A QUESTION OF FAITH

With Father Frank Daly of St Peter’s in Hinckley

IN an article in the Irish Sunday Independent newspaper early last year, the journalist Brendan O’Connor wrote: “outrage is the crack cocaine of 21st century emotion”. What he meant by that was that the anger portrayed by people over an event or series of events was something that can overtake them and can never be assuaged. Sometimes it concerns an event in which they had no personal part to play or by which they were not personally affected but nevertheless they choose to be ‘outraged’ by it and demonstrate their anger verbally, in public marches or of course on social media.

This can be something like the fate of a football manager when the team is not doing well, or something much more significant like the Grenfell Tower disaster, the Brexit debate, the problems of immigration or asylum seekers in our country for example, but there is no doubt that the volume of ‘anger’ and ‘outrage’ expressed has increased significantly in the last few years, causing us to lose our sense of perspective and evolve a ‘blame culture’. Last weekend the Pope was in Ireland and was continually confronted by ‘outraged’ people over the abuse of children and vulnerable adults in the Catholic Church – something which I, as a Catholic priest am continually ashamed of and find it very difficult to live with – and the so-called attempts to ‘cover-up’ the problem. Pope Francis publicly and humbly apologised many times during those two days, and he attempted carefully and thoughtfully to explain why this dreadful situation might have arisen and happened in so many places for so long. But this was not good enough for the media and the ’outraged’ people – they wanted ‘action’ and ‘soon’, but they were not able to say what action that might be. The fact is that any ‘outrage’ in our homes, schools or places of work can so consume us that we cannot see clearly what is happening to us. If people make ‘demands’ because they are ‘outraged’, what will happen if those demands are actually met? Will that assuage their outrage? Sadly not, because this is something that lies deep within the human person, like so many other ‘passions of the spirit’ such as lust, jealousy, envy or resentment. It may take very little provocation for these darker elements of our humanity to come to the surface. What is particularly disturbing is the fact that there are some people and organisations, like the English Defence League, who orchestrate and encourage this outrage in order to pursue their own ends and find people, often somewhat vulnerable, to go along with their extremism. In these cases all reason is gone and replaced by angry outbursts and soundbites, which can sometimes be fuelled by headlines in the media. This behaviour originates in a misplaced notion that in lour modern world ‘I can have what I want, need or demand, whenever I want it’. This cannot be and we must not fool ourselves into thinking that this is all that matters. What really matters for us is that we live together in society and community with an outward-looking and generous spirit, trying to understand each other and yes, forgive each other, assuring ourselves that whatever a situation may look like, this might not actually be the whole of the story, which we need to discover before we allow ourselves to be concerned enough to do something about it. Righteous anger is justified when something truly awful has happened, but this must never be allowed to overtake us to the extent that we become irrational and unthinking, and ‘outrage’ which is so often contrived and can be so divisive and destructive, can never be a sensible way of dealing with matters, be they of relatively little or great significance.