MacGill Summer School 2012
THE FUTURE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN IRELAND
Turning the Corner of Renewal
Speaking Notes of
Most Rev. Diarmuid Martin
Archbishop of Dublin
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Glenties, 24thJuly 2012
Some months ago a commentator on radio – in all good faith - said that he could not understand the Archbishop of Dublin. I seemed, he said, to be constantly speaking from both sides of my mouth and he felt he did not really know where I stood. On the one hand I had said that the Catholic Church in Ireland was at a crisis point and on the other hand I was saying that it had begun to “turn the corner” of renewal.
I do not see these as opposing comments. I believe that both reflect different aspects of the life of the Catholic Church in Ireland today. The problem is that those who see the Church in Ireland as being in crisis fail to see - or perhaps in some cases do not want to see - the Church already turning the corner to a renewed phase in its history. And those who feel we have turned the corner often feel that the Church has already definitively moved forward - perhaps much more than I would hold - and that it is time now to look forward with confidence and definitively archive the past.
Some years ago I spoke here in Glenties about the situation of the Church in Ireland. I can honestly say that I have found my task today in trying to analyse the situation of the Church in Ireland without a doubt much more difficult than it was then. There is no way I which I can make definitive statements. There is no way in which humanly I can unquestionably say that my vision for the Church in Ireland, at least in the short term, is optimistic or pessimistic. It is only the faith I have that Jesus will be with his Church always which gives me encouragement and light. On the human level there are perhaps more unknowns and challenges and dysfunctionalities than there were a few years ago.
I am by no means a born pessimist. I see the many and remarkable positive changes that have taken place in the Church in Ireland since Vatican II and indeed in recent years and in recent months. There are however many
contradictions and levels of ambivalence in the way believers and non-believers look at and evaluate the Church and its role in Ireland today.
Let me give a first example. Priests in Ireland have experienced a very difficult time in recent years, not just because of the trauma of the scandals regarding the sexual abuse of children by priests, but also because of the changing culture in which the role of the priest in Irish society has become very different. Priests are challenged to live their ministry in a culture in which their self-understanding today is radically different to that of the time in which they entered into the seminary. Priests are being challenged in their work and feel that they are not receiving the formation and support they need to face the cultural and organizational aspects of the challenges of change.
On the other hand I believe that if surveys were only to ask the right questions, they might well find that trust and confidence and appreciation for the good, hard-working local priests in Ireland has if anything increased in recent years, as has the affection and the support which priests receive from their congregations.
Priests need to have that fact recognised and affirmed. They hear it and experience it every day from those with whom they work. They need to hear it in public comment. They need to hear it from their Bishops and their superiors. Being a priest today is following a lonely and unsettling furrow, but the vast majority of priests know that they have the human and spiritual resources to face those realities. If any group has faced and existentially lived through the crisis that the Church is experiencing in Ireland and have led the path to “turning the corner of renewal” it is priests.
One of the first great challenges that the Church in Ireland has to face is the challenge of vocations to the priesthood. Why is it that the numbers entering the seminaries are so low? Is the Church reaching out in the right direction? It is not my intention to enter into discussions here about the ordination of women or the introduction of married clergy. I am talking about the challenges that we face in the realities of the real life of the Church as it is today. We have now married deacons; we have committed, qualified and dedicated lay men and women in various pastoral and administrative services. In new structures of parish groupings, teams of priests, deacons and lay men and women will be working together to provide pastoral care within a wider area, each in accordance with their own calling. But we need priests.
It is not just that the number of candidates is low; it is also that many of those who present are fragile and some are much more traditional than those who went before them. I have no problem with priests or seminarians who come from a solid theologically-based traditional faith background. If anything, I would have greater anxieties regarding priests or candidates who simply go with the trends of the day and who lack a real spiritual and theological anchor. There is however a danger that superficial attachment to the externals of tradition may well be a sign of fearfulness and flight from changed realities: and that is not exactly what we need.
We came in Ireland from a very traditional Church and indeed there are many signs that the traditional rigid Church of more recent times that some look back to with approval may not have been what it appeared.
The seminary I entered in 1962, just days before the beginning of the Vatican Council, differed very little as regards the seminary rule and order of the day from that into which my professors had entered twenty or thirty years earlier. Indeed more than one of my professors had no difficulty in using for their lectures the theological notes which they had prepared ten or twenty years earlier.
