Healing service a ‘most meaningful’ Mass

Sydney
11 May 2003

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Healing service a ‘most meaningful’ Mass

Fr Abel van der Veer ... particular affinity with his ministry

By Marilyn Rodrigues

It was “one of the most meaningful Masses I have ever been involved in”, says Cathy Mahoney, of Dee Why. “It eased an awful lot of pain.”

Cathy is discussing the first annual healing Mass at St Kieran’s Parish, Manly Vale, in 1996.

The Mass, for parents who have suffered a miscarriage, stillbirth or death of their newborn, is offered each year on the Saturday following Mother’s Day.

Cathy helped organise the first Mass in 1996, with another bereaved mother, Nuala Pearson, and Augustinian Fr Abel van der Veer, who is co-pastor at St Kieran’s.

Cathy was a young wife and seven months pregnant with her first child when she fell ill with toxemia, a type of blood poisoning, and was admitted to hospital.

The following night her daughter survived a breech birth, but lived for only six hours.

Cathy only saw a tiny white bundle and a glimpsed a patch of dark hair in the nurse’s arms as she took the baby away.

Forty-three years later, and after mothering four sons, the hardest thing for Cathy was that she never had the opportunity to touch her daughter after the birth, didn’t know if she had been baptised or where she was buried.

“She was always in the back of my mind,” she says. “I was left with an empty feeling, and a feeling that I had let her down.

“I was a little bit angry towards Our Lord, too, for taking Anne.

“And no one ever suggested doing anything for Anne, like having a Mass said or anything else.”

In 1996 Cathy approached Fr Abel with a request for a special Mass for Anne and others like her.

“It eased an awful lot of pain,” she says. “And I now know that Anne is with the Lord; I have a little angel in heaven that I pray to.”

Around the same time, Nuala, her husband Paul and their children, Abaigh and Conor, suffered the death of one-month-old Riley, just weeks before Mother’s Day.

That month brought a “lot of pain and a lot of joy”, says Nuala.

Riley suffered from a condition called Edward’s syndrome, rarer and more severe than Down’s syndrome.

“It brought the whole community together,” says Nuala. “People would come up to me at church and say: ‘She’s not just your child; she’s our child’.”

She believes every parish should have a healing Mass like St Kieran’s for families who have lost little ones, and especially for women who have miscarried.

Nuala also suffered a miscarriage, of a child she named Casey.

“A Mass like that is so important because when you have a miscarriage, there is no body, no funeral, and therefore no closure for that family,” she says.

“Women lock themselves in their homes, or go out with a plastic smile on their face and say they are fine, and then go home and die.

“They have got to come out of the closet, and I think it would be wonderful if every parish had a Mass that is healing, that builds community and gives men as well as women permission to cry, especially about a miscarried baby.

“Faith is the only thing that gets you through.”

Fr Abel has a particular affinity with this ministry; his mother carried the pain of a miscarriage for more than 20 years before telling him - just as he was about to enter the seminary.

He says the women he has spoken to mostly worry about whether they took adequate care of themselves during their pregnancy.

“Did I smoke too much? Did I keep working too long? They think about anything that could have affected the pregnancy,” he says.

He uses rituals during the liturgy to try to help resolve the women’s feelings of guilt and their worry about the babies not having been baptised.

He invites them to come forward, place their hands in holy water and imagine they are holding their baby there.

“They can speak about what their hopes had been for their child and their intention that the child be part of God’s family,” he says.

“Most women who come find it helpful.

“People who have suffered a miscarriage, in particular, have that question of what happens to those children who did not have the opportunity to be baptised, and this appeals to that feeling in their hearts.”

At the offertory of the gifts of bread and wine, each mother also takes a flower to the altar, with the intention of handing their child back to God.

Sadly, although Fr van der Veer invites families each year, he is joined most often by women who attend alone.

“Unfortunately, in many cases, after a miscarriage, the husband doesn’t feel the pain like the wife does and does not give her the support she needs,” he says.

Nuala agrees that perhaps men sometimes “don’t realise that when you have a miscarriage you are actually mourning a child, and grieving the loss of all your hope for the future of that child” but adds that they may also feel under pressure to remain stoic.

She says at the healing Mass her husband’s flowing tears were welcomed as a sign for the other men present that it was OK for them to cry.

This year’s healing Mass at St Kieran’s Church, Manly Vale, is at 10am on Saturday, May 17.

If you would like to participate in the Mass please advise the parish office on (02) 9949 4455.