Eddie Gilmore, CEO Irish Chaplaincy writes;
Some members of the Irish Chaplaincy were in Dublin for the World Meeting of Families, attended by Pope Francis, which included them helping out on the Catholic Bishops’ Conference stall at the RDS and generally being available to meet people from all over the world.
We also attended a workshop on ‘The Impact of Imprisonment on Families’. Just as the Chaplaincy finds in its work over many years with Irish prisoners across England and Wales, it was clear from several eloquent testimonies that it is the whole family who serve the sentence, and who need compassion and support just as much as the person incarcerated.
On the Saturday evening we joined 80,000 others at the ‘Festival of Families’ concert at Croke Park, one of the highlights being the sight and sound of 500 Irish dancers on the stage and around the pitch. As somebody on a nearby seat commented “that must be the biggest Riverdance in history”!
Then on Sunday it was the papal mass in Phoenix Park, which was another joyful and uplifting celebration. And especially powerful was the Penitential Rite, which is usually a set prayer at the start of the mass: a kind of ‘saying sorry’ prayer.
Francis, following his meeting with eight victims of abuse the previous day, read out (in place of the set prayer) a handwritten declaration of apology for those all whose who had been abused by ministers of the Church, and for the inexcusable cover ups of those in leadership. He ended each sentence with the words “forgive us”. And those were the words that the following day were on the front page of almost every Irish newspaper, underneath a picture of the Pope.