Lent & Paddy McGuinness

Lent, this year, will be almost as early as it can be. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Autumn (for us in the southern hemisphere) Equinox (21st March). Ash Wednesday this year is 6th February.

So we are to contemplate the eternal things, Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell, early this year in the forty days of preparation for the Church’s greatest feast, the celebration of that event which provides the very ground for our faith, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. The most telling argument for the unbeliever of the truth of the Resurrection is provided by St John Chrysostom in his Homily on 1 Corinthians 4: 3-4 of its effects on his Apostles:

“Here were men who failed to stand up to the Jews when Christ was alive. Yet when he died and was buried they arrayed themselves against the whole world. How came this if as you say Christ had not risen again from the dead, conversed with them and put heart into them? Would they not have said to themselves: What is this? He had not strength to save himself, will he protect us? He did not defend himself when he was alive; will he reach out his hand to us now he is dead? When he was alive he did not conquer a single nation–-shall we convince the whole world by speaking his name? Would it not have been folly even to conceive of such things let alone to do them? Hence it is clear that, if they had not seen him risen and received this mighty proof of his power, they would never have risked such a gamble.”

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Just over a week ago, one of Australia’s leading atheists, the controversial journalist, Padraic Pearse McGuinness, died at his home in Sydney. He did not die unmourned nor without his Catholic friends, of whom there were a great number, praying for his return to the faith he had abandoned in his youth. McGuinness was editor of the journal, Quadrant, until the close of 2007. He attracted the ire, and the admiration, of many.

Padraic McGuinness and I had the same Jesuit headmaster. Fr John Casey SJ, was Rector of St Ignatius College, Riverview, when McGuinness was a pupil there in 1953. He acknowledged, in his Editorial in the July 2007 edition of Quadrant, the generosity of Fr Casey in offering to remit all his tuition and boarding fees when his family was unable to keep him at the school. John Casey was Rector at St Aloysius College, Milson’s Point, in 1961 when I completed my schooling there. I remember well his short valedictory address to our Leaving class given in the science class room. “Most men, when they come to their death beds,” he told us, “mourn the lives they have led.”

Every man determines his own destiny. Lent provides us with the opportunity to review our progress. Every progress is measured by its term.

Michael Baker
2nd February 2008—The Presentation of the Lord