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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Pilgrims feel the wrath of God on the Reek
By John Cooney
THE old saying that religion can be bad for your health took a new twist in regard to the bad weather during the annual pilgrimage to Mayo’s Holy Mountain when rumours circulated of a fatality.
Up to 14 pilgrims were taken to Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar after falling on slippery rocks on rain-lashed Croagh Patrick but thankfully they were said by the HSE to have sustained only minor injuries and were later discharged.
The spate of injuries came during the most hazardous conditions for years experienced on the annual pilgrimage.
The prolonged weather conditions prevented an Air Corps helicopter from landing on the summit of the 2,510 feet high mountain. All day, Mayo Mountain Rescue warned that the approach to the summit had become an accident black-spot and was dangerous.
For a time on Sunday I thought I would be writing a front-page disaster story if the rumour of a fatality had proved accurate and that this would be followed by a national furore with the church authorities in the firing line for not calling off the climb. What many pilgrims regard as a path to spiritual renewal might so easily have ended as a path to death.
The combination of poor weather and danger warnings appeared to have reduced numbers from an expected 20,000 plus attendance. But the many pilgrims who braved the harsh conditions were determined to get to the top.
They climbed and climbed in spite of the chilly and wet conditions, with many penitents wondering if even the deity was in conspiracy with the treacherous elements.
As a veteran reporter of the annual Reek Sunday pilgrimage, it seemed to me as if the wrath of God was being vented on the Church’s mountain militants for increasingly secular Ireland’s abandonment of the church tabernacle.
From before dawn on Sunday, the vanguard of pilgrims had begun the nocturnal assault of Croagh Patrick in the footsteps of Ireland’s national saint who, in the year 441, reportedly spent 40 days and nights fasting on the summit.
Enshrouded in mist and cloud at the cone-shaped summit, the early morning pilgrims at the 8am Mass shivered in the predawn freezing cold while following the 1,500 year old Christian tradition.
Ingenuiously, a boy named Cathal tied a lamp around his red hoodie to illuminate his way in the dark.
As the early bird pilgrims were coming down the slopes ravenous for their late morning breakfasts, others, some in their blistered and mud-spat barefeet, were navigating their way with the help of sticks upwards along slippery rocks and mud slides. Young and old, Irish and immigrants, all stoically endured aching pains, as they offered up their sufferings as penance for their own sins or for special prayerful intentions for loved ones.
A 12-year-old girl from Longford, Leanne Beirne, said she had climbed barefoot for a special intention for her mother which she was delighted to have accomplished.
A bereaved father, who had travelled the long distance to Mayo, said he felt it worthwhile because he had felt a spiritual reconnection with two dead sons. This was Tom Maloney from Limerick who said he had come to pray for his two sons, one who had been murdered and the other involved in a tragic accident.
“I was thinking of them all the way up,” said Mr Maloney.
“I felt more close to them as soon as I got to the top of the mountain.”
Padraig O’Duinn from Cork said he found strength in the knowledge that previous generations of pilgrims had endured the climb.
The practice of saying prayers for special intentions was given the blessing of Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary.
“Every pilgrim climbing the mountain came for a particular intention,” said the archbishop. At the principal 10.30am Mass he told the pilgrims that the Catholic faith was never more important than at a time of much doubt, uncertainty and concern for the future, and he talked of the need for maintaining the faith that had kept the tradition alive through many difficult centuries. In atrocious conditions, the faithful tried to live up to the good bishop’s counsel of perfection.
Meanwhile, through the communications marvel of the internet, I was keeping track simultaneously with the consecration of Ireland’s newest bishop in St Macartan’s Cathedral in Monaghan.
In his first address as Bishop of Clogher, Monsignor Liam McDaid told a large congregation, which included Taoiseach Brian Cowen, that Irish society has forced the Irish Church to look into the mirror, and he admitted that Irish Church leaders had been brought to their knees over the paedophile clerical scandals, but that maybe that is no bad thing.
Bishop McDaid also acknowledged that “the surgeon’s knife” had been necessary to rid the Catholic Church of the evil of clerical child abuse.
“A lot of evil and poison has been excised,” he said. “But there comes a time when the surgeon’s knife has done what it can, is put away and a regime of rehabilitation for the patient is put in place.”
Although it is now standard rhetoric to hear bishops extolling more participation of the laity in the running of the Church, I see little evidence of this actually been put into practice.
So too does Dame Nuala O’Loan who has asked why the clergy and the laity are being kept in the dark about next month’s apostolic visitation of senior foreign church leaders charged by Pope Benedict to help renew the Irish Church.
A note of complacency that all will be right on the night was detectable in Bishop McDaid’s quoting a poem penned by the great writer from Monaghan, Patrick Kavanagh, entitled House Party to celebrate the Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.
Her book was out, and did she devastate
The Roman Catholic Church on every page!
And in Seamus’ house they met to celebrate
With giggles high the dying monster’s rage.
In far off parishes of Cork and Kerry
Old priests walked homeless in the winter air
As Seamus poured another pale dry sherry.
By keeping the wraps around their secretive dealings with the Vatican, Irish Church leaders are missing a great opportunity to listen to the people who want closure on closed clerical shop authoritarianism in church governance. Nor are they listening to the popular support for married priests and for women clergy.
For those Western People readers frustrated by the lack of internal discussion within the Church on such issues, an opportunity to do so will be provided at next month’s debate at the Humbert Summer School in Castlebar on ‘Reforming the Catholic Church’. The four-day programme of speakers and events can now be consulted on the web at humbertschool.ie. Registration is open to all interested takers.
The independent forum will not be about church-bashing or the destruction of Catholicism but will provide a platform for individual Catholics to demand the dismantlement of authoritarian clericalist culture and organisational structures that harboured paedophile clerics for so long and so lethally for thousands of innocent children.
The Humbert School will explore the possibilities for ordinary Catholics of reclaiming their Church and of dispelling the notion that religion can destroy your mind.
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