Future of Irish Church rests on ‘strong’ lay people

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin ‘regrets’ referendum reality check call

The Archbishop of Dublin has warned that the Church in Ireland will only have a future if a new generation of “strong and articulate” laypeople can make their voices heard.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin also insisted that the Church will not be renewed if people are harking back to the past or if Catholics become inward-looking.

Dr Martin said he regretted saying the result of the recent referendum on same-sex marriage was a “reality check” for the Church in Ireland admitting that “perhaps I gave mixed messages”.

The archbishop said he intended to get across the point that a reality check is “nothing more than discerning the facts in all their complexity and then facing the facts and evaluating how to address the facts in a culture that is ever changing”.

Archbishop Martin said he is convinced that the Church in Ireland needs “a new generation of strong and articulate lay men and women”. He called for “a strong laity which is not inward-looking or caught up simply in Church structures and activities”.

Improving

Speaking at the MacGill Summer School in Co. Donegal, he expressed the view that “things are improving within the Church”.

However, he cautioned against the temptation “to think that things can now go back to where they were before”.

He expressed the view that “there are signs within the Catholic Church that some – even young people – are seeking refuge from the challenges of life by adapting ways of the past and are retreating from dialogue with the present into the false security of imaginary better times.”

He insisted that “conformist Catholicism is not the answer”.

“Simply repeating doctrinal formulas is not the answer; an inward-looking Catholicism – liberal or conservative – is not the answer”. He said that the future of the Church depended on well-formed Catholics “who are articulate in understanding their faith and feel called to bring the unique vison which springs from their faith into dialogue with the realities of the world”.