Your Excellency,

Dear Brother Bishops & Priests and dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ who collaborate with the Bishops in the Commissions and Agencies of the Conference.

Tradition has it that St. John the Evangelist lived to be a very old man and that he continued to preach into extreme old age.  The only problem was that all his homilies were on the same subject, Sunday after Sunday – Love God and love your neighbour as yourself.  His younger colleagues pleaded with him to vary his theme, to speak on other topics occasionally, any other topic, but he refused saying that all other subjects boiled down in the end to love and without love all our actions, all our efforts are futile.

Pope Benedict XVI worked on his first encyclical during his summer holidays in 2005.  He was 78 years old and he obviously decided to write on the subject closest to his heart and to speak to the world from the experience of a long life. Fr. Michael Paul Gallagher, who had studied Joseph’s Ratzinger’s theology down the years, was not at all surprised that Pope Benedict chose the same topic as the elderly St. John repeated over and over. He took his title from St. John’s First Letter Ch 4.V.16.  Fr. Gallagher was able to quote for us Bishops at our retreat in Knock in February last from an interview which Cardinal Ratzinger gave to the Corriera della Sera, an Italian newspaper, some months before he was elected Pope. The interviewer asked him how he would describe the essence of Christianity. His reply was:

“A love story between God and humanity.  If this could be understood in the language of our time, everything else would follow.  There is a difficulty in accepting Christianity on the existential level.  The current life styles are very different and so an intellectual response is not enough.  We need to provide living spaces of community and ways of growth.  Only through concrete experiences and lived witness is it possible to make the reality of the Christian message accessible to people now…Faith becomes free and adult (born) from a ‘yes’ to the heart to Christ”.

This interview signalled the Holy Father’s priorities, his overall approach, an appeal to the heart rather than to the intellect, his direct simple style and his definition of faith as a “yes to the heart to Christ”, not forgetting examples from the lives of saints and a Roman Emperor –  luckily not a Byzantine one on this occasion!

“God is love and he who lives in love lives in God and God lives in him” Deus Caritas Est… You will appreciate that the English language is not as subtle as the Greek.  Greek has three words for love. Three words for three different kinds of love – eros, philia and agape.  Incidentally, Irish has four words for love - cion, searc, gean and grá.  Eros is romantic or sexual love but Pope Benedict says it is good in itself. It can be an overpowering and intoxicating emotion. It can be painful also.  The Seanchaí, Eamonn Kelly, described how he fell in love the first time with a neighbour’s daughter when they were both seventeen.  His parents found out and forbade him to continue his romance.  So he left home in a huff and went to stay with an old neighbour to whom he explained his “predicament”, a favourite word of the Seanchaí!  “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep and I can’t keep my mind to my work with thinking of my girlfriend, Eileen”, he told him.  The wise old man scratched his head thoughtfully for a long time and gave his verdict in four words: “You have it bad”. 

“Philia” is the second kind of love.  It is friendship.  In the Gospels, philia describes the close relationship between Jesus and his Apostles.  Agape is the highest form of love.  It is used to describe God’s love for us.  Agape is unselfish love, it is love which is willing to make sacrifices, a love which is prepared to suffer.  Pope Benedict describes St. Paul’s hymn to love in 1 Cor.13 as the Magna Carta of ecclesial service. Our Lord’s death on the Cross is agape in its most radical form.  To sum up the three forms of love: eros is all take; philia is give and take while agape is all give.  But eros, when it is not debased and turned into a commodity can be purified and matured into agape. 

The second part of the Encyclical is entitled “The practice of love by the Church as a community of love”.  John tells us “that God loved us first”.   What would you expect him to say next? “You must love for God in return. What he actually says is, “God loved us first, therefore you must love one another”.

Early on in Part II, Pope Benedict says, “Love of neighbours, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful but it is also a responsibility of the entire ecclesial community at every level, from the local community of the particular Church and the Church universal in is entirety”. This is our main concern this evening. “Love like this needs to be organised if it is to be an ordered service to the community”, he says. “The Christian’s programme”, Pope Benedict continues, “takes its spirit from the Good Samaritan. The heart sees where love is needed and acts accordingly”.  The Good Samaritan is at once the example for individual acts of love towards people we meet by chance and represents the spirit which should animate the organised and ordered Church’s outreach to those in need of any kind. 

He comes back to the heart again. “The heart sees where love is needed and acts accordingly”.  Obviously, when charitable activity is carried out by the Church as a communitarian initiative the spontaneity of individuals must be combined with planning, foresight and cooperation with similar institutions.  Those who provide the service must be trained and more importantly they must be given a formation of the heart.

The Holy Father bases his case for the organisation of the Church’s charitable organisation on the accounts of the lay Church in the Acts of the Apostles and in the history of the Church down the centuries to our own time:

“The Church’s deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia) and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia).  These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable.   For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being… The parable of the Good Samaritan remains a standard which imposes universal love towards the needy whom we encounter ‘by chance’”.

The responsibility for the organisation and supervision of the Church’s three-fold organisation falls on the shoulders of the diocesan Bishop.  The Bishops, as successors of the Apostles, are charged with primary responsibility for carrying out in the particular Church the programme set forth in the Acts of the Apostles: today as in the past the Church, God’s family, must be a place where help is given and received (including people outside the confines of the Church).

