Looking at what is happening in Washington these days, it appears as if the very fabric of US democracy is breaking down. The system of checks and balances the Founding Fathers carefully put in place is creaking badly and urgently needs an overhaul.
It is damaging to democracy that scantily populated states like Vermont and Wyoming should have the same power in the US senate as California and Texas. It is damaging to democracy to have an electoral system in place that gives the highest office in the land to someone who fails to win a majority of the votes. Democracy is about honouring the will of the people – something the electoral college does not. It is damaging to democracy when the three branches of government fail to hold one other in check. When the Senate fails to hold the Executive to account, as is now happening, then the constitution is being flouted, and government is breaking down.
America is in a mess, a country deeply divided. Unscrupulous players are manipulating social media to exacerbate these divisions. The occupant of the White House has no respect for truth or integrity. The party of which he is a member has wilfully colluded in his egregious machinations so that it can stuff the federal courts with right-wing judges who will remain in office for a generation. There is every possibility that should he lose the election in November, neither he nor his supporters will accept the result, leading to an even bigger constitutional crisis. Putin, and every enemy of democracy, is thrilled by what is happening.
The fact that so many Christians have publicly aligned themselves with this president is a scandal. The occupant of the Oval Office has ably demonstrated that he is a naked opportunist with no real commitment to the pro-life cause, as his rhetoric and policies show. He may claim to be anti-abortion, but he is not pro-life. Its identification with this man has irrevocably tarnished Christianity in the US. The Christian should be identified by her concern for the poor, by her support for human and civil rights, by her determination to build bridges and promote reconciliation as well as by her opposition to the death penalty and easy access to guns. If right-wing evangelical Christianity and its ‘prosperity gospel’ is forever tarnished through its association with this president, at least that is one good thing he will have done.
Category: Trump
A decade of highs and very lows
I’m not sorry to see the back of the teens. The last decade has been the most difficult of my life, and while it hasn’t been all bleak, I have little reason to look back on these years with any fondness.
It was a decade of losses. I lost my parents and many other close loved ones. This was the first Christmas without my mother, whom I miss beyond words.
I lost my health and have had to live with daily chronic pain since the summer of 2014. During the first couple of years, the pain was so intense and my self-pity was so all-consuming that I did not want to go on living.
I lost my innocent belief in the power of medicine and medics to alleviate pain and not merely to treat a patient as just another client to cross off their list as soon as convenient.
I lost my job in Redemptorist Communications that gave me joy, routine and a sense of purpose.
I lost my reputation as a responsible, ‘reliable’ priest, having been officially sanctioned by the Vatican.
I lost my home in Dublin and my parish chaplaincy in Rathgar where I felt stimulated as priest and pastor.
I lost any lingering delusion of being a young man. I had to accept the reality of rapidly advancing middle age and that my best years, and any possibilities of new beginnings, were now behind me.
I lost hope for the future of the Redemptorists (and of religious life as we knew it) in Ireland and the Western world. I am one of the last generation of Irish religious.
As fascism, narrow nationalism and right-wing populism gained momentum across the world, I lost hope that people, brought together through the potentially unifying power of social media, would focus on what unites rather than divides.
I lost the naive assumption that social media would bring people together and be a force for good rather than become an easily manipulated tool that undermines democracy, spreads fake news, and feeds people’s worst instincts.
From being a life-long lover of US politics and the US presidency, I lost respect for the office of president and for the party of Lincoln, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower which allowed itself to become the willing poodle of an insane, dangerous demagogue.
The tragedy of Brexit damaged the affection I had built up for Britain following the Good Friday Agreement and the queen’s successful visit to Ireland in 2011. Now we see the worst of England, a country pining for a glorious past it will never recover. It’s hard to forgive the injury the Brexiteers are doing to the cause of harmony in Europe and especially to the welfare of the people of the island of Ireland.
The last decade brought many positives too.
I have gained four family members, grandnephews and grandnieces, that are a source of wonder and joy.
I found a warm welcome and extraordinary support from the Redemptorist community in Limerick, which helped me through my early days of physical pain and wallowing self-pity. It reminded me of the value of religious life.
I have discovered that my preaching has improved with age and enjoy the task of putting a challenging and engaging homily together.
I have – I think – become more tolerant and pleasant to live with. Suffering has made me more human and improved my sense of humour.
Without deadlines to meet, I have read far more and more widely than in the past and would like to think I am more educated now.
As I have aged, I have become more liberal/progressive/lefty in my views. The downside is that I am also more intolerant of those with whom I disagree.
My reading has helped me to see the world from a feminist perspective and to be even more ashamed of my church’s failure to include women as equals.
The election of Pope Francis filled me with hope, to which I continue to cling. He is trying to effect real change in the face of stiff opposition from powerful forces in the curia and in the church who seek to stifle him at every turn.
