This is about comments made by Pope Francis in his newly published autobiography ‘Hope’.
The man is spot on, though he could have said more, maybe he does.
The real story needs to be told about the phenomenon 'liturgical lap dancing’.
https://youtube.com/shorts/dpzw69-4W34?si=I12jKPRzmI6KUJce
The Irish Independent published
Our use of bad language seems to have moved into a new stratosphere. In conversation with a stranger on the street these days one will hear all sorts of swear and vulgar words being used.
Yesterday a bus driver was over heard criticising rudeness, in doing so his words were peppered with the F-word.
It now seems completely acceptable for people on television and on radio to use the F-word ad lib.
Mrs Brown and her boys seem incapable of putting a sentence together without using the F-word. It certainly isn’t funny.
‘The wicked practice of profane cursing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.”
- George Washington.
Clearly the next occupant of the White House disagrees with a previous occupant of the building.
It has been brought to the
 |
| Seamus Dunne |
Seamus Dunne died at Tallaght University Hospital on Sunday, January 12.
Seamus, who was a member of a well known Tallaght family, was born on September 18, 1936, joined the Dominicans in 1955 and ordained a priest in 1962.
He spent most of his years as a priest in Trinidad.
On retiring from priesthood he returned to Ireland and lived in Virginia, Co Cavan, where he reared his family.
He taught at Virginia Vocational School and is a former national president of Down Syndrome Ireland.
Seamus rowed to work every morning as the school was on the other side of the lake to where he lived
Reposing today at 'The Village Chapel Of Rest' Mullagh from 5pm to 8pm. Requiem Mass on Thursday at midday in St Bartholomew's Church, Knocktemple, with interment in the adjoining cemetery.
Another Tallaght man, Jimmy Aengus Hanlon died in December in Australia. Jimmy and Seamus were next door neighbours growing up in Newtown Park.
Jimmy was born on January 26, 1945, joined the Irish Dominicans in September 1963 and ordained a priest in July 1970.
Jimmy spent all of his priestly ministry in Australia, with a short spell at the Dominican priory in Dundalk.
He was an accomplished guitarist.
May Jimmy and Seamus rest in peace.
This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.
There was bad weather forecast for later on in the day on the first Saturday of the new year. I was on the mid-morning bus from Cloghane in West Kerry to Tralee to take the lunchtime train to Dublin. And guess what I saw in a field? Two young lambs, my first lambs of the new year.
It was great to see them and another reminder that the days are getting longer and the hope now is for spring. I’m wondering but for the bus would I have spotted the newborn lambs?
The new bus service from Brandon/Cloghane/Castlegregory to Tralee is a God send, at least for me. It links Castlegregory five times a day with Tralee and twice a day for people living in Brandon and Cloghane. The return adult fare from Castlegregory to Tralee is a measly €4. Those in possession of a Travel Pass can of course travel without paying.
West Kerry is no exception. Since last August Transport for Ireland is providing a top class transport service across the county. Between private operators and Bus Éireann nearly every village and town has a good public service. Are we using it as we should? It seems to be hit and miss. I’ve been on buses with two or three and also on buses where I’ve counted 21 passengers.
I imagine most people have been critical of the transport infrastructure within the county. I’m wondering are those who were the loudest in criticising the paucity of service now making it their business to use the buses? It’s up to us, the people to make it work.
We seem to be fixated on using our cars. Of course there are times when we have to use them but ask yourself how many times would it be just as easy to use the bus. I overheard someone say that the bus was really for the ‘free passers’ and those who don’t have cars. The inference was that they would not like to be associated with them. What nonsense. Snobbery is alive and well in Kerry.
But the TFI have also work to do. I’m still baffled with how poorly the routes and timetables are being advertised. That day I was travelling my phone had no signal, so how was I going to check the timetable? I have not yet seen a printed timetable that I can put in my wallet. Is there single new bus stop erected on any of the routes? It doesn’t seem so.
No doubt we are still in the early stages but timetables need to be tweaked. It makes no sense having a bus arrive at a rail station three minutes before the train departs or arrives.
TFI needs to tell the private operators and Bus Éireann to talk to each other and complement their services.
Between Tralee and Camp there are 15 buses each way every day. Why not have passengers from Brandon/Cloghane/ Castlegregory change on to the Dingle Tralee bus at Camp. It would save a lot of fuel and surely it’s something to think about.
