Saints names on all Aer Lingus aircraft

It’s interesting that Aer Lingus still

gives names of Irish saints to all its aircraft. It’s a nice touch but it is surprising that there has not been a campaign to end the tradition that goes back to 1936.

Every national carrier gives names to its planes and most States give names to their trains.

The Russians call their aircraft after famous people, mainly military. 

The Germans give major city names to their airplanes. They call their trains after famous people. Many years ago they named ICE 820/821 after the famous German Dominican saint Albertus Magnus. The train back then travelled between Cologne and Nurenberg.

Irish Rail calls its locomotives after Irish rivers.

The major Irish Rail stations are called after those closely associated with the 1916 Rising. They were renamed in 1966 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rising.

The name of the main station in the State was changed from Kingsbridge to Heuston Station. John Heuston had a brother, Fr Michael Heuston a Dominican priest.

Trial of Björn Höcke, the ‘real boss’ of Germany’s far right

There are elections in the two Eastern German states of Thuringia and Saxony this coming Sunday.

These are extremely important elections in a post united Germany. It is most likely that the far right AfD party will lead the polls.

That this could happen in Germany is as dangerous as it gets. The Guardian article below is worth a read. Bjön Höcke is a dangerous man,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/29/the-trial-of-bjorn-hocke-the-real-boss-of-germany-far-right?CMP=share_btn_url

JD Vance’s road to Catholicism

Republican US vice presidential candidate JD Vance, who grew up in a Christian family, became a Catholic in his 30s. 

Vance acknowledges that the Dominicans at St Gerturde’s Priory of the St Joseph’s Province, helped and inspired him on his road to Catholicism.

The Dominicans is a broad church. For the moment.

Dr Martin Luther Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech

On this day, August 28, 1963 Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous ‘I Have a Dream speech’.

He gave it in Washington at a march for jobs and freedom.

You can listen to the speech here.

 

17-Minute Listen

• Download
• Transcript

The church is meant to be our home

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

Jim Roche was an Irish Dominican priest. Soon after priestly ordination in 1969 and a spell studying in Rome he went to Argentina, where there were Irish Dominicans working at the time.

Jim was clever, a scholarship boy. He had a great sense of humour and no time for any sort of clerical nonsense. Shortly after his arrival in Argentina he grew a beard. At the time it was forbidden for priests to grow beards in the diocese where he was working. 

On the feast of St Dominic the local bishop came to lunch in the community where Jim was living. During his visit the bishop suggested he shave off his beard. Jim looked at him and said: ‘You might be my bishop but you’re not my barber.’ End of story.

Some years later Jim left the Dominicans and priesthood, moved to the United States where he worked as a lawyer and married a woman from Leipzig. He spent the rest of his professional life helping the cause of the poor and marginalised in California. Jim moved to Leipzig some years ago, where he died, a relatively young man.

Jim was a talented person and a great loss to the Dominicans.

But he was not the only loss during those years. Many fine, good men left the priesthood during that time. I can imagine if those people had remained priests many of them today would be in positions of leadership.

Would it be a different church today? When I hear Pope Francis talk I’m always reminded of the men who left. He has the style of those men about him.

When someone leaves priesthood today it’s seldom they marry a woman, indeed, it looks as if few leave, that is, unless they are expelled for wrongdoing.

It might well be true that there was an element of chaos in the post Vatican II church. But it was a time of great excitement and adventure, and there was a enthusiasm for building relations with other Christian and non-Christian denominations. The church was alive and people were beginning to get involved in a real and meaningful way. Bad things happened during those years but bad things always happen.

I keep feeling the church today is becoming a place for pious and holy-looking people. The make up of parish councils leaves much to be desired and far too often and too easily the parish priest can behave as a bully. And then there can be crass incompetency.

Hopefully the current Synod will edge the church to a more open, honest and real space.

Fr Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Dominican Order, has said there is a ‘profound conversion which is taking place at the centre of the Church, as it reaches out to people who have been marginalised and rejected, and says, this is your home. We are incomplete without you.’

It saddens me beyond words that there are so few priests about today the likes of Jim Roche.

