Colm Toibin gave an awkward tribute to nuns in an interview, when he said that he wants to hear people who are “not nuns, but like nuns, on the radio instead. People with a certain sort of wisdom, people who have some sort of set of spiritual or material values that are serious. Who are asking fundamental questions.”
Peter McVerry, SJ
This is a fairly typical example of a secular intellectual mindset: let’s have the dedication, without the burden of the belief. One way of showing that belief makes a huge difference is to focus on Irish Christian heroes of today, but who are they? Sister Stanislaus Kennedy and Father Peter McVerry come close, as does Brother Kevin, of the Capuchin Day Centre. All of them work for people about whom nobody else can be bothered: people who have nothing and who don’t vote.
Our nation is sorely in need of prophets. Our present economic mess, analyzed all too accurately by Morgan Kelly in today’s Irish Times, is the result of a political tradition of unspoken contempt for the public, a tradition that has resulted in the incredibly expensive public tribunals that have been working for nearly a decade.
Capuchin Day Centre Dublin
This should be the ideal situation for a recall to Christian principles, but the institutional Church, thoroughly compromised by the Ryan and Ferns Reports, cannot say anything. Prophetic words have to come from individual Christians.
Fergus O'Donoghue, SJ is editor of Studies: an Irish Quarterly Review.
