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W W W. M E S S E N G E R . I E

THE POPE’S INTENTIONS

RECLAIMING A CHRISTIAN IDENTITY

Fergus O’Donoghue

This month the Pope asks us to pray ‘that Christians in Europe may rediscover their true identity and participate with greater enthusiasm in the proclamation of the Gospel.

The Eucharistic Congress, taking place in Dublin this month, is a wonderful opportunity for us to celebrate our Christian faith and our membership of the great international Catholic fellowship that gathers around the Risen Lord Jesus Christ and proclaims him as Saviour of the World and the centre of our lives. The Congress is a reaffirmation of our sense of Christian community, going against all the present trends in Europe, where active Church membership and even religious belief itself are in constant decline.

When did we Europeans, who brought the faith to so many corners of the world, become so secular?

Why and how was Christianity marginalised in the Continent where it is the foundation of our culture and civilization? This process was gradual, but every generation born after the Second World War became less interested in religion. That war made people suspicious of political leadership, which they thought had led Europe into disaster. In the 1960s, rapid social change led to the questioning of all political and religious leadership. Deference 4

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was abandoned and, as has been said, “The experience of authority was replaced by the authority of experience.”

Secularism was first seen in the traditionally Protestant countries of Europe, especially Scandinavia.

Ironically, these are the countries where the Church is the state religion and receives government subvention, so the clergy are almost part of the civil service. Catholic countries were slower to secularise.

The greatest decline in religion was in the Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, where Poland and Slovakia were the exceptions in surviving the corrosive effects of atheist materialism. The Czech Republic is now one of the most secular countries in Europe. On a recent visit to Flanders, I could see how churches in traditionally Catholic countries are in danger of turning into museums and Christianity of becoming a form of cultural identity rather than the spiritual foundation of people’s lives.

The sexual revolution of the later 20th Century could not be reconciled with Christian moral

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teaching. It was part of a growing individualism, a strong sense of the complete autonomy of each man and woman. Popular psychology condemned any form of ‘repression’, including sexual restraint, but this attitude extended itself to every aspect of life. According to this mindset, my actions are wrong only if they hurt other people, otherwise, in the words of the late singer Janis Joplin: “If it feels good, do it!”

The essence of Christianity is that it is a community-based and public faith. A dominant group of opinion-formers have long wanted religion to be private and separate from daily life. A former British government adviser voiced this when he said “We don’t do God!” and it is only a few years since an Irish government minister told Catholic bishops to keep silent about anything outside the sacristy, because everything else was none of their business.

Pop psychology has weakened our sense of sin: we do not accept blame for any of our wrong actions, but blame our parents, the Church, the government or ‘the system.’ If we have no sense of sin, we have no need of a Saviour, so Jesus Christ is no longer seen as God Incarnate, but is merely an inspiring example of www.messenger.ie

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humanity. The Church is then seen as out-dated and curbing human happiness. Abortion and euthanasia can be promoted as sensible ways of getting rid of unwanted lives. It is not surprising that Western countries developed a bias against Christianity.

Consumerism had a major impact on European Christianity.

We Europeans became very selfconfident, sure that we could solve all social problems, cure all diseases and look forward to a very comfortable future. We were convinced that other continents would follow the Western model and many of us thought that all religious belief was on the wane. In fact, Christianity is growing rapidly in the Global South, where many people are shocked by our lack of interest in our own religion.

Islamic fundamentalism has shocked many of us out of our secular complacency. Its presence in Europe

has led us to question ourselves and is leading us to rediscover our true identity. Pope Benedict XVI has often said that we Europeans are losing our soul, because we have tried to banish religion from the public sphere. He refuses to accept the inevitability of secularisation and never tires of proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ, who suffered, died and rose from the dead for us.

