Funeral Mass priest should be role model

WHEN a priest told some home truths at the funeral of a victim of Dublin’s gangland violence, some in the congregation heckled him. In his homily, Fr David Halpin stressed that while the people responsible for the murder of Darragh Nugent were the man who ordered the killing and the one who pulled the trigger, he also pointed out that Nugent himself made ‘bad decisions that led him to a dangerous and precarious world’.

The priest was interrupted by a congregant, who shouted that the ceremony was supposed to be a celebration of Nugent’s life, but Fr Halpin was absolutely correct to say what he did. There are many in Ireland, not least devoted churchgoers, who have been baffled for years as to why career criminals, who have dedicated their lives to violence, receive funerals in which they seem to be almost beatified when they are killed.

These are men and women who, every day, profoundly offend against the crystal clear teachings of Jesus Christ, teachings about which there is no moral ambiguity. Yet when it comes to their funerals, the rites are conducted with all the sanctity of the Church, and no mention at all of the evil they did.

It is baffling that the Church seems comfortable with this, when on the other hand it says divorced and remarried people should receive Communion only if they cease sexual relations and live ‘like brother and sister’, and disallows same-sex couples in active physical relationships taking the Sacrament at all.

How can they come down so hard on what essentially is a matter of conscience but still skirt around what needs to be said at the funeral of a criminal? There are many who feel the Church has lost support because it spends far too much time obsessing with sex and not enough on more serious moral matters. In speaking out, Fr Halpin perhaps showed a better way forward for the Church, in calling out evil rather than shaming people for human frailty.