I am delighted that the 2010s has been a good decade for the LGBTI community in Ireland and many other countries with the introduction of marriage equality and other rights. However, much remains to be done, especially concerning protecting those who are transgender.
The last decade has been good too from a sporting point of view. Limerick won the All Ireland hurling title in 2018. Having attended five finals which they lost, I thought I would never see the day when the McCarthy Cup would come back to Limerick. Their unexpected triumph filled me with happiness.
The same goes for Liverpool FC. Under the wonderful Jurgen Klopp, the team is playing with a style and panache I never dreamed possible ten years ago. When they win the Premiership in May, most of my dreams will have been completed.
Hounded by the black dog
The black dog has been hounding me for the past week or so, that feeling when you are low and listless and each day becomes a struggle.
The black dog grabbed me and held on tight. Only now is his grip beginning to loose. It’s not always easy to identify what springs him from his kennel but, I think, several factors have been at play.
The usual January blues have done their thing. It’s that time of year when the Christmas buzz has dissipated, but the all-enveloping seasonal darkness remains.
There has been a spike in my chronic pain. Cold weather exacerbates the constant ache in my back, which of course is not helped by the January blues. Medication does little for my pain. Doctors can do nothing. All I can do is struggle on.
The state of the church in Ireland and the world has left me feeling low. The post-Christmas assembly of Irish Redemptorists demonstrated with crushing clarity just how fragile we have become as a body of men and how fragile is the state of religious life in the western world. What will we be like in ten years’ time? How can we plan for the future when it appears there is no future? How different it seems now from the organisation I joined straight out of school almost 40 years ago.
The state of the world hasn’t helped. The Madness of King Donald and the British Tory Party, as well as the coming to power of extremists such as the new Brazilian president and the clinging to power of autocrats such as the current Venezuelan president, has left one feeling angry, bemused and worried for the future. Our bright, progressive, tech-driven world is threatened by the primal forces of fearful populism and narrow nationalism.
There is also the peculiar loneliness of the long-distance celibate, the tsunami of aloneness, of lack of intimacy, of disappointment and regret, that occasionally washes over and engulfs and almost drowns.
There has been nostalgia for days past, when I was busy and occupied, and thrilled to the buzz of the editor’s office.
So I wonder in the midst of all of this, what have I achieved over my almost 57 years of life? What, if any, difference have I made to the world or the church? What have I contributed over 30 years of active ministry? It’s a desperate seeking after validation, scratching beneath the surface of my existence to see if I have left any visible imprint for good. I know I have, though, when hounded by the black dog, I see just the trace of a blurred line on a tattered copybook.
All I can do at this stage is to try to be good, be honest, be loving, and a little prophetic if I can. And if I can manage any of that, and smile a bit more, then I am doing something meaningful.
The world’s 26 richest billionaires own as much as the poorest 50% – an unjust situation at odds with the gospel
A shocking statistic published a couple of days ago shows the extent to which our world is messed up. The top 26 billionaires are as wealthy as 3.6 billion people, according to a report by Oxfam International. The net worth of these mostly American top 26 reached $1.4 trillion last year. Or, to put it another way, the world’s 26 richest people own as much as the poorest 50%. Billionaires, who now number a record 2,208, are growing $2.5 billion richer every single day, while the net worth of the world’s poorest half continues to dwindle.
Since the great recession of a decade ago, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled, a gap that will only increase as China’s economic slowdown sharpens and with Brexit and Trump’s trade war creating more uncertainty.
No wonder there has been an increase in the popularity of extremist parties and individuals, especially on the right.
For all the progress humankind has made, for all our advances in technology and science, for all our progress in human rights, there is a growing gap between rich and poor. The rich will always find ways to protect and increase their wealth, even in times of turmoil and certainty. (Just look at how leading Brexiteers are transferring assets overseas in case their deluded project goes wrong.)
More people than ever are excluded access from a decent, sustainable, even a basic, quality of living. Women suffer the most from equality. Of course, the rich practice philanthropy, and many are genuine about it, but charity is never a substitute for social justice. It simply keeps the current system in place.
As the wealthy gather for their annual powwow at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a plan is needed to more fairly distribute the goods of the earth. Oxfam recommends that nations tax wealth at fairer levels, raise rates on personal income and corporate taxes and eliminate tax avoidance by companies and the super-rich.
Here in Ireland, as we celebrate the centenary of the first Dail, we also have a long way to go to build a more just society.