‘Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.’ - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Time to bring back the dining car on Irish trains

Manchán’s 'Europe by Train' currently showing on RTÉ 1 on Sunday evenings is well worth watching. Yesterday evening’s programme began with Manchán in Berlin, where he visited the former Tempelhof Airport and the iconic Kreuzberg. Before the Wall came down Kreuzberg was home to the world of alternative living. It was tucked away at the end of West Berlin. With the Wall gone it’s at the centre of Berlin and one of the hippest places in the world, where property doesn’t come cheap.

Watching Manchán rail from Berlin to Budapest one can’t but wonder why Irish Rail has empty dining cars rolling 10 times a day each way between Dublin and Cork.  Since Covid Irish Rail has not resumed serving meals on the service. Why? What must it be costing to pull or push an empty dining car approximately 5,000 kilometres every day?

Some years ago Irish Rail outsourced catering on their trains. Before that the company offered a unique meals service. The breakfast had a wonderful charm about it, similarly with lunch and ‘tea’. Alcohol was served in the dining car and also on the trolley service that worked its way through the train. Currently all alcohol is forbidden across the network.

Today all that is available is a trolley service on some routes. The Belfast Enterprise, which is operated by Northern Ireland Railways and Irish Rail, still has a dining car service.

Iarnród Éireann introduces a new timetable today.

Extra trains between Dublin  Galway, Wexford and Waterford. Within weeks there will be an hourly service between Belfast and Dublin. There are new services on Cork commuter routes. All trains between Dublin and Sligo will now stop at Broombridge to link up with Luas services.

Plans afoot to build a new platform at Mallow and Kishoge station on the Dublin Portlaoise service has now opened.

A new bridge with lift has come into operation at Banteer and a similar type bridge/lift is about to built at Rathmore. Both lines are on the Mallow Tralee service.

A new coach built for the carriage of bicycles has been added to a number of InterCity Railcars. The design seems somewhat unusual. Questionable how many bicycles the coaches can carry.

The abuse and harm caused by Fr Joseph Marmion SJ

This blog highly recommends readers to download the document  ‘Fr Joseph Marmion, His abuse, the harm caused, and Jesuit accountability. A Narrative record’

It can be found on the Irish Jesuit website, Jesuits Ireland.ie

It is a powerful document. The document is not the work of the Jesuit Order. Have other dioceses, religious congregations done a similar study?

Powerful speeches by Harris and Clinton

Below are links to Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton’s words at the DNC in Chicago during the week.

They are two powerful speeches, inspiring words. It would appear that Clinton may not use a teleprompter and has his notes in front of him on the podium.

Anyone who talks in public can learn much from the technique and skill used by both these people.

I had the good fortune of hearing Bill Clinton in person. He has the genius of making the listener feel they he is talking directly to them.

Do we ever get a hint of that in our churches?

It’s also worth noting that both Harris and Clinton used few or any cliches.

A memorable line from Harris, she heard it from her mother: “Never let anyone tell you who you are, tell them who you are."

https://www.youtube.com/live/o10x76nSDEY?si=wpTiG98VVTzv13zq

https://youtu.be/tvlXfYETuVI?si=m79MeqMD1p6UBeqg

Former Vatican envoy to the US says he fears for his life

Sad or hilarious? Both probably.

Reading this one is surely forced to ask themselves how can these people pronounce on matters concerning God.

The following extract is from Catrine Clay’s book ‘The Good Germans’, published 2020, Weidenfeld & Nicolson[page 115]: “... But only one Catholic bishop ever served a long prison sentence. It was the rank and file who stood up to the Nazis. Over half of Catholic priests ended up in prisons or concentration camps."

https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2024/08/excommunicated-archbishop-former-u-s-envoy-says-he-fears-for-his-life/

Weapons description a lesson in cognitive dissonance

An excellent article by Mark O’Connell in The Irish Times of last Saturday.

The next time you are a passenger in a Boeing aircraft worth reminding yourself about the weapons of ar and destruction that Boeing manufacture.

Is it simply part of our nature to be duplicitous?

---

Earlier this week, in Gaza City, Israel carried out an air strike on a school which about 350 displaced families were using as a shelter. Many of these families had recently arrived from the nearby town of Beit Hanoun, after the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had ordered them to leave their homes. Part of the building also served as a mosque; when the strike hit, dawn prayers were being held. About 100 people were killed in the bombing. As always, many of them were children.