What about making an effort to begin leaving the car at home and taking the bus? Just a suggestion for 2025. Try it.
Interesting piece, frightening too, in The Irish Times on Saturday by Daniel McLaughlin, the newspaper’s newly appointed Eastern Europe Correspondent.
A divided Europe fears ‘escalation’ as Moscow’s unacknowledged attacks become more reckless
There have been assassinations, cyber attacks, election interference and plots to put firebombs on cargo planes. Undersea cables have been cut and GPS signals for airliners scrambled. Western security services say a long Russian campaign of unacknowledged aggression is becoming increasingly reckless and destructive. Are Russia and the West already fighting an undeclared war?
“No, we are not at war. But we are certainly not at peace either,” new Nato secretary general Mark Rutte said last month. “Hostile actions against Allied countries are real and accelerating. Malicious cyber attacks on both sides of the Atlantic. Assassination attempts on British and German soil. Explosions at an ammunition warehouse in Czechia. The weaponisation of migrants crossing illegally into Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland. Jamming to disrupt civil aviation in the Baltic region.
“These attacks are not just isolated incidents. They are the result of a co-ordinated campaign to destabilise our societies and discourage us from supporting Ukraine. They circumvent our deterrence and bring the front line to our front doors.”
Since the murder in central London of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in 2006, up to the severing of power and communications cables in the Baltic Sea in recent weeks, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been accused of using an array of “hybrid” or “grey zone” attacks to undermine and intimidate the West while retaining a degree of deniability and avoiding a conventional act of war.
“They’ve always been doing this sort of stuff, and most of the time the West has substantially ignored it. What was Britain’s response to assassination attempts on its soil? Pitiful, really,” says Lukas Milevski, an assistant professor specialising in military strategy at Leiden University in the Netherlands, recalling London’s expulsion of Russian diplomats after Litvinenko’s death and the attempted murder of another ex-Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018.
“The whole point [for Moscow] is to figure out a way for Russia to achieve its international political objectives by bypassing traditional war ... and if possible to only rely on non-military means,” he adds. “They tried to do this for 20 years with Ukraine and ultimately failed and it became a traditional war.”
Multiple objectives
Rory Cormac, a professor of international relations at Nottingham University, says Russia uses unacknowledged attacks to pursue “multiple objectives” against individual western states and organisations such as Nato.
“One is to disrupt supplies of weapons to Ukraine,” he says. “They also want to undermine the resolve to support Ukraine and increase the political and economic costs of supporting Ukraine. It’s not necessarily about winning or ending wars but about a slow, sapping, draining, subversive process.
“They also want to push and test the limits of Nato’s Article 5, to see what they can get away with, to stoke divisions in Nato and undermine consensus and co-operation,” he adds, referring to the mutual defence clause that binds the 32 countries in the alliance.
“They want to spread uncertainty, paralyse western international institutions and their ability to respond and make decisions.”
While Nato states such as Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania seek a strong collective response to hostile Kremlin actions, other members such as Hungary and Slovakia back a softer approach, criticising sanctions against Russia and support for Ukraine and arguing that confrontation with Moscow must be avoided at all costs.
Russia’s use of unacknowledged operations to attack the West takes advantage of these divisions and of the need within Nato to establish consensus between divergent members, while Putin’s authoritarian regime acts without constraints.
“Any ambiguity or doubt makes the response [to attacks] much more difficult and induces paralysis,” says Cormac. “Even a small element of doubt will be exploited by those who are more sympathetic to Russia. That grain of doubt and lack of acknowledgment impedes response.”
While sending substantial military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s full invasion in 2022, western powers have been at constant pains to avoid what they call “escalation” with Russia, leading to delays and limits on support for Kyiv that have compromised its defence.
Armed attack
Fear of confrontation with the Kremlin also inclines Nato to treat its covert attacks as less than acts of war, so avoiding the possible activation of Article 5, which would oblige all members to join forces against an enemy. International law is also unclear over what constitutes an armed attack and on other issues, making any such judgement political.
“This threshold is a mutually agreed or constructed thing. Something is sub-threshold because we in the West say that it is sub-threshold, because we are worried about escalation,” says Cormac. “A lot of western counties and leaders want it to be sub-threshold and don’t have the political willingness to fight back.”
