Greg Daly
Cardinal Kevin Farrell The Pope in Ireland
Pope Francis harbours no illusions about modern Ireland, Cardinal Kevin Farrell told Greg Daly
When it was announced at the closing ceremony of the 2015 World Meeting of Families that the Church’s next global celebration of the family would be held in Dublin, eyebrows inevitably were raised. The September 27 announcement, after all, came just months after Ireland’s marriage referendum, which had seen two thirds of Irish voters voting to redefine how the State would understand marriage and the family.
Two years later, almost to the day, the Dublin-born Cardinal Kevin Farrell, head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, explained to a packed hall at Down and Connor’s Faith and Life Convention that Pope Francis’ decision that Dublin should host WMOF2018 was no accident.
“I would hope that you would all support and gather together so that the Church as a whole can do something about the greatest crisis affecting humanity today – it is the crisis of marriage and it is the crisis of families,” he urged the assembled crowd.
“Let’s not talk any more about it, let’s not discuss it anymore,” he continued. “The reality exists – let’s do something about it.”
Pope Francis had told him that June that his decision to have Ireland host the gathering had its roots in his knowledge and experience of Irish missionaries, the cardinal said.
“I even had missionaries from Ireland – Irish priests – in Buenos Aires in Argentina,” he quoted the Pontiff as saying. “They sent missionaries all over the world. They Christianised many parts of Africa, some parts of Latin America, certainly North America – and I can attest to that – and how many other parts of the world?”
Books
How many books have been written, he added with a nod to Thomas Cahill’s famous tome on the heroic role of Irish monks in the early Middle Ages, on how the Irish saved civilisation?
“Of course, we’re always good about talking about what we do, but there is a basis to that,” he continued. “We need, Pope Francis said, we need to ensure that they be part of the revolution of promoting once again marriage and family life in our world today.”
The situation in Northern Europe, he said, is “drastic”, and simply reading the statistics shows how important it is that action is taken.
Concluding his address, he said: “That’s why he chose Ireland to be the centre of the next gathering of the families. I hope that you will all support it and that you not ever be afraid to voice your support for marriage and for family life in our world today.”
The obvious questions, given this, are what exactly Pope Francis envisages Irish people doing to help realise his revolution in marriage and family life, and how aware the Pope is of the various social changes that have taken place in Ireland in recent times?
“He understands that – he doesn’t think that Ireland is some miracle,” Cardinal Farrell told The Irish Catholic after his address. “Nobody thinks that, but he thinks there’s a great spirit in the Irish people of giving of themselves to others, and of taking leadership roles, and I think that he would hope that Ireland will solve Ireland’s problems first.”
For the cardinal, that seemed a common-sense approach: “I think that’s the way that you project a positive message – you resolve your own issues.”
The Pope had no illusions about modern Ireland, as a typical northern European society, Cardinal Farrell stressed. “I believe that he realises, like everyone realises, the problems that the whole world is faced with. He realises the problems that you are faced with,” he said.
Since the 2015 decision the Pope would have been more fully briefed on the realities of modern Ireland, he continued, pointing to the Irish bishops’ January 2017 ad limina visit to Rome.
“He met with all the bishops privately where he had a free-for-all,” he said. “Pope Francis is great for having discussions. It’s not like it’s a lecture series. He wants ‘okay, we’re all here, we’re all in the same boat together, we’re sitting around the table – now what’s the problem? Let’s discuss it.’”
The priority in this ‘revolution’, the cardinal said, is to hone in on what it is the Church understands by ‘family’. “We need to focus on our concept of family, what we believe as Christians, as Catholics – this is about our Faith in the family,” he said. “Sometimes that’s forgotten, you know. We’re not addressing a multitude of different definitions of family. I think that’s important for us to understand. I think that’s what Pope Francis would hope that we would do, and I think that that’s what he would hope would come out of this.”
Taking a fresh look at the notion of family values and how values are passed on through families should be key to this too, the cardinal said, pointing to the classic ideas of the family as a domestic church and of parents as the first teachers of the Faith.
“Families have transmitted the Faith, but families have also transmitted values, and when there isn’t that strong family life, values are not transmitted from one person to another,” he explained. “Then we find a kind of lost generation, of people who have no values to the extent that they don’t know why they live anymore.”
Not, he added, that he thinks the Pope envisages Ireland sending our missionaries to teach this revived idea of family. Rather, he said, Pope Francis’ hope is that “Ireland will solve Ireland’s issues and then become a beacon of light for the rest of the world”.
In doing this, the cardinal added, it will not be enough to look to older models of value-transmission, such as in the working-class Dublin of his youth where mothers were domestic evangelisers and formators.
“We need to adjust to the moment and the culture in which we live,” he said, noting that “the way the Faith was practiced in apostolic times is not the way the Faith is practiced today”.
Faith transmission
Financial necessity is largely responsible for family realities being different nowadays, he explained, and the transmission of Faith and values being difficult.
“Today I know many families where both father and mother work, who are in and out of the home, some of them work two jobs every day,” he said. “They don’t have the time – kids are with grandparents, kids are with people in the neighbourhood.”
This, he said, is one reason why the Pontiff returns repeatedly – and sometimes in jest – to the topic of grandparents as sharers of Christian truth in a world where both parents must work, and work lots.
“That’s why Francis makes a joke about grandparents, because in the economic situation of the world today, that’s one of the greatest challenges to families and to marriage: the economic situation and the cost of living, and parents have to work two and three jobs just to make ends meet,” he said.
“And that’s the reality – but the reality doesn’t preclude the transmitting of values, the family unit, the family tradition and family values, and every family is different,” he said.