Going on retreat

I'm off to Cebu tonight for the national board meeting of Worldwide Marriage Encounter, which runs from tomorrow morning until early Sunday afternoon. Then I'll head for the retreat house of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary for a retreat that will end early on Saturday morning, 25 July, before flying back to Bacolod. It takes 25 to 30 minutes to fly between the two cities.

Please keep me in your prayers.

Confession and the Year for Priests

When I was growing up in Ireland in the 1950s jokes about confession were part of the staple not only of professional comedians but of Redemptorists, Passionists, Jesuits and other groups who gave parish missions or retreat every year during Lent. There used to be a week for women and a week for men. Every weekday night there would be Rosary, sermon and Benediction. The churches were usually filled for morning Mass - there were no afternoon Masses then. The priests were available for long hours for those who wished to go to confession.

There were inevitably some who had been away from confession for years. When the priest told a joke about the sacrament it was both an expression of a shared faith and fear or nervousness and also a way of touching the hearts of those who were hesitant.

A friend of mine, whom I'll call 'B', sent me the joke below recently. I hadn't heard it before and it made me laugh out loud. 'B' is 100 percent Irish-American and his wife 'G' 100 percent Italian-American. The family has suffered in many ways over the years and 'G' has very bad Ms (multiple sclerosis). Please remember them both in your prayers.

A Catholic guy goes into the confessional box. He notices on one wall a fully equipped bar with Guinness on tap. On the other wall is a dazzling array of the finest Cuban cigars.Then the priest comes in. ‘Father, forgive me, for it's been a very long time since I've been to confession, but I must first admit that the confessional box is much more inviting these days.’

‘Get out’, the priest replies. ‘You're on my side.’

Here is a short article I wrote on the Year for Priests for a newsletter of Worldwide Marriage Encounter in the Philippines. I focused on the sacrament of confession, which Pope Benedict emphasised in his letter proclaiming the year, which was prompted by the 150th death anniversary of the death of St John Mary Vianney, who spent so many hours in the confessional.

Confession and the Year for Priests

On Saturday night, June 27, during the (Worldwide Marriage Encounter) weekend in Cebu, I spent about 50 minutes in the confessional. I think that two came for confession. When I went to join the team meeting it was over and so I went to bed. I had just switched off the light when one of the team knocked on the door and told me that someone wanted to go to confession.

I’m afraid that I went beyond thinking that feelings are neither right nor wrong and didn’t make the right choice in expressing myself. (In WWME we emphasise that feelings in themselves are neither right nor wrong). However, I dressed and headed for the chapel. On the way I met the person who had knocked on the door and apologized for my words. Very graciously he accepted them and told me that he had informed the participants that I was very tired. However, I arranged to be available for confession for a short while after lunch on Sunday, the only possible time, and nearly everyone came.

Pope Benedict in his proclamation of a Year for Priest on the occasion of the 150th death anniversary of St John Mary Vianney, drew attention, among other things, to the saint’s devotion to the sacrament of reconciliation, spending many hours in the confessional. Another saint with a similar devotion was St Pio of Pietrelcina, better known as ‘Padre Pio’. In both cases people came from distant places to confess their sins to these holy priests. I knew three Columban priests who, in their latter years, spent hours in the confessional almost every weekday in St Augustine’s Cathedral, Cagayan de Oro, Fr James Moynihan from New Zealand, Fr Frank Chapman from Australia and Fr John Meaney from Ireland, all now gone to their reward. They were always busy in the “box”, with penitents coming from as far away as Bohol. The word had gone out, as it had from Ars and from San Giovanni Rotondo, where Padre Pio spent most of his life as a priest.

Pope Benedict, acknowledged to be one of the greatest intellects of our time, quotes St John Mary Vianney, who barely managed to get through his studies: “And if this soul should happen to die [as a result of sin], who will raise it up, who will restore its calm and peace? Again, the priest . . . After God, the priest is everything.”

The Pope wrote, “The Curé of Ars was very humble, yet as a priest he was conscious of being an immense gift to his people: ‘A good shepherd, a pastor after God’s heart, is the greatest treasure which the good Lord can grant to a parish, and one of the most precious gifts of divine mercy’”.

I still haven’t figured out what the best time for confession is on the weekend. I seldom now make myself available on Friday night, sometimes because we start too late but also because couples haven’t really got into the weekend yet. On Saturday night it is quite impossible to be present at the team meeting and in the confessional at the same time. But the meeting can go ahead without the priest.

