THE ARCHBISHOP of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has appealed to young people not to abandon the church.He also said the church’s response to the current crisis will come from new structures combined with accountability.
At St Andrew’s Church, on Dublin’s Westland Row yesterday, Dr Martin said: “I appeal especially to the young people among you not to abandon the church. Your church lies in the future, the long future which will be there when my generation will have long since gone.”
He continued that “the church will not be reformed by abandoning the church, but by living the word. The church needs your integrity and honesty and idealism. You have something special to bring so that arrogance of the past can be replaced by a new idealism of the future.
“Perhaps I should not say new idealism, because we have to recognise that there is so much of that idealism is present in the church already and feels rightly betrayed,” he said.
Reflecting on the current crisis, Dr Martin continued: “The church on many occasions in history has betrayed its vocation and failed its people.” Its response “will come not just from new structures, which are necessary and that process will go on, but structures must be combined with accountability, as Cardinal Brady said”
What was needed was “a solitude which can strip from us, as individuals and as church, all the accretions and the superficialities and the corresponding arrogance and sense of self-importance which so often negatively colour our lives and decisions.”
The church needed “to step out of so much of what appeared to be positive but was truly damaging; the church needs to step out of behaviour patterns which had led it away from authentically preaching the word or even placing its own structures above the cleansing power of the word.
“In the painful solitude of the desert, the church must learn how to return to its fundamental mission,” the archbishop said.
“We have too make straight the paths our own lives and address the hills and valleys and the crooked ways of our lives and the false values we represent by the way we live.”
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