Letters to the Editor: Pope Francis saw the big picture, and put climate change in the foreground
Nuns bearing a banner quoting Pope Francis ('I ask you in the name of God to defend Mother Earth') on a march in Bogotá, Colombia in 2015, ahead of Cop21. Picture: Guillermo Legaria/AFP/Getty
Your letter-writer mentions the Pope's choice of burial in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (Pope Francis took on the challenge we all face — striving to be better Irish Examiner Letters to the Editor, April 25).
The legend surrounding the feast of the dedication of this basilica goes back to Pope Liberius (d.366). In a vision to him, Mary, the Theotokos, asked that a church be built where snow would be found on August 5, usually a time of oppressive heat in Rome.
We need not believe the legend that it was a dramatic climate change (snow in summer) that first marked this basilica’s boundary. But we cannot ignore the evidence of science and our own contemporary experiences of what is happening now to planet Earth.
It is a very symbolic burial ground for Francis, who addressed the challenge of climate change in his encyclical letter Laudato Si’ of 2015 and his apostolic exhortation eight years later, Laudate Deum, to all people of good will on the climate crisis.
Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Francis’s signing of Laudato Si’, I am exhibiting a number of my oil paintings in Cobh Library from May 6 to 30 to encourage people to appreciate the seasonal colours of what may seem the undramatic ordinariness of their local environment.
I should add that this exhibition wasn’t planned as such. It just happened that the library’s beautiful exhibition space became unexpectedly available in May.
The exhibition is called The Earth is not a Background Only.
Pope Francis, “the man from the ends of the Earth”, as he styled himself, was a good man against whom the conservative section of the Catholic Church fought in every way possible to prevent any meaningful structural reform from occurring within the institution.
Instead of taking personal initiative in advancing change, he introduced the synodal process, which has brought about little or no structural reform.
Whether it was from his own innate fear of Curia resistance, his refusal to consider opening the diaconate or priesthood to women was a lost opportunity in restoring the institutional Catholic Church’s credibility among women.
He advanced the inclusion of marginalised people within the Church, without tackling the underlying traditional Church doctrine which had excluded them in the first instance.
He has promoted enough cardinal electors to secure a likeminded successor but they may not be enough of a united force to successfully resist canny conservative forces concentrated within the Roman Curia.
It’s interesting to note that in 2019, Pope Francis reached out to the Muslim world.
This avant garde pope signed a historic declaration of fraternity with the grand imam of al-Azhar.
This was the first ever papal visit to the Arabian peninsula. It’s often posited that some Western countries assume that religion does not matter in their country to the same extent that it once did ergo it does not matter to the rest of the world. I would counter such a view by saying that the Roman Catholic Church has a massive global spread. It has diplomatic relations with nearly every country and one must always remember that 20pc of the world’s population identifies as Catholic.
The Church’s diplomacy is deep and it is wide, but often it is invisible to the naked eye. The Holy See has a unique convening power that will play out at today’s papal funeral.
An open letter to the Government and the EU:
As an Irish man living in the East of Ireland and thinking what the EU would have in common with older people like me, I have a dream that one day I’ll stand in front of all the TDs and address the Dáil/EU, not as a politician, not as an ambassador, not as an envoy, no, just as me.
This is unbelievable, to think that Ursula von der Leyen or the European Union would care about Ireland. All they ever did was take from Ireland; we seem to be the European doormat. It should have been recognised as inevitable that the day would come when America would have a president that would want the pharmaceuticals of America to be of revenue benefit to the USA, though these companies were enticed to set up in Ireland with the enticement of favourable taxes and construction of the facilities funded by the Irish taxpayers. Go work it out.
I would inform you of how my country has suffered through the years of austerity, that awful word; that the Irish people have suffered in the name of the banks, with no accountability, no justice — well it was everyone’s fault — but their money was tossed all over the banks’ counters. As a result people lost their homes, lost their jobs, lost their dignity, most emigrated, some died by suicide, while our Government looked on from their plush offices.
There was a time, pre-1973, when Ireland was exporting our agricultural produce. Our entry into the EEC changed all of that.
Our four sugar factories were closed. Flour manufacturing ended. In my local town our many shoe and boot factories were closed. Vehicle and locomotive construction was ended.
Ireland has given away our oil rights, our gas rights, plundered our fishing, closed our coal mining, closed our boat-building plants, and recently closed our peat-briquette-making plants.
Now Poland and Germany, along with other countries, are exporters of most of these back to Ireland. Not proud statistics by any means.
Nobody, not one of our MEPs, stood up and shouted: ‘Stop!’
Austerity meant hospital beds were closed. Those who did not have private health insurance were pushed down the road and left to the waters and the wild. No one came to help them.
The rural communities are being robbed of their banks and post offices. Garda stations closed... schools in need of upgrading.
Our hospitals are heaving with the sick, old people, and children are laying on trolleys and chairs in draughty corridors. Our nursing staff are mentally fatigued, overworked, and exhausted.
It’s been like this for decades.
Our newly-trained doctors and nurses choose to emigrate to where their quality of life far outweighs that of their homeland. Our newly graduated medics are emigrating in large numbers. Our young people cannot afford to buy their own homes.
People who paid their taxes and worked hard all their lives, some are now sleeping rough. Where is the justice?
I’m inviting Mr/Mrs EU to come and take a grand tour of our 26 counties.
Yes, there are nice shopping centres (though some are now derelict), some nice retail parks, lovely scenery, and decimated rural communities, all outside Dublin. Homes where the offspring have long since emigrated and most will never return.
Old folks have passed on, homesteads are derelict, farms unused, growing wild.
Most of our cities have people sleeping rough and food banks are the only thriving aspect of Irish society, because Ireland took the cruellest cut of all the countries in Europe during the downturn.
In 1972, I voted to join the EEC. It was a great idea and Ireland progressed for 20 years, purely by the ambition of the Irish people, until 1994, then this all changed when some not-so-bright spark decided to change from a community to a union. I and the nation were not asked to vote for this change and neither would I have done so.
Whoever thought they had the right to do so on my behalf abused my constitutional rights.
Yes, Ireland always paid its debts, but at what cost?
Politicians looked good telling the EU of our honestly. When the Government started its belt-tightening, it forgot its old people; it hit at the last rung of the ladder, starting with the people who had no one to speak for them.
At least Trump is doing his best for Americans. That cannot be said of successive governments in Ireland regarding immigration, hospitals, justice system, education, housing, etc.
The Irish people have been failed time and time again by our own governments, with no accountability at all. Very sad and disappointing.
We all know (at least those who are aware and worried about it) that there is not enough gas generation being built to guarantee supply in 2030 and beyond, with support instead for increasing, but unreliable, wind and solar.
We may have huge supplies of offshore wind energy but the harnessing of it is the problem.
Also, it’s not sufficient to know that a source of energy is huge until you’ve also considered our huge use of it.
But there is hope: Most of the advanced world is looking again at the benefits that nuclear energy can bring to their society’s needs for clean energy.
Isn’t it time that Ireland had a look to see why that might be, and stopped ignoring nuclear energy and the developing small modular reactors?
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