Bishop O’Reilly’s Homily

at a Mass for Deceased Priests and Bishops

The Pastoral Centre, Cullies, Cavan, 17th November 2010

A year ago we were in Corlough for the funeral of Fr Eugene Loughlain. We gather today to remember him and all our brother priests and bishops who have died and to pray for them that they may rest in the peace of Christ. We know that the families and friends of our deceased priests continue to pray for them.  We know that many parishioners whose lives they touched during their ministry still hold their memory dear and still keep them in their prayers.

Sometimes we say, pessimistically, there’s nobody as dead as a dead priest. The fact that we do not have families of our own, children and grandchildren, to remember us should not make us forget the wider family of parish and diocese that we are part of. It should make us all the more committed to remembering and praying for our former colleagues, the men we worked with, prayed with and shared friendship with as we tried to serve God and God’s people together.

We live in difficult times for the Church. We have taken a battering in the last ten or fifteen years. As priests we no longer enjoy the prestige or the deference that was once afforded to every priest because of the cloth he wore. We feel tainted by the sins of others and targets for the anger and disillusionment of a whole society.

But if we focus too much on our own feelings two things can happen. The first is that we can lose perspective. In Nuala O’Loan’s address to the new Association of Catholic Priests she spoke about this issue:

But the reality is that the majority of the ordinary people of Ireland did not tar you all with the same brush. As they walked through their lives they knew when they encountered good men and good priests. For each one of us there are experiences, moments when life seems too hard and God seems to be absent – there are moments when in this dark night of the soul we cannot even find God. We all know them, and at moments like this it is very often to a priest that we turn in our pain, and it is in the quiet untold work of good men of God that we are held and accompanied down our individual via crucis until we can walk alone…The priest who has walked with us… may never know the difference he had made to our lives, because we do not speak easily of such times.

I believe Nuala O’Loan was speaking for the great bulk of our parishioners. The genuine appreciation of our people and their honest criticism are much more valuable to us than the empty deference of a bygone era.

The second thing that too much introspection can do is cause us to lose our sense of mission. Our ministry is needed now as never before. People are bewildered and afraid. The euphoria of the Celtic Tiger years has been replaced by recession and depression as people try to cope with huge mortgages they cannot pay for, as they face the prospect of unemployment, young people with no option but emigration, old people whose pensions have evaporated. The promise of the Celtic Tiger turned out to be illusory and there is a palpable sense of anger and betrayal.

We’re familiar with the lines of Yeats: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”. The previous lines of the poem say why things fall apart:

Things begin to fall apart when the falcon can no longer hear his master’s voice. For Christians Christ is the falconer.  There are so many who no longer hear Christ or his message. They no longer have a centre, someone who gives meaning and purpose to their lives.  In our culture of conflicting voices it is harder and harder to hear his voice, or to make it heard. But that is our task. We have to first listen to the falconer ourselves, to Christ who is the centre of our lives. We celebrate Mass each day. We hear the words: “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I in him.” We must make that sacramental reality of intimacy with Christ a reality in our lives. And then we have to speak with confidence and courage to lead others to find that centre in theirs.  

People need to hear a message of hope in the midst of all this doom and gloom. And we have a message of hope, a message of life. In the words of the first reading, “Hope is not deceptive, because the love of Christ has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit who has been given to us”. We need to be out there sharing this message of life and hope with the people in our care.

As we pray today for our brothers in the priesthood who have died, we ask them to pray for us as we try to preach the Gospel and carry on the mission of Christ in very different circumstances to what most of them experienced. Our faith in the communion of saints assures us that we are not alone as we face this daunting challenge. As we ask their intercession we pray that they may rest in peace.