Search

Results

Suffered the little ones

24 May 2009 - Preaching the News for Sunday

The Letter to the Ephesians for the Ascension this Sunday encourages Christians to "live in a manner worthy of the calling you have received." A nine-year inquiry into child abuse at Catholic institutions in Ireland concluded that many of those involved knew that sexual abuse was "endemic" but did little to prevent it. About 35,000 Irish children were placed in a network of reformatories, industrial schools, and workhouses run by the church from the 1930s to the 1990s, when the last of them was closed. More than 2,000 told the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse that they suffered physical or sexual abuse while there. "When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where, in many instances, he was free to abuse again," the report said. Schools were run "in a severe, regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and even on staff," the report concluded. "Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from." The report also slammed Ireland's Department of Education for its failure to stop the crimes. In rare cases when it was informed of sexual abuse, "it colluded in the silence," the report said. Cardinal Sean Brady, leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, said he was "profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions. "This report makes it clear that great wrong and hurt were caused to some of the most vulnerable children in our society," Brady said. "It documents a shameful catalogue of cruelty: neglect, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, perpetrated against children." Source: Articles by Padraic Halpin and Carmel Crimmins for Reuters and by the BBC

Children sean brady catholic church ireland abuse sexual abuse physical abuse commission to inquire into child abuse
Setting the record straight on “Bloody Sunday”

20 Jun 2010 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In this Sunday’s gospel Jesus talks with his disciples about his impending suffering and death. On Tuesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron offered an extraordinary apology for the 1972 killing of 14 unarmed demonstrators by British soldiers in Northern Ireland, saying that a long-awaited judicial inquiry had left no doubt that the “Bloody Sunday” shootings were “both unjustified and unjustifiable.” “What happened should never, ever have happened,” Cameron said in a House of Commons statement. “The families of those who died should not have had to live with the pain and hurt of that day, and a lifetime of loss. “Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces. And for that, on behalf of the government--and indeed our country--I am deeply sorry.” The outburst of violence that followed the confrontation ended a nonviolent campaign for civil rights and led to three decades of sectarian strife that claimed more than 3,600 lives. Within weeks of the shootings Britain suspended the Parliament in Belfast and imposed home rule, which lasted until the 1998 Good Friday peace pact ushered in a new era of power-sharing in Belfast. The report endorsed almost every contention that the victims’ families had made over the decades: that the British commander should not have ordered troops to open fire; that the army fired the first shots; that no warning was given before the army fusillade began; that “none of the casualties” were carrying a firearm; and that some soldiers had “knowingly put forward false accounts” of their actions. Calling sections of the report “shocking,” Cameron said: “You do not defend the British Army by defending the indefensible. We do not honor all those who have served with distinction in keeping the peace and upholding the rule of law in Northern Ireland by hiding from the truth.” In Londonderry thousands of people gathered at the shooting site and cheered as Cameron’s speech was broadcast live on giant screens. Repeated outbursts of applause met sections of the report that declared that all of those killed were innocent. Source: Articles by BBC News and John F. Burns for the New York Times

david cameron northern ireland bloody sunday
Old wounds bring new pain in Northern Ireland

29 Aug 2010 - Preaching the News for Sunday

“The just rejoice and exult before God,” we hear in this Sunday’s psalm. There is little rejoicing in Great Britain this week on news of what appears to have been a grave injustice during the height of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. A Northern Ireland police ombudsman’s report revealed there had been collusion between the Catholic Church and the government to prevent the questioning of a priest who was a prime suspect in a series of bombings in Northern Ireland nearly 40 years ago. Nine people, including three children, died in those explosions in the village of Claudy in July, 1972. The report determined that Father James Chesney was a prime suspect in a blasts in Claudy, just outside of Londonderry, but that the police chose not to pursue him even though a bomb-sniffing dog at one point detected explosives in the priest’s car. Instead, the report reveals, then-secretary of state for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw met in private with the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal William Conway, and talked about the possibility of transferring Chesney to the Irish Republic, thus shielding him from further investigation or questioning. Authorities apparently feared that arresting a priest over the bombing would only further inflame sectarian division in the region. After the meeting, Chesney was quietly transferred to the Irish Republic and never questioned. Current Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland said this week that he regretted that the bombing had not been fully investigated at the time but asked that his predecessor’s actions be seen in the context of the summer of 1972. “Cardinal Conway did what he believed to be right in the situation,” said Brady. “He was faced with an impossible situation, but his primary consideration would be the prevention of any further acts of violence.” The Catholic Church in Ireland has denied engaging in a cover-up of Chesney's alleged involvement. All the key figures involved at the time are now dead. The attack was never solved and no one was ever charged. With release of the report, family members of the victims expressed deep disappointment at what was done and called for a wider inquiry. Source: Articles by Eric Westervelt for NPR and the Associated Press

sean brady bombings northern ireland claudy james chesney william conway
Irish eye financial rescue with reluctance

