Leaders want to keep a bust system

Comment

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, Let it Be. – Paul McCartney.

We live in times of overarching doom. Every day the news networks bring us tales of economic stress and people’s daily lives have become trials of terrible survival. It has been fascinating to see that in these troubled economic times there has been a growing movement in Ireland towards the mystical as people search for answers.
For many years, while Ireland enjoyed an economic boom, there had been a growing drift towards atheism and agnosticism and Church attendances fell.
Now, it seems, as the downturn bites hardest, people are more than happy to once again believe that there may be succour or relief of a holy kind to be had. At times such as this it can be difficult for the faithful to be content with simple prayers in their local church.
At times like this it seems people want a new and fantastical religious experience, a more biblical kind of display of God’s infinite power.
It began with tree stumps in Limerick and appears to have grown considerable legs with the recent, and presumably ongoing, ‘apparitions’ at Knock.
Perhaps people are irritated with science as they struggle to contend with mounting bills. In fact, science only makes their lives more difficult as computers calculate their rising debts to the last cent and help the banks and credit unions to know exactly when their next payments are due.
The capitalist economics that have led to our current woes are just another branch of science, so why should anybody want to continue dealing with it? Now is a time when people need help from a power greater than those found on earth. So people look to the skies in the hope that there really is something more.
The last major outbreak of this kind of fervent mysticism came, and I am open to correction, during the gloom of the 1980s, when moving and weeping statues stalked the land with great regularity.
This kind of first-person divine experience must be so much more satisfying to the bruised and tormented mind than simply reciting the same prayers every week, in the same church, before the same priest. It must be far more settling to the believer to feel that they have actually witnessed the divine communicating with them in what up until now has been a one-way line of communication.
This does put the Church in a difficult position. Of course the hierarchy must be quite pleased to see that so many people in Ireland have such considerable latent faith to fall back on in the hard times but this kind of religious experience lies slightly outside of the remit the Church prefers to allocate itself.
It is a catch-22 situation in a way, because surely the Church must believe, if their faith is true, that there is nothing impossible for God and therefore it is not all that unexpected that he, or one of his saints, might materialise on earth at any time at all? On the other hand, we are all too aware that the Catholic Church is extremely zealous when it comes to control and so apparitions and such mystical occurrences can fall dangerously into the category of personal experience and so outside of its grasp.
Interestingly, people’s reach for the mystical in the face of crisis has not been of significant benefit to organised religion as one might expect it to be. The Associated Press recently reported, “Organised religion was already in trouble before the fall of 2008. Denominations were stagnating or shrinking and congregations across faith groups were fretting about their finances.
The Great Recession made things worse. In 2010, I think we’re going to see 10 or 15% of congregations saying they’re in serious financial trouble,” says David Roozen, a lead researcher for the Faith Communities Today multi-faith survey, which measures congregational health annually. With around 320,000 or 350,000 congregations, that’s a hell of a lot of them.” 
Small American congregations are not alone in their difficulties as we see from the recent attempt by the Catholic Church in Rome to rope discontented Anglicans into the fold, albeit under strict rules and regulations.
A financial behemoth such as the Catholic Church cannot have found the recent downturn easy by any means, considering the great wealth it possess and how it invests it just like any other business on the international financial markets. Coupled with this, the donation trays can’t have been heavy since the faithful internationally found themselves on the verge of destitution.
People are feeling very vulnerable at the moment and find that earthly leadership, in the form of politicians, are simply not up to the task of helping them. In many cases, they are seeking a miracle to save them, their homes and their families. In a way, it is very difficult to blame them. What we as a society must guard against at all times is the exploitation of the vulnerable by those who plunge them into further financial hell or drain them of the last vestiges of hope that they possess through the exploitation of this faith.
We are suffering the consequences of a purely man-made problem and the solutions will be man-made. As the world’s leaders seem intent on merely restoring the old system without making any changes, we can expect another boom in years to come.
After that peak has come and gone and we find ourselves bust once again, we can again expect a resurgence in the appearance of sacred ghosts who offer hope to those who feel all hope is gone.