| International News

In a July 28 homily delivered at St. Mary’s Church here the evening before the annual Reek Sunday Croagh Patrick pilgrimage, Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam said that contemporary society “has set an impossible pace” in which to live that has profound and negative implications in terms of the environment, care for the aged and intense pressure on young people.

“We live in the age of the instant, where there is no joy in the anticipation and no time to value the achievement,” said Archbishop Neary at the County Mayo church in western Ireland.

“We are rushed from infancy to adolescence and then through those special years to an ill-timed adulthood,” he said. “The world in which we live has set an impossible pace.”

Croagh Patrick, a 2,510-foot mountain located eight kilometers (about 5 miles) from Westport, has been an important pilgrim site for more than 1,500 years. Croagh Patrick derives its name from the Irish Cruach Phádraig ("St. Patrick's mountain"), although it is known locally as “the Reek.” As a result, the last Sunday of July, when the annual pilgrimage in held, is known as “Reek Sunday.”

About 100,000 visitors annually and an estimated 30,000 on that pilgrimage weekend travel to the site to climb the mountain where St. Patrick in the year 441 spent 40 days and 40 nights fasting on the summit and subsequently built a church there. There is a tradition that says that, at the end of his fast, St. Patrick threw a bell down the side of the mountain, banishing all snakes and serpents from Ireland.

“All of us have to slow down as we climb to the summit. Now and again we stop to catch our breath, or perhaps, in the early light, gaze on the beauty of God’s creation,” the archbishop said, noting that the pilgrimage serves as a vehicle to take “the ever demanding rush out of life.”

“Perhaps,” he added, “we might bring home a lesson from this old mountain of St. Patrick. We might discover the need to reflect, to slow down the pace of life, to wonder at the beauty of the earth, and to really appreciate the value of our friends.”

The rush of life by mankind, Archbishop Neary said, forcing nature’s season to struggle “for their own identity.”

“Lands are ravished for green and even some crops are now genetically modified for quicker profits,” he said. “We have stripped the forests for paper and polluted the seas by our own waste.”

Even holidays are rushed, he noted, pointing to hotels that already “advertise for Christmas as children are returning to school after their summer holidays and they then draw our attention to summer breaks before Christmas night.”

The archbishop lamented as “our greatest fault” the “robbing our children of their childhood.”

The “irreplaceable years of play, discovery, wonder and imagination” by young people are too often stolen away by time spent with video games, “the special effects of the latest film offering” and the unreality of television soap operas that “gatecrashes their innocent exploration of life,” he said.

“There is the perception of the child as consumer by the advertising agents, who introduce them to computer games and chat rooms designed to entice them to more challenging and sophisticated levels, often conscripting them into the hysteria of style wars and more frightening possibilities,” he said. “With these precious years of childhood rushed into adolescence comes the peer pressure to take up alcohol and more sinister levels of drug dependence.”

He pointed to mountain pilgrimage, noting that everyone experiences “the temptation to give up,” and to look for relieve and rest from feet “sore and blistered,” breath that is short and bodies wet and miserable.

Likewise, he said, many young people “in their pilgrimage through life in our land have come to believe that giving up on life is more attractive than the living of it.”

“They too need the strength of all of us, and the gift of our time, when all around are caught in a rush,” Archbishop Neary said. “Hooked on despair, too many see youth to be an end and not the beginning of life’s adventure, and we may not take the time to see that point of pain that drives them to unnecessary death.”

Yet Croagh Patrick, he said, should serve as “a symbol of our own lives and struggles in its call for courage, perseverance and in its joy, sorrow and fulfillment.”

He asked those assembled to remember “those today who struggle with steeper slopes of hunger, exile, famine and separation from their own native lands” and to pray “for those who scale the dizzy heights in search of peace when that summit seems so distant.”

Last year, Archbishop Neary was accompanied on the pilgrimage by Archbishop Sean Brady, archbishop of Armagh and primate of All Ireland. As successor to St. Patrick, Archbishop Brady was the first archbishop of Armagh to climb Croagh Patrick since the fifth-century saint.