One of Ireland’s leading campaigners on homelessness and social justice has expressed concern that June’s International Eucharistic Congress could be, “a holy waste of time.”
Jesuit priest Fr Peter McVerry was addressing delegates attending CORI’s 2012 international conference in Malahide, Co Dublin last weekend on the theme Blessed, Broken and Shared.
He concluded his address to four hundred representatives Irish religious orders by warning that if the Eucharistic Congress did not commit Christians to building a more just society in Ireland and in the world, and if it did not commit them to eliminating poverty, homelessness and hopelessness, “then it will be a holy waste of time.”
Explaining his position on IEC2012 to ciNews, he said the money isn’t the issue for him.
“There will be many people who will contribute and it is not that this money is being diverted from some good cause to the Eucharistic Congress. If the money wasn’t raised in this way it wouldn’t be raised at all.”
He said what he was drawing attention to was Jesus’ request at the core of the Eucharist that we follow him in his total self-sacrificing love.
“Unless we live that out in our daily lives, then the Eucharist becomes a nonsense, or as I said, a holy waste of time. If we are not living the Eucharist, why do we bother attending the Eucharist?”
His comments come ahead of the weekend’s fourth national collection that is raising funds to defray the €9 million bill that hosting of the week-long Congress will cost. Since June 2009, three national collections have been held in all dioceses.
In a statement, Bishop John Fleming of Killala, Chairman of the Bishops’ National Finance Committee, said that in view of the, “very difficult economic circumstances in which our country finds itself at present and despite the undoubted economic benefit which the Congress will bring to Irish tourism, the Bishops decided not to ask the Government for funding for the Congress.”
He explained that they took this decision because they did not want in any way to take from Government funding of crucial areas such as hospitals, schools, care of the elderly and other such essential services.
As a result, the entire cost of the Congress will be borne by the Church in Ireland.
CORI’s conference was also addressed by Fr Anthony J. Gittins CSSp, a professor of Christian Missions and Ministry at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, who spent time as a missionary in Sierra Leone.
He has taught and worked in 35 countries and is the author of fifteen books and numerous articles.
In his address, entitled Do this in memory of me: Do What?, the Spiritan discussed the axiom of psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, ‘to love, you must encounter’.
Professor Gittins underlined, “We cannot love a category such as ‘the poor’ or ‘the homeless’, because that is an abstraction; there are no people in the abstract, and no generic people: only concrete, specific human beings.”
He added, “Jesus dos not love ‘the poor’; he loves actual, real people. It is, in fact, what we might call his pastoral plan: to encounter people one by one, face to face, and inclusively or without discrimination.”
The third speaker was Sr Martha Zechmeister CJ, a professor of Theology at the Jesuit University in San Salvador. Born in Austria in 1956, she studied theology in Vienna. Her main research interests include Political Theology, Latin-American Liberation Theology and Ignatian Spirituality. Between 1999 to 2008, she was professor of Fundamental Theology at the University of Passau in Germany.
She told the CORI conference that religious life must be, “the thorn, the restlessness, the constant impetus, forbidding the Church to makes its peace with the powers of the world.”
The Congregation of Jesus sister said neither apathy nor resignation can lead anywhere, “but equally neither can fanaticism nor aggressive, ideological doggedness.”