Halloween is another example in how we waste our money

This week's column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Apologies for the late publication today.

Michael Commane

You would want to be living on another planet not to know prices are rising by the day across all sectors of society.

With the advent of winter the price of oil, gas and electricity is the hottest of topics. 

Today a kWh of electricity costs approximately 36 cent, a short five years ago a unit of electricity cost 24 cent . Has your wage/salary risen by 64 per cent over the last five years? I doubt it, that is, unless you belong to the mega rich.

What’s to be done? Protest, revolt, change government? For me it’s democracy.

I’ve touched on this subject before but the more I see and experience waste in our society, the more I want to scream, STOP.

We live in a throw-away society there are no words accurate enough to explain what is going on. And it is everywhere; it’s in hospitals, the churches, across the civil service, in the legal profession, everywhere, and each one of us, individually, is also responsible for shocking waste.

In the last 12 months I have taken a flatscreen television and a reading lamp from a recycling facility; both in perfect working order. There is seldom a day I call there that I don’t pick up something of worth.

In my 59 years in the Dominican Order I have seen across the churches unbelievable waste of resources, indeed, unimaginable. At a whim, a priest decides to make changes to a church, priory or presbytery. I have seen bad shoddy jobs done, costing a fortune. 

We have all heard of the €50 million Irish Rail has wasted on a failed signalling project.

The food that’s wasted in hospitals, schools, everywhere.

And each one of us can make a difference and see to it that we help stop this madness.

The Halloween binge is over. It is simply a terrible excuse for profligate waste. How can we complain about the price of everything and then spend hard-earned money on buying utter rubbish, indeed, some of it dangerous?

On Halloween night Dublin Fire Brigade dealt with 1,620 calls. What a waste of money.

I well know a child cannot feel the odd person out but it is our responsibility that money is not wasted on plastic rubbish that will take thousands of years to breakdown. It’s driven by parents and business who want to outdo their neighbour with even more bizarre and idiotic junk, and make money too. 

Last week I saw a plastic headstone with RIP written on it outside a home, what does that mean to a six-year-old child? And it’s a nonsense that straddles all classes.

Think of our food waste, the time we spend under the shower. Do you really need to drive your car everywhere you go? Think of the clothes we waste.

Check your electricity smart meter, make it your business to reduce the number of units you use.

We have got far too accustomed to waste, it’s a mindset with us now and we need to change it, not tomorrow, but today.

Wise words from Pope Francis: ‘Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry’.

Guess what, approximately 2.3 billion people lack regular access to adequate food.

Cut down on waste, start today.

Laika was travelling far slower than the falling star in 1957

 On this date, Sunday, November 3, 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2, on board was Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth.

The satellite flew over Ireland in the middle of the night; my family got up to see it. We saw this glowing white object fly at great speed across the sky. We were sure we had seen history, only to discover the next day what we had seen was a falling star.

A timely date to free Christa Pike

Christa Pike, the prisoner US authorities tried to kill last month, spoke last week of the pain she is suffering, pains all over her body.

The life story of Christa Pike is horrendous, culminating in the murder of a classmate. She did terrible wrong. Whatever happens her she is never going to bring back to life the young woman she killed. It is understandable that the victim's mother suffers great pain.

Would it not now be a compassionate act to free Christa Pike?

On this day in 1984, Velma Barfield was executed in the United States; she was the first woman to be killed in the US since 1962.

This would be a fitting day to free Christa Pike.

Yes, prison is a place of punishment but also a place for rehabilitation.

Life is sacred to natural death.

The wisest of words from Augustinian Robert Prevost

A brilliant remark from Pope Leo; people need to listen to the man.

"Our priory cannot be looking for vocations, our priority has to be living the good news, sharing the Gospel."

Robert Prevost in an interview in September 2023.

Link below is well worth a listen.

 https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CoGQ1e6HW/

May today's German-wide demonstrations be peaceful

The prizewinning film Fatherland is running in Dublin at present.

It's about the return to Germany in 1949 of Thomas Mann with his daughter Erika. He delivers a lecture on Goethe in Frankfurt-am-Main and in Weimar, two cities inextricably linked with Goethe.

