A Pilgrimage of People

I began writing this post before heading off to the International Eucharistic Congress, in light of my community's recent pilgrimage to some of the wonder of Ireland's holy places. Now, having returned from the IEC, I'm finishing up this reflection to segue into a series of posts I hope to begin imminently, reflecting on the many workshops and talks I attended while in Dublin with my Christian brothers and sisters from literally all over the world...

Last week, my community-mates and I were given the parish's blessing to go off on a short pilgrimage together. We chose to head west to Co. Mayo, Ireland, to visit Knock and climb Croagh Patrick.

Knock is a normal parish in the middle of Mayo, but its renown changed forever in 1879. In August of that year, Mary appeared to 15 locals from the parish, coming to them in an apparition on the back wall of the parish church, between Sts. Joseph and John the Baptist, next to an altar with a lamb atop it surrounded by angels. Today, that back wall of the church has been enclosed in a new chapel with statues on the wall to commemorate the appearance by Our Lady of Knock and these saints. The grounds of Knock also include a basilica church, an Adoration chapel, an amazing Chapel of Reconciliation where over 40 confession rooms receive penitential pilgrims, and two wonderful Stations of the Cross walks, both outside. It is an authentic, Church-endorsed apparition site with amazing devotion and steady streams of pilgrims.

Croagh Patrick is a 2500-foot mountain near the coastline of Ireland and the town of Westport. A statue of St. Patrick blesses pilgrims at the foot of the trail that turns from dirt and grass to loose rocks and the climb steepens nearing the peak of the pilgrimage hike. Legend has it that Patrick climbed the mountain to fast on its summit for forty days, and today, there is "the bed of Patrick," a small rectangle of land where pilgrims can pray for his intercession on the spot where he might have rested. Pilgrims of varying degrees of piety and intentionality hike the trails to the summit in the steps of many who have gone before them, including, perhaps, the patron saint of Ireland.

Long story, short: those are just two of many pilgrimages that exist in Ireland, in Europe, and in the world. Part of the rich heritage and tradition of our Catholic Church is the many pilgrimages that are out there. They come in many different varieties, though Marian shrines and hikes/walks are two most common forms I've come across.

One of the beautiful aspects of a pilgrimage is how it enables its participants (I like using that word here because of how active and intentional pilgrimage can and should be) to realize their identity as part of someone (JESUS!) and something (the Church!) bigger than themselves.

Making the journey to any old destination always involves following in the footsteps of many others, many of whom shared their experience through personal stories, writing travel guides, or posting to travel sites with tips for your travels. The difference with pilgrimage - which any vacation can be, to the degree you might decide to make it - is that these shared insights go beyond simple message boards and guidebooks; they are inherently spiritual experiences, journeys meant to be centered more intentionally on God, using the intentionality of making a journey to manifest one's desire to move toward God in a special way.

Whether you make the trip as an individual or with others, you are joining in communion with all the pilgrims who have preceded you and those who will come after you by virtue of the One Lord Jesus Christ who unites all of you. Eucharist is and should be a central part of pilgrimage, whether as part of the preparation, the experience, or the culmination of the pilgrimage. The Eucharist makes maximally present the mystical bond that unites all believers and all pilgrims in Christ. To finish my walk on the Camino de Santiago, I went to a grand All Saints Day mass at the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, which began with the swinging of the enormous botafumeiro thurable; on the flip side, it can be as simple as the small gathering we were invited to my a priest at the Fr. Peyton Memorial Centre in Attymass, Co. Mayo, where we joined a small group of a dozen pilgrims for mass in a little oratory.

We all walk these pilgrim paths in search of something, turning simple tourism and vacation into renewing and regrounding searches for Christ in our lives, finding Christ in the experience of communion with our fellow pilgrims, whether friends or strangers, and with Christ Himself through our community, our prayer, and the Eucharist.

Last night, I left Dublin, having spent three days at the 50th International Eucharistic Congress, the theme of which was The Eucharist: Communion with Christ and with One Another. It was a beautiful experience because of how wonderfully that theme was enfleshed comprehensively through the talks, the masses, and the Congress as a whole.