I also emphasize that confession on the weekend is neither a substitute for dialogue nor a time for counseling, but a moment to acknowledge our own sins – not those of our spouse! – and to ask God’s forgiveness. I recall one occasion as a child when my Uncle Mick, a brother of my mother, said to my lola as she announced that she was going to confessions: “Don’t be telling the family history, mother!” There are times when it is appropriate to ask for advice when we confess but I think that on the weekend it is best to focus simply on confessing our sins as honestly as we can and receiving God’s forgiveness through the priest.

Though I didn’t feel like or behave as a good shepherd on the Saturday night in Cebu, I recognized God’s call in the knock on the door and I thank God that, despite my negative reaction at the time, more availed of the grace of the sacrament the following day than is usual on a weekend.

Marriage: the Heart of the Church

Fr Chuck Gallagher SJ developed Worldwide Marriage Encounter in New York 40 years ago from the Marriage Encounter started by Spanish priest, Fr Gabriel Calvo. Last Friday Father Gallagher underwent serious surgery in New York City. Please pray for his full recovery.

Here is an article he wrote on the sacrament of Matrimony which, with the sacrament of Holy Orders, is emphasised in the Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend. I have highlighted some parts and made some (comments).

HEART OF THE CHURCH

By Fr Chuck Gallagher SJ

The secret of the success of any parish is the quality of the love our husbands and wives have for one another and their children. Their love is the foundation on which the Lord Jesus builds the Body of Christ. This is why Jesus made Marriage in the Church one of the only ways in which hemakes himself visibly present to his Chosen Ones, the people of God.

When Catholics are asked what makes us different from other religions, the answers are likely to be along the lines of the Pope, Mary and the Mass. All make sense. But you never hear mentioned as a significant mark of what it means to be a Catholic is that we treasure our couples as a sacrament - that their devotion and commitment to one another is an essential and unique element of our very identity as Catholics. We would not be who we are as Catholics without our Sacramental Couples.

Sometimes we think that the prime reason that the Church declares that marriage is a Sacrament is to help the husband and wife through the ups and downs of their life together. Without doubt, there are powerful graces that the couple receives through their Sacrament that empower them to accomplish the love to which they have pledged themselves. But Matrimony, like all other sacraments, is not solely or even primarily for the welfare of the individual recipient. All Sacraments are focused on the grace-filled growth and empowerment of the whole Body of Christ.

There are two special prophetic roles that the Sacrament of Matrimony calls our husbands and wives to fulfill for the sake of the whole Community of the faithful. Married couples have the awesome mission of revealing the inner nature of the Trinity to us. As St John reminds us, ‘God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.’ There are two types of love -the love of benevolence (doing good thing for others) and the love of intimacy (belonging to one another). Divine love is the love of intimacy. Father, Son and Holy Spirit don't need anything so they don't need the love of benevolence toward one another. They are one with one another by making themselves completely present to one another.

Husbands and wives, because they are human, practice the love of benevolence but the essence of their marriage is their intimacy, their making themselves permanently present to one another. Marital love is the closest thing we have in human terms of divine love. No other human love, no matter how powerful and good compares with the total presence that loving Sacramental couples can achieve with one another. They model to all of us in the Church the very inner being of God. (Fr Gallagher is emphasising that the basic vocation of a married couple is to be husband and wife. Being parents is a consequence of this.)

So we, the people of God, need our couples to love each other tenderly, passionately and completely not just because it is good for their well being and happiness but so that we can have a taste of how Father, Son and Holy Spirit love one another. Sacramental couples are prophets in the Church revealing the mystery of the Trinity.

Secondly, St Paul tells us that then Sacrament of Matrimony is a mystery. ‘Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church. In the same way husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies, for a man never hates his own body but feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because it is his body - and we are its living parts. For this reason a man must leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife,and the two shall become one body.’

What an awesome responsibility Jesus has placed upon the shoulders of our Sacramental couples. Our husbands and wives are to show all of us in the Body of Christ how Jesus loves us by the way they love one another. Sometimes couples, even great couples with a grand love for one another, believe they are ordinary.

Our Lord himself has granted to then the mission to reveal to the people of God their essential nature. Just as a husband reveals to his wife who he is by the quality of his love for her so too we are who we are as a Church because we are the beloved of Jesus. It is not what we do that makes us Catholic. We don't make ourselves Catholic; Jesus does. He has chosen us. A man does not become a husband because he does married things. It is his wife who makes who makes him a husband by choosing him as her own. (and vice versa!)

