any such referendum would essentially ask the Irish people to reaffirm the general right to life of all citizens, including children in the womb, but to strip the right to life from a small number of children for the sole reason that they have been diagnosed with a serious illness.

In 2012, the Government successfully proposed a referendum to insert a new section into the Constitution which guaranteed “the natural and imprescriptible rights of all children”. And yet now, a little over three years later, leading members of the same Government are advocating the abolition of the most fundamental right – the right to life – for sick and vulnerable children in the womb.

You don’t have to be a Catholic, or even religious, to see the fundamental inhumanity at the heart of this proposal. Just think of the Rubicon which we would be crossing as a society: if constitutionally guaranteed human rights can be removed from one small group of Irish people, then what is to stop others from meeting a similar fate at some point in the future?

Human history is peppered with instances where a section of a society has been deemed to be deserving of lesser or no rights due to their age, sex, religion, race or physical disability. And each time, it has led to discrimination and needless loss of life.

While campaigning to abolish slavery in the US, Abraham Lincoln regularly referred to the writings of Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, whom he had studied decades earlier while working as a travelling lawyer.

He was particularly drawn to Euclid’s famous observation that “things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another”.

Lincoln realised that this rule of mathematical reasoning also had direct application to human society: how can any human being be inferior to another, or be enslaved by him, when all aspects of their basic existence were identical?

Biological

The same is surely true of all children in the womb. Each child is conceived through the same biological process. They each grow, develop and are sustained by their mothers for the first months of their existence.

So how can we say that one child in the womb has a right to life because they are healthy, but that another child should have no such right, because they are terminally ill or seriously disabled?

Lincoln wrote that “he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”

Let’s apply that logic to the Irish abortion debate for a moment: if we, the voting public, believe that we are deserving of a right to life, then how can we amend our constitution to deny it to others?

If we believe that children in the womb are human beings, but at the same time propose that terminally ill babies should have inferior constitutional rights to healthy babies, then how can we rebut any future claim which might arise that terminally ill adults are less deserving of the same constitutional rights?

I can almost hear those proposing a referendum on this issue saying “but it’s not the same thing!” Really? Why not? Children in the womb are either human beings, or they are not. Principles such as equality and universal human rights cannot have any caveats or sub-categories of people to which they do not apply. And yet this is what is essentially being proposed should be enshrined in our laws.

If Bunreacht na hÉireann is amended to say that some human beings do not have a right to life, then that implicitly means that the right to life of all human beings in Ireland will have a question mark placed over it.

The true measure of any society is how it treats its sick and vulnerable. If we strip the right to life from terminally ill children on the grounds that their short lives outside the womb are not worth living, what message does that send to our many citizens who bravely fight terminal illness every day?

All life is precious and deserves to be protected, whether it lasts for a day, a year, 10 years or a full natural life.

The amendment of our Constitution to effectively declare that short lives are not worth living would be a truly shocking development which should be strongly opposed by all who believe this to be the case.

*Barry Walsh is Vice Chair of the Fine Gael Executive Council and was President of Young Fine Gael, 2007-10. He writes here in a personal capacity.

Priests do not grow under cabbages in bishops’ gardens

Letter to the Irish Catholic this week asking some questions about vocations to the ministerial priesthood. The IC printed only some of the letter (as is their editorial policy) but the full letter is given below:

Dear Sir

In the Catholic church we have an on going discussion about the crisis in vocations in the ministerial priesthood in Ireland in terms of staffing numbers and the challenges it poses. It perplexes me to see reactions from around the country when parishes get upset when their bishop announces they no longer have a priest to send to minister. It seems to still be a shock despite the fact we have had this vocations crisis discussion for over 20 years. It upsets but it also challenges the hell out any parish as it forces the parish to go back to basics and re-examine what it means to be parish something which we have been experiencing in Limerick for many years.

But instead of always throwing the petition and letters of complaint at the bishop, how about looking at it the other way?

For each parish who now complains because they don't have a priest because "the bishop wont give them one", when was the last time that parish gave a seminarian to the diocese? Do we as Catholics think priests grow under cabbages that grow in the bishop's back garden? Where do we honestly think these men - whose ministry we all generally agree we respect and need at a grassroots level - where do we think they come from? They are always some other mothers son - but not our son, our brother, our nephew.

 

While the on going discussions about married clergy are needed, those that think that a married clergy is suddenly going to solve the vocations crisis all in one go are deluding themselves. It is as if the only problem with becoming a priest was the "pelvic issue"!! As a young man in his mid-30's I somehow doubt that there would be swarms of men my own age marching on Maynooth in the morning asking to be admitted to the seminary if Pope Francis were to decide that the role on celibacy would be relaxed for all clergy in the Latin rite.

