Seán Moncrieff: When inexplicable tragedy occurs, we all feel it

There are certain occasions when I feel sorry for priests. Lately they have been popping into my head a lot. Because of all the tragedy.

There seems to have been a lot of it in this country in the last few months; situations where, by accident or design, children have died, and where the rest of us shake our heads helplessly in the face of such awfulness.

We all empathise, of course. We collectively mourn, and many people do what they can to help by providing practical or emotional support. But the local priest has a unique role in all of this; the priest has to explain it.

When such awful events are visited on a community there’s usually a funeral, usually in a church, and the people who attend, even if many of them have no religious belief at all, still might hold a thin hope that the priest can provide something to help make sense of what has happened. Which is why I feel sorry for them.

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In Christianity and all the other Abrahamic religions there’s an active, engaged God. One who is fully aware of all the events on earth, who could control those events if it wished to, who would know in advance if, say, a child was going to be murdered. But this God lets it happen anyway.

That’s tough to explain. To maintain that it’s part of some unforeseen greater good is almost obscene. I’m not having a pop at religion here. I imagine many priests struggle with it.

Self-identified Catholics can be highly a-la-carte about what they choose to believe. I know Catholics who are essentially agnostics, but still take comfort in an occasional mass

It’s not a new question. It’s mentioned in the New Testament and Google will auto-suggest “Why does God allow bad things happen to good people” (245,000,000 hits). Various religious websites will provide various answers, including I don’t know.

You may have your own explanation. It could be as simple as the non-existence of God; or you could echo Stephen Fry’s famous answer to Gay Byrne that any deity that would allow childhood cancers and other injustices is nothing short of monstrous. And anyway, in a secular Ireland, is any of this relevant anymore?

In the 2016 census, 78 per cent of people in the Republic identified themselves as Catholic. A new set of figures will be published next April, and it’s widely expected that there will be a decrease in Catholics and an increase of people who have ticked the “no-religion” box.

But whatever those figures are, they won’t describe the nuances of individual belief. Self-identified Catholics can be highly a-la-carte about what they choose to believe. I know Catholics who are essentially agnostics, but still take comfort in an occasional mass.

Similarly, it would be a mistake to assume that No Religion is necessarily equivalent to atheist. There are as many different conceptions of God as there are people.

One perhaps unexpected source of wisdom on this is William Shatner. And it’s nothing to do with Star Trek

Some simply don’t believe. Some think it’s an unanswerable question and so don’t bother thinking about it. Some use that woolly term “spiritual”. Many others simply don’t know, but like the possibility that there may be some unseen order in the universe.

One perhaps unexpected source of wisdom on this is William Shatner. And it’s nothing to do with Star Trek, but the trip he took into space last year with Blue Origin.

He has since written that the trip didn’t fill him with wonder or give him a sense of the interconnectedness of things. Instead, he felt a profound grief,– partially because of the damage we are inflicting on our planet, but also because of space itself. It is vicious, cold and empty; the opposite of life. He discovered that the beauty isn’t up there, but down here, with all of us.

And part of that beauty is that when inexplicable tragedy occurs, we all feel it. We want to help, if we can. God or not, nature has made us a community animal, hard-wired for sympathy; to care for each other. At least we have that.