Priest: People have lost sense of God

ROMAN Catholic Vicar General Fr Martin Sirju yesterday observed that a “palpable sense of God has disappeared” from society and many people are describing themselves as either agnostic or as being spiritual without any affiliation to any religious organisation.

He was speaking at an interfaith service organised by the St Patrick Education district at the Siparia West Secondary School.

Schools supervisor Zabeedah Hosein-Abid said the service was organised as the district’s response to a “challenging” school term last year.

She said teachers were asked to be “mothers and fathers” to students and they had to recognise there is a “greater power” from which they should seek guidance.

“We must seek the strength, courage and fortitude to continue in our vocation,” she said even as the interfaith service itself was jeopardised by an electricity cut in the area.

Speaking on the theme “Peace begins with me,” Sirju said there was an apparent disregard for God which also seemed to have pervaded church services, soit was a normal occurrence to see parishioners talking on their cell phones before participating in the Mass.

He said this was also evident at government functions, where religious leaders were only invited to seek God’s blessings as this was the “politically correct thing to do.”

“Some have no interest in religion and regard the prayers as simply window-dressing,” he said. The increasing levels of violence and the easy availability of pornography, he felt, had contributed to a “cheapness” to life in Trinidadian society.

Sirju said the country could recover from the present crisis of violence but had to remodel its educational system and put a halt to the culture of entitlement, waste and cost overruns in the public sector. “We must instead rediscover the values of hard work,” he said.