Experts say this vagueness is only expanding the “grey zone” in which Putin feels free to act with impunity; last year, for example, Russia was allegedly behind the dispatch of incendiary devices to cargo hubs in Germany and Britain, which could have started fires onboard aircraft flying to North America, western security officials say.
“It’s all very well being ‘deliberately vague’ when signalling to Russia what the threshold for invoking Article 5 is, but the challenge for the new secretary general of Nato is that 32 Nato states need to have clarity ... on what constitutes an armed attack in today’s hybrid war,” says Charlie Edwards, senior adviser for strategy and national security at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Russian attacks are becoming more frequent, bolder and more reckless. So there is a genuine question to ask of Nato and western capitals, about what more they should do to respond, in the absence of meeting the Article 5 threshold.”
The West may be doing its utmost to avoid escalation with a bellicose nuclear power, but what if Russia already thinks and acts like it is fighting a wider war?
“Western governments are still making the basic mistake of thinking that Russian sabotage operations in Europe are part of a different campaign from the conventional war that is playing out in Ukraine – when in fact it is all part of the same war the Russians are fighting,” Edwards says.
Tapping into centuries-old Russian tropes, the Putin regime now justifies its increasingly extreme actions – from sweeping domestic repression to the ruinous war on Ukraine – by claiming to be defending the motherland from devious and aggressive western states that want to rip it apart.
Great power
“All the revolutions since the late 1980s in ex-Soviet republics and former Warsaw Pact countries . . . are seen by the Russians as western-backed coups that constitute aggression against Russia and its interests and its sphere of influence as a great power,” Milevski says.
“So Russia thinks it is at war with the West in a non-military way. They believe they see a sustained campaign of successful western aggression against them and they are trying to turn the tables.”
Europe claims that its mild response to Russian hybrid attacks shows it favours peace over conflict, but if Moscow thinks it would never use force under any circumstances, “then we’re really not choosing to be peaceful, we’re choosing to be harmless”, Milevski warns.
“And that is a terrible state of affairs, especially when you’re next to Russia.”
Yesterday in Riesa, a town in the State of Saxony the AfD ( Alternative for Germany) Alice Weidel was unanimously elected the party’s chancellor candidate for the February general election in Germany.
In her acceptance speech she spoke strongly in favour of remigration, spelling out the word. She also expressed disdain about wind energy.
She promised if she be elected all wind turbines will be torn down and all functioning nuclear power stations would be brought back on line into the grid.
The tone of her voice and her sentiments, with the large German flags in the background made it all look like a frightening day for Germany. As if nothing had ever happened, as if the past had been forgotten.
Only on Thursday Weidel said that Hitler was not ‘right-wing’ but a ‘communist’.
Outside the venue there was a large demonstration against the far-right AfD party.
This from the Guardian during the week. But is it as simple as this?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/08/elon-musk-afd-germany-mainstream-far-right?CMP=share_btn_urlWhen the film Conclave was released some months ago US bishop Robert Barron advised Catholics to avoid the film.
The film based on the book of the same name by Robert Harris is an excellent film. Many critics say the film is as good if not better than the book.
The film is the work of German director Edward Berger and is well worth seeing.
Yesterday Bishop Barron wrote on X the piece below on Jimmy Carter’s funeral service.
Would it not have been more dignified and appropriate for the bishop to have said nothing? Is it not the business of the family to bury their father in the manner they decide? They may well have been carrying out the wishes of their father. Jimmy Carter was a great man and certainly his funeral service does not deserve the comments made by Bishop Barron.
Below is his comment on X.
"I was watching highlights from President Carter’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. I found some of the speeches very moving. But I was appalled when two country singers launched into a rendition of John Lennon’s "Imagine." Under the soaring vault of what I think is still a Christian church, they reverently intoned, “Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try” and “imagine there’s no country; it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Vested ministers sat patiently while a hymn to atheistic humanism was sung. This was not only an insult to the memory of a devoutly believing Christian but also an indicator of the spinelessness of too much of established religion in our country."
Kathy Sheridan’s opinion piece in The Irish Times yesterday makes great sense.