In this case, the pilgrimage had almost nothing to do with the place or what was physically there - no apparition, no mountain, no pilgrim trail, no rich tradition tied to the grounds of the Royal Dublin Society. This time, the pilgrimage's magnitude was based entirely on people, people from all over our universal church answering the call to gather and share dynamically in the richness of the Eucharist. I think I'll share two small stories rather than attempt to boil down the experience to a few futile paragraphs.

Among the 120+ countries represented, I saw a group of women from Zimbabwe. They caught my eye especially because they had beautiful dresses and headwear made with patterns of the IEC2012 logo and bible quotes and sayings all over. Tuesday night, I found my seat in a not-yet-crowded hall for a talk on the renewal of marriage through Eucharist, choosing a seat in front where I could stretch out. As the room became half-full, a woman came into my peripheral vision, moving in to become the 2nd person in this near-empty row, saying smilingly, "You need someone to sit next to you?"

We made some small-talk; I fetched her the handout for the talk that she had missed on her way in; and, we talked a bit about our homelands and marriage. Her name was Sindisiwe (like Cindy-Sue-way), and she was lovely with her English and taking notes in very neat handwriting. After the talk, she asked me what state I was from. When I told her "Illinois," she didn't seem to recognize it, so I added, "Chicago - a big city." I could tell it was one of those questions asked in large part so to give the asker the chance to share her own answer. She replied, "My son's in Philadelphia." I told her I'd be visiting there in a few weeks to see friends and family. Without missing a beat, having instant trust in me, she invitold (a word invented to combine invitation and being told) me to bring her son a gift, which I was happy to agree to - she gave me his name and e-mail address and wanted to give his phone number, too, but her phone had disappeared. She had bought a bunch of keepsake rosaries for family and friends, and she wanted Sibanda to have one, too.

He moved to the US for work 7 years ago, and they have not been able to see each other since then. She gave me her e-mail, too, so she could get in touch with me to give me his phone number when she got back to Zimbabwe. So now, when I go to Philadelphia, I'm going to visit a best friend, see my aunt and uncle, travel on to Scranton to see another friend, and serve as a pilgrim courier to connect a loving mother with her dear son through a simple holy gift.

One more for the road: I went to a talk on Wednesday morning about the permanent deaconate, something that I - and many in the Church - don't understand well enough, and actually, many countries don't even have actively. During the talk, I spoke with a nearby man during a conversation break who is in formation for the deaconate. It became clear that many men in the room, scattered around lay men and women and some priests, were either deacons already, in formation for the deaconate, or discerning that vocation. After the formal talk ended, we had ample time for question-and-answer.

People were bringing up great things and really adding depth to what we were learning that morning, making this talk the one during which I took the most notes by far. Toward the end, a man in clerical blacks (not a rare sight at all at the IEC) asked for the mic. He stood up and introduced himself as Archbishop Napier of Durban, South Africa. He then proceeded to make some wonderful comments, including his personal involvement, at least once a year, in interviewing deacons and their wives on their status in progressing through the six-year formation, as well as stressing that deacons must be affirmed for the duties they do rather than the things they don't do, upholding them as an important distinct ministry of vocational call rather than an afterthought to priests.

I was struck my his insights - he clearly is a learned and wise man - but I was more struck by his humility. He took a seat in the middle of everyone else, toward the back, and blended right in as one of many pilgrims just coming to partake in the dialogue. Granted, he had the advantage of relative anonymity since he is so far from his home turf, but he had a quiet approach to his participation there, choosing a way of being that aimed to simply share the experience. I had another moment of appreciation for the humility of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who along with the Papal Legate and a few other prominent bishops, sat up front, alongside Br. Alois of Taize, during an evening Taize prayer service in the Youth Space - Archbishop Martin and the others sat patiently and quietly as the 1,000ish people processed forward for at least half an hour to reverence a Taize cross as the music circled around the prayer. As I made my way toward the cross, I caught the Archbishop's eye and saw in his gaze such patience as he was clearly in gentle awe at the devotion that was unfolding so steadily.

The global reach, the humility, and the faithful exchange was all around, from simple pilgrims seeking just an opportunity to have to those committed and appointed shepherds of this flock. I hope you'll take a stroll with me in the coming days and weeks as I try to share a portion of the insights I found during my time at IEC2012.