Christianity is the basis of our European values and culture. It is the foundation of our civilization. We have spent several decades trying to preserve Christian values, without paying much attention to the faith on which they are grounded. The Holy Father knows that we may pay an incalculable price and suffer enormous spiritual decay if we do not place the Gospel, once more, at the centre of our lives. The Eucharistic Congress is a very good place to begin.

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THE POPE’S INTENTIONS

ARE OUR PRISONERS OUR RESPONSIBILITY? John Lonergan

This month the Pope asks us to pray ‘that prisoners may be treated with justice and respect for their human dignity.’

Once the term ‘prisoner’ is mentioned most people’s immediate reaction is to feel apprehensive and to think of a violent, dangerous, addicted and bad person. In addition, many others will be greatly influenced by the most recent high-profile criminal case that dominated the news headlines when some unfortunate person was subjected to a horrible and vicious assault which left him or her traumatized and shattered, often for the remainder of their lives. And while, of course, there are people in prison for violent crimes, it’s wrong to believe that every prisoner fits such a violent profile.

Indeed, the reality is quite different.

A large number of our prisoners are often likely to be more sinned against than sinful and, as a society, we use our prisons to dump many of our social misfits and rejects and literally put them out of sight and out of mind. The truth is that many never had a chance, and struggled from birth to cope and survive the numerous obstacles they faced, incidentally, not all of their own making. Others were born into extreme poverty, their 4

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parents – and in many cases a single parent – were unable to provide the stability, love and support that all children need from day one. Also, the opportunities to grow and develop to their full potential were never even remotely available to them, and the culture they were born into was overwhelmingly negative and depressing.

Fr Harry Gaynor, while a chaplain in Mountjoy Prison in the 1980s, gave a short presentation on behalf of the prisoners to a prison-based management meeting one day. He began: ‘nobody knows me’ and all of us present were rocked back on our chairs realising that while we all knew the criminal history of the prisoners, we knew very little about them as a human beings.

The phrase most frequently spoken by the prisoners in Mountjoy in every discussion I had with them was ‘are you listening?’ They repeated this time and time again, checking to know if they were being heard.

The reason for this was that they were never listened to, they were seldom asked for their views or for their side of the story. Indeed, they

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were shouted down much more than listened to. Listening to the prisoner is one of the great services that prison chaplains provide to prisoners – they hear the prisoner. Little wonder then that chaplains are so highly respected and the service they provide to prisoners is invaluable.

We are too quick to judge and condemn often without knowing the full facts. This is not to overlook the wrongdoing or to make excuses for the wrongdoer. At the end of the day the individual must be held accountable for his or her actions. But it is vital to get a full insight into the reasons and causes of such actions

in order that we may be able to help and prevent others from following a similar path. A young woman who was serving a sentence in Mountjoy in the 1990s summarised it very well when she wrote ‘I alone must do it, but I cannot do it alone’. Yes, we must do it ourselves, but we all need and depend on the help, support and encouragement of others.

But lest we forget, the vast number of people in Irish prisons were born in Ireland, grew up in our towns and cities, were educated in our schools, lived in our communities. They belong to us. At times we try to distance ourselves from this reality by referring www.messenger.ie

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to our prisoners as ‘them’ as if they came from another planet. Many prisoners are broken people and as a society we must all take some responsibility for the conditions that contributed to their brokenness.

A number of years ago I heard a lovely story told about the late Pope John XXIII. During his time as a cardinal in Venice in the mid 1950s, he was having supper one night when his secretary, a priest, arrived carrying the personal file of a troublesome priest. Handing the file to the cardinal

In March of this year at the launch of the report The Irish Prison System – vision, values, reality, produced by the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Father Peter McVerry said ‘when a person commits a crime he or she is showing no respect for the victims. When the State imprisons the person for committing that crime, and subjects them to degrading and inhumane conditions and treatment in prison, the State is equally failing to show respect. The State, which is us, must ensure that when it commits

‘Show respect to gain respect’ must be the motto in all our dealings with prisoners he said ‘Your Eminence, you’ll have to do something about him’. The cardinal took the file, read it and then picked up a wine glass from the table and asked ‘who owns that glass?’

