Pope’s letter to elderly

Pope’s letter to elderly

By Ronnie Convery

Pope Francis has sent a moving and powerful letter to the elderly as the Church prepares to celebrate the first ever World Day of Grandparents and Elderly People.

The celebration which will be marked this year on July 25 is intended to place the focus of the Church on the often hidden but heroic work done by older people and is intended to thank them and encourage them.

The letter, written in a deeply personal way by the Holy Father is sure to touch the hearts of senior citizens and all who care for them. Flourish has therefore decided to carry an abridged version of the letter and dedicates this special issue to our older readers. In the words of the Holy Father … “The whole Church is close to you – to us – and cares about you, loves you and does not want to leave you alone!”

My dear elderly friends:

I am well aware that this Message comes to you at a difficult time: the pandemic swept down on us like an unexpected and furious storm; it has been a time of trial for everyone, but especially for us elderly persons. Many of us fell ill, others died or experienced the death of spouses or loved ones, while others found themselves isolated and alone for long periods.

The Lord is aware of all that we have been through in this time. He is close to those who felt isolated and alone, feelings that became more acute during the pandemic…

Even at the darkest moments, as in these months of pandemic, the Lord continues to send angels to console our loneliness and to remind us: “I am with you always”. He says this to you, and he says it to me… May every grandfather, every grandmother, every older person, especially those among us who are most alone, receive the visit of an angel!

At times those angels will have the face of our grandchildren, at others, the face of family members, lifelong friends or those we have come to know during these trying times, when we have learned how important hugs and visits are for each of us. How sad it makes me that in some places these are still not possible!

The Lord, however, also sends us messengers through his words, which are always at hand. Let us try to read a page of the Gospel every day, to pray with the psalms, to read the prophets! We will be comforted by the Lord’s faithfulness. The Scriptures will also help us to understand what the Lord is asking of our lives today.

Eternal

I was called to become the Bishop of Rome when I had reached, so to speak, retirement age and thought I would not be doing anything new. The Lord is always – always – close to us. He is close to us with new possibilities, new ideas, new consolations, but always close to us. You know that the Lord is eternal; he never, ever goes into retirement.

Think about it: what is our vocation today, at our age? To preserve our roots, to pass on the faith to the young and to care for the little ones. Never forget this.

It makes no difference how old you are, whether you still work or not, whether you are alone or have a family, whether you became a grandmother or grandfather at a young age or later, whether you are still independent or need assistance. Because there is no retirement age from the work of proclaiming the Gospel and handing down traditions to your grandchildren. You just need to set out and undertake something new.

As I have often observed, we will not emerge from the present crisis as we were before, but either better or worse. And God willing… this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing… If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators... If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might discover once for all that we need one another, … No one is saved alone. We are all indebted to one another. We are all brothers and sisters.

You need to show that it is possible to emerge renewed from an experience of hardship. I am sure that you have had more than one such experience: in your life you have faced any number of troubles and yet were able to pull through. Use those experiences to learn how to pull through now.

I think of the painful memory of war, and its importance for helping the young to learn the value of peace. Those among you who experienced the suffering of war must pass on this message. Keeping memory alive is a true mission for every elderly person: keeping memory alive and sharing it with others.

I also think of my own grandparents, and those among you who had to emigrate and know how hard it is to leave everything behind, as so many people continue to do today, in hope of a future. Some of those people may even now be at our side, caring for us. These kinds of memory can help to build a more humane and welcoming world. Without memory, however, we will never be able to build; without a foundation, we can never build a house. Never. And the foundation of life is memory.

Finally, prayer. As my predecessor, Pope Benedict, himself a saintly elderly person who continues to pray and work for the Church, once said: “The prayer of the elderly can protect the world, helping it perhaps more effectively than the frenetic activity of many others.”

He spoke those words in 2012, towards the end of his pontificate. There is something beautiful here. Your prayer is a very precious resource: a deep breath that the Church and the world urgently need.

Irish famine memorial will grace St Mary’s

By Brian Swanson

Scotland’s first memorial dedicated solely to the dead and displaced Irish victims of the Great Hunger will be unveiled in the grounds of St Mary’s in the Calton later this month after a lengthy campaign by the descendants of those it commemorates.

The stainless steel sculpture, created by Donegal-based artist John McCarron, will stand in the grounds of the church regarded as the spiritual home of the impoverished Catholic families who were forced to seek a new life in Glasgow during one of the darkest periods in Irish history more than 170 years ago, when the country was devastated by the potato famine.

It is estimated that a million people died and another million fled starvation in the Great Hunger years from 1845 to 1852 with 100,000 eventually finding a new life in Glasgow.