Yet at that time theology was changing. The changes of Vatican II came to an Ireland which was perhaps too little conversant with the theological and liturgical developments that had been taking place in Europe and which were at the basis of the theology of Vatican II. It was clear, however, that our very static Latin textbooks were no longer the ones needed to respond to the current of change taking place in the world. My moral theology lectures on justice dealt in the abstract with questions that could have been asked one hundred years earlier. Its responses to the realities of the changing world were defined almost in simplistic and static question-and-answer formulae. The seminarian was to be given safe guidelines and clear-cut answers to the challenges of the changing world: and that no longer responded to the changing times.
There was a real desire within the Irish Church to adopt and apply the changes expressed by the Vatican Council. Sometimes, however, we tend to evaluate the results of Vatican II excessively in terms of what changes had taken place and where we feel there is more to be done. Vatican II was not simply a Council which fostered change and things new. It did not set out to create a new Church. If anything it was a Council which brought us backwards; it brought us back beyond what we had experienced in our youth and education to a deeper understanding of the faith of the Church, which was rooted in the scriptures themselves and in the constant tradition of the Church.
Change did take place. The pace of change in Church and in society was such as to challenge fundamental assumptions. Change is difficult to live with and to manage and the rigid culture of Catholic Ireland in pre-Conciliar days had not provided us with adequate norms of discernment adapted to the new situation.
One of the challenges we face when we talk of “turning the corner” is that one might be tempted to think that “turning the corner” meant either returning to the safe and well-known environment of the past, or opening out the pathway to a new modern, safe and well-lit motorway. In today’s rapid cultural change “turning the corner” is unlikely to be the end-product of renewal. The life of the believer, and life in the Church, is about a faith journey on which we encounter never ending corners to challenge us. We are called to adapt and respond to new situations through a profound insight into the teaching of Jesus Christ which the enables the Church to rediscover ever deeper its own true identity and mediate meaning in a world of change and uncertainty. “Turning the corner” of renewal in the Church means taking the risk of a faith which always entails elements of the unknown.
“Turning the corner” and moving forward does not mean turning one’s back on the past. There is no way in which the Church in Ireland can put definitively behind it the scandals of the sexual abuse of vulnerable children by priests and religious. This does not mean that the Church becomes pathologically fixated on a dark moment of its history. Neither does it mean that the Church overlooks the realities of the past and the suffering, past and present, of the victims and survivors.
Despite many investigations I believe that – as a Church and as a society - we still have to reflect adequately on the deeper roots of the abuse crisis and the response to it by the Church. I do not accept that is enough to say that it happened in different times and people reacted as best they could in the context of the day. I am not attempting here to criticize the decisions of individuals or to challenge their good faith. That is not my task and I am not the one to judge. It has been said to me even by fellow bishops that I would have acted in the same way as they did at the time. I cannot say that I would not have done so. This does not however mean that we abandon the search to deepen our understanding of what happened.
In the Archdiocese of Dublin we have published figures which showed that 84% of the allegations the diocese received over a fifty year period referred to events which took place in a twenty-five-year period from the late 1960’s to the 1980’s. The number of allegations relating to the successive years is greatly reduced. We have to try to understand better what happened to produce such an explosion of abuse at a particular point of time and how such a horrendous situation was not recognised for what it was. This attempt at understanding obviously must look at the responsibilities of all in society at the time, but there is a special responsibility to ask deep and uncomfortable questions as to why this happened in the Church of Jesus Christ.
The truth can be painful, but I believe that we still have a long journey to travel to fathom fully the truth and to accept that truth and to internalise that truth, about what happened within the Church in Ireland at a particular moment in time.
In today’s economic climate there is understandably no great interest in establishing new and costly investigations into the further aspects of the abuse scandal, even though – as is well known – I believe that there are some instances where the public interest would be served by public investigation. The answers to some questions are not to be found just in the archives of the Church.
Even if no further Commissions are likely, this does not mean that men and women of courage and conviction should not continue to seek other ways to shed the light of discernment on how the presence of the Church in serving the most deprived went wrong, and allow the truth to emerge. The fact that thousands of children were abused within the Church of Jesus Christ in Ireland is a scar that the Church will bear within it for generations to come. There is no way that it can be put aside.