Going to Lay in the Grass

Once a month, my three housemates and I travel up from our post in Clonard, Co. Wexford and the Diocese of Ferns to invade Dublin. Sometimes we hop on the Wexford Bus; sometimes we catch a lift from a friend of ours. That friend is a priest who supervises primary school education in the diocese, and he is part of the community in Dublin that we join each month.

The University of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) has become an incredibly robust and constantly growing outreach across America, pulling in tons of incredibly talented post-grads from Notre Dame and all across the country. Those who accept their invitations to join ACE spend two years in Catholic education; they dedicate their summers to coursework toward a Masters in Education while spending two academic years as Catholic school teachers in under-resourced Catholic schools all across the country, from Oakland, CA, to Richmond, VA, to Mission, TX.

ACE also includes advocacy and fellowship networks in many different places, and the O'Connell House/Keough-Naughton Centre in Dublin hosts a unique version of this group. People who work in Catholic education in Ireland, mostly as teachers and administrators, gather together at O'Connell House on one Friday every month, under the leadership of an American Notre Dame/ACE alumnus and his Irish wife, to share a mass, dinner, and some conversation. Since the House of Brigid is a group of Notre Dame alumni that benefited from Catholic education and continues to serve it - in the primary schools of our home parish of Clonard - we join the community as well, invited to serve primarily as the music ministers for these humble, homey masses.

At the end of each academic year, the ACE Community in Dublin commissions two young Irish people who have been selected to travel to America to study at Notre Dame and serve a Catholic school as teachers in ACE. This commissioning mass is the finale for each year, and a few weeks ago, we traveled up to Dublin to join the community for this final mass to send forth two Irish girls to Our Lady's University.

Our celebrant for the mass was a man named Fr. Michael Drumm. He sensed the mood of the mass - an intimate group of less than 50, including the families and friends of these two girls, in the parlor of a very old Irish house, stationed in plastic chairs around a makeshift altar and the hearth of a seldom-used fireplace. Fr. Drumm ministered to us accordingly, and his homily was a bit like hearing your dad tell a story by the fireside on a cozy night at home.

The centerpiece of his homily, at least in the way I heard it, was a simple reflection on grass. You ready for this? Here's three simple facts.

1. Grass grows.
2. No one has ever seen grass grow.
3. If you laid down in a field for a long time, the growth would envelop you.

Ok, father, we've all heard the cliches about grass growing, water boiling, etc., and we just heard the Sower and the Seed parable for the Gospel - what else ya got? But this wasn't just the standard use of a tired metaphor. He was trying to convey a sense of what a teacher should strive for in his or her work, their ministry. This really struck me as a tremendous way to preach patience alongside presence.

You see, we usually start each month's gathering with a round of introductions before the opening song of the mass, and this month we bypassed the usual convention in favor of focusing on our two honored guests. The introductions for the four of us youngens from Wexford are usually laugh-inducing, four of giving the same short schticks, though I sometimes slip in a joke, like "I'm the product of 17 years of Catholic education." But this time, I had a different introduction that would have put me squarely alongside these two gals - "I'm Dan, and I'm going to be a Catholic high school teacher and campus minister, starting in August." So secretly, I was being phantomly commissioned all the while.

Fr. Drumm's words cut straight through to me. I had never prepared myself explicitly to accept a teaching job, figuring it may come as an extra responsibility to my main pursuit of being a campus minister but wouldn't be my main occupation. But here I was, a few weeks in to knowing that I'll begin teaching theology to 14-to-16-year-olds imminently and beginning to regularly muse and hypothesize over how I'll undertake the ministry.

I already am committed to a vocabulary of ministry, presence, service. I've assumed a mindset of spirited commitment to ministry, no matter what the medium or "job" for it is. I remain imperfect - crotchety, critical, particular, opinionated, moderately moderate - but the vocabulary I persist in using during prayer/reflection, conversation, and job interviews indicates the ideal I am pursuing and the reality I try to enflesh. And Fr. Drumm provided us a metaphor that encapsulated so much of what my friend, the one who referred me to her school and now my employer, had previously told me: "Just love them."

As I've spent more and more time in ministry, the sower/seed metaphors have been consoling. You must be willing to sow the seed and not insist on seeing it grow. You have to be willing to pass the garden on to others to water and harvest. You also have to know that you're seeing the fruits of seeds sown by other ministers. We are truly a Church when we work together in such a way, trusting in the mystical bond we share as Christ's Body, knowing that the guiding hand of our Church can make such a difference.

