Values that are alien to the Irish

As the debate on abortion progresses, we, Catholic people of Ireland, need to take stock and decide how we cope with what confronts us.

It is clear that the secular/pagan agenda being presented to the Irish people is designed to sweep aside the old certainties that served us well through good times and bad, down through the ages.

It is also clear that the misdeeds and awful crimes committed against innocent children by a minority of Catholic clergy has resulted in a loss of moral authority at every level of our poor Church, and has effectively silenced it at the very time that the Irish people, of every religion and none, so desperately need sound leadership and values.

We, in the Franciscan family, find ourselves with the same dilemma that confronted St Francis of Assisi 800 years ago and, just as he, after much soul-searching, eventually brought himself to embrace the leper, rejecting nobody in his time, this is the only way we can go.

We have no shortage of lepers in Ireland today. Just as Francis embraced the leper, we need to figure out how to embrace the pagan without embracing paganism, condemning nobody, embracing the sinner while rejecting the sin, just quietly and gently promoting Gospel values by how we live our lives.

Families are struggling to survive, children are going to bed and school hungry, victims of crime and injustice are forgotten and abandoned, while the rich get richer and the authors of our misfortune flaunt their ill-gotten gains in the face of the new poor.

Values that are alien to the very soul of the Irish people are being rolled out and proclaimed as the ultimate goal in a godless age and these same values, or absence of values now challenge us to respond.

As St Francis himself put it so well: “Where there is hatred let me sow love, where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope, where there is darkness, light.”

This is not a time for walking away. Rather, it is a time of great hope and emerging light.

We, lay Franciscans and all right-thinking people, need to make it quite clear that we will not remain silent while this or any future government goes about turning our hospitals and clinics into centres that reject life, rather than nurture it — from conception to natural death.

Our hospitals, our doctors, and nurses are second to none.

Our young mothers and babies are the best-cared-for in the world as they embrace life. Let’s keep it that way.

John Murray

National President

Secular Franciscan Order

St Francis Church

Liberty St

Cork