Catholics must embrace identity as creative minority, bishop urges

Faithful Catholics must accept that they are a minority in modern Ireland, but must resist any temptation to seek solace in ghettos, Waterford and Lismore’s Bishop Phonsie Cullinan has said.

Dr Cullinan was speaking in Maynooth at Evangelium, a Catholic apologetics conference for young people aged between 18 and 35. The conference, now in its third year, was established by Fr David Marsden, inspired by a similar annual conference in Britain.

Describing how he had been reading a book on the life of St Alphonsus Liguori, Dr Cullinan said that considering the obstacles St Alphonsus faced in founding the Redemptorists, “if the Holy Spirit were not behind it, it would never have survived”.

This was “fairly typical” for new initiatives in the Church, Dr Cullinan said, observing that, “if the Church were not of God it would have ended at 3pm on the day we call Good Friday over 2000 years ago”.

Reformer

With this in mind, he said, Catholics should not worry about being a modern minority, and should remember how reformer saints had always battled majorities to bring about renewal. Identifying this as “probably the only viable strategy”, he warned “one false alternative would be for the Church to ghettoise itself”.

Europe’s Catholics, he said, must recognise that being an active Catholic “is now a choice rather than a matter of social conformity”. Urging those attending the conference to embrace their identity as what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has called a “creative minority”, he called on them to engage with the world and accept their task in the rebuilding of Christian culture.

“The creative minority is the way in which God has throughout history brought about reform,” he said, continuing, “That has always been the way change occurred in the Church.”

Other speakers at the conference included Dr Tom Finegan, who spoke about human rights, the Chilean Jose Ureta, who spoke about the link between evangelisation and apologetics, and solicitor Maria Steen whose speech on Catholic education was, Dr Cullinan said, “a tour de force”.