Thursday, August 23, 2012

Nuncio calls for 'authentic' faith

THE Pope's envoy to Ireland yesterday set out his vision for the future of the Catholic Church here by stating that its teachings needed to be followed faithfully.

In a homily on the final day of the Knock novena, Papal Nuncio Archbishop Charles Brown 
said the church needed to be "authentically Catholic" if it was to have a future.

The comments came just months after a clampdown by the Vatican on priests who have articulated so-called liberal views and a survey that revealed massive alienation among the laity toward church teaching.

A senior member of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP), a group that has called for more dialogue within the church, last night questioned what he meant by "authentically".

Applause

Archbishop Brown's homily, which received a round of applause from thousands of pilgrims, made just a passing reference to the scandals that have rocked the church here.

Instead he opted to focus on ways to re-invigorate it.

"So what is this future going to be like? Before all else, I would say that the future needs to be authentically Catholic if there is to be a future," Archbishop Brown said.

"We need to propose the Catholic faith in its fullness, in its beauty and in its radicality, with compassion and with conviction. We need to be unafraid to affirm the elements of the Catholic way which secular society rejects and ridicules."

Fr Sean McDonagh of the ACP responded to the comments by asking: "Is it 1920s or 1950s authentically Catholic, or is it 1960s (the era of the Second Vatican Council)?"

A spokesman for the Catholic Communications Office said the term was a "call on all the faithful to follow faithfully the teachings of the church".

Archbishop Brown, who took up his post here earlier in the year, said there had been repeated remarks about the demise of the church, but his experiences were more hopeful.

"It seems as if every few months, a new survey is released showing, or purporting to show, that the Catholic faith is disappearing in Ireland," Archbishop Brown said.

"We have had two decades of scandals, crimes and failures. 'The Church is finished!' seems to be the cry heard everywhere."

But he spoke of the thousands who attended the Eucharistic Congress, the thousands who made the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick and the hundreds who packed a tiny Cork church for an ordination ceremony earlier this summer.

Earlier this month a global survey concluded Irish people are abandoning religion faster than almost any other country. 

Only Vietnam has seen a bigger drop over the past seven years.

And in February an ACP commissioned study of Catholics found that 77pc believed women should be ordained. Nine out of 10 said priests should be able to marry. It also revealed just 35pc went to church weekly.

Archbishop Brown said he believed the Eucharistic Congress had been a turning point for the church here.

In March, a summary report was published of the Vatican's Apostolic Visitation to Ireland, in which it pointed out that there had been a tendency "not dominant but fairly widespread among priests, religious and laity to hold theological opinions at variance with the teachings" of the church.

It said that this "serious situation" required particular attention.