Michael KellyIn the United States, where I spent last weekend attending the Religious Education Congress sponsored by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, there is a special affection for Ireland. This is especially true when it comes to the Church.
The history of Catholicism in North America and much of the English-speaking world is synonymous with Ireland. The sprawling Los Angeles diocese, like so many others in the USA, relied heavily on Irish priests. Many churches are named for St Patrick, St Brigid, St Columbanus, St Kevin etc. and at many of these same churches a prominent plaque pays tribute to the founding pastor, usually a Murphy, O’Donnell, Mahoney or Fitzpatrick.
At various times in the 2,000 year history of the Church, different countries and peoples take on a disproportionate responsibility of the life of the universal Church.
Missionaries
Take, for example, the countless heroic and saintly Irish missionaries who left our shores as part of the various mission movements whether to restore Europe after the Dark Ages or to what we now call the developing world when these countries were dark and mysterious places to us.
The Irish Church is no longer such a source Church and, in fact, is in need of missionaries from elsewhere. This is evident in a place like southern California where one is now likely to see a new church named for St Rose of Lima or Our Lady of Guadalupe. At the cathedral parish of the Diocese of Orange, for example, there are two Sunday Masses in English, four in Vietnamese and five in Spanish. At least in that part of the US, the new source churches are Latin America and Vietnam. And this is where many of the vocations are coming from too.
The election of Pope Francis just over two years ago can be seen as a clear indication that Latin America in particular is now the source Church for the Catholic world in the way that Ireland was at the Dark Ages, Spain and Italy were at the time of the counter reformation and France and Germany were at the time of the Second Vatican Council.
The Latin American Church’s vibrancy combined with an active love for the poor and a thirst for justice is a powerful antidote to the cynicism and lethargy that have crept in to the tired Irish Church.
Digging deeper
The elephant in the room when it comes to the Church in Ireland becoming more missionary is resources. Most US Catholics contribute significantly more to their parish on a weekly basis than Irish Catholics do. It’s not uncommon to see a weekly collection in a US parish top $30,000 when a similarly-sized parish in Ireland might take in less than €1,000.
US parishes and dioceses, therefore, can afford to invest in faith formation projects in a way that Irish parishes can’t.
Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. US Catholics give more because they see resources used for vibrant faith formation. But, unless Irish Catholics start to dig deeper, the kind of faith formation we need to roll out at a parish level is unlikely to happen.
Lifelong faith formation
The RE Congress, as the Los Angeles gathering is titled, brings together some 30,000 delegates from 18 countries. The majority are from the US. Many of them are employed in parishes and dioceses as catechists, youth ministers or faith formators. Sr Edith Prendergast, the Irish woman responsible for organising the event for the past 28 years, told me the secret is to see faith formation as a lifelong project. “From the womb to the tomb,” she joked.
In Ireland we’ve relied on the schools and the culture to introduce new generations to the Faith. Evidently, that’s no longer enough. The cultural narrative in Ireland is no longer instinctively Catholic in the way it once was. In the schools, many teachers no longer share the Church’s Faith and those who do often feel completely abandoned by the parish and the home.
A renewed sense of the importance of the parish as the primary encounter with Christ will be vitally important if the Church in Ireland is to be fit for purpose and truly adopt what Pope Francis calls a missionary footing. The Pope knows that the only answer to a tired and jaded culture is a renewed sense of the Church as a missionary project to those who no longer attend Mass rather than a work of maintenance for those who do.