‘Our priests are constantly burying young people who die for want of a reason for living’ – Bishop of Derry

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There is a “crisis” among young people who “we are losing to self-harm, through addiction and reckless actions”, the Bishop of Derry has warned.

Bishop Donal McKeown told The Irish Catholic that “our priests are constantly burying young people who die for want of a reason for living”, while also saying the Church must be a “prophetic voice” and critic of Government.

While some people say nothing about the issue, the bishop said, others ask, “how can we stop this?’

“They don’t ask: ‘How is our worldview actually nourishing dysfunctionality? How is it actually promoting a negative worldview that has no hope? ‘Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die’ really is not a terribly motivating ideal,” Bishop McKeown said.

“If all you can tell young people is ‘Have fun’, ‘Life is too short to say no’, ‘Let’s feel good’… These are ads, slogans that are being churned out to them. If you keep telling them that, no wonder they will say ‘what on earth’s all this whole living thing about?’ It’s good for the market, but our job is to critique what the strong would like us to promote.”

The bishop warned that the current dominant ideology in Ireland is as “intolerant as Catholicism ever was intolerant of dissidence”.

“Our job is to ensure that for the sake of young people that we can offer this integrated view of who the person is and also an integrated worldview which helps them to make sense of science, art, music, literature, mathematics, physics and all of those things within a particular  transcendental horizon, rather than just in terms of the one-dimensional ‘liquid society’ Pope Francis talked about recently in Dilexit Nos [the Pope’s encyclical on the Sacred Heart].”

He added: “There’s a whole crisis out there and I think our job, not being on the inside anymore, is that where possible as Christian churches together to be on the outside having a prophetic voice. Being a friendly critic.”

The “tectonic plates” of politics are changing across the world, according to Bishop Donal, and with an election coming up in the south he warned of having an “absence of principles”.

“If there’s no ground of principle on which you can actually argue, it becomes a sparring match, and that obviously rubs off on how we are as societies as well. If mocking people and tearing them to pieces becomes acceptable for leaders to engage in, then why do you expect the population to not believe that is an acceptable way of arguing? So yes, there is, in a context of fear, always attempt for retrenchment, pulling back behind the walls, and we have that temptation in Church as well,” he said.