Chai Brady
Building Hope responses on display at St Michan’s, Halston Street. Photo: Archdiocese of Dublin Dublin prelate launches new renewal phase
Despite the Church in Europe experiencing a time of decline it is also a time of “new beginning” the Archbishop of Dublin has said, launching a new phase of the ‘Building Hope’ pastoral renewal initiative.
Ahead of the publication of the Building Hope Pastoral Strategic Planning Resource 2025–2027 in September, which was built on three years of “prayer, reflection and tentative action”, Archbishop Dermot Farrell published a pastoral letter ‘Building Hope with Open Hearts’.
The archbishop said: “These materials are the result of broad consultation and dialogue, prayer, reflection, action, and further reflection, undertaken in parishes and partnerships of parishes. I ask you all to join with me in using the resources developed here, as you explore creative and courageous ways to renew the Church in our diocese.”
Archbishop Farrell said that in coming weeks there will be workshops associated with the Building Hope planning resource which he encourages parish leaders to attend. “In engaging with this resource, we are called to encourage each other. This will mean moving beyond certain worries that we understandably have, as well as facing up to the ‘resistance’ that often surfaces when we need to change. This is the vision of Building Hope with Open Hearts,” he said.
The archbishop said that “there are vibrant communities who live out the gospel, who live out of the words and actions Jesus has handed on to us. Those vibrant communities may now be small, but smallness is not the issue. Smallness was never an issue for Jesus, and smallness is never an issue for his heavenly Father…”
He added: “The Church in Europe finds itself in a time, both of decline and of new beginning. The decline is there for all to see. However, Christ calls people of faith to look at the Church from the standpoint of his Father. Let us look at the Church – and the world – with the eyes of God. Smallness is not an end-point, but a beginning. This is how the Church began. It is always how the Church begins.
“Let us find our way, step-by-step, working more deeply together, as we build our partnerships of parishes, embracing the road the Spirit is bringing us on, in such a way that, as Pope Francis says, ‘our lives can become a song of love for God, for humanity, with and for creation’.”
As part of the Building Hope initiative, in 2022 Archbishop Farrell announced the 53 partnerships of parishes in the Archdiocese of Dublin and also gave a timeline and pastoral aids which informed this stage of the initiative.
The archbishop formed the Building Hope taskforce in April 2021 which published a report based on 3,000 consultation responses in November 2021, this was used to initiate the Building Hope strategic planning process, taking the key elements of the taskforce report as a foundation for renewal in the archdiocese.