BRIAN QUIN S M, RIP: A HOLY PRIEST

Brian Quin, S M, died yesterday. Requiescat in pace. He will spend Holy Week with God.

Brian was a holy priest. I’m proud to say that I am one of his many first cousins, and I feel bereft.

Brian stood 6ft 7in and possessed a fine bass singing voice. The boys at St Patrick’s Silverstream, where he taught geography, including my three sons, called him ‘Chewie’ after the character Chewbacca in Star Wars, for his speaking voice.

I’m proud of Brian because he always wore his roman collar when most of his brother priests do not, for reasons of humility I’m told.

Well, Brian was a humble priest. If he hadn’t been humble he’d not have been holy – but he wore his collar with pride I believe, the same holy pride exhibited by St Paul who gloried in nothing but the Cross – and in these times of Modernity gone Mad, the Cross is perhaps heavier because there are fewer to carry it.

I’m proud of Brian because he stood and spoke and wrote for life when so few of his fellow Catholic priests did so.

I’m proud of Brian for being the first priest I knew who learned and spoke te reo. And for his patient years of scholarship, translating the early letters of the French Marist priests who were largely responsible for bringing the Catholic faith to New Zealand. 

New Zealand is the poorer for his passing.

Fr Brian's Requiem Mass will be celebrated at St Mary of the Angels, Wellington, on Tuesday March 27, at 1.30 p m.   

WHY THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE GONE (Letter to Dom Post, March 24)

Remember the good old days when your baby was delivered by the GP you’d known for years? By comparison, maternity care now (Overcrowding puts vulnerable babies at risk, March 23) seems an even sorrier mess.

 

How come? The answer lies in the apparently anodyne line, “increasing complexities in the mother, including age and obesity”, and its subtext.

 

The good old days came to an end when abortion was legalised. Since then women have been able to delay giving birth by aborting unwanted pregnancies, increasing the chance of prematurity and its risks to mother and child in subsequent pregnancies. Waiting for their babies, many pass the optimum age for child-bearing and by abortion let themselves in for eating disorders.

 

Babies are not merchandise, to be ordered and delivered at a time that suits, or consigned to the rubbish bin if they’re not when or what you wanted. Born or unborn, babies are human beings and must be treated as such.

 

Otherwise we invite the consequences of “overcrowding, expensive transfers and worn-out staff”.

While our so-called Health Boards continue to kill unborn children, they will have to cope with ever-increasing difficulties in caring for the babies who escape their mothers’ wombs alive.

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CONFORMING TO STANDARD CHURCH 'ETIQUETTE'

I wear a mantilla to Mass. It's something above and beyond the call of duty, you might say, which I do to show reverence for the Eucharist. I decided to do it after hearing a homily which held up many of our 'pious' pre-Vatican II habits to ridicule and derision.

I was taken to task for that yesterday. To ram the message home today I was emailed a page from a book by Patrick Thomas McMahon, 'A Pattern for Life - The Rule of St Albert and the Carmelite Laity'. Father McMahon says:

"We should avoid extravagant displays of public piety. Our mannerisms in church or in any public place should conform to the standard etiquette that is expected ... we follow the guidelines of the local church. Where they kneel, we kneel. Where they stand, we stand. ... The Scriptures are our guide in the spiritual life."

First, it’s absurd to suggest that instead of obeying the Church with a capital ‘C’ we should follow the church - i.e. the local community - in whatever aberration they’ve fallen into. That just takes the cake.

In other words, if I’m asked to be what a church calls ‘a Special Minister’ (instead of Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, and all that the word ‘extraordinary’ implies) and they use paper towels to purify the chalice, against the advice of the bishop, I should use a paper towel too. Or if a priest sits down and expects me as ‘Special Minister’ to distribute Holy Communion instead of doing it himself, I should do so. Or if people are laughing and chatting in church, I should too. Or if they don’t bother to genuflect, neither should I. And so on and so on.

Perhaps Fr McMahon has never attended Mass in a church like the one where I did yesterday, a ‘Mass’ which I suspect was invalid, where the sacred vessels and the Body and Blood of Christ were passed around from hand to hand like bread and butter plates. Where the priest talks and laughs while celebrating Holy Mass. Because that’s "the standard etiquette that is expected", should I conform to it, and talk and laugh too?

Second, if I'm walking down Courtenay Place in Wellington - a public place - should I conform to the standard etiquette that's expected, i.e. wear next to nothing and get drunk and pass out?

Third, it’s absolutely not only the Scriptures which are “our guide in the spiritual life”. As a Catholic and a Carmelite I'm guided also by the Magisterium and Tradition of the Church and the saints – especially the Carmelite saints.

You can expect a more sympathetic hearing from me in regard to Fr McMahon when he’s canonised.

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Wildflowers growing in the ditch in our lane (photo by Quentin Kynoch)



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IN CASE YOU PALMERSTON NORTH DIOCESE PEOPLE WERE WONDERING

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I've been asked - by a fellow vigilante, on the footpath outside Hastings Hospital last Thursday (Thursdays are when they kill unborn children) - about the recent request from the PN Diocese for suggestions to improve the Mass count (basically).