21 Nov 2010 - Preaching the News for Sunday

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

timothy geithner ireland financial crisis european union european central bank eurozone brian lenihan herman van rompuy
The end of an era in Irish education

22 Apr 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

“Why are you troubled?” Jesus asks his disciples when he presents himself to them after his Resurrection. The recently troubled relationship between Ireland and the Catholic Church has entered into a new chapter and perhaps moved toward some resolution, with the Irish government's plans to end the Catholic Church’s monopoly on the nation’s primary school system. An initial government study has identified 50 schools in Dublin and 43 towns where the demand for multidenominational education was greatest and school control could be shifted to other sponsors, secular or religious. The government has not yet announced a timetable, emphasizing that the shift will be respectful of religious tradition but firmly nondiscriminatory. Ruairi Quinn, the education minister, foresees “radical change,” estimating that as many as 1,500 of the 3,169 schools the church now controls will eventually be transferred to other sponsors. Leading members of the Irish clergy have praised the plan as a good step forward, noting that surveys find only half of Irish parents want their children in religious schools. State control is favored by 61 percent of the population, according to The Irish Times. In addition, the change should help accommodate the growing numbers of foreign-born residents, whose representation has tripled since 1991 to 17 percent of the population. The move comes in the wake of the government’s blistering documentation of the church’s failure to protect children from abuse and its long refusal to admit culpability, as well as Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s closure of the Irish embassy in the Vatican last November. “The change,” said a New York Times editorial, “should promote healing in a country traumatized by the church’s cover-up of years of sexual abuse of children by rogue priests.” Source: An April 14, 2012 editorial in the New York Times

ireland church schools ruairi quinn child sexual abuse
Ireland could use another Saint Patrick

03 Jun 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In this Sunday’s gospel we hear Jesus' final command to his apostles: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” Ireland’s Catholic Church, host of the International Eucharistic Congress June 10-17, will need to start evangelizing closer to home. The church has suffered a dramatic loss of credibility in recent years, surveys indicate. While a recent study by the Association of Catholic Priests found that weekly Mass attendance throughout the country is still one of the highest in Europe at 35 percent, the capital of Dublin—where Mass attendance in some parishes is 2 percent—has been hit by a combination of religious apathy, secularization, and disenchantment as a result of clergy sex abuse scandals. David Quinn of The Iona Institute, a think-tank that aims to highlight the benefits of religion for society, believes it is wrong to present all of the church's challenges as being linked to clerical abuse scandals. The shift in public opinion, he said, is "driven primarily by the secularizing trends that would have overtaken the rest of Europe over the last century, and only secondly actually by the scandals, because the downward trends were in place before the scandals ever came to light."Divine Word Father Vincent Twomey, a moral theologian, thinks the church has to look inward to find the root of its current difficulties. "Our real problem today is not caused by society or the current government's policies, which are quite clearly anti-church, anti-Catholic," he said. "The church itself has contributed to the secularization of society by failing to grasp the imagination of people, by failing to feed their intellectual thirst for the truth," he said. Source: An article by Michael Kelly for Catholic News Service

ireland secularization vincent twomey international eucharistic congress david quinn
A handshake heard around the world

01 Jul 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Sunday’s gospel contains the moving scene of a long-suffering woman with a hemorrhage who touches Jesus’ cloak to be healed. She speaks with Jesus and is blessed by him with the words, “Go in peace.” More than 30 years of sectarian and political violence in Northern Ireland caused suffering on all sides, but a private meeting and an iconic public handshake this Wednesday between Queen Elizabeth II and former Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader Martin McGuinness demonstrated how far peace has progressed in recent years.The meeting between the queen, the titular head of the British armed forces, and McGuinness, a former senior commander in the now defunct IRA which waged a terrorist campaign with the aim of uniting Ireland, would have been unthinkable until recently. The queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten, was killed by an IRA bomb in 1979 while on a fishing trip in the Republic of Ireland.But 14 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that paved the way for shared government in Northern Ireland, reconciliation is gaining momentum. A stable administration is making its own decisions on bread-and-butter issues, and British-Irish relations are better than they have ever been. Sources: Articles by Jamie Smyth for The Financial Times, the BBC, and Megan Gibson for TIME

northern ireland good friday agreement ira irish republican army martin mcguiness queen elizabeth ii
Luck of the Irish runs out on tax dodge

