The leadership of the Church in Ireland has “a huge amount of
repenting” to do according the auxiliary bishop of Down and Connor,
Donal McKeown.
In his reflection for Lent, Bishop McKeown said that due to the wide
acceptance of the “gilded story of holy Ireland” the Church hadn’t been
able to “recognise the reality of evil in our midst.”
The Chairman of the Irish Bishops’ Council for Vocations said that
while there “was no future unless the past and its pain were processed”,
he also underlined that there was no future if the Church remained a
prisoner of its past.
He added that it was now time for the story of the Church in Ireland
to be retold in ways that recognised “the terrible sins of the past.”
We have a chance “to learn from the experience of human” as well as “ecclesiastical blindness.”
However, he also underlined that Lent should not be about satisfying
“a tendency towards masochism or self-righteousness.”
Bishop McKeown
warned those looking at the six weeks as a quick-fix weight loss
programme or an “insignificant nod towards the world’s starving
billions” that they risked making Lent just one more self-help therapy
or a superficial attempt to assuage a guilty conscience.
Warning that new systems without a changed heart were meaningless, he
was critical of those who encouraged Irish society to see the current
financial strictures as “part of a necessary but temporary blip on the
glorious road to utopia through economic growth.”
He said that Lent challenged political leaders and opinion formers to
“repent for believing and perpetuating the lie that human beings are
merely consumers rather than citizens.”
The Bishop said he hoped the “current economic debacle” would force
society to promote social cohesion and community in a culture that said
it was our duty and right to obey all our thirsts and where
self-restraint was frowned on as unhealthy.
Though Lent began with ashes and purple, it was not “a self-hating
exercise in pain.” Lent, the bishop said, asked us as individuals to
look at our patterns of behaviour and tackle selfish urges and encourage
generous ones.
“Lent is an invitation to listen to our hearts and not just to
bathroom scales” and to refuse to become “a Pavlovian slave to an
advertising jingle,” Bishop McKeown said.
“This season is a call to hear the cry of the poor above of the screech of advertisements,” he concluded.