THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN has said that the Catholic Church has
something to offer the country’s younger generation of politicians – but
has criticised how Ireland allowed itself to be caught up in the Celtic
Tiger.
Speaking in DCU last Tuesday afternoon, Martin said Ireland had “begun to
think that we had attained something more sophisticated than was really
there” during the economic boom years.
“There is a sense in which we felt in someway that we were on the
road to a Celtic paradise on earth… [but] paradise can never be achieved
in this world,” Martin said, during a speech on the relationship
between church and state to DCU’s Institute of Ethics.
The Archbishop also welcomed the announcement by new education
minister Ruairí Quinn of a new national forum on the patronage of
primary schools – but warned that simply transferring schools
immediately into state ownership would not be a fix-all solution to the
system’s current problems.
Though the Church obviously bore its responsibility for the problems
of clerical sexual abuse, Martin said it was “equally easy to indicate
how the State failed both in its role of monitoring what was happening
in those institutions but also about the quality of the institutions
[...] in general it would be wrong to think that simply moving
responsibility from parents to the State would provide a more effective
answer.”
The Archbishop also noted that “the group which bears the fundamental
constitutional responsibility for educational choice – parents – is the
least organised” on a national scale, and was thus the most difficult
group to interact with.
This was probably have been because could be to do with the previous model of outright Church control, however.
Elsewhere, Martin acknowledged that the Church could take a totally
active role in the political life of the state, saying that if the
Church was to adapt to “the culture of the times” it would face the
danger of not being able to confront it.
The Church risked being only to “speak the language of the culture of
the day” without being able to shape it – leading to an organisation
that was ”politically correct, but without the cutting edge of the
Gospel.”