The new Communist state of the GDR tries to use Mann and indeed Goethe as two people who favour the world of communism. Weimar is situated in the former GDR.

Today across Germany students, young people and the not-so-young are demonstrating in protest against living conditions in their country.

Yesterday it was Italy, the previous weekend Paris.

Many shops throughout Germany have been boarded up in preparedness against any violence that might ensue.

And all these demonstrations seem to be falling into the laps of the far right in all three countries; indeed, the irony of it, the demonstrations are left wing in orientation but it will be the right wing who will benefit.

Germans, in the name of all those who were murdered in the Hitler years, must at all cost stop the AfD gaining power.

Thomas Mann, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann would never have approved of the AfD, or indeed, Goethe. 

At the end of the film Thomas Mann clutches his daughter's hand as if to say, after all my fame, pomposity too, all that matters is our love, all the rest is like dust falling through our hands.

In other words it is all a joke until it's no longer a joke.

It is always important to know the context

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

- Friedrich Nietsche (German philosopher 1844 - 1900)

Early yesterday morning while cycling in Dublin I spotted a young woman dancing/jumping about on the footpath; I was surprised and startled until I came close and saw her on the phone, most likely she was communicating with her child.

The short lived life of a publication that opened no doors

On August 8 the following

appeared in Occasional Scribbles: "This blog has heard from a reliable source that the free-sheet, The Key, a publication of the Irish Dominican Friars is ceasing publication after its next edition.

"This blog has learned the reason for this decision is due to lack of donations. The source said it depends completely on voluntary donations and that they have not been forthcoming."

And now it has come to pass. In the current winter edition there is a notice simply stating: 'This is the final edition of The Key'.

Right through the current edition of the free-sheet not a word of explanation why. This is not acceptable. Who is answerable for this fiasco? Was there an editorial board, was there an editor? If so, who were they? Who financed the project, and how much money was lost on the publication? 

The following two sentences appear in the current edition: 'Through disciplined reflection on reality, reason arrives at the necessary conclusion that creation possesses a First Principle and First Cause. This primary reality is God, the Creator who stands as the ultimate answer to human questioning.'

The article is written by Dr Robert McNamara, it  takes up six pages of The Key.

Who is the target reader. I doubt it's a scholarly journal, so who is expected to read this. What actually do all the sentences mean? Twenty three pages of sentences with some photographs, many of the same person. Surely there is more to the Dominican Order than talking about ordinations.

I suggest all those responsible for The Key visit any school in Ireland, and ask students and teachers to read this free sheet. And then watch their faces and ask for comment.

Everything about it is appalling, the writing is turgid, attempting to sound 'holy' and knowledgeable. And the layout would win a prize for poor quality. The first thing one learns in journalism school, never publish a picture without naming the people included. Every sub editor knows after reading the first paragraph, whether or not it's worth continuing to read. The Key may well appear on the shelves of journalism schools as an example of what not to do.

The Catholic Church in Ireland is a registered charity and it's time it realised its responsibility in how it manages its affairs.

It's profoundly sad to write these words but it is another example of how the institutional church refuses to learn from its mistakes and less than professional behaviour.

Charles Haughey and Vincent Browne kiss and make up

This week's column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

My first class on Thursdays is at midday. Last Thursday I was planning to leave home sometime after 11. I was about to turn off the radio when I hear Oliver Callan interviewing retired journalist Vincent Browne about his new book on Charles Haughey. 

I’ve been listening to Browne for a long time. I never got tired of him, and that’s unusual because I eventually find myself getting tired of journalists and priests as they blather on about the same old things all the time. Vincent Browne has been different, at least for me. 

A few minutes into the Callan interview I was stuck to the floor listening. I stayed there for over 20 minutes, realising I had to go to school. I broke all my own cycling rules, jumped up on my bicycles with earbuds in place and listened to the full hour-long chat. 

It was fascinating. If you have not heard it, I recommend listen to it on the RTÉ Radio Player. I have no hesitation in saying that it was one of the best pieces of radio I’ve ever heard on RTÉ.

Of course he couldn’t have had a better subject, non-other than the famous/infamous Charles J Haughey.

I bought the book that same day. It’s some tome, 696 pages, including notes.