"Did you find out," he asked, "what's going to happen to our responses?"

I did. Having written a few pages - once I got started it was hard to stop - and knowing that at least two other parishioners had replied, I thought perhaps the responses could be circulated, with thanks.

Mainly because I remember years ago being asked to list all the hymns sung in our parish so the Diocese could approve them. Or not. It took me hours but I did so joyfully anticipating the day when I could biff  'A Mother as Lovely as You' (truly!). And it was 2018 before we were sent the List of Approved Hymns. 'A Mother as Lovely as You', I'm happy to say, was not on it.

But I digress. The parish team person I asked about the responses didn't know so I asked the parish secretary who asked Father.

Here's the reply:

This consultation is part of the Dioceses’ Strategic plan for the year 2018 and each parish feeds their ideas into this.  It is anticipated that the Bishop will sum up the pastoral year by issuing a pastoral letter to the Diocese.

So there you go. The Bishop will send us a letter.

A HAPPY ENDING - IN THE CHURCH OF NICE

I thought I should say that the story about the woman and the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) has a happy ending.

She's coming to Mass again and is full of questions.

But seeing the subject's come up (see above), why is it called that? You'd think that the 'C' would stand for Catholic, as in Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults. I had to google RCIA to make sure it's not. But is it about initiating adults into any old Christian church, or specifically into the Catholic Church?

I'm pretty sure it's the latter. So why not call a spade a spade? Are there fears that the term 'Catholic' might be seen as discriminatory and/or exclusive?

If so, it's a manifestation of the Church of Nice.

THE LOYAL WIFE AND THE BLACKMAILER (Letter to Dom Post, March 20)

If ever there were an example of ‘hate speech’, it’s New episode of Married An Orange Blight (March 19).

 

At the risk of being seen as coming out of “Trumpland”, I have to say in spite of the word “alleged” popped into the first paragraph, Jane Bowron’s sordid wallow in Trumps’s supposed affair and supposedly unhappy marriage amounts to libel.

 

In a remarkable inversion of the Christian mores still but ever more precariously upholding society, the text and carefully chosen photos depict the loyal wife as an awkward fool and a blackmailing ‘adult film’ (shouldn’t that read ‘soft porn’?) star as gorgeous and greatly to be admired.

 

But the unintended effect of Bowron’s fit of spleen is the light inadvertently shone on Melania Trump and her dignified silence.

Thank God some people still know how to keep their mouths shut.

A CAUTIONARY TALE OF RCIA AND EVIL

A woman I know - not very well, yet - has told me that not long ago she lived close by a cathedral in a New Zealand city, and would sometimes go in and just sit and admire the architecture.

One day she was approached by a priest. A young priest (whose youth might be a factor in the story).

This priest said to me, "On the way over here from the manse," - you guessed it, this woman was not a Catholic - "God told me to speak to a woman sitting in the cathedral now, and bring her into the Faith."

"If you'd said that to me," this woman said, "I'd think you were barmy, but I could take it from a priest. He had the oil and everything with him. So I became a Catholic."

"WOT???" said I. "On the spot? You mean you didn't have to jump through those RCIA hoops?"

"Nup," she said.

And then she moved to the heart of the country and attended Mass there, and became friends with the priest, an import who asked her (she has a degree in English) if she would come to his country to teach English.

And then she got to hear that people were talking about her and the priest.

She stopped going to Mass.

It's a cautionary tale. Wonderful to know you can approach that person who you've been thinking might want to become a Catholic, and reassure them that it doesn't have to take months of meetings and potluck meals and 'sharings'.

And so awful to know the power of our tongue for evil.

HAWKING WOULD HAVE BEEN A DEAD CERT FOR EUTHANASIA (Letter to Dom Post, March 15)

Stephen Hawking, “icon”, “genius as celebrity” and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge was diagnosed at age 21 with motor neurone disease. He was given two years to live and became profoundly depressed.

It’s highly unlikely that even in those circumstances a man of Hawking’s spirit and character would have opted for it, but under the terms of David Seymour’s depressing, defeatist Assisted Suicide bill he’d have been a dead cert to qualify for euthanasia.

What great potential, achievements and inspiring triumphs of the human spirit will be lost to our nation if we decide to legalise assisted suicide?

Think about it.

I CAN'T WORK THIS OUT (Letter to Dom Post, March 14)

Teens who attend a Labour camp being more likely than most to have a victim mentality, (Labour gets it all wrong, March 14) Labour’s “victim-led” approach might have got it all right.

No. The Dominion Post is right to assert that “16 year-olds are in the eyes of many, still children” and “adults should have acknowledged their duty of care and informed the parents”.

But wait on. I can’t work this out.

A man puts his hand down a teen’s pants and it creates a furore because the Labour Party tried to hush it up.

But when a doctor ends the life of a teen’s unborn baby we're all okay with that, because the State says it's none of our business, and even her parents have no right to know.

Please explain?

WHAT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING?

"So," Father asked a class of 7 year-olds or so the other day at Mass, "what's THE MOST IMPORTANT THING?"

