GREAT NATIONS START BY ENSURING ACCESS TO LIFE ITSELF (Letter to Dom Post, July 16)

When Paul McDonald of Massey University (July 15) says ‘great nations and nation builders start by ensuring every resident has access to basic necessities of life’, he gets it nearly right. To be exactly right he needs to say great nations start by ensuring access to life itself, especially for residents of the nation’s wombs.

WHEN DOES A 'FETUS' MORPH INTO AN 'UNBORN NEPHEW? (Letter to the Dom Post, July 17)

Reading Man guilty of crash that killed unborn nephew (July 17), I wondered what is the defining moment when a fetus, which can legally be killed right up to full term by abortion and go supposedly unnoticed except as a statistic, morphs into an ‘unborn nephew’ whose loss is rightly mourned.

SQUARING LUCAN'S LOVE FOR HIS HAIR WITH HIS LOVE FOR HIS SCHOOL (Letter published in the Dom Post, July 15)

You have to wonder how Lucan Battison (School must cough up $24,000 for hair bill, July 11) squares the cost of his hairdo – actually apparently more like $32,000 - with the love he professes for his school. Or with the love he professes for his faith, which in essence instructs him to put the interests of his classmates before his own.

LUCAN WILL LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LAW AND JUSTICE (Letter to Dom Post, June 28)

So Lucan Battison (No school ball, no footy for Lucan, June 28) didn’t break the law. What he’s learned is, disobedience and disrespect for his classmates is all right with the world. When he eventually learns it’s not all right with God, he’ll realise the difference between the law and justice.

CATHOLICS DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY DON'T KNOW (First published in 'NZ Catholic', July 7)

Our home has been graced with the presence of Our Lady of the Place, who from her niche under a bay tree keeps watch over our front door. Perched on a broken culvert pipe salvaged from the farm, she was blessed recently by Fr Paul Gurr, O Carm.

It was a misty moisty morning. Father Paul’s brown cassock echoed the habit of an eremitical nun, a friend and advisor to us lay Carmelites who stood by with the Moderator for Australasia, ‘im indoors (outdoors for once) and my pious poodle Bosy. We gave her the title chosen by the first Carmelites and Father Paul, an Australian singer of note, pleasured her by ‘silencing all the songbirds’ with a song by Handel.

I’d found her by climbing a ladder through cobwebs and a trapdoor into the belfry of our church. As ‘Queen of Heaven’ she once upon a time on  Sundays presided over us convent girls on Our Lady’s side (as opposed to boys on the Sacred Heart side) with the Sisters of St Joseph of Nazareth right behind, within prodding distance. She’d been sent to the belfry in the  ‘70s, when the tabernacle was demoted to her place on the sanctuary sidelines.

On Monday mornings we kids acquired a taste for schadenfreude as occasionally an unfortunate was stood up in class and asked, why weren’t you at Mass yesterday? I was never thus - my parents were always there, several pews back, once a month separated like their children behind banners proclaiming the Holy Name Society and the Catholic Women’s League (the latter, broadly speaking, wives of the former).

At Communion time none of us kids stayed in the pews. We’d been baptised practically at birth and dragooned, some would now say, into First Holy Communion at age seven. Two of us were young for our class and had to wait six months to be served a special breakfast afterwards on our own by the nuns in the convent parlour: boiled eggs.

Since then two generations have grown up and largely gone. Now we must welcome into our schools the non-baptised children of parents who haven’t been sufficiently educated in the faith, the primary reason being that prayer is insufficiently taught and known. Knowledge being a gift of the Holy Spirit received in baptism, we now don’t know what we don’t know. See what a bind we’re in?

I’m currently reading Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, named for a painting of Mary in Germany which Francis ‘in exile’ had copied and took back to Argentina. There on the monthly anniversary of her installation thousands of pilgrims now revere her as the Mother who can solve our knottiest problems.

It seems to me that teachers, parents and children need to put prayer first and in prayer, under any title Mary is our paradigm. ‘Thou art careful and art troubled about many things: but one thing is necessary’ (Lk 10: 41, 42).

No one knows better than Mary what Jesus meant. Prayer.

 

IF THE MEN LEFT ALONE FOR 15 MINUTES HAD BEEN CHRISTIANS (Letter published in Dom Post, July 9)

If the men left alone for fifteen minutes had been Christians (Shocking truth about the male mind, July 6), they’d have been delighted with the opportunity to pray.

AS A COLLECTION OF INDIVIDUALS WE'RE CALLED COMMUNITY (Letter to Dom Post, July 3)

‘No harm being an individual’, says Rosemary McLeod (July 3). Of course not - but as a collection of individuals we’re called community, and our community is broadly based on a set of rules (the Ten Commandments) which teaches the individual to put others’ interests before their own. And the further these ‘rules’ recede from our national consciousness, the more violent and high-maintenance our community becomes.