Wednesday, August 17, 2011

WYD pilgrims determined to be architects of the future - Bishop McKeown

The young people of faith who are travelling to Madrid for World Youth Day “are determined not to be prisoners of the past but architects of the future,” according to Bishop Donal McKeown of Down and Connor.  

Speaking ahead of the departure of a group 50 pilgrims from his own diocese and the diocese of Derry, Bishop McKeown, who is Chairman of the Episcopal Commission for Vocations and Youth, said, “Despite negative publicity and a hostile cultural environment, many still hunger for belonging, peace with the past and a dream for the future.”

Quoting the renowned American peace activist, Fr Daniel Berrigan, he said World Youth Day, “still provides a focal point for that generation of young idealists who refuse ‘to be distracted from distraction by distraction’.”

Speaking of the context in which these young pilgrims are embarking on their journey, Bishop McKeown said that there was much talk about where Irish Catholicism goes in the context of the current challenges. 

“Some suggest that only a radical break with a corrupt past will offer any prospect of a future.  Others are equally clear that only a return to clarity and orthodox teaching can help people reconnect with faith in Jesus,” he said.

The 61-year-old bishop commented, "As leaders at local and national level seek to sketch out 
ways forward, Catholicism – and all other religious groups - will have to swim in a very different sea from the one where my generation grew up.”  

He suggested that one of the changes emerging is an end to the century-long culture where religious identity was something a person is born into and so part of who a person is fated to be.

“Now faith is a matter, not of fate, but of choice,” he explained and suggested that the new National Directory for Catechesis in Ireland recognised this changed environment. 

“Church will be less about keeping people in their allotted faith community and more about inviting them to opt into a local church family where they can grow in faith,” Bishop McKeown said.

The Bishop, who will participate in World Youth Day in Madrid, also warned against local churches becoming a “transient and comfortable ‘holy huddle’ of currently like-minded individuals, based on a supermarket approach to religious experience.” 

He warned that diversity and choice do not have to mean fragmentation.

He underlined that the core elements of the early Christian Church were “the teaching of the apostles, the community, the breaking of bread and prayer.”  

Commitment to these core disciplines, the Bishop told pilgrims, were “as much key parts of Christian discipleship in the 21st century as they were in the 1st century.”

In a culture where the competitive consumer is king, faithfulness and loyalty, justice and solidarity are not necessarily popular modern virtues, he said.  

“But faithful belonging to the imperfect pilgrim People of God is not just a lifestyle choice that I make. I suggest that there is little future for forms of Christianity that give more space to my choosing, than to my being chosen.”

In a message of hope, Bishop McKeown concluded that leadership in church and state is not just about articulating anger and repentance but also about sketching a dream.  It involves the Gospel value of pointing out that those with a past can also have a future.

A special feature on World Youth Day 2011 is now available on the Bishops’ Conference website www.catholicbishops.ie