Mags GarganThe Primate of All Ireland has said that real growth and change in the Irish Church will not come from the bishops but from the ground up.
Speaking to about 250 young adults at a youth conference organised by the Legion of Mary in Dublin at the weekend, Archbishop Eamon Martin said the three biggest challenges facing the Irish Church today were people not understanding their faith, lack of spirit filled worship and lack of mission outreach. However, he said they were also the Church’s biggest opportunities to “share and engage with our faith”.
“Our people just don’t know or understand what our faith it about,” Archbishop Eamon said. “If we could find ways of enabling people to learn more, to reflect more, to think more about their faith that is the greatest opportunity for the growth of the Faith in Ireland today.”
Small groups
He said that this was too big a task for the bishops alone. “I’m not sure if the task of developing and understating our faith is best coming from the centre or the top. It actually begins on the ground, with small groups of people,” the archbishop said.
“Our worship needs to be spirit-filled. If people experience a spirt-filled community at worship they will want to come back. We need to revisit that sense of the sacred. To find ways of helping people to touch the sacred in worship,” he said.
Referring to Pope Francis’ call to mission and reaching out to the margins, Archbishop Eamon said “I think that for a long time I myself and many of us in the Church have said ‘We are in the Church, why are people not coming?’ But there are a lot of people coming to keep us busy, but we have neglected I’m sure that we need to go out.
“We are being called to go out, it is a huge challenge but it is also the great opportunity to be able to share and engage with our faith.”
Bishops “spoke truth” in marriage debate
Archbishop Eamon Martin said the Irish bishops were criticised for both not speaking enough and speaking too much on the same-sex marriage debate, but that he believed “they spoke the truth into the debate”.
In answer to a question from the audience at a youth conference in Dublin at the weekend, he said same-sex marriage was a “really difficult issue”.
“There are a large number of Catholics who believed that their bishop shouldn’t speak on this issue and others who were clear on the opposite. I know some people will think the bishops got it totally wrong and some people will think they got it right in the way they pitched the Catholic message into this. I would encourage people to actually read the Meaning of Marriage document and the 26 pastoral messages written by the bishops. I believe they did speak the truth into the debate,” he said.