God makes us “fit to share in the inheritance of the holy ones,” and in Christ, “all things hold together,” this Sunday’s reading from the Letter to the Colossians informs us. In Europe, it is the European Central Bank that is being commissioned to hold things together and make Ireland financially fit.

Investors urged the European Central Bank to act quickly--and Ireland to accept help--to avoid plunging the Eurozone into crisis and panicking world markets. European officials responded midweek by laying the groundwork for a bailout of Ireland that could reach $136 billion, but Ireland’s Finance Minister Brian Lenihan insisted that his country wasn’t ready to seek help despite a huge budget deficit and sky-high interest rates on its government debt.

European Union President Herman Van Rompuy on Tuesday cast the Irish crisis as a decisive moment for Europe and its common currency: “We all have to work together in order to survive with the Eurozone, because if we don’t survive with the Eurozone, we will not survive with the European Union.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Europe learned painful lessons from its slow response to the crisis that convulsed Greece earlier this year. “The lessons of that experience . . . is you want to do this quickly and decisively and not wait,” Geithner said, though he declined to offer specific views about Ireland’s predicament.

Source: Articles by Marcus Walker, Patrick McGroarty, and Charles Forelle for the Wall Street Journal,
Rick Newman for US News & World Report, James Kanter and Steven Erlanger for the New York Times,
and Adrian Croft and Nigel Davies for Reuters