Some of us are old enough to remember the regular edgy inquiries 10 years ago as to why this paper was so damned preoccupied by the activities of one Donald Trump when we had plenty of our own problems to reckon with. That free-range anxiety currently hovering in the ether may help explain it.
In previous years images of President Joe Biden awarding the Medal of Freedom to people such as Liz Cheney, George Soros and Bono might have looked like another clatter of wealthy privileged folk slapping each others’ backs. Last week it felt more like Biden’s last desperate message to an apathetic world.
“You’re like a dying wasp you are,” said Dublin criminal Gerard Hutch to RTÉ’s Paul Reynolds in November when the journalist doggedly challenged him at the election count. It was the first and worst insult the crime boss could think of and all the more stinging because it contained a germ of truth. Criminal reputations, corruption and crass ignorance are now badges of pride. That didn’t begin with Trump – we’ve had plenty of our own examples in politics, banking, property and elsewhere – but Trump gave it a public swagger that spawned imitators like flies. His latest notions about annexing Canada, Mexico or Greenland like a pound shop Putin are just what the Maga faithful expect – but only because the notions come wrapped in the flashy power of his wealth. To everyone else they sound psychotic.
Wealth is not just a means of living in luxury but a way of changing perceptions of its owner.
It allows Hutch to own properties around the world while simultaneously basking in the persona of Robin Hood, winning admiration and gratitude for his inner city philanthropy. It enables Conor McGregor to hire expensive legal services for himself and his co-accused, James Lawrence, in a civil rape case and to shrug off the jury’s €250,000 damages award against McGregor as “modest”. The jury found Lawrence had not assaulted Nikita Hand.
It empowers Trump to hire legions of lawyers, advisers and PR people to deny and delay the scores of legal actions against his lifelong frauds, bankruptcies, lawbreaking and sexual violations. Above all, it has catapulted Elon Musk to Trump’s right hand. “F u retard”, Musk replied on Monday to a Twitter/X poster who was urging the EU to take action against Musk’s global misinformation rampage.
If that response suggests that all is not well with him, the fact is that he would be gone long ago, were it not for the inoculation of wealth.
McGregor’s dismissal of the civil rape trial as a “kangaroo court” echoed the Trumpian petulance of men unaccustomed to pushback. Rich men will always have helpers like Gabriel Ernesto Rapisarda, an Italian self-described entrepreneur/celebrity agent/professional brand builder who recently declared that sales of McGregor’s Forged Irish Stout were booming in Italy and predicted a further sales “explosion” once the hotel CCTV footage of Hand, McGregor and Lawrence – shared with the parties solely for the trial – is aired this month. Presumably Gruppo CR, an affiliate of the giant Conad consortium of retail co-ops and warm family-first ethos, is aware of Rapisarda’s classy marketing tactics.
But for wealthy men like McGregor, the sales are incidental. It is about vindication.
“One of the biggest risks of wealth/power is no longer having anyone around you who can push back,” the US billionaire investor Chris Sacca wrote about Musk a couple of years ago. “A shrinking worldview combined with intellectual isolation leads to out-of-touch s**t ... I’ve recently watched those around him become increasingly sycophantic and opportunistic ... agreeing with him is easier, and there is more financial and social upside”. He could have been talking about Trump or any wealthy bully with a fragile ego.
It’s 14 years ago since young Occupy Wall Street activists spent 59 days protesting against economic inequality, corporate greed and money in politics. Eleven since the IMF’s Christine Lagarde and others were questioning the sustainability of capitalism itself. Eight since Trump was first elected on the promise of corporate tax cuts and deregulation (and carried it through). Six since Bono argued at a Davos World Economic Forum panel that “capitalism is not immoral – it’s amoral. It requires our instruction ...” It has taken more people out of poverty than any other ‘ism’, he said, but it is a wild beast that if not tamed can chew up a lot of people along the way. Who was listening?
The 13 billionaires tapped for Trump’s Cabinet alone have a combined net worth of €340 billion at least. Five of Silicon Valley’s finest including Google, Amazon, Meta, Tim Cook and Sam Altman have donated one million each to Trump’s inaugural parties. Trump himself will be the richest US president in history.
When the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead (allegedly by the scion of a wealthy family) last month and stunned every boardroom, the New York Times reported that 75,000 of the 80,000 reactions to the company’s sombre death announcement were laughing emojis. “The crisis for [big US] business is that it doesn’t understand quite how hated it is by millions of people,” commented former editor of The Sun-turned-corporate PR specialist, David Yelland. Mark Zuckerberg already spends about $30 million a year on personal security, according to Yelland.
