Parish life for Ireland’s Catholics will be very different in the future, Archbishop of Armagh
and Catholic primate Eamon Martin has said.
“It will impossible for us
to hold on to the ways we lived in the past,” he has said.
“We are in a transition time
between the relative security and certainties of past times and
discovering what the Spirit wants of the Church in Ireland today and tomorrow,” he said.
In a recent address at the Seamus Heaney Home Place centre in Bellaghy,
Co Derry, he said “parishes of tomorrow will be ‘communities of
intentional disciples’ sustained by committed and formed lay people.
“The key to this will be the
formation of cells, or smaller gatherings of committed people who meet
and pray and develop together their understanding of faith, and who find
there the courage to engage in mission and outreach,” he said.
Many parishes already had prayer
groups, lectio divina groups, adult faith groups, youth groups or
adoration teams, he said. “Each of these gives to its members a sense of
belonging, identity, mission and vocation.”
He said it would “of course mean a
certain amount of ‘letting go’ by priests and even bishops as the
centre of gravity of life, worship and mission in the parish shifts from
the parochial house or diocesan curia to the little domestic churches
and gatherings of families on the ground.