After a few moments’ reflection his secretary said ‘you do your Eminence’.

‘I do’ responded the cardinal and then he dropped the glass onto the floor where it broke into smithereens.

Pointing towards the broken glass the cardinal asked ‘and who owns it now?’ After a few moments the secretary replied ‘you do, your Eminence’. The cardinal said ‘yes, I do’ and then picking up the priest’s file he continued ‘and I own that broken priest too’.

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people to prison that their personal dignity is always fully respected, to do otherwise is to fail to live by the standards that the State itself demands of its citizens’.

‘Show respect to gain respect’ must be the motto in all our dealings with prisoners. This is based on my belief that personal change cannot be enforced on people and must be achieved by consent and agreement; it must be nourished from the inside out and requires a strong belief that every human being has the capacity to change. The more people become aware of their own humanity, the more likely they are to respect the humanity of others.

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NEW SERIES

PARENTING TODAY

Eoghan Keogh

When my daughter was still very young I started using the structure of the Examen prayer as a way to pray and connect with each other.

We took ten minutes at night when she was ready for bed to pick out the best bits of the day, tell each other about them and be grateful. Also, we picked out the bits that were hard or that we didn’t feel too good about and asked for God’s help with them.

I think in that way she got a sense that God was gentle, always loving, always encouraging. She picked out her best and worst things and I picked out mine. There was nothing made up in our sharing. Then we decided if there was anyone we needed to pray for, and made a wish to God for that person.

Now she is thirteen and not so keen to be praying with her daddy at

bedtime! But, the roots of that honest way of reflecting and talking with each other had been soklklwn, and these days it continues most often when we are alone driving between places in the car.

Praying with my daughter has changed me. I know I have to trust God, try to understand her and facilitate God’s movement in her life.

Our way of talking together before God has helped me to connect really closely with her. It has also helped us both through some quite difficult transitions. I like to think it helped form the positive image of God she now has.

She once asked me how I prayed when I am on my own. I explained to her how I often use a piece of Scripture, maybe a Gospel passage and try to think about the sort of

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person Jesus was. One time I gave her a little piece of scripture and suggested she read it, see if any word or image jumped out at her and write a little reflection about that. What she wrote just blew me away, it was so powerful.

She doesn’t like going to Mass but that doesn’t mean she is losing her faith. If she experiences Mass as boring or uninspiring that is how she experiences it. I can’t ask her to park that, as if her experience were wrong and insist that she has to do it. She may only take my insistence and transfer it in a negative way onto God! My challenge is whether I can empower her to experience it differently maybe by her getting involved more? That means I’ve got to get involved too! Mass or any aspect of Church is not a parenting tool.

Mass is something we go to take part in because we have faith in and love of God. Our going is a consequence of our love.

I really would like her to understand how faith and social justice go hand in hand. We’ve talked about her coming to Calcutta with me for a few weeks when she is older. I have been there before doing some volunteering work. I would love her, through those kind of experiences, to get a sense of the person of Jesus and what he stands for. I pray for her every day. Who knows where life and her spiritual journey will take her?

She may make some of the mistakes I made but I can’t control that. Her

life and her path is her own. We have chatted about how important it is to pray in whatever way you can, because prayer is connecting, it forms relationship. Without it, slowly but surely we all drift away from God. I really don’t think young people today lack faith but, they don’t connect with the traditional expressions of faith. One day shortly after Apple Computer’s founder Steve Jobs died, I stuck a picture of the company emblem and also a cross on the blackboard at school. I asked the students to write a paragraph about each of them. They wrote in great detail about Apple. They identified strongly with it for the ipods, ipads and so on. They had less to write about the cross. When I asked them which was more important they agreed overwhelmingly that it was the cross, even though they couldn’t explain why.