The home is known as the Domestic Church. So every Catholic family is a vibrant source of love and grace. As a matter of fact, the quality of life in the big church is more dependent on the success of the little churches than on any other single factor. When husbands and wives give themselves completely to one another and are devoted to one another, then the Gospel lessons of generosity, self-sacrifice and openness to God's presence in our lives become meaningful andacceptable. When couples fail with one another, Sunday becomes a ritual to be done rather than a revelation and empowerment.

What a glorious vocation the Sacrament of Matrimony is!

Couples in the Church are the prime witnesses and prophets of two of the core mysteries of our faith - the Trinity and the very identity of the Church itself. The first Sacramental life that our children experience is that of the Sacrament of Matrimony. It is through that experience that they are led to all the other sacraments. It is the primary catechist. In a real sense we can call the sacrament of matrimony the foundation Sacrament. (This is a point I hadn't reflected on before. Most children, of course, are baptised when infants but what they experience in the years until their First Holy Communion is the sacrament of matrimony of their parents. Whether that is a good or bad experience depends on how the parents accept, as husband and wife, the graces of the sacrament of matrimony). It is the responsibility of all of us in the church to treasure our couples, to revere and honor them. Without them we would not be the Catholic Church just as we would not be Catholic without our priests.

Martyrs of China

Today the Church honours 120 martyrs of China who died for the faith in persecutions between 1648 and 1930 . Pope John Paul II canonized them on 1 October 2000. St Augustine Zhao Rong, whose name heads the group, was a diocesan priest who had been a soldier. The brief biographical note at the canonization reads: Blessed Augustine Zhao Rong, a Chinese diocesan priest. Having first been one of the soldiers who had escorted Monsignor Dufresse from Chengdu to Beijing, he was moved by his patience and had then asked to be numbered among the neophytes. Once baptised, he was sent to the seminary and then ordained a priest. Arrested, he had to suffer the most cruel tortures and then died in 1815.

Among those martyred in July 1900 during the ‘Boxer’ Uprising was St Anna Wang, 14. Her father and stepmother both apostatized, though Anna had pleaded with them not to. The ‘Boxers’ tried everything possible to dissuade Anna but in the end they beheaded her. Fr Francis X. Clark SJ in his book Asian Saints says that ‘witnesses reported that, even after her head had fallen, she kept in the same kneeling position until one of the guards pushed her to the floor’. Anna’s stepmother repented and became a fervent Catholic.

I came across a homily given by Deacon Greg Kandra of the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York, on this feast last year. It’s on his blog, The Deacon’s Bench. He highlights the fact that these 120 persons were individuals, 87 of them Chinese, 33 European missionaries. He drew the attention of the congregation to a number by U2, Where the Streets Have No Name at a Super Bowl in New Orleans on February 3 2002, a few months after the September 11 killings in the USA. The names of the victims were highlighted.

On 11 May this year at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem Pope Benedict focused on the fact that every victim of the Holocaust had a name.

The phenomenon of martyrs down through the ages since the time of St Stephen is, for me, one of the greatest proofs that Jesus the Risen Lord is with his people. And when you read about the witness of St Anna Wang you see how we often despise the young people of today by expecting so little from them and encouraging them to turn away from any kind of sacrifice in their lives, from following Jesus.

Please pray for the Catholics of China who are still going through a very difficult time, in some areas more than in others. And pray that the efforts of Pope John Paul II and of Pope Benedict XVI to reach out to the Chinese authorities will bear fruit.

Misyononline offline (temporarily)

We uploaded the July-August Misyon on the first of this month. Yesterday afternoon we suddenly went offline. I've been in contact with the people we pay to pay the server. The fault is with the latter but I hope we'll be back as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, you can access most of the material from the current issue here, thanks to Joy Rile, my editorial assistant.

When I was doing mission appeals in the Archdiocese of Westminster and the Diocese of Nottingham in England during the summer of 2005, I think, I saw the young Filipino seaman in the photo above on the posters of the Apostleship of the Sea. They were having their annual fundraising at the same time. His name, as I recall, is Vicente.

In a parish in London I mentioned the poster and seafarers in a homily. After Mass a young member of the Royal Navy, who was from the West Indies, if my memory serves me right, thanked me for speaking about those who work at sea.

St Maria Teresa Goretti

I remember when I was seven my mother bringing me to the Capuchin church, Our Lady of the Angels, in Church St, Dublin, way back in 1950. It was the day that St Maria Goretti was canonised. In those days there were no afternoon or evening Masses, so the ceremony, as I recall it, ended with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. But what I remember most vividly, because I did not appreicate it at the time, was the recitation of the 15 mysteries of the rosary, the first time I had experienced that. Now there are 20, with the addition of the Mysteries of Light.

