Sir, – Eighty years ago this month The Irish Times (June 27th, 1932) reported “a special excursion train leaving Ballymena after midnight carrying 300 pilgrims to the Dublin Eucharistic Congress for Sunday’s final celebrations, was attacked by a mob of hooligans at the station”.
This past week Ballymena elected its first Catholic nationalist Mayor PJ McAvoy and we Methodists selected (not elected) our first ever woman as president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, Dr Heather Morris. What progress. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – While there was a good feeling of community present at the recent Eucharistic Congress, the chasm between the lay faithful and the higher ecclesiastical clerics has intensified rather than lessened over the past 30 years.
In spite of lay men having played significant roles even in ecumenical councils and women as abbesses having had jurisdiction in governing dioceses well into the 19th century, canon law 129, promulgated just 20 years after the reform-orientated second Vatican Council in 1983, allows only clerics to exercise the “power of governance” in the Catholic church.
Unless there is a reform of canon law to allow lay people, especially women to shoulder their rightful role as baptised people with co-responsibility with bishops for the governance of our church, the emotional feel-good factor that occurred at the Congress will quickly fade into oblivion as a further consolidation of Vatican absolutism will continue unabated. – Yours, etc,