THE VATICAN has been criticised by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin
for its tardiness in responding to reports from apostolic visitation
teams to Ireland, submitted last April.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin
emphasised he was not criticising Pope Benedict, but was encouraging a
sense of urgency on the part of the Pope’s “collaborators”.
Speaking
in Dublin last Thursday, he said the pace of change in Irish religious
culture was such that “the longer the delay in advancing the fruits of
the apostolic visitation, the greater the danger of false expectations,
and the greater the encouragement to those who prefer immobilism to
reform, and the greater the threat to the effectiveness of this immense
gift of the Holy Father to the Irish Church”.
He was “impatient to
learn about the path that the apostolic visitation will set out for
renewal for the Irish Church so that our renewal will move forward
decisively. At the same time, I am also becoming increasingly impatient
at the slowness in the process, which began over a year ago. This is not
a criticism of the Holy Father. It is an appeal to his collaborators.”
Seven
apostolic visitation teams were in Ireland to investigate the church
over the recent winter and spring months.
They were in the four Catholic
archdioceses, the Irish seminaries, and met male and female religious
congregations before reporting to Rome by Easter.
Archbishop
Martin was speaking at All Hallows College, Dublin, to delegates from
almost 70 countries attending a conference held in anticipation of the
2012 Eucharistic Congress.
He said Ireland was “undergoing a
revolution of its religious culture”.
In some Dublin parishes “the
presence at Sunday Mass is some 5 per cent of the Catholic population
and, in cases, even below 2 per cent. On any particular Sunday about 18
per cent of the Catholic population in the Archdiocese of Dublin attends
Mass,” he said.
For the second time since he became Archbishop
“there will be no ordination to the priesthood in the Archdiocese of
Dublin, and the coming years indicate only a tiny trickle of new
vocations”.
He believed “the secularisation of Irish culture is very advanced”.
His “greatest concern” was “the rift which is growing between the church and young people”.
“We
have bright, intelligent, generous and idealistic young people. Most
will have been educated . . . in Catholic schools. However, from a
relatively early age, they drift away from any regular contact with the
church and especially from Sunday Mass.”
He said that “too often
the renewal agenda of Irish Catholics is driven by an inward-looking
agenda of reform of church structures. Such an agenda will have very
little appeal to those who have really lost contact with the church and
regard such reform as interesting but of little relevance to their lives
– indeed it might lead them only to further alienation.”
There
were “those who feel that my evaluation of the current situation is too
negative, and gloomier than that of others. I do not think so. I
believe, however, that my evaluation is realistic.”
He described
as “painful” the “failure in passing on the faith to the coming
generation”.
A reason for this was “a failure of believers to witness
their faith in coherent forms of service relevant to the current
cultural situation”.