I think it’s really important for us to connect with what is important for our children, even if we don’t understand it, even if we think it’s ridiculous. We can have this instinct to control rather than to empower, but I think it’s really important to listen to what they are saying or trying to say, and to trust that somehow God is in there with them. My faith tells me that God is present all of the time and I think my responsibility to my daughter and the students in school is to gently draw their attention to the positive signs of God’s presence in their lives. www.messenger.ie SEPTEMBER 2012 53

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If a young person says at an early age that he or she doesn’t believe God exists, in his or her experience of life that might well be true.

Or, maybe he or she is operating out of a belief system that belongs to someone else. I think it’s important to find a way to talk to him or her about his/her belief system and how or whether it supports them in life.

If a young person says they are more spiritual than religious it tells me that they have probably spent time thinking about it for themselves.

To me that is a very good thing.

God works in his own way and we cannot reduce God to our way of doing and seeing things. When we try to force things in a particular direction with the best intentions, maybe the question is when did we stop trusting God? When did we stop believing in our own paths, our own journeys’?

I think the question to be resolved might often be one of our own personal faith.

It is important not to project it onto the child.

Obviously as I go along I have to be sensitive to assessing my daughter’s level of maturity and ability to make good decisions about things. It is not that I give her free rein. She understands that consequences go hand in hand with the decisions she makes. As a parent, there has to be an openness in me to what God wants for my daughter in any given moment or situation. It is not all about what I want, and as she gets older it is less and less so! I must release her a little more every day into God’s hands, trusting the journey, trusting my experience of how God has moved, shaped and cradled me in my own life.

IN LOVING MEMORY The names sent to us of all those who have died are entered on our

LIST OF THE DEAD

They are placed on the Sacred Heart Altar in our oratory and remain there for two months.

Every Wednesday a Mass is offered specially for them, that they may have eternal rest with the Lord, and that their families and friends, may be consoled in their loss.

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A GRATEFUL HEART

Bishop Willie Walsh

P

Short Series of Reflections on Life

sychologists tell us that a spirit of gratitude is something that some people acquire early in life and others don't and that we cannot alter that spirit later in life. It's a case of once grateful always grateful and once ungrateful always ungrateful! Whilst not questioning their expertise, that rigid characterising of people into grateful and ungrateful seems to me to be too black-and white. I would like to think that we can nurture and nourish a sense of gratitude and thus improve our behaviour in this regard.

Gratitude is part and parcel of being Christian and as such can be taught and presented to people as an ideal towards which we can strive.

Certainly, the scriptures are not found wanting as a source of

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inspiration for the spirit of gratitude.

They have a continuous stream of expressions of gratitude to God for all his blessings.

Many of the Psalms in the Old Testament are songs of thanks and praise to God: ‘Give thanks to the Lord for he is good for his love endures forever’ (Psalm 117). ‘All you works of the Lord, O Bless the Lord, /To him be highest glory and praise forever’ and the writer continues on to praise God for the sun, the moon, the wind and rain. (Rev.19:5ff) When we move to the New Testament we have immediately a hymn of praise and thanks from Mary in the Magnificat: ‘My soul glorifies the Lord…’ This is followed by Zachary's hymn of praise at the birth of John the Baptist: ‘Blessed be the

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Lord God of Israel’. Jesus constantly gives thanks or praise to his heavenly Father especially at the more solemn moments in his life: ‘While at supper he took a piece of bread, gave a prayer of thanks, broke it and gave it to his disciples, “take and eat it,” he said, “this is my body”'.

When he healed the ten lepers he expressed his disappointment that only one of them came back to give thanks to God. Jesus saw giving thanks as an act that somehow disposed a person to be a follower of his or, in our time, an act that enables us be better Christians.

Jesus' whole life on earth was an act of supreme generosity of spirit. The Eucharist itself is of course the great prayer of thanksgiving. The very word ‘Eucharist’ means giving thanks.