As is now customary in this continuing mass slaughter, almost as soon as the air strike occurred scenes of overwhelming barbarity began to flood the internet. Humans blown bodily asunder; parts of corpses scattered and strewn; children screaming over the dying and the dead. Such horrors are now routine, having over the last 10 months become part of the texture of daily life. Over our morning coffees, still bleary and barely awake, we read of the latest atrocities, and choose either to watch or ignore footage of suffering on an almost unthinkable scale (“This video may contain graphic or violent content”).

It can be hard to process this information, to make sense of the horror and to connect it with our own relatively comfortable and secure reality. The day after the air strike on the school in Gaza, I saw on Instagram a video of a little girl screaming over the body of her father, who had been killed in the attack, and I found myself wanting to know not why this was done – Israel’s stated rationale is nothing if not well known, worn so smooth by endless repetition that it scarcely registers to the touch – but how, and by what precise means. A moment or two on Google yielded the information, courtesy of CNN, that the weapon that killed the girl’s father, along with dozens of other civilians, was something called a GBU-39 small diameter bomb.

Another moment on Google took me to the website of its American manufacturer, Boeing.

Looking through the website of a weapons manufacturer is an interesting exercise, an object lesson in cognitive dissonance. In the “Our Values” section of the site, I read the following: “Across our global enterprise, Boeing employees are united by a shared commitment to our values, which serve as the guiding principles for all we do. As we innovate and operate to make the world better, each one of us takes personal accountability for living these values.” You can also read a good deal of material on the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, its celebration of Pride month and its respect for LGBTQIA+ team-mates, and its record in sustainability.

Catalogue listing

Elsewhere on the site can be found the catalogue listing for the GBU-39, the bomb that killed that little girl’s father, and which scattered the body parts of dozens of civilians throughout the remains of the school they were sheltering in. This “low-cost, precision strike weapon system”, as the catalogue describes it, is “effective against a wide variety of stationary targets” including “bunkers, air defence assets, airfields” and so on. The list is a long but by no means exhaustive one; it does not include, for instance, such stationary targets as schools or mosques.

There is a particular horror that arises from the juxtaposition of the abstract language on the Boeing website – the language of sales, of corporate values, of technological specification – and the concrete fact of what their products are for, what they do in the world. It makes me wonder about the people who work for these companies, and how they justify to themselves the work that they do. There must, presumably, be some psychic membrane by which the experience of such work is cordoned off from the distant fact of its effects. There must be some mechanism through which the company’s celebration of Pride month, say, becomes a more meaningfully felt reality than the Palestinian child weeping over the corpse of her father.

It seems to me that the jarring contrast, on the website of the Boeing Company, between the abstract language of liberal values and the concrete reality of colossal violence, reflects a larger tension between the humanistic rhetoric of the liberal democracies of the West and the killing they facilitate and support. Think of Ursula von der Leyen, who speaks of the EU’s role as a “force for peace and for positive change”, but who for many months provided unconditional support to the assault on Gaza on the principle of Israel’s “right to defend itself”. Consider the Biden administration, with its unwavering commitment, at the level of rhetoric, to peace, diplomacy and restraint, and its even more unwavering commitment, at the level of policy, to providing Israel with American-made weapons such as those which were dropped on that school.

Complicit

As I looked at the Boeing website, it struck me that the same company which made that bomb also made the machine that, only days earlier, took my family and I to Greece on holiday. The Boeing 737 aircraft that flew us to Athens so that we could see the Acropolis and visit museums and lie by a pool for days on end; the Boeing GBU-39 that was dropped on that school by another aircraft: both of these technologies originated in the same place, produced and sold by the same multinational corporation. They were made for very different reasons, to do very different things, but for the benefit of the same shareholders.

And perhaps this fact doesn’t make me as complicit as the employees of Boeing – united, as they are, by a shared commitment to their company’s values – or its shareholders. But it deepens my insistent and unnerving sense, as a citizen of the supposedly peaceful and civilised West, that as long as this annihilation of an oppressed people continues, none of us can ever be innocent.

Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli strike on the Al-Taba’een school in Gaza. Photograph: Mahmoud Zaki/EPA

Poor taste for a bishop not to call a person by their name

"Wake up America, remember who her #1 has been for nearly 4 years…”

The above quote appears on Bishop Joseph Strickland’s Facebook page. The line was posted in recent days. The sacked bishop is obviously referring to Kamala Harris and doing so in a rude manner, unfortunately, Trumpian in style. The least the man could do would be call the person by her name.