That anxiety in the ether may be a useful reminder that wealth and its uses are rarely benevolent; that capitalism requires our instruction. And that sucking up to Trump will not leave us on the right side of history.
I’m a slow reader and take to books in fits and starts, go through phases of reading and non-reading.
From time-to time I come across great reads that I believe inspire and impress me.
I remember as a young man reading Sean O’Casey, which left an indelible mark on me. It happens from time to time. The same with Dickens.
Another book that greatly influenced me is Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. It gives the reader, at least it gave me, a whole new perspective of what happened in World War II and the resolve of the Russians.
Yesterday I finished reading Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the World. It is a work of genius. It tells and explains the story of where we are with the Catholic Church in Ireland today.
Scally has been living in Berlin for over 20 years. How he describes the similarities between the former GDR and the Irish Catholic Church is intriguing, and accurate.
It is a powerful read and this reader highly recommends it. It certainly should be read by every clerical student and priest in the country. Everyone should read it.
More about the book on this blog in the days ahead.
This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.
Michael Commane
We are into the first full week of 2025. I don’t know when I last made a New Year’s Resolution. I’m wondering did I ever. But I have an idea for this coming year.
My usual way of travel is public transport and a fold-up bicycle.
On the Sunday after Christmas I was on an early morning Luas with my fold-up bicycle. I was on the Green Line tram, which goes from Brides Glen beyond Sandyford to Broombridge, which is near Cabra.
Somewhere near Harcourt Street, close to the city centre, two men got on the tram. They had an appearance about them that they may have been sleeping rough. They were sitting across from me and I could easily hear everything they were saying. That was not difficult as they were talking very loudly, almost shouting at each other.
They were discussing what stop they should get off. It was either Grangegorman or Phibsborough. Eventually they decided on Phibsborough. When I heard Phibsborough I became a little anxious as that was my stop too and at that hour on a Sunday morning it’s a deserted place.
I don’t know how it happened, but we got talking. I told them I too was getting off at Phibsborough. They were full of questions, as I was. They asked me where I was going. I told them. But they wanted to know more and asked me why was I up and about that early on this Sunday morning.
Before I had time to reply one of them asked me was I a priest. I was dumbfounded with the question and told them I was. We had a lovely chat, funny too.
Before it came to our stop they offered to help me lift my bicycle up the steps at the station. There is a steep set of steps at Phibsborough. When we got there the lift was working so there was no need for them to help. We said our goodbyes and off we went.
The encounter has been on my mind ever since. How stupid and indeed wrong it was of me to make my mind up about two men in a matter of seconds without ever having spoken to them, knowing absolutely nothing about them.
And I do it all the time, with both men and woman, young and old. I can’t talk for anyone else but I’d make a fair guess and say it is something we all find easy to do. How often we make up our minds about people on how they are dressed, how they speak, where they live, what sort of work they do.
There’s a long list of boxes to be filled and we judge people accordingly. And it’s worse than that, so often we decide on people without ever having met them.
There’s a mystery behind every face. It would make the world a much better place if we allowed the mystery of the other person to unfold before we allowed our grubby little thoughts to destroy her or him.
It sounds to me like a wise and good New Year’s Resolution to be kinder and more sensible with our ‘judgements’ on other people.
The weather is often a subject of conversation in Ireland.
After a relatively mild winter so far we are currently in the grip of snow, ice and wind. So far no snow in Dublin but close to freezing rain. No weather to be on a bicycle.
On January 6, 1839 Ireland experienced the Night of the Big Wind, indeed, to this day people refer back to it.
It was the most damaging storm in 300 years. It damaged more than 20 per cent of houses in Dublin.
The requirements of cooling AI server towers are such that for every 100 words of text generated by ChatGPT, three litres of water are consumed.
The cat story of Thursday makes for good reading.
A woman who read the piece tells the following story. She came across a heron on the road who had been hit by a car. She brought it to a vet who charged her €150 to euthanise it.
She later discovered from a friend an incident about the same vet. The friend brought her sick dog to the vet. He phoned the woman to tell her he had to put the dog down.
