What you can do if no one will listen…..

We have all been frustrated at times by injustice that we feel incapable of correcting. Not merely do we feel powerless to challenge the system ourselves but we have no idea how to get anyone to listen to us.

I ran into this system with our local city authorities recently. The city refused to return s deposit I had made to get my utilities hooked up in spite of an admitted agreement to return the deposit after a specified period of prompt payment of my bill. When the time came the city manager was very pleasant, admitted that we had a contract but said the city council had decided not to live up to its

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE COUNCIL - PART I

As a child and teenager growing up in Ireland sixty years ago, Catholicism was a very simple system: you said your prayers, did what you were told to do by the priest in his Sunday sermon and never really questioned it all: the symbols, the liturgy, the “bells and smells”.

But whether it was due to me or to the Church, in the post-World War II era through the 1950’s things began to change. Pope Pius XII, a cautious, conservative survivor of the upheavals and carnage of war, died in 1958. I vaguely remembered his election. This time the election of his successor, a seventy-six year old reputed moderate, Angelo Roncalli, Patriarch of Venice, was seen as a temporary compromise because of his age. His pontificate was to be one of the shortest in recent history, but also one of the most decisive. It put an end to the defensive mentality of the Church since the Reformation and the exaltation of the monarchical Papacy by the Vatican Council of 1870.