A priest has criticised parents who reduce their child’s First Communion to an “orgy of materialism with miniature brides”, claiming many children never return to Mass the following Sunday.
Fr Paddy O’Kane, parish priest for Ballymagroarty in the Diocese of Derry, said some families prepared their child for First Communion simply “because everyone else is doing it”. “Perhaps [it] is a harmless tradition keeping them in a club which for all its flaws, they’d rather remain part of,” he said. “Or they don’t want their child singled out as different. Or they just want to throw a party.
“Then it’s reduced to an orgy of sentimentality and materialism with miniature brides and bouncy castles and bursting bank accounts.”
Writing on his parish website, Fr O’Kane reminded parents that when their child was baptised, they “promised to bring him/her up in the practice of the faith”.
“That promise will only be kept if this is not a ‘once off’ occasion but the beginning of a new stage in his/her faith journey. Simply put, you must bring him/her to back to Mass again every weekend after his/her First Communion.” He also said he expected a “reverential silence” during Mass. “It is not acceptable to engage in conversation at any time but most of all at Holy Communion,” he wrote. “Children are like blotting paper – they soak up all they see and hear.”
In 2015, Fr O’Kane called for an end to the school “production line” of preparing children for First Communion only for them never to return. He said that after a recent First Communion only 20 of 121 children returned the next Sunday.
Sisters give up their role in new hospital after protests
The sisters of Charity in Ireland have said they will end their involvement in a new national maternity hospital.
Two Sisters have resigned from the board of St Vincent’s Healthcare Group (SVHG), the trust set up to manage the new maternity facilities in Dublin.
Their decision came after protests over their role at the new institution.
Protesters said the hospital should be free to offer operations that are forbidden by Church teaching, such as gender reassignment surgery and abortion. They were also unhappy because the Sisters of Charity were one of three religious orders involved in the infamous Magdalene laundries.
Health minister Simon Harris had said the hospital would have been run independently of the Sisters. But Bishop Kevin Doran of Elphin had maintained that, as the campus of the planned new hospital was owned by the Sisters, it had to follow a Catholic ethos. “Public funding, while it brings with it other legal and moral obligations, does not change that responsibility,” the bishop said.
Mr Harris has described the decision by the nuns as “truly historic”.
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