Two days later the dog was at her door, tail wagging.
Wonderful words spoken by Jimmy Carter about his former opponent. A world that seems now to have disappeared. Unfortunately.
https://youtu.be/9gNrZypFkPE?feature=shared
A lovely story in The Irish Times by Jennifer O’Connell on Saturday.
Losing a pet, they say, is a practice run for losing a human you love. But for something that’s only a rehearsal, the pain feels very real. In his podcast series Animal, Sam Anderson describes the death of his family’s hamster as a toothache that settles on the house. The days after the death of a pet pass in a fug and eventually, because the human heart is resilient, acceptance follows, and maybe someday in the future you’ll surprise yourself by talk of another pet.
That’s usually how it goes.
But not in the case of JJ, our handsome, sweet, manipulative six-year-old black Bombay cat.
From the start, JJ did everything on his own terms. We planned to adopt one kitten through a local rescue service – Lydia was an 11th birthday present for my oldest daughter. But when we arrived to pick her up, the lady who answered the door had one tiny, shivering black bundle in each hand. Which do you want, she asked. Of course we took them both.
Lydia was ridiculously lazy, unfailingly loyal and, to be blunt about it, a bit dim.
But JJ was different. He was a bright boy. You’re not supposed to be able to train cats – as cat owners will confirm, they train you. (As cat owners will also confirm, there’s no such thing as a cat owner. Think of yourself instead as an unpaid Airbnb host to a perpetually unimpressed guest who might abscond without notice and deposit a poor review in the middle of your floor.)
Let’s put it this way: he entered into a deal with my younger daughter, just three when he arrived, whereby he would sit and stay for as long it took for her to give him a piece of roast chicken. Soon she could leave him for 10 minutes and he’d still be waiting in the same corner of the kitchen, stock-still as a trained sniper.
As they got older, the relationship between JJ and Lydia became more fractious, and JJ began staying away from home. We suspected he was two-timing us with another family, probably the kind of people who didn’t insult him with a diet composed mostly of expensive hypoallergenic kibble. We discovered the identity of the other family when my neighbour Phyllis phoned me once during a bad storm worried because he wasn’t at home. By which she meant her home.
One morning in early 2022, when he was five, JJ didn’t leave immediately after snaffling some grub. By the time the text arrived later that day, I already knew that gentle, cat-loving Phyllis had died. He stayed with us for a while as he mourned her and then he got back out there. But whenever a roast went on, he’d appear like magic in the chicken spot.
I think we always knew that one day he’d just stop coming home. That we could have coped with.
It was a Saturday afternoon in November last year when a neighbour phoned to say there was a distressed black cat in their front garden that looked like one of mine.
The painful angle of his back legs was how I knew JJ was in trouble. He had been hit by a car which did not stop. He pulled himself as far as my neighbour’s gate, and was wedged between the railings. I looked around for an adult to tell me what to do, but my small daughter and the poor, broken cat were looking at me.
In the end, the nine-year-old was the brave one. She held him in a box in the back seat, as he whimpered and tried, with his two working front legs, to claw his way out. She talked to him in a soothing voice and kept him calm. In the vet’s surgery, I put a hand on his small, warm head and whispered goodbye.
The vet phoned later. The cat’s spinal cord was severed. She could dose him up with steroids and fluids overnight, she said. That would give you some time to decide, she said. I asked her what she would do if it was her cat? She said that she would let him stay asleep. But if you need time ... But taking time would have meant delegating the decision to my three children, so I told her to let him sleep.
The days after were hard. The absence we thought we had got used to now permeated every room. The vet called again and asked about caskets for his ashes. Something nice, I said. Maybe wood.
Seventeen days later, I was at work when my husband rang.
“Guess who just walked in?” he said.
If you have cats, you may have seen this one coming. JJ was back. JJ had sauntered in, eaten some kibble and was now, as we spoke, in the chicken spot, gazing optimistically at the oven. I didn’t believe it until my daughter sent photographs.
The vet was understanding when I phoned to say that the cat I euthanised was not, in fact, our JJ. It happens, she said. Does it, I asked. Well no, she conceded. But black cats are hard to tell apart. We tried to find the owner, but he had no microchip. I felt terrible. She said I had still done the right thing, and offered to split the bill.
