Communion excesses - Consumerism undermining relationships

ONE of the really rewarding things about being successful is you can give your children things and opportunities you may not have enjoyed yourself.

Things you may not have enjoyed because your parents, like more or less everyone else in far less affluent times, simply did not have the money to indulge you as they might have wished.

However, even if they had the cash it is unlikely they would have splashed out on things as daft as indulgent and as pathetically insecure and ostentatious as some of the trappings surrounding our children’s First Communion knees-up.

These excesses — and that is just what they are — include handmade, Italian silk gowns at €700 a pop, iridescent kid-leather shoes, French manicures, spray-on tans or marquees with full bars and string quartets as well as shopping trips to Paris for eight-year-olds.

There is even a glossy magazine to serve the needs and fashion ambitions of Ireland’s First Communicants, with, presumably, a section on helicopters for hire.

Some parents will participate even if the keep-up-with-the-Jones bills are beyond their reach while some censorious grandparents, remembering far harder times, will look on in amazement.

In far too many instances moneylenders will make hay while the sun shines, preying on the peer pressure that surrounds this often debased event.

Many of our children, especially our beloved daughters, will look like the cast of Footballers’ Wives on a day-trip to the Vatican before a World Cup match, all bling and empty posturing, radiating nothing more than an affected sincerity undermined by an encouraged vanity. What the few remaining clergy, those charged with celebrating the spirituality of the day, will think is not hard to imagine.

Everyone likes a good time — especially if it is achieved by indulging our loved ones — but do we really have to do it in such a loud, empty and tacky way? There must be a better way to show our love for our children than turning a religious rite of passage into a rodeo of taffeta and high-sugar drinks.

Participation — which is, after all, voluntary — shows at least a recognition of the fact it is a sacrament of the Catholic Church and not a kind of makeover challenge for prepubescent fashionistas.

It says a lot about modern Ireland, despite all the great changes and progress, that when confronted with one of the first spiritual set pieces in the lives of children of supposedly practising Catholics we turn it into a festival of consumption. We concentrate on the packaging rather than the content, the marketing rather than the substance. We turn an opportunity to recognise the significance and centrality of spirituality and otherness — of whatever brand — in everyone’s life into a day eight-year-olds get to wear plastic tiaras.

It well may be that this fiasco is the price the Catholic Church has to pay to retain a smidgen of influence in our schools as the religious and cultural backgrounds of pupils becomes more varied. It is inevitable some people, probably a growing number, will try to have their children educated in schools where a specific religion is not taught as a central belief. Some will want education without a Christian ethos.

If religious education was moved outside schools, the Catholic Church might have smaller numbers to cope with on Communion days but it might return to being a religious event rather than a jamboree somewhere between Christmas and the summer holidays.

The Catholic Church has had to face a tremendous fall in religious practice and terrible, evil scandals but its core message of love and spirituality, and similar messages from so many other churches, will serve us far better than slavish consumerism.

Though in this context Communion is a Catholic sacrament the issues at play are not specifically Catholic: the predominance of consumerism over deep spiritual and emotional needs and how that development is undermining our relationships, society and humanity.