Bishop dismisses denial of Church’s good works as ‘ideologically driven’

People who deny the good work that the Church in Ireland has done are not being fair and instead are being driven by ideology, Bishop Donal McKeown has said.

Referring to the Taoiseach’s speech with Pope Francis at Dublin Castle, Bishop McKeown pointed out how Leo Varadkar said “the Church in Ireland has done many good things”.

Dr McKeown said that “any denial of that reality is ideologically driven”. However, he also added that Catholics “do a huge injustice to Christ, to ourselves and to others if we pretend that the past was not scarred by Original Sin.

“The temptation to power, to arrogance and to blindness was no less real a hundred years ago than it is now,” he said.

In a homily at the National Padre Pio Pilgrimage in Knock on Monday, Bishop Donal McKeown said that instead of condemning others for their sin, the first task of a Catholic is to be sure that parishes and dioceses are credible witnesses of Jesus, “people who have known forgiveness and who want others to know the joy that it brings”.

Evil

In facing evil in Ireland, Dr McKeown said that secondly, like Jesus, “we have to speak the uncomfortable truth in love to our contemporaries”.

Acknowledging the Church’s failings in the past “frees us to comment on where our society is also marked by sin”.

Emptying the meaning from words such as marriage, gender and love removes fundamental reference points for young people discovering who they are, Dr McKeown said.

By removing God you “stimulate hunger for self-indulgence”, leading to the Church being replaced by the power of “corporations and strong feelings”, he added.

He said young people are dying not because of Christ’s call, but because they are told to obey their “thirst”, and that life is too short to say no.

Finally, he said, evil can only be cast out through prayer and fasting and that facing sin and its consequences is “possible only for those who have opened themselves up to Christ’s grace through prayer”.