Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has hit out at reformers and media critics calling for new structures in the traditionally authoritarian Irish Catholic Church.Speaking in Drogheda, Co Louth, Sunday, Archbishop Martin said that renewal in the Church did not consist in creating new structures, but in returning to the very roots of the Christian faith.
Celebrity
"The path of renewal in the Church is not a path of celebrity or popularity or triumphalism," he said.
"It is not a media plan; it is not simply a pastoral strategy", added Archbishop Martin, stressing that it was the Eucharist and the renewal of the faith that mattered.
Archbishop Martin was preaching in St Peter's Church after the annual procession and display of the relics of St Oliver Plunkett, a former Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland who was executed in Tyburn, England, in 1681. He was canonised as a martyr by Pope Paul VI in 1975.
In a display of traditional Catholic piety, the mile-long procession of St Oliver's relics moved its way from Our Lady of Lourdes Church to St Peter's Church, led by the Carlingford pipe band and representatives of local Catholic organisations including the Knights of Columbanus.
The chief celebrant at the Mass was Cardinal Sean Brady.
Against the background of public revulsion at the scale of exposed clerical child sexual abuse of children, Archbishop Martin, in his homily, said the path of renewal for the Church was "a path of suffering".
And he appealed to Irish Catholics to renounce in their hearts and their lives many attitudes dear to them, and to purify their "understanding of God from the many cultural accretions which would tend to create a comfortable Christianity, a smug Christianity, a domineering or patronising Christianity, all of which are founded on a false sense of what brings certainty to faith".
Painful
Renewal demanded conversion and conversion was always painful, he added. "It requires the pain of recognising errors and misconduct."
A faith that seeks to align itself with a culture that was not open to understanding the true nature and the activity of God ends up just as an ideology or a veneer, he added.
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