We'd just heard the Gospel in which Jesus repeats the First and Second Commandments given to Israel in the Old Testament - the First, to love God with all our heart, all our soul and all our might; and the Second, to love one another. And although they'd heard the children's version of the Gospel (has that ever been canonically approved?) Father sat down and put those commandments another way. A really different way.

He asked the children, "So what's THE MOST IMPORTANT THING?" The children didn't know.

"LOVE ONE ANOTHER!" said Father.

And then he went on to say how hard that is to do. When someone calls you names, or gets you in trouble with the teacher, or leaves you out of their games. But that being friends with one another was still THE MOST IMPORTANT THING.

I badly wanted to ask Father, "So why is that the second Commandment, and not the First?"

This pernicious idea, the elevation of fraternal love over filial love, has permeated Catholicism for far too long. It's the idea behind Father facing the congregation at Mass instead of facing God on the altar. It's behind the tuneless, wishy-washy 'songs' about serving one another that we get to sing. It's behind the sidelining of the Blessed Sacrament, so that in church we don't have God getting in the way of catching up with one another. It's behind the whole 'Church of Nice' in which we never ever tell anyone they're doing anything wrong in case we hurt their feelings.

Father was right to say how hard it is to love one another. In fact it's impossible - unless we first love God. If we don't love God, we don't know what love really is.

It's not being nice to people, it's not giving to Caritas, it's not even going to Mass on Sunday, unless we do those things for the right reason - which is to give glory to God. And we won't want to give glory to God unless we love Him,  and get to know how He loves us - by keeping His commandments.

In the right order. Loving Him FIRST. Because He loved us FIRST.

ANGLICANS AND "THE WORD OF THEIR god" (Letter to Dom Post, March 7)

The way Anglicans can meet “potentially uncomfortable challenges” (Church has a big call to make, March 6), including same-sex marriage, is actually to teach “the word of their god” as the Dominion Post insultingly puts it.

Traditional Churches in New Zealand - including Catholic - have committed to the pervasive cult of niceness.

If they dared say gays are not ‘born that way’, that there’s no such thing as “gender fluidity” or that abortion is murder, they’d be pilloried in the press for hate speech and Christians who’ve fallen for modern mores (“progressives”) would accuse Christians who say such things (“tradionalists”) as uncharitable.

But true charity always speaks the truth, and the truth never changes.

If traditional Churches abandoned their career in New Zealand as the Churches of Nice and fearlessly preached the Gospel, they’d find their pews filling up once more with people who in their hearts long for that truth which is permanently ‘relevant’.

THE DOMINION POST WRITES ME A LETTER

Get this: the Dominion Post has sent ME a letter. First time ever!

It's their response to my latest letter on euthanasia (see below), which they declined to publish. Instead they ran an anodyne letter which made no mention of their glaring mistake, and emailed me an explanation so weak it could hardly stagger onto my screen.

THE ARTICLE , said the Dom Post, WAS WRITTEN FOR A FEB 17 DEADLINE BUT HAD TO BE HELD OVER BECAUSE OF THE SUSAN AUSTEN TRIAL. WE WERE 'CAUGHT OUT' BY THE EXTENSION TO THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS.

What was their sub-editor doing? Her fingernails?

By publishing a euthanasia article on Saturday March 3 which stated the deadline for submissions was Feb 20, theoretically the Dom Post could have forestalled a tsunami of last-minute submissions either for or against, which theoretically could have swayed MPs’ decisions, which theoretically could be the subject of a complaint to the Press Council – which theoretically could have inspired the Dom Post’s unprecedented email to me.

Please note that they offered no apology!

Here's the letter they declined to print:

It’s beyond unfortunate, it’s irresponsible for the Dominion Post to say (The end of days, March 3) that submissions on Act’s Lone Ranger David Seymour’s assisted suicide bill closed on February 20.

People can make submissions until midnight, Tuesday March 6. Do try to keep up!

It’s unfortunate also that you don’t mention the countries where assisted suicide is illegal and likely to remain so - like the UK, like Ireland, Italy, France;  43 of the States of America, and all the Australian states except Victoria and the Northern Territories.

Contrary to the whole tone of your article, especially the sidebar, euthanasia is absolutely not sweeping the world.

Maybe because many people still remember the euthanasia programme for the mentally and physically disabled, both adults and children, which expanded to include bombing victims, geriatric patients and foreign forced labour, in Nazi Germany in World War II.

RUBBER-STAMPING ASSISTED SUICIDE (Letter to Dom Post, March 2)

To get real about doctors’ judgments in relation to ‘assisted dying’ (a dishonest euphemism for assisted suicide), Ann David (Letters, March 2) needs only look at the judgments doctors make about abortions.

Recent research shows abortion is associated with small to moderate increases in anxiety, alcohol misuse, illicit drug use and suicidal behaviours, but consultants are still ticking off  90% of abortions on psychiatric grounds.

An obstetrician/gynaecologist of my acquaintance tells me that in Dunedin during his time at Otago University, everyone knew that abortions were rubber-stamped.

It’s beyond naive to think the same wouldn’t happen with legalised euthanasia. Specially not with the complication of impatient rellies looking over the doctor’s shoulder.