Tony Flannery

The First Christmas 

18^th. December – Cork Unitarian Church – 18^th. December

introductory comments

The late Rabbi Lionel Blue, who gently awakened me from my dogmatic slumbering, once told me a great story.

When Franco Zeffirelli was directing the acclaimed Jesus of Nazareth (starring Robert Powell), he had a problem. The child playing the boy Jesus kept stumbling through the words of his bar mitzvah (“Confirmation” for Christians).

Zefirelli had obviously read St.

The past year or two in the Irish Catholic Church was a largely positive time. This was due to the first stage of the Synodal Process, which turned out to be much better than was generally expected. There was, in my opinion, a real opening out, listening, learning, changing. Without naming anybody, I was really surprised by the way that some of the more traditional people, both in authority and in media, changed their views, and became open to the need for renewal and change.