I was born in an oasis of peace when most of the world was at war.
December 28 1941, three weeks after Pearl Harbou German troops were at the western bus suburban bus stops of Moscow.
I remember my 3rd birthday, eating apple pie, and a present of a toy which my elder brother told me was a four-engined bomber. I didn’t know what a bomber was, though there was an anti-aircraft battery a half-mile up the road on Howth’s Baily Green , one of two defending Dublin Bay and our capital city, the other at the opposite (southern) side of the bay.
I know now that at the time (in) 1944 the Battle of the Bulge was raging in France, and
that the Russians had driven the Nazis back from Moscow and most of Russia, and was well on the way of liberating much of Europe from the Nazis.
Reading Jude’s blog on the cruelty inflicted on himself and his classmates by dog-collared teachers I can only record that such cruelty was never inflicted on me either
by the Christian Brothers over a decade nor in my two years at Rockwell College from 1957 to 1959.
I wonder how many of my Dublin contemporaries remember the Penny Catechism which, while John Charles McQuaid was Archbishop of Dublin, reckoned that only 6,000 years separated us from Adam and Eve?
The calculation was derived from early 17th Century Anglican Primate James Ussher (1581-!656) one of the foremost scholars of his time. Four years after his death, at the
Restoration of the British Monarchy in 1660, The Royal Society (modelled on an
Institution created by Louis XIV in France) introduced Scientific Method, which presumably left such antiquated notions with the hillbillies in the US and other evangelical Protestants.
What puzzled me most about the Penny Catechism was how it told us how we should recognise and love our neighbours’ as commanded by our Redeemer.
It went something like this –
Q. Who is our neighbour ?
A. Our neighbour is all mankind, even those who injure us or differ from us in religion.
Who compiled that Catechism?
It would not surprise me if most of today’s inhabitants of Balkill Road are lapsed
Catholics.
To the right of us and the left of us on our road on Howth Hill our neighbours were overwhelmingly
Protestants.
And the idea that any of them would want to injure us was so far from my infant experience that it shocked me 75 years ago.
Who the Devil, Him/Her or Itself compiled the Penny Catechism?