By the time I got home that evening, JJ had been fed and cuddled and told off and reminded how much he was loved. He slipped back out into the night. And we never saw him again.
It’s been a year, and we have nearly all come to terms with the fact that JJ is really not coming back. The other black cat, the cat I am still only half persuaded was not JJ, gifted us the chance to grieve. My younger daughter is convinced JJ is still out there, living his best life eating someone else’s roast chicken.
May 2025 be kind and good to all readers of this blog, indeed, to all mankind.
Within the last 24 hours this blog has been read on all continents bar Australia.
Readership in Brazil tops the list with 1,160 logging on, then the US with 1,140, 497 in Hong Kong and 479 readers in Ireland, 419 readers in Singapore, 24 in Russia. In Trinidad and Tobago it was read by 14 people. Eighteen in Uzbekistan, 64 in Turkey, 115 in Mexico.
There were 629 unidentifiable places where it was read.
The blog began in June 2007.
The link below is a wonderful read about a quirky type of man, a man of many parts. It was published in The Irish Times on Monday
https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/2024/12/30/the-legend-of-sparrow-robertson-the-last-sportswriter-in-nazi-paris/
The world is talking about Jimmy Carter ever since his death was announced. He was truly a great and inspirational man.
Even president-elect Donald Trump spoke well of him, though he did add that he disagreed with him philosophically. Interesting to know the specific philosophy.
Below is a review of a book by Carter. It’s written by Dominican Vivian Boland and makes for an interesting read on the first day of 2025 and some few days before Donal Trump becomes US president.
REVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PASTORAL REVIEW 4 (2008) 90-91
JIMMY CARTER, FAITH & FREEDOM: THE CHRISTIAN CHALLENGE FOR THE WORLD London, Duckworth, 2005, x + 214 pages
This best-selling book by President Jimmy Carter recalls a more hopeful time, when the phrase ‘ethical foreign policy’ actually meant something. His Christian faith, he says, helped rather than hindered his activities as President and it continues to inspire his current activities. The foundation established in his name is now a major non-governmental agency promoting development, justice, reconciliation and peace in many parts of the world. In recognition of its work, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2002.
On issues that divide Christians across the US – science and religion, for example – he takes a liberal line for the most part. In regard to divorce and gay unions he argues that governments should define and protect the rights of citizens while church congregations define ‘holy matrimony’. He recently left the Baptist congregation of which he had been a member for seventy years on account of its attempts to justify biblically a subservient position for women. He has ‘never believed that Jesus Christ would approve either abortions or the death penalty’ but as President obeyed Supreme Court decisions to the best of his ability, ‘at the same time attempting to minimize what I considered to be their adverse impact’.
He is one of the best-placed commentators on current concerns about religious fundamentalism: he knows what is involved in trying to be a faithful believer and a politician in the ‘real world’. He is clearly not in sympathy with neo-conservative fundamentalism, which threatens the separation of church and state, ‘one of America’s great glories.’ He is clearly angry that a lot of painstaking work in relation to Cuba, North Korea, Palestine and nuclear non-proliferation has been crudely undone by subsequent administrations, in particular the present one.
The chapter on the use of torture in the war on terrorists is the most shocking in the book. It includes the extraordinary revelation that some of the countries in which the ‘rendition’ of terrorist subjects by the United States is carried out are Islamic states, some of whose human rights records have been condemned by the US itself – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan and Uzbekistan. This use of torture, as well as the internment camp at Guantanamo Bay, represents a departure from America’s historic leadership as a champion of human rights. He calls it ‘an embarrassing tragedy’. He is clear that the pre-emptive war against Iraq and the continuing occupation fail to meet the criteria of the just war tradition.
He writes also about environmental concerns, but in his view the world’s greatest challenge in the third Christian millennium is the growing chasm between the rich and poor people on earth. The clarity and conviction of his writing remind the reader that here is no armchair academic or idealistic preacher but a man who has given his life to the search for solutions to these problems. Although there are many things here that might tempt one to pessimism, perhaps even cynicism, the overall sense is hopeful, that the space between the truths of religion and the officially protected scepticism of free societies can be successfully negotiated. Mainline politics may not be the place to do it but President Carter’s experience shows that there are other ways, other kinds of institutional involvement, that do allow it to be done.
Vivian Boland OP