After the first 20 pages my immediate reaction was that Vincent is a better talker than writer but now further into the book I’m beginning to change my mind; he’s every bit as good a writer.

I found myself laughing out loud when Vincent tells his readers as indeed, he told Oliver Callan, that Charlie had a bad word to say about everyone. That reminded me of a story I tell about myself; I always warn people that if the officiating priest at my funeral Mass says I never said a bad word about anyone, the lid will rip off the coffin and slam the priest in the face.

Early in the book Browne gives what seems to me an accurate account of how Charlie made his first large sum of money; they were back handers from two wealthy men, looking for favours when he was first elected to the Dáil in 1957. I was eight that year. 

Charlie Haughey was a name I was to hear in my home and among my friends for the greater part of my life. 

So you can understand why I’m captivated by it and the icing on the cake is the fact that it is written by VB.

The world and its mother now know Charlie was corrupt, which means he caused great hardship to some people, but he was also a rogue. So far into the book he reminds me in some ways of Trump; Trump’s followers would die for him and likewise there were silly people who would have given their lives for Charlie. 

When I heard Browne tell Callan that he considered himself at the end of Haughey’s life a friend and that he cried on leaving him on his last visit, I was reminded of what I am forever saying: It’s all a joke until it’s no longer a joke. 

Not yet finished the book but I plan to write more about it in this column.

Charles Haughey was driven by money and women

Paddy O'Keeffe (1923–2013), first editor of the Journal, now the Irish Farmers Journal, said in an interview with Vincent Browne on August 18, 2012 that he admired Charles Haughey's intellect but didn't admire his greed and selfishness: "He was always looking out for the main chance. Charlie was driven by money and women.... [But] he was a bloody good Minister for Agriculture".

Former Garda Maurice McCabe a beacon of hope and truth

 Mick Clifford writes in the Irish Examiner that eight years after Maurice McCabe, nothing has changed for Garda whistleblowers.

The Garda is no exception. It's the exception that an organisation changes its ethos having been found out.

Former Garda Maurice McCabe is a beacon for all who want to speak truth to power, who simple want to tell the truth and justice be done.

Coverups are insidious and serve no one. They are an oxygen that feeds so much wrong doing across all society.

The practice of Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) should be made illegal.

Justine McCarthy seems confused about Dublin buses

Justine McCarthy writes a weekly opinion piece in Friday edition of The Irish Times.

Her column on Friday was, as per usual, an interesting and good read; she always has a point to make.

In this column she writes how angry and vulgar we have become and full marks for that. 

But then she writes: "Ban the cacophonous phones on public transport. At the same time, make the trains big enough so that passengers are not squeezed into them like sardines and, Dublin Bus, please restore the exit door beside the driver to let passengers say thanks when disembarking".

Again, top marks on banning the cacophonous phones on public transport.  But Irish Rail has no spare rolling stock, not until 2027.

And as for restoring 'the exit door beside the driver to let passengers say thanks when disembarking.'

Not sure what Justine means by that; does she mean we go back to buses with one door? Nope, that can't happen as it slows up the bus. It's so easy to shout 'thank you' to the driver when exiting through the middle door. have you noticed if you do say thank you, invariably the passenger behind you will also say it?

Just wondering, when was Justine last on a double deck bus in Ireland?

Still a lovely piece, thank you.

Sixty-one year-old ex-drug addict runs in Sunday's marathon

This is a lovely story, which appeared in The Irish Times on Thursday; well done Paul and good luck tomorrow. 

Paul Killeen, who has overcome four decades of heroin and later crack cocaine addiction, is “determined” to finish the Dublin Marathon on Sunday.

“It will be emotional to run the streets where I used, where friends died over the years. That will carry me through on the day, thinking of people I grew up with who are gone because of the drugs.”

From the Liberties, Dublin, he has been drug-free for five years, having first used heroin when he was 14. He endured brutality and sexual abuse at school.

“I went to the Christian Brothers, and I was dyslexic; I didn’t know that at the time. I was called ‘thick’ and ‘stupid’ and came home with black eyes. If you were late for school, you got the leather strap.

“I was an altar boy, and things happened there.”

He went on to Bull Alley vocational school – now Liberties College, but got expelled after three months “for fighting”.

