Might Covid and 2020 mark a final rupture in history of Irish Catholicism?
Salvador Ryan writes in the Irish Times:
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Happy New Year
Wishing you every blessing in the new year
Presider’s Page for 15 December (Gaudete Sunday: Advent 3)
We’re well over halfway through Advent. Traditionally, today is called Gaudete Sunday, which means ‘a day for rejoicing.’ The reason for celebration is that the day of the Lord’s coming is nearer.
What does the word “final” mean in relation to the Christian community, the Church:
G K Chesterton wrote on “The Five Deaths of the Faith” in “The Everlasting Man”:
“I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.”
Ladislas Orsy SJ, who was 100 years old on 30 July, has a motto:
“Dum spiro, spero!” – “As long as I am breathing, I hope!”