Sacred mystery of the First Communion DVD
FIRST Holy Communion season is here again, or ‘Loan Shark Week’ as it is also known. It is a special day in a young Catholic’s life, when boys get to wear their school uniform on a Saturday and be given enough money for a PS4 Pro before they have left the church, while the girls get to wear a miniature wedding dress, as though they were about to enter an arranged marriage with a 2,000-year-old carpenter from the Middle East. If they’re lucky they might also get a silk umbrella, which would come in handy if there was a chance of sun which, as with any special occasion in Ireland, there will not be.
At our son’s ceremony we were informed that we should respect the sacred rites and not take photographs during the Mass. However, the good news was that the guy with the massive video camera and lighting rig in front of the altar would be selling DVDs of the day later in the week.
Obviously my son’s teacher hadn’t been schooling him in the ancient traditions of Ireland, as he turned to me and whispered, “What’s a DVD?” Naturally, I cleared my schedule for the afternoon to teach him the audiovisual catechisms of my youth, from the Old Testament’s primal sin of not rewinding VHS tapes before returning them to the shop, to the one commandment of DVDs, ‘thou wouldst not steal a car, so why wouldst thou pirate a DVD?’.
It was a day of revelations for my son, who concluded that the olden ways are weird. Just wait until he learns that Ireland was considering taking a blasphemy charge against the Cheshire cat from Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
Blasphemy laws for soccer, GAA and the Lotto
WHILE it seems odd that comments by Stephen Fry (pictured inset) comments were broadcast at all, given that they air on a station that still considers the Angelus a valid part of its daily programming, it is curiouser and curiouser that they were on a show titled ‘The Meaning of Life’ – surely a fair warning that there would be a discussion of all aspects of human existence. Fry’s comments on what he might say to a god, were he to meet one, weren’t even directed at Catholic Jesus, but rather all Jesuses everywhere.
Perhaps Fry’s comments would have been less hurtful if they were made by an Irish person, who had served their time here in the dour days of the 1980s and 1990s, being dragged from holy well to moving statue, and from Novenas to Knock, in pursuit of enlightenment. But anyone who did go through that period would tell you that it is almost impossible to discuss religion without offending someone.
It is much like the sporting world – get fans of two opposing teams to discuss whose team is superior and watch as it descends into a screeching match of such escalating frequency that only Roy Keane’s beloved dog Trigger can hear them – and Triggs has been in doggy heaven for five years now. Or he might be in doggy hell, it really depends on how he felt about Saipan.
The whole Fry blasphemy debacle has been slightly embarrassing, not least because the laws themselves are so incredibly vague that Jesus Himself would probably have to show up to get a prosecution.
The Irish blasphemy laws also garnered a large amount of pointed throat-clearing and eyebrow-raising from atheists, as the statutes do not categorise as a religion ‘any organisation that employs excessive psychological manipulation of its followers’, which is really a description of all religions, as well as the GAA, various weight-loss groups, sci-fi conventions, and those National Lottery ads that suggest you might want to buy an island.
Can we put time travel into the Constitution?
FOR anyone who does wish to go back to the good/bad old days in Ireland, when we weren’t allowed to question faith at all and ‘Father Ted’ was considered highly sacrilegious, there is good news this week from religion’s arch nemesis: science. Mathematicians from the University of British Columbia and the University of Maryland have published a study this week which proposes that, mathematically at least, time travel is possible. Great news for anyone wishing to head back to the more innocent days of the early 1990s, when the abortion debate was raging in Ireland, America was at war in the Middle East, and Johnny Logan was writing Eurovision winners for us. Just remember to bring your XtraVision card.