Changing times for the Church – but still a distance left to travel

It’s the best part of twenty years since I delivered my one and only sermon to the masses at the Masses – in the salubrious surrounds of Mullingar Cathedral.

It wasn’t an actual sermon of course, but more a talk where the sermon should have been, on a Sunday during Lent in the year 2004.

I’d been in Rwanda with a team from Trocaire, where we’d seen tangible evidence of a world devoid of humanity, ten years after the genocide that had wiped out up to a million Tutsis in one hundred days.

Each year for their Lenten campaign, Trocaire choose a specific region in the world to highlight their work and the plight of the people there – so it might be Honduras after Hurricane Mitch, Nigeria and its endemic food poverty…or, in this case, the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda.

The sheer barbarism of what happened in this Country of a Thousand Hills will remain embedded on my brain for the rest of my days – and that was a decade after it happened. And that’s the story I was telling from the altar in Mullingar Cathedral.

I’d originally be slated down for Saturday evening Mass and then maybe one on Sunday – but I sort of got into a rhythm on Saturday night and volunteered to do all of the Masses the following day.

The final one was the Bishop’s own Mass, and Michael Smith was a man wholeheartedly committed to the work of Trocaire – so even he stood aside to let me at it.

And to crown it all, my wife and two little boys of five and four (as they were) sat in the congregation for this big finale.

But anyone with small children will know that keeping them quiet and attentive for the duration of a Mass is a job of work, and soon they began to grow restless.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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