Caribbean Church under attack

On the last day of 2000, a frenzied attack on the congregation attending Mass at the Cathedral resulted in the deaths of Sr Teresa Egan, a St Joseph of Cluny nun, and Fr Charles Gaillard. The vicious assault also left a number of people seriously injured.

Various lessons can be drawn from these attacks when considered alongside other heinous crimes here at home and in the region. It ought to cause us, Caribbean people, in our own territories to take a broader view of what is happening in and around us.

Part of the picture is surely that the Catholic Church has become subject to a kind of iconoclasm — which is not peculiar to the Caribbean by any means — whereby those unsympathetic to the Church treat with disdain its values and beliefs and often seek to vilify it.

Archbishop Felix himself referred to the spouting of hate on the radio as one of the possible contributory factors to the Holy Week attack.

But the ordeal with which Archbishop Felix has had to deal ought also to bring home to Caribbean people that the Church at all levels is not immune to the crime that pervades our societies.

In October last year, two young novices of the Missionaries of the Poor were shot dead in Kingston in the kitchen of their community house. Over the Easter weekend Stephen Hackshaw, an active member of the Marriage Encounter team, was murdered at Caparo.

JUSTICE AND MERCY

How we the Caribbean Church deal with the present situation must send important messages to all our societies. While recognising the value of justice, the Church knows that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is a distortion of justice. Such distortions occur, it states, when “the neighbour is sometimes destroyed, killed, deprived of liberty or stripped of fundamental human rights” (Dives in Misericordia, “The Mercy of God” art. 12). It is not the way of the Church.

The Church teaches that there is an insufficiency to justice when it is not shaped by the “deeper power” of love, which must take hold of life in all its dimensions.

On this Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday, the Church proclaims once more to the world the mercy of God revealed in the crucified and risen Christ. More than ever it recognises that humanity needs to know God’s mercy and that it is its responsibility to make this mercy known.

It is the only way by which all peoples will rise above the threats to human freedom and their very existence.

If the individual in today’s society lacks the courage to utter the word “mercy,” states the encyclical, Dives in Misericordia, so much greater is the need for the Church to utter the word, not only in her own name but also in the name of all the men and women of our time (art.15).