Here, in Fr. Drumm's observation, I find new depth. This metaphor preaches patience: go and be there, knowing that a difference may not come instantly or quickly or even measurably. It preaches presence: commit to laying down, to being in the thick of it, going on to the front lines. Most of all, it preaches certitude: grass can, does, and will grow, even though no one has ever seen it. Grace is often invisible to our eyes, especially in the very live moments in which it unfolds right before our eyes. But we know the grass grows, and we must remember that a commitment to tend to it and spend significant time with it yields results, results that are reliant on something - Some One - greater than any one of us "gardeners."

My friend's exhortations about my new school warned against orthodox catechism-thumping, indoctrination, and strict lectures on tradition. Instead, her insights centered on committing to a thorough presence, a desire to provide a sturdy and substantial counter-culture of faith, on that will give teenagers an alternative to what one scholar calls "moral therapeutic deism" and give them an attractive invitation to thoughtful Christian life and a lived faith.

Here, Fr. Drumm showed me just what I must do. I need to go lay in the grass, accept that I may not see it grow, and remember that if I lay there long enough, the growth will overwhelm me.

Faith Seeking Understanding

I remember sitting in the side office of the reception room of the Office of the Undergraduate Admissions at Notre Dame late during sophomore year. I worked there, sharing the auxiliary office with a dear, sweet lady named Judy. Between handling epic amounts of paperwork and answering dozens of phone calls, often from worried parents and frazzled teenagers, Judy was basically the gatekeeper of the Our Lady's Administration, shepherding people to their help while defusing nervous hearts and angry tempers.

Amid the shuffling papers, tour guides' coming to get their name tags and business cards, and my own organizing our student hospitality program, we had new piles of paper on our desks. Judy was organizing the new influx of materials on Notre Dame's different departments and majors. The newest stuff was newly designed cards from the majors of the College of Arts & Letters. Having completed almost two years at Notre Dame and feeling very satisfied with my major, I wasn't a free agent looking for a home. However, I was (and always will be) an impassioned theology major who was curious what his department was touting to prospective students.

I picked up a Theology card off the stack and began to read. I can't remember exactly the points that the card made, but I remembering progressing through it and smiling - as a current theology major, almost halfway through his coursework, I felt like I was experiencing exactly what the card was promising to potential theology students. The card wasn't making the major into something more glamorous or pristine than it was; it didn't use fluffy quotes or fancy graphics. It led its reader to the main point of theology, of the study and discussion of God: faith seeking understanding.

This great quote from St. Anselm is probably the greatest explanation of what theology is and should be. Yes, the little theology major card did use this quote, but it used it well. And it used the quote justifiably because, not only did some of my professors use the quote to describe their personal and their classes' approach, that's what studying theology at Notre Dame is.

I'm not just writing to uphold Notre Dame Theology - excellent as it is and as excellently as it prepared me as a person of faith and as someone who aspires to minister and catechize to others in the Church. I'm writing to uphold this as the definition of theology that people should embrace and know. Theology isn't just MTS and PhD students striving after the academic and intellectual pursuits; it isn't just deeply orthodox people digging into tradition to pile up some trivia. Theology is the quest of any and all believers to nourish their faith with a greater understanding.

Faith is that commitment we make in our hearts to believe in that which we cannot prove, that which our reason cannot deduce conclusively. Taking things on faith does not mean that we stop thinking, reflecting, or praying about them. It means that we have to consider them in a broader light than solely reason, and our Catholic tradition embraces the cooperation of faith and reason, which can and will nourish our spirits.

We need a broader narrative of intelligibility. We can't bracket our thoughts to solely what we can explain with scientific precision and clarity. We have to incorporate in the breadth of God, the One who isn't limited by space or time, the One who is omnipotent.

We need to embrace transcendence. We believe in a God who is in time and who entered time, a historical God who has directly acted in human history, most profoundly by becoming man as Jesus Christ. Yet, He is also a God who is above and beyond time, greater than any of our explanations of nature can articulate.