Action for justice is a Christian imperative. The church has a whole body of teaching built up over decades that speaks about the rights of workers and of the poor, a body of teaching that places the church and its members firmly on the side of the oppressed. In fact, the church teaches that action for justice is a constitutive part of living the Gospel. It is not enough for us to tell the poor, the abused, the unjustly treated, that we will pray for them or that we will give money to charity to support them. We must also do whatever we can to address the injustice. Our faith compels us to be concerned for justice and to work for it.
We must support all efforts to build a fairer, more just world.
People who make me ashamed to be a Christian
I am no saint and am full of faults and prejudices of my own but there are some kinds of Christians I find embarrassing and who give Christianity a bad name. Among them are:
Christians who support a man who gleefully puts kids in cages at the Mexico border.
Christians who (quietly) support the burning down of hotels designated as reception centres for refugees.
Christians who use the cloak of clericalism to nakedly climb the hierarchical ladder.
Christians who refuse to receive holy communion from a person of colour.
Christians who use their position of trust to use and abuse the weak and vulnerable and those who cover up for them.
Christians who greedily exploit and denude the environment, or treat it with reckless abandonment.
Christians who blame those who are gay for sexual abuse in the church.
Christians who want nothing to do with Christians of other denominations.
Christians who disown a family member simply because he/she is gay (even though God created everyone in God’s own image and likeness).
Christians who send gay teens to special camps to undergo so-called ‘conversion therapy.’
Christians who advocate erecting walls and barriers between nations and peoples rather than building bridges.
Christians who, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change.
Christians who are repulsed by transgender people, even though they have no idea about the life-long pain and trauma transgender people go through.
Christians who agitate about some pro-life issues while studiously ignoring others.
Christians who confidentially tell you that they just hate having all those foreigners around. (Who knows what diseases they might have?)
Christians who vociferously attack the current pope while tolerating no criticism of his immediate predecessors.
Christians who anonymously report or delate other Christians to those in authority for not being, in their view, sufficiently orthodox.
When Christianity is not about love, then it is about nothing.
True love, which always speaks the truth, is the only antidote to the lies and fake news of today
Love is an overused word today. We find it everywhere from graffiti-laden locker room walls to the heart emojis in anonymous internet chat rooms. It sells everything from underwear to Ferraris. It is confused with every kind of feeling and state and emotion. I’ve been thinking of the casual way I misuse the word love:
I love chips
I love a nice lie-in on a Saturday morning
I love Liverpool FC
I love preaching
I love salt
I love a good game of hurling
I love a book that captures my imagination
I love relaxing on Cape Clear island in the summer
I love Munster rugby
I love history and politics
I’m sure all of us can come up with our own list of ways we misuse the word love.
But what is the true meaning of love? For those who are Christian, if we want to know what true love is, we need only look at God. God is love, St John tells us. God not only loves, God is love. And God showed us what true love is like by sharing it, by shaping us like himself, with an inbuilt capacity for loving. By sending his only Son among us to show us how to live.
The nature of true love is spelled out for us in St Paul’s famous ode to love that is read at so many weddings: “Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not envious, boastful, rude, and arrogant. Love does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful, love takes joy not in wrong-doing but only in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
That is the definition of true love.
True love does not change with the times. It can be cheapened by misuse and overuse but its essence never changes. Love is not infatuation or lust or obsession. It is not servile submission or putting up with. It is not grasping or abusive or domineering. It is not a one-night stand or a casual fling with someone whose name you forget the next day. True love overcomes, forgives, endures, sacrifices, empathises. It never gives up on anyone. It sees the good in everyone. Love, true love, is our best nature because it is God at work in us.
True love is never selfish, never all about me. When you love it’s not all about you anymore, you empty yourself for the one you love. You die to yourself for the one you love. Think of the give and take in a marriage or a committed relationship. Think of the parents of a handicapped child who spend themselves for that child every single day. Or the one who cares for an elderly parent. Patience, sacrifice, devotion, willingness to be there for someone always – that’s love.
True love speaks the truth. Or, as St Paul puts it, love delights in the truth. It always speaks the truth, no matter how difficult or dangerous that might be. Love speaks uncomfortable truths, whatever the cost. We can think of politicians, presidents and others throughout history, and especially today in this era of fake news, for whom that concept is alien.
Andrei Sakharov was a brilliant scientist who helped develop the Soviet Union’s nuclear programme. The Communist authorities honoured him for his achievements. But then he began to speak out in favour of social justice and human rights and against the bomb. So he was stripped of his honours and sent into internal exile in the city of Gorky, where he could contact no one. He was punished severely for telling the truth, as so many of his country men and women were. But he did not back down and he was vindicated in the end. Love speaks the truth no matter what the cost.
Love risks everything. It pays any price; lays everything on the line. Think of Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who willingly gave his life in Auschwitz for a man he did not know.
True love risks everything.
The Bee Gees were onto something when they asked: How deep is your love?
frommypulpit 