Celtic Football Club was founded at St Mary’s, initially as a way of raising money to alleviate poverty among the Irish families whose descendants now account for around a third of Glasgow’s population.

The same generosity which distinguished the community who supported Brother Walfrid in his work in the 1880s, was evident in the fundraising campaign to build the memorial which will be soon be numbered among more than a hundred such spaces in towns and cities all over the world.

Plans for a Glasgow memorial by Coiste Cuimhnveachain An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger Memorial Committee) began in 2015 and in under two years raised an impressive £80,000 .

Donations came from all over the world and included an incredible £22,000 raised at a single dinner-dance at Celtic Park.

Jeanette Findlay, chair of CCAGM said: “It is only right their legacy and struggle are commemorated by their descendants in a permanent and fitting way.”

A full report with pictures of the unveiling and blessing of the sculpture is scheduled to take place, in line with level 2 Covid restrictions, on Sunday July 25, will be published in the August edition of Flourish.

Remembering Cardinal Tom 20 years on

By Stephen McGinty

Cardinal Thomas Winning once visited the House of Lords to meet Derry Irvine, the Lord Chancellor. After a long wait in the outer chambers, Winning spotted Irvine striding towards him, woollen wig flowing, ruffled shirt tucked in place, breeches and silk stockings meeting neatly at the knee and patent leather shoes buffed to a brilliant shine. As Irvine passed, giving Scotland’s cardinal only the smallest of nods, Winning muttered to his companion: “if that’s the Lord Chancellor, can you imagine what God looks like?”

It is now 20 years since Thomas Winning’s death. His sudden demise in June 2001 put an end to an impressive, but at times complicated and controversial career and reunited him with the God he had served all his life. As his biographer I was surprised by the depth of my emotions at his passing. My father, ever practical, attempted to cheer me up by stating, ‘at least you know how the book ends.’

Thomas Winning was a fascinating character and I still think fondly of our many interviews, which always took place on a Sunday morning, in the sitting room of the Oaks, the arts and crafts home, in which he lived on the south side of Glasgow. I would fax (yes, it was that long ago) questions over to his office a few days before and he would do his best to research and remember the period up for discussion. In the early days he would try and engage with me with small talk about Celtic, his abiding passion, till it quickly became apparent, I had no knowledge and even less interest in football and so instead we would settle down to our own 90 minute game of competitive questioning.

Yet I was nearly always surprised at his candour and honesty over the weeks, months and years in which we spoke. Only once was there a minor fall-out when, far into the project, he got cold feet, concerned about his candour and insisted on a written document on his right to read the final manuscript. I knew things were back on track when I attended a talk by George Weigel, the biographer of Pope John Paul II, at a Glasgow hotel. As I walked in, I received a punch to my kidney from behind. Surprised I looked round and it was Cardinal Winning, smiling his crinkled Robert de Niro smile and joking: “are you looking for tips?”

Thomas Winning had bold plans for the Archdiocese of Glasgow and they did not always work. He wanted to build the City of God on the streets of Glasgow but his Pastoral Plan for spiritual renewal, in which the laity would work in small groups, across the city’s parishes was wildly ambitious but failed to attract the enthusiasm of many of his priests and parishioners. His expansion into social care saw the diocese end up with a debt of £10 million. This took years to correct but it was his very lack of fiscal prudence that enabled him to launch, perhaps his most successful scheme, the Pro-Life Initative, in which the diocese offered financial and practical support to women facing crisis pregnancies. This even earned the surprising support of Germaine Greer, the feminist academic, for providing “real choice”.

Of course he made mistakes: his handling of the case of runaway bishop Roderick Wright led to damaging publicity, and his view, shared by almost every bishop in the Church at the time, that abusive priests should not be reported to the police by the diocese but dealt with ‘in house’ now seems hard to imagine.

Yet Winning the man, separate from the public figure, was all too human. And he also had a complicated relationship with God. When it was whispered that the diocesan debt might mean that he would be overlooked for the red hat of a cardinal he prayed for the strength to cope with his disappointment. Many times during our interviews I attempted to get him to open up about his prayer life, but it was only after his death that I was given access to a journal in which he had noted his reflections during a religious retreat, and there his spirituality revealed itself a little more…

Like many people, Cardinal Winning never felt good enough for God, never felt that he could achieve his goals, a position he hid behind a thick West of Scotland carapace of toughness. He compared himself unfavourable to Cardinal Basil Hume, who, he believed had a ‘Ready Brek’ glow of spirituality that he himself lacked. But Winning had other qualities: he was a spiritual pugilist, raised in a crucible of anti-Catholicism who over the course of his career elevated the Catholic Church out of the ghetto and into the mainstream.

