|
|
 |
You are > Home > God could do it, if we let him
|
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
God could do it, if we let him
By Fr Brendan Hoban
WHAT was remarkable about Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s recent speech in Dublin was not what was said but who said it.
His main thesis – that the Catholic Church in Ireland in the future will have be very different from the past – is not new. It has been said before in a thousand different ways.
Six years ago in a book, Change or Decay, Irish Catholicism in Crisis, I wrote the same thing and there is a long and honourable tradition of Catholics in Ireland since the Second Vatican Council naming a difficult but very obvious truth, the effective betrayal of that council. In summary, necessary and obvious change in the Church was shuffled off the agenda. Time and time again.
My main point in Change or Decay was that unless we were prepared to embrace (not just tolerate) change that the Catholic Church in Ireland would die on its feet.
I wrote in the introduction: “The Catholic Church in Ireland is, in a number of key areas, in freefall. Yet extraordinarily we still seem reluctant to face the truths that everyone else can recognise. A feudal church is incapable of conversing with today’s world. And unless we embrace change the Irish Catholic Church will turn over and die – unless we are prepared to move from denial to reality, from self-interest to gospel courage, from a necessary dying to a new way of living.”
In effect, what Martin was saying.We need, in other words, to embrace change so that we can re-make, re-create, reimagine a new and very different Church.
The outline of Martin’s ideas are clear: the old arrogance of an insensitive and domineering institution will have to change; ‘the narrow culture of clericalism’ has to be eliminated; the parish has to become the key outreach agent in terms of preaching the Gospel, sensitive to and comfortable with modern communications; and so on.
What he didn’t say is what almost everyone else is saying: that we need to re-image priesthood for a different world; that celibacy for all priests needs to be looked at; that the promise of women priests needs to be addressed; that church teaching out of sync and rejected by the people needs attention.
Martin didn’t say that because it would have been a bridge too far. He has to be politically astute; he has to watch his back; no hostages to fortune.
There are ‘dark forces’ around who could blow him out of the water if he doesn’t pick his words carefully. So he half-said what needed to be said and while half a loaf is better than no bread, the irony is that while Martin may be, as some have said “going too far”, the reality is that he’s not going far enough. What’s needed is a much more fundamental shift than even Martin has in mind.
A shift from Roman control to local collegiality, a shift from clerical control to lay decision-making. But so far, so good. The great truth Martin named is the reluctance and the failure of the Catholic Church to change. An instance of this, Martin suggests, is what he calls “signs of subconscious denial” in our attitude to the child abuse revelations. After all that has happened, there are ‘still strong forces which would prefer that the truth did not emerge’.
That reluctance to name the truth and, according to Martin, to proceed accordingly with effective and monitored child protective measures is indicative of a wider denial: about religious practice; about vocations; about faith; about ‘Catholic’ schools; about transparency in financial matters; about our penchant for setting up structures and pretending that therefore something is happening; and so forth.
A central difficulty is that we need to get out of our system not just the culture of control and secrecy that has left such devastation in its wake but the unsustainable belief that things can continue as they are (that things are, like the economy, coming around!), that the Church knows better, and that the Church has a sense of entitlement to act almost as a State within a State.
The task of the Catholic Church is about personal and institutional renewal, getting back to the basics of what we are and what we do and jettisoning that oppressive and controlling culture that hinders us not just from engaging with the lived concerns of our people but that helps divest the gospel message of Jesus Christ of outdated and irrelevant baggage.
The big question of course is: have we the will and the capacity to change? It’s all very well for Archbishop Martin to say that there will be a very different Catholic Church in Ireland in the future. But who will change what needs to be changed?
Rome won’t, because the evidence to date is clear – Rome won’t countenance any significant change. The sounds coming out of Rome since the council – especially during the pontificate of John Paul and Benedict – were about going backwards not going forward, about ‘reforming the reform’ rather than sponsoring reform, holding back rather than pushing forward, about keeping control rather than sponsoring freedom.
The clergy won’t do it. If the clergy were prepared to change, it would have happened decades ago. Anyway we’re too old, too tired, too dispirited and as well as that we lack the resources, the energy, the direction and the competence to plot a course into the future.
The people won’t do it because they sense that it’s probably too late. So many have walked away, so many may be still in the pews but their minds are no longer with us, so many heard promises before of what was going to happen and nothing did, so their capacity to respond to the challenges of the present is extremely limited.
From a human point of view the Church looks, well, irreformable. But God could do it. In the Second Vatican he tried to get our attention by pointing us in a particular direction – a people’s Church, collegiality, co-responsibility, openness, transparency. We knew better, of course, so we went our own way and look where that got us!
Yes, God could do it, if we let him.
Main News Page |
Previous Page
|
|
|
|
Facebook
