Peter Costello
I am infinitely loved: A month of meditations
by Brian Grogan S.J. (Messenger Publications, €4.95)
The title of this little pamphlet is taken from a remark by Pope Francis: “When all is said and done, we are infinitely loved.” Brian Grogan reapplies this to draw out in a month’s course of meditations the idea that each individual reader is infinitely loved.
The book is arranged with a meditation facing a quote from a prayer and a quote from the scriptures, with in-between a space of the reader’s own name. So rather than those broad generalities that so often make up books of this kind, the message of love and attachment is focused on you yourself.
This makes for a very involving text which many will benefit from, perhaps in unexpected ways. But that, too, is the author’s intention. He suggests that a relationship with both God and those around us is an ongoing, changing, explorative affair. This is a quiet little book, which readers having personalized it, will come to cherish in a quiet fashion too.
Liturgies for Young People
edited by Donal Neary S. J., with a foreword by Archbishop Eamon Martin (Messenger Publications, €14.95)
We have all had the experience: of looking round the congregation at a Sunday Mass. There are older people, the mature middle aged we might call them, and there are young parents with their couple of small children. But where, one asks oneself are the teenagers, the university students, and the people in their first jobs: nowhere to be seen. Every pastor is conscious of this black hole.
In this manual Fr Neary provides a set of liturgies arranged around the school year to which have been added others out of season so to speak for crucial events of one kind or another. The aim is to provide services which will engage that youthful cohort, and hopes to leave them with a permanent benefit, so that when in due course they have their children, the grandchildren of the mature, they will find a place once more in the pews.
That at least is the hope. But one wonders if the structure of school and Church, where in a sense the young are captive, fully answers the need. The apostles after all did not linger over long in the porch of the Temple; they travelled around, and they stood up in the agora with all the competing streams of opinion and commerce. But as Archbishop Eamon Martin points out in his brief foreword these suggested liturgies can be adapted as well to many other occasions of life beyond school and Church.
Good Seed, Fertile Soil. Religious Vocations in Limerick. A Biographical Dictionary, Volume 2: South County and City of Limerick
by J. M. Feheney (Iverus Publications, Mardyke House, Cork T12 W8RP, €20.00)
The author is a Presentation Brother, and this is very much a local author’s work of love for the past of Limerick Diocese, with brief biographies of the priests and nuns who have worked there. It will prove of immense value to readers of all kinds, but reminds us all of the real achievements of a past that has gone by.