Strickland was bishop in Tyler Texas from 2012 to 2023 when he was removed by Pope Francis.

The words of former taoiseach Leo Varadkar on what he said about aspects of social media come to mind.

Makes much more sense to take train and ferry

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

I was stopped in my tracks some days ago listening to the Claire Byrne Show on RTÉ Radio 1. Philip Boucher Hayes was stepping in for Claire. He was interviewing Dr Jerry Murphy, who is a civil engineer and director of the  Environmental Research Unit at UCC. 

Murphy is a scientist deeply concerned about the state of our climate and how we are in the process of destroying our world.

He argues that even if every plane moved over to Sustainable Aviation Fuel by 2050 it would only reduce the warming effect caused by aviation by half. And to do that by 2050 is a pipe dream.

Murphy said that while living in London in the 1980s his annual salary was £10,000 while a flight from London to Cork was £200. He argues that the cost of flying is going to be very high and that we won’t be flying as much. He mentioned that at UCC they are now told to zoom rather than fly to a meeting.

‘Travel by airline must go down and costs go up if we are to get to net zero,’ he said.

And using batteries is not the answer he told Philip: ‘To use a battery to fly from London to Dubai it would have to be bigger than the plane.’

‘The idea of flying off to Saville for a weekend will probably not be there by 2040. I think we’ll take a ferry to France, I think we will have slower holidays. Not my personal wish. Flying will become very expensive and aviation should reduce.’

Murphy thinks it’s sad that our young people can’t buy houses but can pop over to Saville, Rome or Barcelona for the weekend. In 10, 15 years we won’t be able to pop off for a weekend because airfares will be so expensive, he says.

But of course it’s not just an Irish problem. There is need for a global consensus, as aviation is international.

He sees future travel being much slower, with us using ferries and trains.

Later that day I was cycling in Dublin City centre. The number of people I saw looking for directions on their phones or conventional maps made me think of Jerry Murphy earlier on the radio. 

Besides the damage all our flying is doing I’ve been wondering for some time now about the modern phenomenon of flying here there and everywhere. It’s probably a most un-PC thing to say. But cycling in Dublin that afternoon I was struck by the number of bored-looking people I saw, wandering about the place. 

Maybe my imagination was running away with me, maybe I was jealous but I couldn’t help thinking there is something phoney about the tourist industry. Yes, it brings in a sackful of cash but is that the criteria on which everything is based?

I hear people saying they ‘did’ Berlin or went shopping in New York for the weekend. I’ve seen tourists in West Kerry jump out of their car, take a picture, jump back in and drive off.

Of course travelling can do us great good, broaden our horizons, widen our minds but surely taking a boat and ferry and spending more time at it is a far better idea, and saving our world too.

Irish households waste €60 worth of food per month

In 2022 Irish households threw away an estimated 220,000 tonnes of food, which works out at 29 per cent of total food for that year.

Food waste costs the average Irish household approximately €60 per month or €700 per year. That’s an annual national cost of €1.29 billion.

Donald tells the world he is better looking than Kamala

Below former US president speaking yesterday evening.

Mr Trump has now declared that he is much better looking than Kamala - “I’m much better looking than her(sic).

The former president is not great on English grammar.

According to his own words he is the best at everything and his opponents are the worst ever and in everything.

Is it all for real? It is.

https://youtu.be/yhXHnr6NZow?si=wfbSWmU9Lj8sSM6d

Fr Derek Smyth RIP, priest of the Archdiocese of Dublin

Derek Smyth, a priest of the Archdiocese of Dublin, died on Tuesday, August 13. Below is a comment published on the condolence page of RIP.ie

Not long after he arrived in Foxrock and complaints had been made about his approach I had occasion to write to the archbishop in his support, I wrote: “Derek was a man of vision who challenged the congregation to think about our religion and what it means to us. His homilies are thought-provoking, constructed in a contemporaneous context, with a commentary meaningful in the current modern idiom, that challenged the status quo mediocrity that for so long has been a feature of the catholic church we were reared with – a mediocrity that has been leading many younger generations to question why we should still bother with an arch conservative monolithic structure that appears unwilling to embrace a more modern approach, relevant to the vicissitudes facing people today. We need priests of his calibre, to make the Gospel relevant in a current context, if the church is not to lose further members, or attract younger members who will be the future church”.

