The new Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin, now has roughly
one year to acquaint himself with the diocese he will take over from
Cardinal Seán Brady at end of that period. As he knows, he will not only be taking over the Armagh archdiocese, he will also become the new Primate of All Ireland and almost certainly the next president of the Irish Episcopal Conference.
He will become the leader of Northern Ireland’s Catholics but he will be in the national media spotlight as well.
Given his relatively young age (52) Archbishop Martin is going to have to take on all these tasks for the next 25 years, a long stretch by any standards, although John Paul II was Pope for even longer than that and despite physical infirmity offered leadership right to the end by which time he was in his mid-80s.
Archbishop Martin will obviously find himself reacting to events a great deal of the time, but he will also need to have in his mind a vision of the sort of Church he would like to see develop in his diocese and on this island.
In addition, he will have to have a vision of the sort of interaction he wants to see between the Church and the wider society including its politics.
In other words, he will need a pastoral vision, a civic vision and a political vision. All of these will need to be informed by a theological vision.
The pastoral vision is, of course, primarily about looking after his flock as best he can with the help of God.
That word ‘pastoral’ is both overused and misused. It has also taken on a very soft meaning.
When a bishop says he is ‘pastoral’ what he often has in mind is looking after the sick and wounded members of his flock, which is obviously a very important task for a shepherd.
But it also means protecting and defending his flock. This is the main reason a shepherd has a crozier after all.
One of the main things Christians need protecting from is bad ideas, a term we shouldn’t hesitate to use. The old way of doing this was to prevent bad ideas going into circulation at all and to suppress those responsible for the bad ideas.
Within the Church itself, there is still a need to deal with theologians and others who directly deny certain of the fundamental teachings of the Church and therefore challenge the very core of Christian identity.
This could involve, for example, withdrawing their license to teach as Catholic theologians (as happened to Hans Kung).
For the most part, however, it will simply mean informing Catholics that a given idea promulgated by a priest or theologian or religious is false and erroneous and to explain why this is so.
It is astounding how rarely bishops in Ireland carry out this basic task and one result of this, is huge confusion among Catholics as to which beliefs are fundamental to Catholicism and which are not.
A bigger challenge arguably is to deal with bad ideas coming into the Church from the outside. One of the very worst ideas is moral relativism which is leading to a very widespread individualism that eats away at the vitals both of the Church and of the wider society.
In fact, this is the single biggest ideological challenge facing the Church in the West today because it makes it virtually impossible to teach that there are objective moral truths by which all are bound.
Indeed, it leads to the widespread notion that is it insulting and offensive even to suggest that such truths exist.
It also feeds into the ideology of choice, which is effectively the religion of the Western world today.
We see this most dramatically at work in debates about abortion, but also in debates about euthanasia and in debates about the family.
Archbishop Martin need be in no doubt that this widespread moral relativism is going to become even more widespread and become more intensely politicised and thereby find its way increasingly into law in ways that will impinge on the rights of religious believers.
Already there are suggestions in the context of the debate about abortion legislation in the South that doctors and nurses will have to take part in ‘emergency abortions’ regardless of their own beliefs.
If and when we legalise same-sex marriage either in the North or the South or both, will religious schools be required one day to teach that same-sex marriage is morally equivalent to man-woman marriage?
This is what Pope Emeritus Benedict called the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ and the Church in Ireland and elsewhere is going to have to work out strategies for dealing with it.
It is also going to have to deal with attempts to further marginalise religion and to exclude it from any real public influence.
Freedom of religion will increasingly be defined as freedom of worship only, rather than as the freedom to manifest religious belief in the workplace (e.g. to refuse to perform abortions or dispense abortifacients) and the freedom of religious organisations like schools to fully live by and teach their beliefs.
The temptation to passively accept what is coming will be huge, or else to offer only lip-service opposition.
Archbishop Martin, in conjunction with his fellow priests, bishops and laypeople will instead have to devise a strategy to deal with this and to think not months ahead, but years.
In turn, this will mean a concerted educational effort that will alert Catholics to what is coming and to teach them how to resist it.
In 25-years-time we will be approaching the mid-21st Century, a sobering thought. If Irish society continues on its present trajectory, abortion is likely to be legalised. We could well have euthanasia. Same-sex marriage could be legalised and Catholic schools could be forced to teach it.
We can only guess at what levels of religious practice will be then and at how many priests and religious there will be.
Big efforts will have been made to reduce religion to a mere private ‘lifestyle choice’, that is, to completely relativise it.
Resisting this in its entirety is, of course, beyond the strength of one man and probably of the entire hierarchy also.
But without a sober analysis of what lies ahead, and unless a great deal of thought is put into how to deal with it, this is almost certainly the future we face.
Archbishop Martin can’t be daunted by this.
Other Christian leaders in the past have faced much worse situations and eventually the Church has pulled through.
But strong leadership will be needed allied to a clear vision.
That leadership will have to come above all from the man who will soon enough be the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.
He will need the prayers of all Catholics!