Blog

Helen Bond, a leading academic, explores the New Testament for clues to women’s involvement in Jesus’ ministry. 
Thanks to Paddy Ferry and to Mary Cullen who edits Open House. This article is in the current edition of Open House.
Helen Bond is Professor of Christian Origins and Head of School, Divinity at the University of Edinburgh.

Seamus Ahearne reports from his cocoon. “I wonder will those of us cocooned emerge as beautiful butterflies or their equivalent?”
“‘bread is broken in many different ways and is done daily.   Even in the lock up days of the cocooned. … ‘Bread is broken’ on the phone.  In the papers dropped in the door. In the messages. In the shared videos. In the sheer goodness of people.”

Chris McDonnell writes in the Catholic Times of Dorothy Day, the American Christian Socialist, who “asked questions that, at the time, society was unwilling to contemplate, questions of injustice that fell on deaf ears.
Many of those questions remain unanswered in our present days, now brought into sharp focus by the world-wide COVID crisis that is indifferent to race, colour or wealth, a crisis that ignores passport controls”

Seamus Ahearne reviews Forbidden: Fruit Life and Catholicism in Contemporary Ireland
by Declan Henry.
“I think his Book could be a serious challenge for Reflection during these times. As a Church, we have much to do. to face a new world and to find a new place in that world.”

Paul Moses reports in commonwealmagazine.org on a joint act of prayerful solidarity between Catholic and Muslim in the west of Ireland as a response to the corona virus pandemic.
Sadly, but no longer surprisingly, it drew a backlash of bigotry from some people.
But “We never know if the seeds we plant will sprout. But even if they fail, we don’t stop planting.”

Fr. Jim Sabak, OFM has a thought provoking article on praytellblog.com
“It is always God who acts in and through sacramental encounter, the ordained serving as instruments to gather the Church together for the purpose of encountering God’s activity. In these days, this experience must take place beyond the usual sphere of ritual and rubric. Anything else serves only to limit our vital experience of God’s forgiveness, mercy, and love.”

Chris McDonnell in his Catholic Times column wonders how life might be changed when we eventually return to the light from the current darkness we find ourselves in.
“… the consequent life in faith of our Christian community will be fundamentally altered by our current experience.
We might resume familiar patterns but we will come to them as changed people. The shock of the new will be unavoidable. Faith will have been tested by experience and the well-worn path we have happily followed will be lost in the stones and bushes of the hedge-row. The real challenge will be to maintain our experience of inter-dependence, the realization that there is such a thing as Society, that we need each other”.

Brendan Hoban says that “The corona virus has robbed us of many things, including our freedom and almost our hope, but the experience of dealing with the death and funeral obsequies of those we love adds an unconscionable burden at the present time.”

Seamus Ahearne has time on his hands as he waits to metamorphose from his cocoon. However he wonders “what will emerge for us as Church”….”Our creative juices can be sharpened over these weeks and months.  No longer will it matter if we have female deacons or priests or celibates.  We will be on call to answer the needs.  And those needs will be different and new.”

Sean McDonagh writes about the current corona virus pandemic.
“History teaches us that pandemics can change things dramatically. ….. Covid-19 will also change history dramatically.”
“The ways humans destroy much of the natural world and engage in factory farming is based on the fallacy that what we do to the natural world will not have a negative impact on human health and well-being. Covid-19 tells us that this untrue.”

We are Church are presenting a talk by Fr Diarmaid Ó Murchu in an on-line Zoom event on Monday 20 April, 7.30 to 9.00 p.m..

A suggested gesture in solidarity and hope …

Roy Donovan reminds us that it was “the women who stood at the foot of the Cross when the men had fled”. He asks, “Pope Francis spoke eloquently about separating colonialism from the spread of the Good News at the pan-Amazon synod. What about separating male culture from the spread of the Good News?”

Seamus Ahearne is wondering if “We may have to learn new and different ways of celebrating Rituals.    I think the official Books don’t do it. But that is very true of much of our present Liturgies.”
” If only this time of desert, (of House Arrest) stirred the hunger within, for what really is essential to living life to the full.”

Chris McDonnell writes “The choice of where to pray and when to pray has come down to us through subsequent years; for now, this Spring, we have limited options.” and he reminds us of Teilhard de Chardin who found himself in the Ordos Desert in China in 1923, unable to offer the Eucharist and wrote “Since once again, Lord I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar,
I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself. I your priest will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world.’

Gerard O’Connell and  Colleen Dulle report in americamagazine.org on the establishment by Pope Francis of a new commission to study the issue of the ordination of women deacons.

Tim Hazelwood is using the social distancing to reflect. “Now may be the opportunity for us to learn that we all are Church and that we must be Eucharist every day, of being thankful and believing that the risen Christ is with us.”

Maura O Shea writes of her perspective on the distancing, isolating, and close downs that have happened as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Brendan Hoban, in the Western People, writes about the absence of Holy Week Ceremonies this year.
“Church leaders are caught between their responsibility to give clear and appropriate guidance and the felt need of the people to celebrate the key events of the first Easter. But their (and our) moral responsibility is clear. The bottom line is that no compromise that might endanger health and life is acceptable.”

Dermod McCarthy draws our attention to an interesting webcast.