Sir, - I recently stood with 28 others (yes, I counted) at the ten o'clock Mass in Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Sean McDermott Street, Dublin. I saw no young women, no children. Hardly anyone younger than me (48). Around here I don't see designer clothes, furniture or car. I don't know of any babies being planned four years hence to fit into a busy work schedule. I don't ever expect to see that. I don't see the young mothers who used to be the backbone of this church.
I wonder how Archbishop Connell's notion of "wanted" children applies to this parish? Who is he talking to? I guess I could be called an a la carte Catholic, but that sounds way too positive a description of one with so little faith as me.
Nowadays I mostly show up for births, marriages and deaths, also Christmas and Easter. My faith is not strong enough to be a la carte. I think maybe it's time to let go of even these few obligations and wait outside the church.
I don't see or hear Jesus in any of the Archbishop's words. No sign whatsoever. I feel really sorry for his clergy and religious who struggle in our parish. What is he telling us and them? He may be telling me that it's time to go. That I don't belong here now.
Oh, by the way, I was in the church for my mother's 29th anniversary. Pregnant with her eighth child, she was too weak with illness to survive her lovely baby daughter by long. She knew it too. She talked to me, her eldest boy. She knew the high price to be paid. Back then her choices in this parish were zero and less. Archbishop Connell has a noted disdain for a la carte Catholics. I have news for him. In some cases they may well be the only Catholics still in these mostly empty pews and paying his expenses. I'm surprised that the contraception war, lost all those decades ago, is still able to stir the archbishop. Would that he could get himself equally worked up about the massive injustice all around me. The immense greed for property that is driving an already poor area into oblivion. But that would lack the technical and philosophical and theological niceties of a contraceptive debate. It might mean taking a good long hard look at his own lifestyle. God forbid. - Yours, etc.,
Pat Reid, Clonmore Villas, Ballybough, Dublin 3.