As suggested at the outset, there would seem to be a nurture versus nature debate around the quality of gratitude among psychologists, who tend to settle on the fact that you either have it or you don't. I think that it can be nurtured and developed even in the seemingly most ungrateful

of people. Certainly, it is a Christian ideal and like all such ideals it must come with its own share of transforming grace that will have an effect on even the hard-hearted.

Whatever about the nature/nurture debate it is lovely to encounter people who have a real sense of gratitude in their lives. Some time ago I wrote a short article for a magazine.

Soon afterwards I got a letter which really touched me. The writer was a woman who in recent years had lost her husband and a son – the latter in tragic circumstances. She spoke of both with obvious deep affection and with palpable grief. She then went on to thank me for the article and to thank God for all the good things in her life. I was quite moved on reading it. Here was a woman who had suffered a great deal and yet retained a sense of gratitude for all the good things in her life. If I were in her position, would I be grateful for my blessings or would I be angry or even bitter with God for the loss of my husband and son?

It always saddens me when I

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meet someone who appears to be incapable of counting their blessings, who only seem able to count their troubles. I accept that life can be very difficult for some people and I just don't know how I would cope if I were faced with a terrible family tragedy, with permanent ill health or the collapse of a business.

I find it very inspiring to see the manner in which some people faced with enormous difficulties can still retain the capacity to be grateful for their blessings. On the other hand I find it hard to understand people who always seem to focus on minor inconveniences and who see completely unaware of all the good things they have in their lives.

It would seem that they are never satisfied unless they have something to complain about.

I sometimes feel that in our western society that we have lost the capacity

to count our blessings and to be grateful for what we have. Some five years ago I had the privilege of visiting some priests of our diocese of Killaloe who were working in South America.

They were working amidst the poverty stricken people in the shanty towns around the city of Lima in Peru (shanty town pictured on previous page). I can honestly say that I encountered far more smiling faces in those shanty towns than I ever see in Ireland.

Amidst the poverty they appear to have the capacity to be happy today as long as they have enough to eat. They appear to have the capacity to enjoy life and to have a sense of gratitude in relation to their lives.

Thank you, Lord, for all the blessings you have given to me especially the blessing of life itself, the blessings of friendship and love. And thank you, gentle reader, for taking the time to read this reflection.

THANK YOU TO OUR PROMOTERS, READERS AND BENEFACTORS Through the generosity of our Promoters, most of our readers are able to receive the Messenger at the lowest possible cost. THANK YOU. Be assured that the Lord will bless you for your help in making better known His name and the love of His heart.

Thank you also to all of you who sent donations during the past month for the spread of devotion to the Sacred Heart and for other good causes.

You are all remembered in our prayers and Masses.

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PART 1 OF A NEW 9-PART SERIES

EXPLORING GENESIS: THE FIRST CREATION ACCOUNT

Carmel McCarthy RSM

With the best intentions in the world people can set out to read the Bible from cover to cover. Somewhere in the early chapters of Genesis however this resolve may begin to falter as one encounters strange things: snakes that talk, people who live till they are 999 years old, a flood that engulfs the world apart from one man in a flimsy boat surrounded by a motley collection of animals. Not to mention interminable lists of ancestors. Why bother with the Old Testament we ask? As its title suggests it is very old, perhaps even antiquated, with little relevance to our modern concerns. As Christians, is it not enough to become familiar with the Gospels, and try to live according to the teaching of Jesus?

It is understandable that some

may find the Old Testament outdated by the New. The Old Testament impression of a jealous and angry God contrasts starkly with Jesus’ teaching about the love of his heavenly Father.

And yet for those who truly desire to follow Jesus, the Old Testament is indispensable, because without the Old Testament we cannot know fully who Jesus is.