The Irish Bishops’ Conference brings the Bishops together to combine their resources and energy to carry out the Church’s threefold mission of kerygma (preaching and teaching, leitourgia (liturgy), and diakonia (works of charity). To assist us in our mission, we have your good selves in our Commissions and Agencies.

For example, under kerygma we have the Commissions for Doctrine, Education, Missions, Ecumenism, Catechetics, Clergy/Seminarians/Permanent/Diaconate, Communications, European Affairs, Religious and Bioethics.  For leitourgia we have the Commisions for Liturgy, Pastoral Renewal and Adult Faith Development.  Under diakonia or ministry of charity, we have Child Protection, Emigrants, Migrants, Justice and Social Affairs, Pastoral Care (ACCORD and CURA), TRÓCAIRE for Third World Development and education at home and Healthcare.  Where does Finance and General Purposes fit in?  Under diocania!

Remember the first deacons were given responsibility for purchasing food and distributing material aid to the poor.  Diocania was meant to be material help but given with humanity and coming from the heart.  I don’t know how to categorise Research and Development!  I will conduct an opinion poll at the reception later this evening!  

The deacon’s service was a spiritual one which carried out an essential responsibility of the Church, namely an organised, well-ordered love of neighbour.

Over the centuries, the diaconate gave way to the hospitality of the monasteries, and later again to the work of the religious orders among the poor.  “This love”, Pope Benedict says, “does not offer people only material help but refreshment and care of souls – something which is often more important than material help”. Pope Benedict gives the example of a Roman Emperor – Julian the Apostate in the 4^th Century.   He was hostile to the Church, blaming Constantine for his father’s assassination. When he became Emperor he set out to restore the pagan gods but he also set up structures to replicate the Church’s charitable activities – the reasons why the “Gallileans” as he called them, were so popular. 

He hoped to outdo the Christians in their love for one another.  Lucky for Pope Benedict, Emperor Julian the Apostate does not have a worldwide following!  Of course, without the sacramental life and the prayer life of the Church, his efforts soon faded out. Prayer and the Eucharist have been the source and sustaining power of the great saints from St. Martin of Tours, to St. Francis of Assisi to Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. Prayer and the Eucharist remain the source of the Church’s charitable work today.

I think that our diocesan ministry of charity to the poor at home, to our immigrants and the elderly is our one which needs special attention today.  The stresses of Child Protection have distracted us and taken most of our time/energy.  But, our people generally do not see the poor as a priority.  A survey recently done in one diocese placed the care of the poor at 8^th place in their pastoral priorities!  While we have a surprising number of volunteers in our parishes they are predominately in the kerygma and liturgical area.  A survey of my own parish of Thurles showed that over 1025 or 12.5% are involved in Church activities. There was a similar percentage in Kimmage parish in Dublin and in a Co. Clare parish – 10% plus in each.  Volunteering in Church activities came second only to volunteering in sport which involved 15%. But then the numbers who work in St. Vincent de Paul and Social Services Councils is small, mostly from the older generation and they are declining in numbers for want of younger volunteers.

The increasing number of courses in Theology in our various Colleges and Institutes include very few courses on the Social Teaching of the Church.  The Compendium of the Church’s Social Teaching needs to reach a wider readership and to be available to study groups.  Does anyone remember Canon Hayes and Muintir na Tíre of the 1940’s and 1950’s?  He inspired the imagination of the young people and Canon Hayes was the ideal of priesthood shared by many seminarians in the 1940’s and 50’s. He could lay claim to being the Priest of the twentieth century.

When we plan for the Permanent Diaconate we tend to list the functions which the deacon can exercise. We think mostly of liturgy and preaching and teaching.  We rarely think of the primary function of the seven original deacons! There is a real danger that the Permanent Diaconate will be squeezed out between concern with undermining the identity of the priest on one hand and lay worries about a new form of clericalism on the other.  The purpose of the Diaconate is not to fill in for absent priests or to do as much as possible of what the priest normally does.  The Deacon’s distinctive ministry is rooted in his being a sacramental sign of Christ, the Servant, who washed the feet of his Apostles before the Last Supper.

Pope Benedict covered all the bases, as we say, in his two-part, sixty-two page Encyclical on the love of God and the love of neighbour.  He used six Greek words to great effect, eros, philia, agapae, kerygma, leitourgia and diakonia.   I will end with a story I heard about an elderly couple on the borders of county Tipperary-Limerick – Densie and Josie.  One evening, Josie said to Densie: “Densie, you never tell me you love me anymore”.  “Listen my good woman”, said Densie, “the day Fr. Hogan married the two us abroad in Solohead Church forty years ago, I tould you I loved you.  If there is any change in the overall situation, you’ll be the first to be informed!” What kind of love is that? Eros or agape? I think we have to invent a new category for it – deep freeze love! Maybe Densie is not alone in depositing his love to the freezer?

Our love for God and neighbour should be kept a few degrees above body temperature at all times!  We should try to love “with a heart that sees” as Pope Benedict says.  As we might say, we should love God and neighbour with a heart and a half!