REACTION TO the economic crisis is often dominated by the negative, while we need “a greater sense of common purpose and hope for the future”, the Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin has said.He has also referred to how, in coming days, people would be reading about “sordid events” that happened in the archdiocese.
Speaking yesterday at graduation ceremonies in Dublin’s Mater Dei Institute, he said that “reading and listening to much of the media coverage of the current economic situation in Ireland, I sometimes fear that our reactions and commentaries are so often dominated by the negative: about what is not going well, about inadequate responses, and about responses simply being shot down. Today, we need a greater sense of common purpose and hope for the future.”
He continued that “the roots of the current economic crisis show us that, like it or not, we are all in this together. The solutions will only come when we find a new sense of national purpose and national unity. Certainly, there is need for critical observation and comment. That is of the essence of a free and democratic society. But there is a sense in which negativity only produces negativity and acrimony, rather than productivity and purpose.”
Society needed the contribution of religion “and religion needs religion,” he said.
He added that “in these days we will be reading of sordid events that took place within the Catholic Church in the archdiocese of Dublin, about the abuse of children and about how it was managed. Such events happen when the community of the church becomes centred on itself and its position in society and when it drifts away from its roots in the message of Jesus Christ.”
The church in every time of history needed “to be recalled to the integrity of its message, which is never one which seeks power or privilege,” he said. The more the church became “a church of the spirit, the more it will have to offer society, not that it will have a programme for economic or social reform; rather it will lead us to have a prophetic understanding of what is happening in society and in the church,” he said.
The essential thing was “not just what is happening and where things are going or even what went wrong. The challenge is to understand the meaning of what is happening, of moving beyond the functional and the pragmatic to seeing the deeper things that each of us need and society needs.
“There is a sense in which the church can only be a leaven in society when it thinks outside the box of the thought patterns of society. The church can only do this when it returns in its thought and action to its roots.
“Being a counter-cultural church will be painful and humbling and demanding in a culture which is often arrogant in its own certainties.”
He also said “in times of economic cutbacks there can be a temptation to look at education in a very functional and pragmatic way. I think that anyone who has responsibility for educational budgets, rightly, has to think in pragmatic terms.”
But “education is not just a production line, which produces Leaving Cert students, as it might produce cars or computers. Students are not products,” he said.
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