State Violence by Raymond Murray Read Free Book Online Page B

symbolised in the term ‘communion of saints’. The church is the unity of the living on this earth with the faithful departed, those who sleep, who rest in peace. The Eucharistic bread is the bond of living cohesion. Therefore at Holy Mass there is a special commemoration of the living and the dead: both are united spiritually in Christ as the ‘communion of saints’. Hence the use of the beautiful phrase for the Eucharist – Holy Communion, and the emphasis in Catholicism on praying for the purgation of the dead, praying with the dead, revering their memory at Easter, the feast of the resurrection of Christ, and in November. The dead are laid to rest in graveyards, in ground that is specially consecrated, like a congregation symbolically ‘sleeping’ around the building of the church; united to the people praying in the church who greet their memory as they pass their graves.

Community graveyard
    With this understanding one can see then that the executed belong to a community church in life and in death. Tom Williams and Captain Robert Nairac are brothers in the family of the faithful. That Williams is buried in isolation in a prison yard and Nairac in unconsecrated ground is a total contradiction of the community dimension of the faith they professed and a source of deep hurt to their surviving relations and to the people from which they came. They should be symbolically united with their brothers and sisters in a community graveyard where the ‘church’ sleeps in a great dormitory awaiting the arousal call of the Lord. The biblical idea of Christ as the bridegroom, who loves his Church as his bride and who will bring her resplendent to himself, expresses beautifully the idea of the corporate nature of the Church, a single entity. These men should be buried among their own people, their ‘bones resting with their fathers’.

A glorified body
    Corruption in a tomb is a transitory state only, from which man will re-arise as one awakes from a sleep into which one has slipped. Ephesians says, ‘Awake, sleeper! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon you’ (5:14). This fundamental conviction of resurrection of the body, the human person, whole and entire, dominates the whole Christian existence. It superimposes itself upon our thoughts in these cases of Tom Williams and Robert Nairac. We are mindful that all people are sinners. Tom Williams, aged 19 years, made a holy preparation for death in the company of Fr Patrick McAlister and he went to death holding his crucifix and praying. Cardinal Hume, former Abbot of Ampleforth where Robert Nairac was a student, made an appeal for the safe return of Captain Nairac when he disappeared. At least his body can be returned to ‘rest in safety’. The religion of these two victims stretches beyond the grave. It would be fitting to respect the community nature of their religion, Catholicism, and the dignity of their bodies as individuals created by God and brought to a new creation by Jesus. Both men, like all Christians, lived in hope that their bodies would be transformed from present misery to a glorified state.
    Abridged versions of this article appeared in Doctrine and Life and the Irish News .

II - INTERNMENT
Torture and Internment, August 1971
    On 9 August 1971, 342 Catholic men were interned in Northern Ireland. Patrick McNally was among 23 of my p arishioners in Armagh who were arrested. He and Brian Turley of Armagh were two o f the twelve hooded men tortured in Ballykelly Barracks. I took this statement from Patrick on 18 March 1974:

Arrest
    At 4.30am on the morning of 9 August 1971 the soldiers came to my house. I said, ‘Is it internment?’ One of them said, ‘Yes’. They brought me to the grounds of Saint Luke’s hospital in Armagh There was a lorry waiting there. I was the first into it, and shortly afterwards they brought in a few others, Corrigan and McGinley. Then we headed out to