We need to extend beyond reason, fact, and science. We can study the bible historically-critically, and we can learn greatly by contextualizing the writings in their authors, their cultures, their historical settings, and their formation. However, those things cannot fully penetrate our spirits without what Pope Benedict XVI calls the "hermeneutic of faith". Our reading of the Bible must be encompassed by the belief in the greater truth of God and our faith in Him as Love.

Theology - by a barely educated layman or a lifelong priest and theologian - is one's faith in pursuit of greater understanding. It isn't the pursuit of complete and total understanding, of finding every answer. It isn't the pursuit of dead ends that force one to take on some kind of blind faith.

It's a faithful effort toward asking the questions and seeking to gesture at mystery. It's embracing one's imagination as a means of using the gift of thought to reach out to something that reason cannot fully articulate. It's the struggle to discover the depth and riches of Scripture and Tradition that are so full of potential nourishment for our minds and hearts.

When we say, "I believe," from the Latin credo, we aren't claiming a conclusive belief in something that we either understand fully or believe blindly; we are saying that we have faith in the truth of what we are asserting, in the tenets of our creed. We are promising that we will strive toward better understanding of the mysteries of our faith, mysteries not because they are unsolvable but rather because they invite wonder, curiosity, and awe. Theology is our chance to undertake that pursuit. Theology is faith seeking understanding.

On Earth as it is in Heaven

"Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

We pray the words of the Lord's Prayer with a degree of rote recitation from the sheer quantity of times we've spoken it. It becomes almost mechanistic, robotic, empty-headed, nonchalant.

To an extent, the more positive aspect of these mostly negatively-connoted words is not only ok; it's encouraged.

Prayers like the Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary, Glory Be, etc. are "familiar prayers," prayers that are meant to be so well ingrained that you can recall them without difficulty. They're meant to provide our prayer lives with a foundation, a basis, a default. That's not all they are - each prayer carries incredible meaning if we choose to pray over the words with intentional scrutiny and reflection - but they're intended to be the prayers that come forth from our being naturally.

We can look to these prayers especially when we are unable to come up with anything else, when we don't want to come up with anything else, when we don't want anything else but those prayers that we've known all our lives, in our church, in our school, in our families. These familiar prayers are meant to give us the words that will remind us of God's love and presence before we struggle seriously or move anywhere near the brink of hopelessness. We can turn to the Hail Mary or the Our Father to get our wheels turning and move into the embrace of God through prayer; these prayers catalyze our movement toward Him during those times when familiarity breeds comfort and peace, bringing solidity to our faith in a moment when we are seeking God.

Within these beautiful prayers lie profound formulas. These well-known phrases are simple enough to flow on naturally but rich enough to nourish us with great meaning. One phrase I come back to time and time again is in the Our Father:

Having obsessed in the form of an Honors Senior Thesis over the Kingdom of God, I enjoy that I've gained a layered understanding to what the Kingdom of God means for us. As a result, I really latch on to mentions of it in the readings for mass, and I usually perk up each time we pray over the Kingdom in the familiar prayer we say each mass.

We pray that God's kingdom will come, that His will be done. We pray that it happens on earth just as it happens in heaven. How can we know heaven on earth? How can we recognize and make present and real the Kingdom of God? Rather than dance around this any further, I'm gonna pass you on to one of my favorite theologians, who is all over this. Read it twice or three times or more because it makes those familiar words take on a beautiful depth for you when it sinks in...

"Two things are immediately clear from the words of this petition: God has a will with and for us and it must become the measure of our willing and being; and the essence of 'heaven' is that it is where God's will is unswervingly done. Or, to put it in in somewhat different terms, where God's will is done is heaven. The essence of heaven is oneness with God's will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes 'heaven' when and insofar as God's will is done there; and it is merely 'earth,' the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God. This is why we pray that is may be on earth as it is in 'heaven' – that earth may become 'heaven.'" -Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth (Pt. 1)

Crossover Post

Every other Friday, it's my turn to post to my community's blog, the House of Brigid (http://www.houseofbrigid.org). This week, I decided I'd copy my words on over to here, to give a taste of what we write about in updating our family, friends, and benefactors on our lives over here, and bring any of you into the loop who didn't realize this was going on (how many blogs does this guy have!?). So enjoy, and feel free to stalk the community once in a while...

"Conference Calls"


Since October, I have been volunteering as a member of St. Vincent de Paul's St. Patrick's Conference, the group that serves the needy people within Clonard Parish.

