Kirstyn Higgins |
Father Bergin has now been at the parish of St. Bride’s for 8 weeks, and has proved a very welcome and valuable member of the pastoral community in both the Church and the school.
I met with him to ask his thoughts on a number of topics including the refugee crisis, Pope Francis and the Catholic Church today.
In this first of four parts, I discuss Father Bergin’s initial thoughts on the school and parish, and ask him how he thinks Catholicism will cope in the future.
What are your initial thoughts on the school and St. Bride’s?
I’ve been here for 8 weeks now and the reflections tend to be favourable. I’ve spent the last 28 years as a priest working in England in South Yorkshire, and of the parishes I had worked in, some were very good, some weren’t quite so good.
Before I came here I was in a very poor area, of great social decline and deprivation. Up here I was glad to come back to a parish that was much fuller in numbers. It takes a little while to get used to anything and for your parishioners to get used to you, but I would like to think that generally speaking their impressions of me have been fairly decent, and my impressions of them have been decent as well.
I’ve never actually lived quite as close to such a big school as this, and I’m glad to have been invited to get involved in the school. My impressions of the school have been very favourable. I think there are a lot of good standards in terms of academics and ambitions, and how the staff have outlined what their hopes are for pupils which is simply that they be at their best and attain their best, and I think that’s an excellent way to be.
I think Catholic schools tend to be very good, but this would be regarded in the Diocese of Motherwell as one of the best. So it’s a great honour to be attached to a school like this, and I hope that over the years I’ll get more and more involved in the life of the school as it seems appropriate and fitting to do so. So overall my impressions are favourable, and hopefully people’s impressions of me are favourable as well.
What do you think has the most essential role to play in keeping Catholicism alive in younger and future generations?
That’s a very good question because we live in an age where religion as a whole in Western Europe is on a major decline.
The great charismatic force that helped to develop us as nation states, as people, with wonderful traditions from music and architecture to our morality and law, seems now even in the Catholic countries to be unwanted, and I find that particularly sad.
I am convinced however, that you can have the best Catholic school and Parish in the world, but if in the family the faith is not recognised, respected, lived and practised, then I think you will find that you’re going to be struggling a bit.
So I think the home is of unquantifiable importance. I’ve always believed that in the Religious Education of young people, it is rather like a three-legged stool.It involves the Parish, the family and the school, all working together, and if one of them doesn’t do their best, the stool topples over.
One of my little sayings is that religion is caught, not taught. If you’ve been brought up in a school with a great passion for science, with a great science teacher, they will pass that passion on to you. If you have a rubbish teacher, you won’t have the same love for that subject at all. I think it’s almost the same in our faith. If our family sees faith as something important, then there’s a good chance that we might see it as important as well.
We might see that what that faith will pass onto us will help us to cope with the difficulties and challenges in life. But it is being told in an increasingly secular society that this is for the mad, the bad and the sad.
So I think that family is very important. I came from a family where religion was seen as important, and it’s interesting that my brothers and sisters still all go to mass and regard their religion as important. They’re just ordinary, very good people, with mortgages and children, but they see this as an important aspect of their life, and I think it was passed on to us by those before us, particularly our mother and our father, if that makes sense.
Kirstyn’s Interview with Fr Bergin continues tomorrow, where they discuss the shortage of priests in the Church, and the impact Pope Francis has made.
