The Irish hierarchy has been urged to consider appointing an advisory
group of eight, similar to the group of eight cardinals appointed by
Pope Francis to advise him on reform of church governance.
In a document submitted to the Association of Catholic Priests, Mgr
Dermot Lane, President of Mater Dei Institute of Education in Dublin,
suggested that the bishops should now establish this kind of select
group to advise them on reform and renewal of the Church.
He suggested that the group might include a disaffected intellectual,
a woman, someone from the business world, a theologian, a religious,
lay person active in ministry, a priest, and a bishop.
“This group of eight should be given a clear brief, with a specific
timeline, and some resources, which might be funded, for example, by the
Bishops’ Conference and CORI and 10% of all weekend parish collections
for one month,” he said.
In his discussion document, Mgr Lane writes that the last three years
have been “a huge success for the ACP”. He adds, “The ACP has given
outstanding support and leadership to the priests of Ireland.”
However, elsewhere, Mgr Lane warns that the crisis of faith in
Ireland today is far more serious than most church leaders recognise.
“This crisis of faith is not something that began with the revelations
around child sexual abuse. This crisis of faith had begun prior to the
revelations of abuse” and he blamed the “inadequate response of
ecclesiastical authorities” and “the failure of the church to come to
grips with the winds of modernity.”
He warns that this crisis of faith will not be resolved by condemning
secularisation, or demonising the secular, or berating the ways of the
world.
“The only way forward out of this crisis of faith is by engaging with the secular world as proposed by Gaudium et Spes,
by initiating a dialogue between faith and the public square in
Ireland, and by attending to “the unquiet frontiers of modernity”.
Addressing this crisis of faith will also require social and cultural
analysis of what exactly is happening in modern Ireland today, he
suggests.
“In this way faith will be able to find positive points of contact
with the secular (eg: the turn to mindfulness, the search for
well-being/wellness, the quest for the spiritual…) while critiquing the
negative aspects of the secular,” Mgr Lane writes.
This analysis will need the help of the arts, philosophy and
theology. It is far from clear that the current methods of the new
evangelisation in Ireland are sufficient to the task of addressing the
crisis of faith.
He suggests that some of the “urgent issues” facing the Catholic
Church at this time include overcoming clericalism, bridging the gap
between intellectuals and the institutional Church, healing the wounds
revealed in the Ferns, Murphy, and the Ryan Reports, and the regaining
of trust among people
He calls for the Church in Ireland to set about establishing a
pastoral plan and a theological ‘think-tank’ which would consider how to
bring faith into dialogue with society, the academy and the Church; how
to establish authentic structures of dialogue at national, diocesan and
parish levels; how to recover from the betrayal of trust.
A particular focus for the Irish Church and the ACP at this time
should be to give attention to the ever-increasing number of disaffected
Catholics, indifferent unbelievers, the growing number of articulate
secularists and atheists within Irish society, and the significant
number of unbelievers who, nonetheless, continue to be fascinated by the
story of Jesus as for example appears to be the case with Scalfari, the
former atheist editor of La Repubblica.