WEDNESDAY REFLECTION
Mid-week Reflection
12th May 2021
Last week I was heading to St Mirin’s Cathedral for the Mass of Chrism which is always a beautiful occasion even though, this year, as last year, we were a less than twenty people at a Mass that would normally have had more than a thousand people. What was particularly touching for me on that day, in which we renew our priestly promises, was that on the way, I passed St Mary’s Church where I was ordained a priest almost 52 years ago. I was a little early and in a nostalgic mood, so I decided to pass by the house in which I had been brought up. It was only four decades of the Rosary distant from the church.
When I talk to pupils about those days, they find it astonishing and hard to believe that the tenement in which we grew up had six households with thirty two inhabitants! So, we were never short of friends and, in fact, some of my cousins lived upstairs in the house in which my father had been raised. He actually lived in the same building all his life.
When I turned into the street, the scene of my childhood, which I hadn’t visited in a time longer than I can remember; for a moment I wondered if I would feel sad. Would I remember happy days? Would I wonder what had happened to all those people? Would I feel my parents presence? But I didn’t really because it dawned on me that, as Cardinal Ratzinger once said of his parents, “They had moved on to the other world.” So a whimsical smile was enough and I headed on to the Cathedral singing to myself, “Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.”
Monsignor Monaghan
