Delivering
the Russo Family Lecture at Fordham University in New York this
afternoon, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said teachers had told him that
many children came to school without having had breakfast.
In some schools, children were so under-nourished that their learning ability was being hindered. Martin also said that people who were contributors to the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul one year ago were now turning to the society for help.
“Ireland is today picking up the pieces economically and paying the price socially. The social effects are dramatic,” he said. “There is growing anxiety that the austerity measures introduced to respond to the economic crisis are now coming to a social breaking point.”
Speaking about child abuse, Martin said the effects of the scandals had had a demoralising effect on the entire Church in Ireland. While the “overwhelming majority of priests in Ireland led, and lead, an exemplary moral life”, an “extraordinarily high” number of children had been abused.
“We are talking thousands,” he said, and a number of priests in the Archdiocese of Dublin had been serial paedophiles. “There is no way you can simply explain away the huge number of those who were abused and the fact that this took place undetected and unrecognised within the Church of Jesus Christ," said Martin. “Today we are in a safer place, but it took decades to attain this.”
On school patronage, Martin said that the Catholic Church would relinquish many of the institutional roles it had held in Ireland, but this did not mean that the Church should retreat into sacristies. “If anything, its presence must become even more vigorous within society,” he said.
A “sizeable number of parents” wanted to see “high-quality denominational education remain an essential pillar, alongside other models, of our national educational system”.
Martin said denominational education “should not become divisive or exclusivist, but neither should religious education be reduced simply to a colourless presentation of the history or sociology of religion”.
The archbishop said that many Catholic teachers no longer practised their faith “and there is a growing danger that, due to curriculum pressures, catechesis will be limited to two events, First Communion and confirmation, and stop there”.
The archbishop pointed out that a quarter of the people in the Archdiocese had registered in the most recent census as “something other than Catholic, well above the national average”.
Of the three quarters who ticked the “Catholic box” on the census form, many were “not practising or even in any real contact with the Church,” he said.
“There are already parishes in Dublin where Catholics are in a minority, and it is clear that the cultural Catholicism which today still exists will not continue for ever.”