Priests need to move away from a mindset of “ministerial serving of
people”, and recognise that communities have an active role in pastoral
outreach and evangelisation, Bishop Brendan Leady told a gathering of
priests from the Diocese of Ferns.Speaking at a lecture for priests at the Enniscorthy Eucharistic Gathering in Co. Wexford last Saturday, Bishop Leahy said it was time for “a change in pastoral mentality” and for priests to “see others as co-responsible - to see others not simply as the object of our ministry but as the subjects together with us of evangelisation and pastoral development”.
In his address on the subject ‘Priests in a Changing World’, the newly-ordained Bishop of Limerick said that clerics need to “lose our ‘over-concern’ with ourselves”.
“Something Pope Francis keeps saying in recent months is that we need to avoid self-reference, we need to go outside ourselves. I think lay people, like the pro-life people at the moment, are tremendously active. There are a number of lay people coming forward who are committed, who want to promote, in this case life, but many of them are also very engaged in the Church. It is that co-responsibility,” he said.
“This community taking up the notion of being a community and together working to see how best to promote and bring forward our relationships with one another as a parish community.”
Bishop Leahy said that in the past the Church was like a train, “that had an engine and many carriages being brought along by the engine, whereas today what is perhaps being called for is for everyone to be an engine. In that sense, all of us could be co-responsible. No one is being carried along.
“In other words the community, it might start with the pastoral council, but ultimately the whole parish has to take ownership of the fact that we are the subjects of the Christian event and not simply the carriages being drawn along by the engine,” he said.