(The Nationalist, January 2005)
Before Christmas, there were a number of appeals to the public to help people in need. The response was outstanding. For example, Trócaire invited people to give a Christmas present of a goat, day-old chicks, fish for a pond, an emergency kit for refugees, or tools and seeds. A card would be sent to the recipient, and the item bought would go to a person in need in the Third World. People responded very generously.
The parish I live in near Belfast gave £3,500 just before Christmas to an appeal from a nurse in the parish for medical supplies for the hospital where she worked in Uganda.
Then came the tsunami. There have been many appeals, and people have been asked for donations on street corners, at work, in their church, and in local fund-raising drives. The response has been huge. The relief agencies say it has surpassed any previous appeal several times over. My parish gave £9,000. Another Belfast parish gave £100,000.
Similarly, the public response in Midleton to the need for people to search for the missing boy, Robert Holohan, has been fantastic. Up to two thousand people came out in the worst of weather, and it was very bad from January 4th onwards: extremely high winds, cold and wet. There were people who gave up some of their holidays, or took a week off from work, to do this. And they kept at it for nine days until his body was found. (May he rest in peace.)
It is hard to find words strong enough to praise such people. The response to the need was heart-warming and encouraging; it restores one’s faith in people.
Such generosity does not come naturally. What is natural to us is to look after ourselves and leave others to fend for themselves. For example, in pre-Christian times, Roman society was hard and cruel. There was little warmth, tenderness or human kindness in it. It was a ‘survival of the fittest’ world. A Roman writer coined the phrase, ‘Man is a wolf to man’.
If you have ever lived in a society untouched by the Christian faith, one of the ways you notice the faith’s absence is in a lack of compassion. That is true of the present as well as the past.
I have lived in societies where the Christian faith has had little impact. They could be hard and cold, with little compassion. One of the things that attracted people in them to the Christian faith was that it was compassionate.
I believe that, where people abandon the Christian faith, they become individualistic, a sense of community is lost, and a society develops which is cold and uncaring. Twenty-five years ago, a government commission in Sweden warned that the country was becoming selfish and uncaring.
Jesus is the light of the nations. He came to a people who lived in darkness and he brought them light. Let’s keep the flame of faith alive. It matters. Humanitarianism is what follows when people follow God-made-human, Jesus Christ.