19 Oct 2014 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Though Jesus’ advice to “repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,” which we hear in this Sunday’s gospel, is one of the most oft-quoted lines of scripture, in real life many a multinational corporation does all that it can to legally dodge billions of taxes in its homelands. Bowing to pressure from U.S. and European officials, Ireland will phase out one such loophole. A tax maneuver known as the Double Irish has allowed major U.S. technology companies such as Google Inc. to funnel income through subsidiaries in Ireland to slash their tax bills at home. The decision to close that loophole won't affect Ireland's low corporate tax rate or other special tax breaks that have lured the likes of tech giants Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle, all of which have set up Irish subsidiaries to help them shelter foreign profits from U.S. taxes. The elimination of the Double Irish, though, marks a concession to the U.S. and European nations that have been trying to crack down on corporate efforts to move profits and even their headquarters to countries with low tax rates or special tax breaks. U.S. companies hold about $2 trillion in cash offshore. Apple said it is holding $138 billion in foreign subsidiaries, much of it in Ireland. EU leaders said member nations were losing more than $1 trillion a year to individual and corporate tax avoidance. "All the larger economies are desperate for tax revenue" in the wake of the Great Recession, said Edward Kleinbard, a USC law professor and tax policy expert. The European economy has remained fragile, with several member nations in or nearly in recession again. "Ireland has offered up this sacrificial lamb," Kleinbard said, "in the hopes of preserving what's most important to them in the long term, which is their low corporate tax rate." Ireland's 12.5 percent rate on corporate income is second only to Switzerland's 8.5 percent rate among the world's most advanced economies, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. tax rate is the highest at 35 percent, though many companies don't pay that much because of tax shelters and loopholes. Homily hint: A tax collection system is only effective if it is fair and balanced. When huge corporations are allowed to enjoy tax dodges while small corporations and the typical worker pay their fair share, a question of justice is raised. Jesus was serious about both parts of his famous phrase—we need to get right with God while doing right as citizens. Source: An article by Jim Puzzahghera and Paresh Dave for The Los Angeles Times

taxes fairness corporations ireland
Homily stories

21 Feb 2010 - First Sunday of Lent, Cycle C

Some cousins from Ireland came for a visit recently and all the clan gathered for a feast. Before the first bite was taken, we stopped to pray: O God, we remember our grandparents and great-grandparents who, at such a tender age and in such dread circumstance, left their beloved families behind and braved a terrible voyage to an unknown land. We honor their courage and their faith and all the sacrifices they made so that we, today, might enjoy freedom and prosperity. We pray in gratitude also for those who, through the years, tended the connections between here and back in Ireland, the ones who wrote the letters, told the stories, and sent the snap shots, so that our kinship would not be lost. And we pray for those who re-connected over the years, who opened their homes and hearts to us when we visited, and who blessed us with the gift of their presence in our homes. We are the richer for the affection we share and the stories we hold sacred–stories of courage, of sacrifice, of perseverance, of faith, of hope, and of love. They let us know who we are, who we belong to, and what we believe. Through all the days and all the ways our family has ventured, we know that you were with us, God, ever present, always guiding, leading us on.

Authors Tom McGrath

gratitude ireland perseverance

Restricted
Homily stories

07 Mar 2010 - Third Sunday of Lent, Cycle C

When I was a college student I visited Ireland, the land of my ancestors. The spiritual highlight of my trip was when my Irish cousins brought me to the town of Raer Cross to stand among the ruins of a stone hut where my grandmother was born. I was surprised that I was so deeply moved. The house wasn’t much to look at; the slate walls were crumbling and it was astonishingly small. But I knew in my bones that this was holy ground. I stood in silence and let the stones speak. I wondered about my grandmother’s life as a girl, one of many children living in this small hut. I wondered what she thought, at age 16, when she had to leave her home, never to set eyes on it again. I wondered how it felt to board a ship to travel an ocean away to an unknown land without any certainty about what would await her in her new land. I’ve since learned that a lot of people who visit their ancestral homeland experience the place as sacred. Which makes me wonder about my own life. Why am I so unaware of its sacredness? Moses had the blessed experience of knowing that, as he was tending his flock, he stood on sacred ground. We should all be so lucky to have such awareness. After all, God dwells among us. And no matter where we spend our days, we dwell in God.

Authors Tom McGrath

ireland ancestry heritage sacred

Restricted

← Previous 1 2 Next →