He left school unable to read or write but got an apprenticeship in a garment factory in Smithfield. It was around this point that he was introduced to heroin.

Asked if this was a difficult time in his life, he says: “To be honest, I was 100 per cent happier than when I was in school. I had an apprenticeship, and I was accepted. I wasn’t judged.”

In and out of prison

He didn’t realise how his drug habit was becoming an addiction, however. He lost his job as a jeans cutter and was soon “in and out of prison” for robberies to pay for heroin.

He learned to read and write at St Patrick’s Institution (former young offenders’ prison) and found acceptance there.

Still, heroin came before everything: “I was living with my ma, then sofa surfing and eventually ended up on the streets.”

In the 1990s, he met a woman and had two children with her. “I was an addict when they were born. They never saw me clean until five years ago. I would trample over people to get what I thought I needed.”

After he stole his daughter’s Confirmation money, he decided to go to England, “thinking I would get off heroin”.

He lived on the streets of Birmingham, spent time in prison and was introduced to crack cocaine. His mother, with the help of social workers, tracked him down and brought him back to Dublin.

“Crack was only starting in Dublin then. I was injecting. I hadn’t patience to smoke it.”

About 2019, he frequented the Lighthouse cafe on Pearse Street, a drop-in centre for homeless people, run by the Tiglin addiction charity. Its founder, Senator Aubrey McCarthy, and its staff encouraged Paul to think about recovery.

A confluence of circumstances in 2021 led him to apply for a place on Tiglin’s 16-month residential rehabilitation programme.

“At an appointment in St James’s Hospital, my doctor, [Prof Colm] Bergin, said: ‘Paul, if you don’t stop the drugs, your immune system is nearly gone. You are gone in six weeks.’

“Something clicked in my head. I’d just had enough. I was tired.”

He was offered a place on the Tiglin’s men’s residential rehabilitation programme in Ashford, Co Wicklow, starting December 2021, followed by aftercare in the charity’s Greystones centre.

A key worker, who ran daily, encouraged him to run with her. He had run for Dublin as a child, and had loved it.

After 40 years taking drugs “to block every feeling I ever had out”, he was in recovery, without drugs, and reliving a lot of trauma.

“Running helped me process that. My running is my [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings. I can’t do meetings. I can’t sit in a room. It makes me very anxious. But I love going out on a run. I feel free when I am out.”

He has been training for the marathon for more than a year, and is “excited but nervous”.

The day after the marathon, he travels to South Africa to volunteer for Tiglin in the townships of Cape Town. It will be his fifth trip there. “It’s a way I can give back.”

He has no regrets about life.

“It is what it is. I am happy. I am working for Tiglin. I have my children back in my life. My ma is 88, and she’s delighted. My sister, I never got on with her. We are like that now,” he says, crossing his fingers.

Vincent Browne's interview was simply brilliant, the best

Oliver Callan on his morning show yesterday interviewed retired journalist Vincent Brown.

It was one of the best pieces of radio I have ever heard; Brown is a genius. His book  Charles Haughey is in all bookshops now. 

In the interview he tells great yarns on Charlie; he jokes as he tells Callan that Charlie had not a good word to say about anyone.

If the book is as good as yesterday's interview it has to be a page turner. We'll see, I'm sure it is. Brown is a once-off. Imagine if we had a working journalist of priest like him today. He's never bpromg and give great hope to those who dream and hope for better days.

Below is the link to the full interview.

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/d33ae414-e92c-4741-90eb-b4eb00cdb2ae/

Review of Tomáš Halík's The Afternoon of Christianity

This is a review of Tomáš Halík's book The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change

The review is written by Louis Roy OP, Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada.

Tomáš Halík, a Czech theologian, conceived his informative, stimulating, and timely book through reading and exchanges between 2015 and 2020. It has the merit of demonstrating why our twenty-first century can be what he calls a kairos, an all-important opportunity and a drastic turning point in Catholic thinking about its relation to our global world (p. 19 - 23). 

