We are gradually moving towards a totalitarian approach to government where our freedom is slowly being stripped away from us, writes Fr Seán Mulligan
It’s a short Gospel today with a very powerful message: the great commandment of love. First of all, love of God and, secondly, love of neighbour.
We read that one of the scribes puts a question to Jesus. He asks him: “Master, which is the greatest commandment of the law?” The Jews followed strict observance to a series of commandments laid out in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible. In fact, there are 613 laws listed in the Torah, including the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments.
But Jesus doesn’t list any of these in his answer. Instead, he responds by reciting the Shema, which is a prayer from Chapter Six of the Book of Deuteronomy, which devout Jews recited several times each day. It was a kind of creed for them, the defining belief that must never be forgotten. “Shema, Yisrael. Listen, O Israel. The Lord, our God, is one Lord. You must love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Then Jesus adds an additional commandment – “you must love your neighbour as yourself” – which he takes from Chapter 19 of the Book of Leviticus. He says that on these two commandments hang the whole law.
So Jesus is clearly stating that all law, human and divine, must be centred on these two great commandments: first of all, love of God and, secondly, love of neighbour. If we neglect the first and greatest of these commandments, namely love of God, then all subsequent laws are open to error because they’re not founded on the source of all truth and love, namely Jesus Christ.
Relevant
That’s what’s happening in our world today. God is no longer seen as relevant and is increasingly being eliminated from civilisation with the end result of immoral and unjust laws in our society. We are gradually moving towards a totalitarian approach to government where our freedom is slowly being stripped away from us, our freedom to travel, to come and go as we please, our freedom to come together as a family with friends in our own home, our freedom to peaceful protest and even our freedom to practice our Faith in public.
So what has happened to Catholic Ireland? If we look at the preamble to the 1937 Constitution, which states as follows: “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from whom is all authority and to whom as our final end, all actions, both of man and states, must be referred, we, the people of Éire, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our divine Lord, Jesus Christ, who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial, gratefully remembering the heroic and unremitting struggle to regain the rightful independence of our nation and seeking to promote the common good with due observance of prudence, justice and charity, so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured, true social order attained, the unity of our country restored and concord established with other nations, do hereby adopt, enact and give to ourselves this Constitution.”
In Article 44 of that same Constitution, we read: “The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to almighty God. It shall hold His name in reverence and shall respect and honour religion.”
So what has happened to our country in the intervening 80-plus years since that constitution was promulgated? A constitution fou-nded on and written in the blood of countless Irish men, women and children who gave their lives for freedom from tyranny and religious persecution.
We now face a new type of tyranny and persecution from within, whereby the Irish people are being denied their constitutional right to practice their Faith in public. As of Friday, a priest can be jailed for celebrating the Mass in public for the first time since the repeal of the penal laws in 1829. That was during a time of persecution under British rule. Today it’s our own Government who are orchestrating this attack on our Faith and on our right to practice it in public.
At a time when hairdressers were still open to the public, our Government decided to close our churches to public worship”
But unless the Government is planning and holding a referendum to remove Article 44 from our Constitution, then nothing has changed, and what the Government are imposing on us as Christians is a violation of our Constitutional rights.
When Ireland moved to level three a few weeks ago, we became the only country in Europe where public worship was prohibited as part of the Government’s Covid-19 restrictions. No other country in Europe at that time was adopting this extreme measure of denying the people their right to practice their Faith in public, or preventing us in our duty to give public worship to Almighty God.
Since then, only Wales in recent years has followed suit by taking the decision to close their churches for a two-week period in what they refer to as a firebreak.
The Church went way beyond what was basically required in an effort to ensure the safety of parishioners with the result that there was no evidence of any cases of Covid-19 linked to attending Mass. The Church was the safest place you could be outside of your own home, and what happened? The Government closed down our churches anyway. At a time when hairdressers and beauty salons were still open to the public, our Government decided to close our churches to public worship.
Then, as you know, on Wednesday night, we moved to level five, and so we’re now faced with another six weeks of the Faithful being denied the sacraments of the Church, at the end of which there’s a possibility of a return to level three, which in theory means our churches will still be closed for public worship.
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There’s something gravely wrong with a society where God is not seen as essential but off-licenses and abortion clinics are, or where a hundred people can freely mix and walk through a supermarket, but parishioners cannot sit two meters apart in a church and participate in the holy sacrifice of the Mass.
We now live in the most anti-Christian, atheistic country in Europe. The land of saints and scholars is long since gone and has been replaced with the land of apostates and unbelievers. When do you ever hear our political leaders speak of God? Never. God is a forbidden subject, a name only to be spoken within the confines of a church building or in the privacy of your own home. He’s certainly not welcome in the chambers of Dáil Éireann.
But Jesus says: “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my father who is in heaven.” We must not allow what’s happening in our country to alter our relationship with God. We must listen to the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel and place God first in our lives.
Follower
Love is always self-giving, never self-seeking. So if we truly love God, then we must give our whole lives to him without expecting anything in return. For those who love God, Jesus doesn’t say we never have to suffer in this life. In fact, he says that if we want to be a follower of his, we must pick up our cross every day and follow him.
But if we follow these two simple commandments of love, if we do that, no matter what cross we have to carry in this life, whether it be the cross of illness or suffering or rejection and persecution or any other cross, we’ll always experience a true peace, which can only come from knowing and loving God.
Fr Seán Mulligan is a priest of Carrickmacross parish in the diocese of Clogher.