Most Tuesday nights, I get a lift down to St. Michael's Hall to join a handful of other volunteers for a two-hour meeting. We receive whoever has come down to ask for help in person, hearing their stories and requests one-by-one as they come in to talk with us. After that, we review the call sheet from the week to discuss all the people who have texted or called the conference mobile to make requests for help.

Most people need food vouchers to buy some groceries or otherwise enable them to divert cash toward other bills and expenses. Sometimes, people need coal to heat the house or a check to subsidize their electricity bills, which have often gone into arrears. Whatever the request, it is the charism of the Society to make the visits in person rather than sending envelopes through the post.

So each Tuesday night, the call sheet turns into a schedule of visits, assigned to pairs of volunteers to go out and make the visits, splitting 10-20 calls into sets that two or three pairs will to tend to in the coming days.

This week, I went out on visits again, and I am starting to get the hang of it. I'll never be able to catch up to the Irish ability to catalogue the details of the locals' lives and families; they have a disposition toward internalizing everyone's stories that feels a bit gossipy at times but is mostly evidence of their compassion. I am often briefed by my partner as we drive from one visit to the next so that I can have a basis from which to begin listening to our next conversation partner.

We hear stories of people waiting on welfare programmes to pan out in their favor or efforts to renegotiate balances on outstanding bills, of people on the cusp of bouncing back while others are mired in debt and must be referred to financial consultants. I find that they do most of the talking - listening is maybe our greatest service - while my Irish partners do most of the responding, bantering back and forth at a pace and rhythm that leaves me half a step behind. I try to sit back because I'm just a temporary helper trying to broaden my perspective in order to see the whole of local life here, but occasionally, I want to ask a question or put in my two cents. This week, we visited one lady who was intrigued by my accent, spoke just as much to me as to my partner - an unusual departure from the norm of being the third party to what is usually a one-to-one discussion - and even asked me questions about myself toward the end of our encounter. She was very complimentary of what I said I was doing here and wished me the best of luck.

Sometimes our work hours revolve largely around planning and administering different things from our seats in the office or putting voice and music to the praise of God from our corner of the church at masses, so I can start to feel a bit detached from the people who I hope are helped by what we're doing.

Being with the Vincent de Paul volunteers and going out with them to visit our neighbors is not only grounding and humbling; it's fun. It's a great chance to embrace a servile, humbler, complimentary role and just be present to the conference's volunteers and to those we try to serve.

The Catholic in Education

Thank God for the way that Catholic education is set up in the United States. Thank God for its almost-total separation from the public school system.

Those are the thoughts that cross my mind when I read about the crisis facing Catholic schools in Ireland.

The system here is way different than what we'd be used to as Americans, but here's what I've gathered:

• National Schools are state-funded schools, all of which teach religion as a core subject, They are allowed to espouse a specific ethos, which is usually religious and most often Catholic.
• "Rule 68" allows schools with such an ethos to permeate the whole of their curricula with that ethos. So Catholicism's influence isn't limited to the time spent on religion.
• Religion class in Catholic schools is taught mostly off a standardized national curriculum, and sacramental prep - Confirmation included - is tended to mostly, if not entirely, within the school and within the subject's time during the school day.

This kind of entanglement of everything is one of the things I can't handle in the Irish socialized (as in "socialism") society.

Various politicians are currently throwing around new initiatives that would require a significant number of National Schools that espouse a Catholic ethos to drop it while other ideas suggest banishing Rule 68 and/or requiring that exclusive religious teachings are banned and comprehensively inclusive teachings are instituted.

This kind of tension shouldn't exist. When I think about what's right or wrong here, my thought process is clouded my the entirely foreign concept of the state funding schools that overtly endorse a religion. Doesn't it seem kind of backwards to reality that in increasingly secular Europe, schools have state funding and a religion? As an advocate of our school system, flawed though it may be, I would be in favor of removing religion from state-funded schools in Ireland, except that such an action would be the end of religious schools in this socialized system.

My fuller instinct is to defend religion, not just Catholicism, especially as the coverage of it that I get - mostly from the Irish Catholic - includes outcry from Church of Ireland, Methodists, and Presbyterians, fewer though they may be.