There were two extraordinary things about the canonisation of Maria. One was the presence of her mother, the first time this had ever happened at such a ceremony. The other was the presence of Alessandro Serenelli, the man who had tried to rape her and who then murdered her. He repented some years after the incident and asked for and received the forgiveness of Maria's mother. In his latter years he was a member of the Capuchin Third Order and lived with a community of friars. He died in 1970.

I have many friends who have found themselves in a situation similar to that of Maria Teresa, to give her her two baptismal names. She was born on 16 October 1890 and died on 6 July 1902. So she was a few months short of 12. Despite her lack of formal education she was well formed in the Catholic faith at home. Some of my young friends who have been violated, some of them small children, have had very little schooling.

In June 2007 a 13-year-old namesake of the saint, Maria Teresa Medrano, was raped and murdered in Bago City, just south of Bacolod City where I live. A few weeks later Mary Joy Mayo, 16, was brutally raped and slain in Talisay City, just north of Bacolod.

My Columban colleague in Olongapo City, Fr Shay Cullen, is dealing with situations like this all the time.

Today's gospel happened to be St Matthew's account of the cure of the woman with the haemorrhage and the raising from the dead of the 12-year-old daughter of Jairus. (I much prefer St Mark's far more vivid account which we had two Sundays ago). One of the characteristics of Jesus was that he gave importance to children in a society where they were 'seen and not heard'. I often heard when I was young that 'children should be seen and not heard', something I have never fully accepted. Indeed, one of the most gratifying things I was told by a friend of mine, now with her own large family, who told me when she was a young woman that she always appreciated the fact that when she was a child I took her seriously.

It is striking that God often chooses young people who are poor to remind us of his love for us. St Bernadette of Lourdes is a prime example, and the three children in Fatima.


There is a desperate need today to emphasise the importance of chastity and purity. These are virtues that are mocked and undermined, especially in Western societies. They are virtues that people have always had to struggle with but were recognised before, at least in Christian societies, as desirable. Today they are not. I believe that this has increased the level of unhappiness and violence in the world. The number of abortions, both legal and illegal, has soared. And when deaths related to pregnancy are cited there is usually no inclusion of the children who have been killed. The number of marriages and families breaking up has soared.

Yesterday I came across the website of Pure in Heart, 'an Irish youth community dedicated to living the true beauty of sexuality'. Thanks to Father Gerard Dunne OP for the link on his Irish Dominican Vocations. Young people are attracted to what is good, not to what is bad. They may be seduced by the latter but what touches their hearts and their idealism is what is from God. Pope John Paul II recognised that on the centennial of the death of the saint. And it's not only young people. One of the most awful aspects of the abuse of children by adults, especially priests and religious, is the destruction of trust, the destruction of innocence.

May St Maria Teresa Goretti - it has just struck me now that she must have been given the name 'Teresa' because she was born the day after the feast of the great Carmelite saint of Avila - obtain for our young people, boys and girls, the grace of a deep appreciation of who they are and of the importance of self-respect and of respect for others.

25th Anniversary of 'Negros Nine'

Today is the 25th anniversary of the release of the 'Negros Nine'. The Nine included three priests and six laymen, leaders in their mga Kristianong Katilingban, Basic Christian Communities. They were falsely charged with the murder of Mayor Pablo Sola of Kabankalan, a murder for which the New People’s Army (NPA) announced they were guilty. Father Vicente Dangan, now deceased, was a priest of the Diocese of Bacolod. The area where the Columbans worked at the time is now the Diocese of Kabankalan and it was in St Francis Xavier Cathedral that we had a special Mass yesterday. The main celebrant was Columban Father Brian Gore. Bishop Patrick A. Buzon SDB of Kabankalan presided.

The Negros Nine episode made a household name of Father Brian Gore in his native Australia as it did of the late Fr Niall O’Brien in Ireland. He later became the founding editor of Misyon in 1988. I took over from him in 2002. Father Niall died in 2004.

The July-August issue of Misyon contains a number of articles to mark the occasion. Father Gore tells us how the legacy of the Negros Nine continues in The Negros Nine Live On.


Mrs Nomy Muhal, whose husband Conrado was one of the six laymen, shares her memories of the event in Faith of a Woman. There are photos above and below of Nomy visiting her husband in jail, their eldest daughter Cecille still a toddler. There is also a recent photo of Nomy.

Cecille, one of the two daughters of Conrado and Nomy at the time, recalls her visits to her father in jail when she was a toddler in A ‘Negros Nine Baby’. Cecille acquired two more sisters after her father’s release. Sadly, he never lived to see his four lovely daughters grow up. Cecille, now a nurse, is on the left in the photo below.