When Jesus asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ the reply was, ‘John the Baptist; and others Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets’ (Mark 8:27-29). But then Jesus asked the crucial question: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ The disciples were confronted head-on with the central question of Christian faith: who is Jesus Christ? This same www.messenger.ie NOVEMBER 2012 7

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question rings down through the ages, inviting each of us into relationship.

And to give depth to this relationship we find that the New Testament itself constantly refers to the Old to tell us who Jesus is, and why he has come.

The opening sentence of the New Testament plunges us into ‘the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’ (Matt.

1:1). The very first thing that Matthew chooses to tell us about Jesus is that he is of Hebrew descent, and that through his Hebrew ancestors promises were made which were destined to find their fulfilment in Jesus’ cross and resurrection. The roots of our Christian faith lie deep in the Old Testament, and to explore these roots, there is no better place to begin than with the Book of Genesis. Hence the title for this series.

The opening chapters of Genesis contain two distinct creation accounts, both of which set God’s creative activity in the remotest past. But these chapters are not the oldest layer of writing in the Bible. In its final form the book of Genesis contains a mixture of units of varying ages, arranged in keeping with the aims and interests of its final editors, a group whom modern scholars call the priestly writers. These editors are thus named because of their focus on ritual, sacrifice and genealogical concerns. Living about 500 BC onward, they sifted through all the earlier oral traditions available to them as they left their stamp on the overall final structure of the first five

books of the Bible, collectively known as the Pentateuch.

It is thanks to these final editors of the Pentateuch that the Bible now opens with this wonderful poem in which God is celebrated as creator (1:1-2:4a). Following directly on this comes a second, and much earlier creation account (2:4b-3:24). This second account is attributed to a tenth-century BC author whom scholars call the Yahwist, because in it the name Yahweh is the preferred title for God. Although these two creation accounts are very different in style and vocabulary, they share a common conviction: Israel’s God is creator of all that is. Leaving appreciation of the second account for next month, we will now explore the opening poem against the backdrop of its first audience in the 500s BC. The priestly creation account is a highly skilled poem in which the work of creation is neatly arranged in a six-day sequence, culminating in Sabbath rest on the seventh, in which even God participates! God’s creative activity is conveyed through the image of a mighty wind/spirit hovering over a watery and dark chaos. Out of this dark primal matter God creates the cosmos by the power of speech alone. This mode of creation occurs elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, as in Psalm 33:6, where the heavens and their inhabitants are made by Yahweh’s ‘word’ and ‘the breath of his mouth’.

Rather than using images suggesting that God shaped the cosmos on the

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model of various human activities (as in the second creation account), the priestly writers are careful to reserve the term 'bara’, ‘to create,’ for God’s action alone.

‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. These opening words in Genesis 1:1 can be understood as a summary statement of God’s creative activity, in which there is no need to elaborate on the origins of the heavens, which are his own abode. The earth however was an undifferentiated mass, and

it, and then living beings populate it. The description of creation in Genesis 1 largely follows this pattern.

First God creates light (1:3-5), then the firmament (1:6-8), and finally he raises the earth out of the waters and causes plants to grow (1:14-19). After that, he creates the living beings: birds, animals, plants, and human beings (1:20-31). All of this happens in the poetic framework of one week.

The universe of Genesis 1 is entirely positive, to such an extent that the text contains no negatives. A recurrent

Out of this dark primal matter God creates the cosmos by the power of speech alone the purpose of the remainder of the poem is to describe how this was ordered into a harmonious whole for the benefit of humankind.

The creation of human beings is presented as the climax of God’s creative activity. They are the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of divinity itself, and human responsibility for the earth is portrayed as participating in God’s own authority over creation.

In Genesis 1 the universe rises out of a watery primal darkness (1:2). The picture suggested by this account is that of a world submerged by water, similar to the flooding that occurred each year in Mesopotamia and Egypt, although not in Israel. After the flood, the earth slowly reemerges from the waters, vegetation begins to cover

feature is the statement that ‘God saw that it was good’, and finally, ‘it was very good.’ The first negatives appear in the second creation account (2:5 onward), as we shall see next month.