On principal, I think there has to be a place for religiously motivated schools, and I think if all schools are state-funded, provision has to be made and respected to allow for that within the system. At the same time, it's hard to argue with people who don't want state-funding to go toward the proselytizing of a specific religion or its ethos. BUT AT THE SAME SAME TIME, isn't it silly to say state funding can go to a school that espouses Catholicism but is required to teach, with equal validity, potentially conflicting tenets of other faiths? I'm not sure the proposals would go that far, but the line of thinking carries a fair deal of preposterousness.

My only experience of this is with the primary school I've done some work in here in the parish. The children are well-behaved and have solid discipline, and the teachers are very hospitable to our coming in to do our catechesis. However, some basic things aren't part of the experience at the school, mainly regular visits to the Church and mass. We had to bring ashes to the school and administer them in two assemblies and a handful of classroom visits because, not only do they not have a meeting space big enough for the school to assemble in (an unfortunate problem of space currently being addressed with new construction) but they don't have any kind of a chapel or sacred area. 

If this whole stream of commentary seems watery and incoherent, it's because it is. I don't know how to engage with these criticisms. I agree with some principles on each side, and, as is so often the case with how my college-educated and Notre-Dame-formed mind sees the world, I want to scrutinize and pick apart the flaws in the system. If the State didn't (have to) fund every school, a private school network could support those seeking religiously influenced education and leave others to go to non-religious schools and seek out supplemental religious schooling from the parish.

It's a tough sea to sail in this culture of increasing Irish hostility to faith and its institution mixed in with austerity and recession. The Catholic Church here will need its leaders to hold strong, and I only hope that the future of the overlap between politics and the Catholic Church will be brighter in Ireland, America, and around our world.

In the NAME of Love

I'm off from work at the parish this week, a welcome respite after a Holy Week full of commitments - enjoyable, spiritually nourishing commitments but time on the clock nonetheless. So, a few days at home and a few days on the road means not making powerpoints in the office, not organizing binders of music for masses, not exchanging pleasantries with parishioners and office staff, and not being mistaken for my housemate.

You see, my housemate and co-worker and dear friend Kurt looks somewhat similar to me. We're both 6'1"-ish, pretty slim, and are often wearing similar outfits (jeans with a t-shirt or hoodie/pullover). So, for some reason, that causes Irish people - despite having known us for 7+ months now - to constantly mix us up. Many of those don't even realize that they've done it.

Sometimes it grates on me - I've been here trying to serve and build a presence for over half a year, and you still don't have my name matched to my face? Are Kurt and I just a homogeneous blob of person? Those moments are undeniable, but there are also plenty of times where I just chuckle to myself. Kurt and I even decided at one point that maybe we should just change our names - he'll start going by Theobold, and I'll be known as Haywood. It's harder to mistake a Haywood for a Theobold, right?

The times when I do get called the right name are heartening, especially when it comes from someone who I recognize or know vaguely or or only met once or twice - like the time I went to shake for peace with a man who followed his wish for peace with my name or the volunteer mothers from our parish's other school who knew my name even though my housemate was their school's confirmation program coordinator or the little kids from the school I help at who shout my name from their soccer games in the grassy areas by the sidewalks. The profound effect of calling someone by name is something we have all felt at some point, whether in a foreign country where people often mixup your name or in the most common and mundane situations.

Our first names are often known also as our Christian names. These are the names with which we were baptized into the Church, the names under which our parents brought us to God and His people to join in the communion with Christ. In Isaiah 43, God tells us, "Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name: you are mine." Our names are how everyone knows us, including God. It is how God identifies us and calls us to Him individually, each as His son or daughter.

Yesterday, I decided to keep to my usual morning and head to Wexford town for daily mass at a town church. Amid the change-of-pace factor of joining with a different community and different dynamic, the Gospel reading struck me. Within the Easter octave, we remain in the pinnacle of Easter joy, this day - Tuesday within the Easter octave - bringing us John's account of the empty tomb and Mary Magdalene's encounter with the Risen Lord.

Mary is overwhelmed with emotion to the point of weeping and thinks Jesus is just the nearby gardener coming to tend to the land. How does she go from confusion and uncertainty to the realization that the Risen Lord is right in front of her?

"Jesus said to her, 'Mary!'
She turned and said to him in Hebrew, 'Rabbouni,' which means teacher."