Derek will be sorely missed by those who really care. I only wish I had known him much earlier in my life.

— Brian More O'Ferrall

The first words between Valentia and Newfoundland

US President James Buchanan officially opened the new transatlantic cable between Valentia Island and Trinity Bay, Newfoundland by speaking with England’s Queen Victoria on August 16, 1858.

A few weeks later, due to a poor signal, the service was forced to shutdown. After many attempts and financial problems  the project succeeded.

Since 1866, there has been a permanent cable connection between the United States and Europe.

RTÉ 1 Television screened an interesting programme on Monday evening on the many attempts at laying the cable. It is available on the RTÉ Player. Well worth watching.

A former IDF soldier deeply disturbed by recent visit to Israel

This is a powerful piece of writing by Omer Bartov. As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, he was deeply disturbed by his recent visit to Israel

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov?CMP=share_btn_url

Benedict go-between declares his loyalty to Pope Francis

It surely must say something about the quality of the man when he says this being left in limbo by the Holy See about his future role had left him feeling “insecure and paralysed, powerless”.

The article appears in The Irish Times last week,

DEREK SCALLY in Berlin

Archbishop Georg Gänswein was once one of the Vatican’s most influential clerics, at the side of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – later Pope Benedict XVI – for nearly 30 years.After the German pope’s surprise resignation in February 2013, the archbishop acted as go-between with his successor, Pope Francis, and stayed on as personal secretary and carer until Benedict’s death in December 2022.

Archbishop Gänswein’s life in the Holy See ended abruptly when his memoir appeared two weeks after Benedict’s funeral in January 2023, making public alleged private tensions between Benedict and Francis.

Banished from Rome, where he carried the nickname “Gorgeous George”, Gänswein was ordered back to his home diocese of Freiburg in southwest Germany, with no concrete role, in March 2023.

After 18 months in the wilderness, the 68-year-old has now made a public profession of loyalty to the pope in Germany’s Bild tabloid. He has now been appointed papal nuncio to the Baltic countries, based in Lithuania.

“Like any bishop who, on his consecration, professes the pope his loyalty and reverence, I have done the same,” said Archbishop Gänswein, appointed titular archbishop of Urbs Salvia in 2013. “I did it then with Benedict and will with all his successors on the throne of Peter. I have kept this promise. Whether I did it willingly, though, is another matter.”

The German cleric described his last year as “the most difficult of my life” and said his forced departure from Rome had left him with “painful wounds” and “great disappointment”. Being left in limbo by the Holy See about his future role had left him feeling “insecure and paralysed, powerless”.

It was a change of tone from January 2023 when Archbishop Gänswein wrote in his memoir how Pope Francis had “humiliated” him by stripping him of his duties in the Vatican household in 2020.

Other headline-grabbing claims in the memoir alleged doctrinal disagreements, with Benedict supposedly unhappy with how Francis had tightened up again rules on the traditional Latin the German pope had loosened. The final showdown between Pope Francis and Archbishop Gänswein came later in 2020 over another book taking a conservative line on priestly celibacy. It appeared – with a foreword apparently written by Benedict – just as Pope Francis was discussing looser celibacy rules as a possible solution to a priest shortage in the Amazon region.

Critics argued Archbishop Gänswein had overstepped his role with Benedict and, with or without the ailing former pope’s knowledge, allied him with conservative groups opposed to the direction of the Catholic church under his successor.

In an April interview Pope Francis said Archbishop Gänswein “did some very difficult things to me” but did not go into detail.

Archbishop Gänswein also kept things vague yesterday when admitted he had “made mistakes, no question, including towards Pope Francis”.

“I have acknowledged these and dealt with them, the relationship between the head of the church and me is relaxed and healthy,” he said, dismissing reports of ongoing tensions as “yesterday’s news”.

Fresh claims

The archbishop is not the only senior German cleric in the headlines, following fresh claims against Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith until 2017.According to a report in the Pillar portal, detailing a 2015 audit, church inspectors found Müller officials attempting to remove several plastic bags containing large quantities of cash.

Vatican auditors also found large amounts of the departmental budget in the conservative cardinal’s personal bank account. He dismissed the report as “typical intrigue” but did not deny a claim that Pope Francis ordered him repay €200,000 to the department.