This opening poem of Genesis cannot and must not be read as though it were based on modern scientific theory. Its agenda lies elsewhere. Its seven-day framework intentionally highlights the conviction that Sabbath observance is so important that even God has kept it from the dawn of creation. Poetry by definition is symbolic, touching the heart and mind in ways that cold analysis of data never can. Perhaps the musical genius of Haydn’s Creation best captures something of the wonder of this opening chapter of Genesis. www.messenger.ie NOVEMBER 2012 9

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A TRIBUTE TO JESUIT CARDINAL CARLO MARTINI

Michael Paul Gallagher SJ

On the day of Cardinal Martini’s funeral I received an email from an atheist dramatist in Milan saying that he felt the loss of an extraordinary spiritual leader. Danilo even complained that the Pope had not come to the funeral (something that was not thinkable: the Italian President did not come but the Prime Minister did, as well as 20,000 others inside and outside the Duomo).

Danilo’s appreciation of Martini was shared by many thinking unbelievers in Italy, including the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica, who published many interviews with the Cardinal. Indeed in the early years as Archbishop of Milan (the biggest in the world, it is said) Martini created a series of annual encounters with non-believers. Even when they moved from the cathedral to the largest hall in the university, it was hard to get a ticket to be present. The tone was never one of mere debating but of respectful searching together.

Another well-known initiative of this Biblical scholar was a monthly meditation on scripture for young people. It too started in Milan Cathedral but then had to expand,

connecting with many churches in the diocese through closed-circuit television. Martini had a gift of leading this lectio divina, uniting his expertise in the Bible with Ignatian spirituality, thus making the texts come alive as prayerful and personal.

If these were two of Martini’s public pastoral activities, what of the man himself? I met him on a number of occasions. For instance he came to the scholastic community of the Collegio del Gesù for an evening every two years. He preferred not to give a talk but simply to respond to our questions. He did so with honesty and a rare quality of reflection. You knew that this man was behind his words and was quietly passionate about his service of the faith. You also sensed his openness to new questions and his desire that the Church should not run away from them. He was not a naïve liberal but a wise man alert to the many challenges of his day.

I heard him preach on a number of occasions. Again, his style was undramatic but quietly intense. Like Newman his focus was ultimately on inner formation of people’s hearts, and like what we know of

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(Pic: Raminus Falcon / Wikimedia)

Newman’s impact, Martini’s sermons invited people to a different kind of listening, ultimately a listening to the Spirit within them. And in ways like Newman, Martini has published many of his preached retreats to clergy and religious (including an annual retreat in a Third World country). These books of meditation (many available in English) capture the style and spirituality of this gifted evangelizer (as the Pope has described him).

Indeed Martini was much influenced

by Fr Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology, and especially by its stress on conversion to love as the foundation of religion.

On one occasion he gave me a lift in his car. At that time I was working for the Pontifical Council for Culture.

During the journey he questioned me about the day-to-day priorities of the office. He was very well informed and full of suggestions about more creative ways to reach out to today’s cultural situation. Cardinal Martini was a tall and imposing presence, a natural leader, with a style of depth and dignity that could seem distant at times. Yet he was greatly loved by his priests, especially by the

Above: Cardinal Martini on his 90th birthday.

Top: People queueing to enter the Duomo to participate in Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini ceremonies. (Pic: Bramfab/wikimedia)

younger generation of those he had ordained in his twenty-two years as Archbishop. In his younger days in Rome he was much involved with the community of S. Egidio which looks after poorer people, some of them living on the streets.

For his tomb in the Cathedral of Milan he had chosen a verse from Psalm 119: ‘Your Word is a lamp to my steps’. He lived with that lamp and made it real for countless thousands of people. www.messenger.ie DECEMBER 2012 25

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