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 final part we discussed misconceptions about the Church, and the greatest aspects of his priesthood.
In your opinion, what is the greatest misconception about the Church?
I think that there are many, many misconceptions about the Catholic Church, including misconceptions by Roman Catholics as well.
We see it, very often, in terms of a real killjoy thing. We tend to have seen a liberalisation of views in many respects and sometimes these views have been changed in order to sometimes believe that people’s lives will be better and sometimes the Catholic Church is seen as being a killjoy in its opposition.
So take the old chestnuts – same sex marriage, abortion, contraception and things like that. The Catholic Church is very often seen as being man made rules and regulations. I keep saying to people, “Your faith must always be rooted in a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” That is of incredible importance.
If that doesn’t happen, your faith will always be lacklustre, it will always be concentrated on the failings and sins of the Church, of its shortcomings and scandals.
You will always see it as just being made up of rules and regulations and forget that the first thing, the whole thing is about a relationship with Jesus Christ, who wants us all to be fully alive and fully human, to be the best that we can be, and I think that sometimes we Catholics are not as good at emphasising this as we should be.
However, I have been a priest now for 28 years, I was 36 when I became a priest, and I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve built a couple of Churches, I’ve been a school chaplain, a hospital chaplain, a prison chaplain, I’ve been chaplain to a high-security mental hospital, I’ve been a military chaplain, I’ve worked in the Middle East with the military in Iraq and other places, I’ve been in action with the Parachute Regiment, so I’ve been around a little bit.
I’ve been with people at the best and worst times in their lives. So I have a reasonable experience, and one of the things I always tend to think, is that the Holy Mother Church, and it’s a phrase I use a lot, is still a source of affirmation, great compassion, and great forgiveness.
I think it’s the great strength of the Church, and I’ve been fortunate in so many places to be able to be a part of giving that affirmation, forgiveness and sense of compassion, and encouragement, and enabling so many people to be the best that they can be.
But that won’t be spoken about. The scandals, the shortcomings, all the rest of it, that will be seen by people, and newspapers in the secular culture love to highlight that, but it doesn’t love to see and doesn’t talk about the other stuff, because very often it goes unnoticed and unrecognised.
But then again, isn’t that what sometimes happens with virtue? Look at the newspapers, and it’s all the scandals, sins and murder that gets onto the front page, it’s not just the sheer goodness of people.
What is the greatest aspect of your priesthood?
The greatest aspect of my priesthood is the greatest aspect of the ten years where I was a teacher. In these years, I loved to see young people being the best that they could be and especially doing those things where they felt they weren’t going to be very good at it and to enable them, to recognise talent, gifts and ability that they didn’t think they had.
My role as a priest is to put into practise those words of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel, “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.”
My job is to help people recognise that we are all the beloved sons and daughters of God, that God wants us to fly on eagle’s wings and be simply the best that we can be. If your best is 10 out of 10, that’s your best. If your best is 5 out of 10, that’s your best. If your best is 1 out of 10, that’s your best.
St. Irenaeus from the second century once had a wonderful saying, “When men and woman are fully alive and fully human, there is the Glory of God.”
When I have been in situations where I have seen people being the best that they can be, then I have felt that that was a day’s work that was worth it. That was a period of time that was worth it.
So those aspects of my life I feel great about, and that can be in all sorts of ways. A woman came to see me today whom I had conducted the funeral of her mother some short time after I came here, and there is a wonderful opportunity in things like funerals, not just a simple service, to trigger off just that simple thing that John Newton called, “Amazing Grace.” Sometimes, that Grace affects people in all sorts of ways, and can bring them back to the Church and enable them to realise things about themselves and their relationship with God and other people that they never realised before, and if you have somehow been a little bit of an avenue in helping them to achieve that, that’s what your job is.
To see people at their best, being the best that they can be, and recognising that somehow they are of infinite worth to God. One of the great things about Catholic education is that whole thing of the wonderful situation that education is not so much, I think, filling empty vessels.It is about setting people on fire with gifts in them, and if I’m your teacher and I’ve had a part in that, that’s a wonderful honour, and sometimes as a teacher you suddenly realise that the people you’re teaching are actually much cleverer than you, brighter than you and you just know that.
But should you take that as a threat? No. To somehow feel that you were part of triggering and touching certain things in the intellectual ability and the character ability, to feel that you had a part to play in that is a very great honour.
I think it’s worth saying too, that I’ve loved being a priest, I enjoy being a priest. In an age where it doesn’t seem there’s much street-cred in it, when not many people want to be priests, I’ve enjoyed being a priest and I wouldn’t want to be anything else.
(Part One | Part Two | Part Three)