He rightly states that genuine dialogue is happening among the innumerable spiritual groups which have mushroomed in the last fifty years or so, more than any other locus (p. 12-13 and 151-161). I also found helpful his Jung-inspired periodization of our collective faith experience (p. 31-37): (1) the morning of life (youth and early adulthood); (2) the noonday crisis (in which the Church is now and which is an opportunity for maturing, namely the kairos); and (3) the afternoon (mature age and old age).

Some readers will perhaps wonder at Halík’s “disdain for neo-scholasticism,” which he denounces as an “attempt at ‘scientific, objective’ theology,” adding that he had an “allergy to ‘metaphysical realism’” (p. 164; see p. 82). 

On the same page he writes, “The claim to know and present the ‘objective truth’ is something I have always suspected of pride and narrow mindedness.” 

Is this judgment, at once moral and intellectual, warranted? Surely neo-scholasticism was defective insofar as nineteenth - and twentieth-century Catholic thought was often merely theoretical or, better, “conceptualistic,” as Bernard Lonergan put it. But were all forms of that thought merely theoretical? 

Far from rejecting neo-scholasticism wholesale, the Jesuit philosopher-theologian Erich Przywara and the phenomenologist Edith Stein both thought that a combination of Thomism and twentieth-century philosophical thinking was not impossible. 

Halík’s list of Recommended Reading (at p. 213-221), however, does not include Przywara, Stein, Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, Maritain, or Lonergan, although there are a few comments, in the body of his book, about Augustine’s and Aquinas’s creative open mindedness.

Despite repeatedly recognizing the importance of the intellectus fidei in the churches, Halík’s post-modernist philosophy weakens his case for a faith devoid of certitudes. Despite its strong reaction against modern philosophy, post-modern philosophy shares with the former the assumption that the pursuit and the assessment of truth are the privilege of the free individual (or a group thereof) with the right to arbitrarily select a view of life not according to an objective sense of truth, but out of a subjectivist sense of meaning.

Regrettably, Halík has adopted the stance typical of both modern and so-called postmodern philosophies. Consequently, his radical pluralism stands in contrast to Lonergan’s pluralism, which is a moderate pluralism, that is, an acceptance of plurality of viewpoints (see Lonergan, Method in Theology, chapter 12, sections 8–12). 

I might add that Halík’s modernist and relativist construal of religious freedom is a misconstrual of the one that Vatican II taught in the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” (Dignitatis Humanae).

Halík does not keep together, as all the Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas did, the apophatic doctrine that in this life we cannot know God as He is and the kataphatic doctrine that we do know God validly by analogy. 

Because of his unilateral emphasis on apophatic assertions, Halík unduly weakens the content of Catholic faith. Moreover, because he insists on a faith always permeated with doubt, Halík has no room for a sound apologetic of the act of faith in Jesus Christ and in his message as conveyed by the Church. 

He might be aided by Newman’s statement(and an influential slogan for Lonergan) that “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” Difficulties, which are intelligent questions, are existentially raised regarding aspects of revelation, whereas doubts, which are willful, amount to not receiving the risen Christ’s message as validly interpreted by his disciples and the New Testaments’ writers.

While talking about “educated conservative Christians,” Halík declares that “the fatal deficit of conservatives is that they are unable to offer a viable alternative [to the] superficial progressivism in the Church,” thus implicitly praising his own presumably non-superficial progressivism (p.90). But he does not mention the competing alternative put forward by those Thomists who know the thought of Aquinas very well but are classicists, convinced that there ought to be one Catholic theology (see my piece “Thomas Aquinas since Vatican II,” in The Lonergan Review of 2019).

Fortunately, there is another alternative, namely the moderate pluralist position expressed by Lonergan. By ignoring both of these alternatives, Halík seems unaware that his proposed radical pluralism—despite its praiseworthy elements—will not prevail in the Catholic Church. The result, I predict, will be the perhaps limited influence of the classicist Thomists and of the Lonerganians, in coexistence with a confusion of ideas among progressives (see the Conclusion of Lonergan’s “Dimensions of Meaning,” in Collection).

Notwithstanding Halík’s brave attempt at reforming the present thought of the Church, because much is at stake in the issues under consideration, I have been rather tough on central aspects of his enterprise.

I fear the result of his relativism (despite his assurances to the contrary) is that evangelization would be put on the back burner and adhesion to the Church would be almost discouraged.