In London, the FA Cup Final was played at the weekend. As is traditional, the inspiring hymn Abide With Me was sung with gusto before the soccer action got underway.
Sports fans know a thing or two about faith and hope. To give yourself fully to your favourite team is to be a true believer, and it is to live the whole gamut of emotions and experiences from joy and hope to sorrow and despair.
Perhaps that is why so many elite sportspeople are so level-headed and tend to take things in their stride. Today’s victory, can easily be tomorrow’s defeat – and vice versa. The do well to recall the ancient Hebrew wisdom that ‘this too will pass’.
Abide With Me has salient comfort for Christians when tempted to despair or give in to a lack of hope in the face of the many challenges facing the Church and society: Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.
It was sentiment like that that Bishop Paul Dempsey was appealing to in Dublin’s St Andrew’s Church on Sunday when along with Bishop Donal Roche he took up his new ministry of service as an auxiliary bishop in the sprawling Dublin Diocese.
Bishop Dempsey recalled the words of Pope St John XXIII to denounce ‘prophets of doom’ to point to those who look at the challenges facing Irish Catholicism and conclude – either gleefully or gloomily – that the Church is dying.
The Church is not dying, Bishop Dempsey insisted, but a particular historic form of the Church is dying.
And any farmer will tell you, that for growth – something must die. The scriptures are full of such paradoxes: “I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit…”
This is not to say that the model of the Church that has gone before was wrong. The Catholic Church would not have thrived after the Reformation were it not for the vision of the Council of Trent, but what was relevant for the 17th Century in terms of structures and ways of ecclesiastical thinking is certainly not adequate for the 21st Century.
Nor is this an issue of liberals and conservatives, progressives and traditionalists – ideological capture of the Church diminishes the ability of the Church to witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our technocratic world has very little interest in inward-looking conversations akin to moving deckchairs around the Titanic.
Faith teaches us that God makes the Church ever-new. And yet, this belief is understandably tempered by the human reality that the Church in Ireland is tired. But we must not allow tiredness to be the guiding light in out discernment. Of course, the Church must pull back to save resources and energy. But this should be strategic rather than defeatist. Bishops are not regional managers of banking groups, closing local branches to give a better return to shareholders. The Church must never forget that it is missionary by its very nature and must always work for growth.
The Pope’s synodal pathway is centred around prayerfully listening together as people, religious, priests and bishops to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to the Church in 2024.
That discernment, which has already begun, will be difficult because the need for careful deliberation is matched by the urgency of the situation.
What shape the Church in Ireland will take in the future is still largely unclear. Certainly, it will be smaller: but it must be a Church that – in the words of Pope Francis – ‘goes out’. It must be one that, confident in the Gospel, seeks to bring people to a living faith capable of transforming everything.