The Church in Ireland
I've been in the beautiful, wild, West of Ireland for ten days with my family. I love it here, it is home to me, a place that has constantly been a part of my life no matter where I have been or lived in England. Mayo has always been home, where the family are, where the familiar places are. I often wonder, and am often asked if I could live here. I dream about it all the time, but one of the real problems I would have would be the Church here. The liturgy is poor, the people seem spiritually starved. The Mass is often dreadful, occasionally bearable. There is no sense of reverence or sacredness, the best you can hope for is an enthusiastic or genial delivery of the canon of the Mass; the responses are rushed and formulaic. Yet Ireland IS Catholic. I went to Mass last Sunday and there were literally thousands of people in St. Mary's Church, Westport . Thousands! It's awesome! Irish people ARE Catholic—it's in their nature, their bones, it oozes out of their p...