19.04.2016
Interfaith Service to Remember Victims of Brussels Attacks in Donnybrook
An interfaith service of commemoration for the victims of last month’s terror attacks in Brussels was held in the Church of The Sacred Heart in Donnybrook this evening (Tuesday April 19). President Michael D Higgins attended the service which was arranged at the request of the Ambassador of Belgium, His Excellency Philippe Roland. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Archbishop Michael Jackson presided.
The Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown, as well as Imam Sheikh Hussein Halawa and the Cantor of the Jewish Community were also in attendance. President Higgins was joined by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Críona Ní Dhálaigh, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charles Flanagan, and members of the Diplomatic Corps.
On 22 March, the Belgian capital was hit by twin suicide bomb attacks at Brussels Airport and Maelbeek Metro station which killed 32 people.
During the service Archbishop Jackson delivered a reflection on the attacks. The text he spoke to is reproduced in full below.
BRUSSELS: Hope in a time of fear …
The Most Reverend Michael Jackson, Archbishop of Dublin, April 19th 2016
VICTIMS
As always our thoughts are with those who are victims of The Brussels Bombings, with all who lost their lives in whatever place and in whatever circumstance. Our thoughts are with the citizens of Brussels and with the people of Belgium. March 22nd 2016 changed their lives for ever and we travel with them in their death, loss, torment and grief.
JOURNEYING
The world is a travelling place. It is little wonder that those who wreaked human havoc in Brussels on the morning of March 22nd 2016 in the name of ISIL did so at places to and from which people travel, and therefore in which they congregate. Departure and arrival may seem to be everyday and automatic things to many but for some they are points of anxiety and stressfulness. In Brussels, people have had to come to terms with these places as being points of death and devastation, as they continue to use these places day by day, because they have no other option. In Genesis 28, Jacob set out and left all he knew behind. Jacob was on the run and he also became a refugee. The place where he found himself spending the night – he gave a name to it, he called it The House of God: Beth El. This is more than a gesture. This is the start of a theology of place and a theology of truth; this is an ecology of God. It is the start of naming some thing, some place, owning it and taking the fear out of it. In the name of those who were killed, those who were injured and those who tended them and in the name of the security forces we continue to name Brussels by the name Brussels – owning it as a place of hope and of truth.
VALUES
One of the core components of identity is values. Many of us with a comfortable, settled identity simply live out the values of the society to which we belong and contribute to them; indeed we have long assumed that they will ‘be there’ when we want or need to appeal to them. They come out of a deep cultural oasis of connection, of experimentation, of accommodation, of enterprise, of thought, of artistic endeavour and of commerce. The values of European Humanism – as they continue to engage, almost despite themselves and rather uneasily, with a Christianity in crisis internally and externally – are precious to the people of Brussels and Belgium and to all Europeans. The challenge for those of us who are their custodians and champions is that we need to upend the commercial model that sees exploitation as the endgame of trade and expenditure as the crowning glory of the human person. The sporadic and the devastating come together in the expression of the violence and the cruelty and the public cynicism of ISIS; those of us who are appalled and abhorred by it need a response from within the best of our inheritance.
FRACTURE
We speak of fractured societies and of human brokenness – and we are right to do so. Brussels is today a fractured society and many human beings are broken: individuals and their relatives; members of the police and security services; rapid response care workers and hospital staff. People who have lived alongside one another with un–ease now live alongside one another with dis–ease. This is a continuing torture for any society and a specific torture where indigenous, indigenized–migrant and migrant live in adjacent separation. Fracture also facilitates ghettoization and self–selecting gated communities. All of this foments suspicion, human alienation and DriveThru neighbourhoods.
Christian people are called and compelled to seek hope while they and others seek help. The root of the word: fracture may in this instance give us cause for hope in a time of fear. Two meanings coming from its Latin root: frango, I break. Fracture and fragmentation can have two meanings therefore: breaking up and breaking through. And this is where hope comes in. Hope can break through, but the difference is that it can also build up. It is this sort of fracture and fragmentation to which Christian people are called, however angry and however frail and however ineffectual we have become in our own minds and in the minds of others.
DO WE REALLY WANT TO TURN OUR EVERY NEIGHBOUR INTO OUR ENEMY?
There are four pairs of words that spell out the principles, from a Christian perspective, of what we perhaps quaintly refer to as: Inter Faith Encounter. Encounter is a slip–road to meeting and meeting may, or may not, result in dialogue. Encounter will happen anyway; the question is: What do we do with it? and: What do we do in it? These four paired principles are:
Presence and Engagement
Hospitality and Embassy
Sending and Abiding
Individual and Community.
Not engaging urgently in these terms in effect means that we collude by our inertia and our silence with the idea that: our every neighbour is in effect our enemy. Communication and connection are essential to the outworking of a future with hope in a time of fear …
We have no option but to journey on – in the midst of danger and sorrow, grief and loss.
I conclude with the words of a woman in the hangar at the airport in Brussels to which survivors were hurried on March 22nd. The report of what she said is as follows (as carried in The Tablet):
‘One African woman expressed very clearly what was going on: With their bombs these attackers try to strike our way of life, our culture, she said. But look at us here. We are together in this hangar, no one is fighting, and we are here together, peacefully. She was right. It was amazingly calm and silent in the hangar.’
We remember the people of Belgium and the citizens of Brussels.