 

We need to start having a serious discussion about what priesthood means for us in the Catholic Church and in Ireland so perhaps we could start a discussion in this paper answering some questions:

• Do we really understand what exactly the church teaches about the ministerial priesthood? After VC2 we have the priesthood of all the baptised so why do we need priests?   
• Why does the Latin church have the discipline of clerical celibacy? Can a serious theologian or one of our bishops perhaps come out and actually explain it to us? Set out what exactly the position is so we understand and please explain why we give dispensations to converts and not to our own men.
• Has anyone bothered to actually ask what do our priests think about it all? Independent surveys as opposed to ones sponsored by special interest groups like Iona or ACP or ACI who always have their own slant on things.
• Does a vocation to priesthood also imply a vocation to celibacy? What are the pros and cons of combining the two?
• Can the formators at Maynooth gives us insight into how we are forming our current seminarians in this area at the moment? We have listened for years to the consequences of the formation or lack there of; so please tell us what have we learned and how are we fixing the problem, what have we changed?
• If we relax the disciple what does it mean practically speaking for us in the pews; are as we Catholics in the pew going to delve into our pockets deeper to support Fr John, Mrs Fr John & family? What about pensions and inheritance rights? If Fr John is married and dies do parishes just kick the widow and children out of the local presbytery? Let's start having that discussion and thinking about what it would mean. There are a lot of people pushing for married clergy but I haven't heard anyone telling me what it means for my day to day material support to my church.
• Also as someone who has worked in East Africa, what support will we give to churches in Africa, Asia and South America who are barely coping now, never mind when you add in such family issues.
• If the discipline is relaxed, would any priests who have left the ministry because they got married and had a family, would they be interested in coming back into ministry - after all they are still priests; just barred from ministry by law. Has any one asked them?

Can we have this discussion, can we start and stop pretending that priests grow under cabbages in bishops' gardens.

Yours sincerely

Shane Ambrose

May is the month of Mary - The Irish Catholic

May is the month of Mary

Our Lady is the paradigm of a truly liberated woman

by Wendy Grace

The Irish Catholic

May 1, 2014

This Easter, I was in Seville for the Semana Santa celebrations. This is where thousands of people line the streets to watch processions of depictions of the Gospel called pasos. These pasos are large carved wooden sculptures atop a moveable float of wood. 

Many of the pasos are dedicated to beautiful statues of our Lady surrounded by hundreds of candles and fresh flowers. These pasos are led by hundreds of ‘nazarenos’ dressed for the occasion and accompanied by music from a brass band. The pasos are carried underneath by a team of men who carry the paso on their shoulders and necks. This is no easy task, most weigh over a metric tonne and are carried by between 25 and 54 people. 

The streets are lined with people in awe of this witness to our Faith. As I stood with many others watching the first Marian paso it suddenly stopped in front of me; I and many more blessed themselves. I became emotional thinking of what a great mother Mary is to us all and what a true role model she is for young women today. 

I felt blessed to know her and to really appreciate what I was witnessing. 

In Ireland the devotion to Mary is particularly strong. Many would credit the apparition at Knock to the great devotion the Irish people had to Mary prior to its occurrence, which began in Ireland in the 8th Century. 

In Knock in 1879 Our Lady appeared in an apparition lasting for several hours, witnessed by 15 people. The Blessed Virgin, St Joseph, St John the Evangelist and an altar with a lamb surrounded by angels appeared and hundreds of cures and miracles were credited to Our Lady after the apparition. 

Traditionally May is the month for many Marian devotions around the world. A flourishing of Marian devotions began around the time of the crusades when Christianity was threatened. It was in 1965 that Pope Paul VI identified May as a good time to incorporate special prayers for peace. 

In many countries on May 31 a recitation of the rosary is often followed by a solemn public procession with a statue or a portrait of the Virgin Mary as it is carried back to the church. One lovely family tradition in some countries is to create a May altar consisting of a table with a Marian picture or statue surrounded by flowers. 

The purpose of the altar is a place where each day the family would say the rosary together. How beautiful it is for a family to pray together, in a union of their hearts, connecting them to one another and Our Lady. 

Flowers feature in many May traditions. The practice of honouring Mary with flowers began in monasteries and convents in medieval Europe. People were reminded of Mary through the flowers. 

The first reference to a garden dedicated to Mary is from the life of St Fiacre, the Irish Patron Saint of gardening. He planted and cared for a garden around the oratory to Our Lady. This is where he built his famous hospice for the poor and the sick in France during the 7th Century. 

Ornaments 

In Eastern churches additional ornaments are added to the statue of Mary during May including a crown to symbolise her importance to the Church. Processions take place in order to mark the occasion of Mary being crowned, where people reflect on Mary’s role in the history of salvation. 

In the Philippines Mary is greeted with the Flores de Mayo (Flowers of May); coloured flowers are collected to decorate the parish church alters and aisles. In the afternoons communities congregate together to pray the rosary and share homemade snacks.

Continue reading HERE. 

The Irish Catholic - A conference discussing "Pope Francis and the Future of the Catholic Church"

On October 4th the Irish Catholic in association with Trocaire hosted a conference at the Red Cow Hotel in Dublin looking at "Pope Francis and the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland". It was an interesting conference with presentations from: Austen Iveragh (papal biographer), Eamonn Meehan (Director of Trocaire), Fr Tom Norris, Baroness Nuala O Loin, Mark Patrick Hederman (Abbot, Glenstal Abbey), Breda O'Brien (journalist) and David Quinn (Iona Institute).

The conference was live streamed on iCatholic and videos of the talks have now been made available.




Archbishop Charles Brown, Papal Nuncio to Ireland, address to the Conference - Pope Francis and the Future of the Church in Ireland

This Conference was hosted by The Irish Catholic and sponsored by Trócaire.

Evangelii Gaudem - iCatholic Study Circle Videos on "the Joy of the Gospel"

iCatholic continues with their short videos on Evangelii Gaudem (the Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis apostolic exhortation.

This series of videos features Michael Sullivan (Editor - Irish Catholic), Breda O'Brien (Journalist and commentator) and Fr Donal Dorr SPS (Kiltegan Father and writer on Catholic Social Teaching).