Bishop Donal McKeown There is a real need for good news, because society is wallowing in despair and meaninglessness, the bishop of Derry Donal McKeown has said.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic in Derry, Dr McKeown said there is a need for Catholics to develop the confidence to engage as Catholics with our culture, to influence the culture which is one of the calls of Pope Benedict and Pope Francis as well and John Paul II – “get out there and engage in debates about creation, about human life, about AI, about all those things” he said.
To do this, Catholics need to embrace an intellectual faith that is different from a more pious faith in the past he said, adding that the Church is not just downsizing, “it is actually re-shaping for mission, we’re not downsizing for the sake of downsizing, we’re doing it in order to be better, fitter, leaner and better able to engage with our society at the intellectual level and all other sorts of levels.”
He said that for Derry, he hoped that the opening of the St Paul’s religious bookstore in Derry “will be able to help us develop a sense in Derry of people who want to engage at an intellectual level with the faith and also we want to engage as people of faith in discussions in a synodal church and discerning God’s way forward rather than being cowed or afraid to engage because Catholics feel inadequately prepared in their knowledge of scripture and so on.” He was keen to be clear he wasn’t playing down the importance of pious/ tangible faith. “I think both of those things (piety/sacramental and intellectualism) are important. It is physical things that have kept people going, such as in the 18th Century when there were no churches it was things such as holy wells and domestic pieties that kept the Church, kept the Faith alive, that applied in Japan and Korea as well after the martyrs in those countries. So the tangible, the sacramental remains an important part of how we experience the transcendent. We have that sense that creation is good and that oil and water and bread, all can be bearers of the divine message, that is the message of hope. So I don’t think the tangible should be downplayed, as if it is something that is only old fashioned, it’s important for everyone.”
Hope, he said, is based on the narrative of the past that says God has always been faithful to us in the past. “We’ve come through all sorts of times, the monastic flourishing in the early centuries, then the rediscovering of a suffering church during the Penal Times, then the whole resurgence of missionary activity in the 18th/19th and 20th Centuries. So I think the Church goes in cycles and this is an opportunity for us to say ‘God has been faithful to us, always remaking us in the past, and we can face the future and all its problems, not because we are hopeful things will work out the way we want them to, but because we believe God is constantly at work in our society. That sort of liberating message which stops us from complaining about the past and blaming somebody else for things going wrong and saying how can we discern God’s way forward because we believe God is at work, even on Calvary, even when everything looks bleak, the kingdom of God is close at hand is the message, so I hope this is a time of reshaping for mission rather than downsizing.”