Thank you, Martin

Our friend Martin McGuinness  has gone from us, mission accomplished.

 We bless him as he goes. He brought to our political life qualities we needed so much, patience, courtesy and friendship.

While other leaders in the world were practising their craft of turning peace into war he was perfecting the art of turning war into peace. 

We are grateful to him and to his colleagues for that.

He did not discover the way to peace in the midst of war, he had the vision of peace all his life. His sadness was that often the vision was hidden by obstacles to peace set up by those who should have been friends.

If we have sadness now it is because he did not stay with us long enough to see the best result of his genius.

Go raibh sé i  suaimhneas  sioraí Dé go deo.

We thank his Family , Colleagues and Neighbours  too, for they so faithfully loved and supported him.

 

TWO OF MANY EAMONS

Eamon Casey who died recently was one of Ireland's most famous bishops. Irish bishops have been famous for lots of  things but Eamon became famous for one thing in particular, he fell  in love with a friend who was married  and they had a son .

When he was a student in Maynooth  seminary some of his fellow students prophesied  that he would not  live  long - they thought he would die in a mighty crash  driving his car  furiously fast.  Driving in  those  days if you " went  over forty" either you boasted about it or someone else  complained about it. Someone  suggested  there should be a law requiring a red flag to be carried in front of his car. He did have some crashes but nobody got hurt.  Our  concern about his loving or driving  may make us  forget how  caring, thoughtful, compassionate were so many other things he did. Like  cooperating with Des Wilson (no relation of mine I'm afraid ) to build houses for people in England who didn't have any or heading  Trócaire in Ireland to help get food and a living for people in this world who had neither.

Eamon Casey was ordained in 1951 and so, as Maurice Chevalier might have sung, I remember him well. He went to England as  a lot of Catholic priests did in the fifties and sixties , saw the plight of workers  there  who were  paid for the job but not  provided with decent living  during the job or after it.

There was another Eamon who followed much the same track, Eamon Gaynor who was ordained the same day I was - he joined up with people like the Mc Alpine's fusiliers  Christy Moore sings about and  went along with them as they  shifted camp from one section of English motorway to the next, living like nomads  because that's the way it was. One Eamon was bringing companionship to the labourers , another Eamon providing homes for them  if they could get  a bit of prosperity and peace to live in  them. Brave young men  who thought comfort was for other people.  Falling in love "inappropriately" and driving too fast seem  not to matter all that much when you look back on it.

Institutions are strange. They see what you are good at and get you to do something else instead. Casey was taken from the houses and Gaynor from the motorways back to Ireland to savour the -- what's the word, decitement perhaps --  of  the Irish church struggling to ignore the Second Vatican Council. They made Casey a bishop and Gaynor a curate and there you were. Casey eventually became head of Trócaire which was good, although  one always remembers it was founded when  anti-birthcontrol hysteria  made many religious people wary of organisations like Oxfam. Fortunately Trócaire and similar organisations did magnificently and carried themselves with dignity until the hysteria faded. One of the people responsible for that was Brian Mc Keown , a  Belfastman, one is proud to say.

As for the Eamons of this world and the people they generously befriended, some of them built motorways for our English neighbours, some fought their wars for them, some preached their sermons for them, some built their schools and managed their hospitals for them. One prominent member  of the Catholic church in England and generous admirer of the Irish said to me : One of the best things you Irish people  could do for England is go home and force us to do all this for  ourselves.

One is not always grateful for large mercies though. I don't know exactly  where  the  idealism of Eamon of the Motorways led him eventually but I do know  the other Eamon's  love life made us forget how many houses he and that other Des Wilson got built.

How would it have been if the church administration had brought  one of the Eamons back not to administer church affairs but to help the homeless in Ireland , and told the other Eamon to stay where he was and go on taking care of  the uninsured and lonely Irish who were  left, as it were,  by the side of the road? 

Annoying - the president ?

One answer to President Trump's recent executive  order to tighten control of immigration has come from what may seem unlikely sources. The presidential order called  halt to financial subsidies for town and city  councils who refuse to carry out the President's  severe directions about  removing immigrants. 

So some municipal councils are refusing to obey.

 In the state of Connecticut a city council not only refused to obey but got a standing ovation for refusing. One of its  Republican councillors said , "It's sad that we're voting on this tonight, it's great to see the community come together but it's unfortunate that this is why". The "why" was the need for  this, like other councils, "to make the state's (Connecticut's) largest city a safe haven for undocumented immigrants" .  A small but growing number of USA cities, towns and college campuses  have declared themselves safe sanctuaries for immigrants under this threat from the administration.

This sanctuary movement  is reminiscent of what happened in Europe centuries  ago - immigrants take their folk memories with them wherever they go  - when monasteries -  some of these were as big as small towns in population and wealth - were declared sanctuaries, sanctuaries even for wrongdoers. It is reminiscent also of places of refuge for citizens of the USA who went north for sanctuary in Canada because they refused to fight in Vietnam and other wars whose morality they could not believe in. And there  are towns in America still proudly remembered  as sanctuaries for fleeing slaves.

Like any humane and dignified  initiative the ancient right of sanctuary was abused. They say for instance that when rich European nobility  went to fight in the Christians' eastern  crusades some of them did some foul deeds and on returning home founded  monasteries, partly to become reconciled to the Almighty and partly to ensure  they could live the rest of their  short lives there and die in peace, safe from competitors and enemies.

In  Middletown , Connecticut, a short while ago the Mayor said : "It's been our practice for years not to enforce federal immigration law....". 

The University of Connecticut declared its commitment to protecting undocumented students.

A Hartford Connecticut newspaper   recently reported  their  Mayor saying,   "This is a welcoming , caring, and inclusive town" - he too was reacting against  the Presidential order.

Meanwhile about eight thousand people recently assembled at a site in North Dakota to protest at an oil pipeline being made to run more than a thousand miles  through sacred tribal land of native Americans. They protested the President's order that  the pipeline  must proceed, under the care of the Army's engineers. What happens if the people keep resisting to the point of standing in physical opposition, Army or no Army ?

The Franciscan Action Network  said, "Building a pipeline through indigenous people's sacred land is a violation of their religious freedom just the same as if President Trump gave permission to tear down St Patrick's Cathedral in New York to build an oil refinery there ".

In North Dakota it would likely poison the people's water supply into the bargain.

 The Sisters of Mercy of the Americas  called the latest executive order on immigrants  "morally unacceptable" 

So the President testing his political and financial muscle in the present struggle for internal power is not just a matter of annoying the press and the fleeing industrialists. Consciences and city councils are annoyed  as well.