Yet at one religious retreat at the House of the Sacred Heart, a retreat home buried in the English countryside, he was finally able to open up both emotionally and spiritually. To forget about his position within the church and recognise that he was, like everyone else, a simple pilgrim. The spiritual exercise involved imagining himself among the crowds when Jesus healed a sick and lame man…

As I wrote in This Turbulent Priest: “The layers of loneliness that accumulate from the long-term exposure to an isolated position began to strip away and the warmth of the environment and the dynamism of the ideas seeped into his soul.” As he told me: “It was part of a big opening for me. It was a turning point in my philosophy of pastoral work. I thought I was open, but during the retreat it was as if you had taken a tin opener and opened yourself up. It was as painful as that.”

Looking back over the 20 years since his death, when I think of Thomas Winning I don’t think of the big achievements or the dark moments of office, but of the man struggling to do what he believed to be right by his faith and unsure, even to the end if he had earned his heavenly reward.

Twenty years on I like to think that Thomas Winning now knows what God looks like.

Stephen McGinty is the author of This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning, published by HarperCollins. His latest book, The Dive: The Untold Story of the World’s Deepest Submarine Rescue, was published on 10 June, also by HarperCollins.

Dumbarton’s John is new Speaker

By Lord McFall as told to Brian Swanson

My faith is deeply rooted in the community in which I grew up. I was brought up in a Catholic family, attended Catholic schools and went to Sunday Mass in my local Catholic church, St Patrick’s Dumbarton. 

I received all the sacraments from baptism to marriage at that church and I consider myself fortunate to have been supported throughout my childhood by so many good friends, teachers and, of course, my family. I am now a parishioner of St Michael’s Parish in Dumbarton – the same parish I have attended for over 40 years. I am the first Catholic Lord Speaker and my faith is an important part of my life. 

 

What was your motivation to enter politics?

Most politicians, when asked what motivated them to enter politics, say that they were motivated by a desire to change things for the better – that was definitely the case for me. I think that politics is fundamentally about helping others and the words of President John F Kennedy come to mind when he said, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” I have tried to do this throughout my political life, primarily through serving my constituents, something which is equal to, if not more important than what goes on down on Westminster. 

Consensus

Institutions like the House of Lords, by their nature, contain diverse sets of opinions, and one of my jobs is to bring people together and build consensus so that this we work effectively towards a common goal. 

In my opinion, Pope Francis’ words in Fratelli Tutti capture the political vocation perfectly: “Politics is something more noble than posturing, marketing and media spin. These sow nothing but division, conflict and a bleak cynicism incapable of mobilising people to pursue a common goal. At times, in thinking of the future, we do well to ask ourselves, ‘Why I am doing this?’, ‘What is my real aim?’ For as time goes on, reflecting on the past, the questions will not be: ‘How many people endorsed me?’, ‘How many voted for me?’, ‘How many had a positive image of me?’

Good

“The real, and potentially painful, questions will be, ‘How much love did I put into my work?’ ‘What did I do for the progress of our people?’ ‘What mark did I leave on the life of society?’ ‘What real bonds did I create?’ ‘What positive forces did I unleash?’ ‘How much social peace did I sow?’ ‘What good did I achieve in the position that was entrusted to me?’” 

Can religion and politics co-exist?

I know that there are those who say religion and politics must be kept separate but in my view they are intertwined. When Pope Benedict XVI addressed both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall during his visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, he spoke powerfully about this very question. He said: “I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation. Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.”  

I couldn’t agree more with those sentiments and I have always valued the contribution of faith communities and people of faith to political life and, of course, the work of Parliament.  

Impact

To take one example, there is no more pressing threat to the world today than climate change and the Church has an important role to play in shaping the global political response. As the Bishops of England and Wales and Scotland said in their Pastoral Letter for Pentecost Sunday: “…The way we live our everyday lives has an impact on everyone and on the earth … In our political thinking, there must be a new global understanding of our world, where nations recognise our common responsibility for the dignity of all people and their rights to sustainable livelihoods, in authentic freedom. Pope Francis speaks of a global politics that looks beyond our own needs to the needs of all, most especially the poor and the marginalised.” 

Will your faith guide the decisions you make in your role as Lords Speaker?

Politics is not for the fainthearted! And there are often tough decisions to be made, important decisions which affect the reality of people’s lives.

Faith

My faith has strengthened me during numerous trying periods over the years. Despite the difficulties, I would still encourage young people to become involved in politics as a powerful force for the advancement of the common good. 

 

What is your favourite quote from the Bible, a saint, or religious leader ?

I often think about the words of St Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times and, if necessary, use words.”