Archbishop’s vision for smaller, more dynamic and lay-centred Church

One of Ireland’s most senior bishops has warned that the Church is witnessing the last vestiges of Christendom.

In his homily at a Mass for the Association of Papal Orders in Ireland last Wednesday, Archbishop  of Tuam, Michael Neary, emphasised that he was not talking about Christianity, but Christendom with particular reference to Europe.

Recalling the words of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, he defined Christendom as a communal understanding and experience of Christian culture and polity, which he said was moving towards its end.

In a blunt assessment of the state of the Irish Church, Dr Neary said his priests have been telling him of measurably declining congregations and a steady dropping in contributions. “They see few teenagers in their churches. They fear that those falling away in recent years will not return,” he said, adding that he himself could “see the same with my own eyes in our cathedral parish”.

Speaking at McKee Barracks in Dublin, the archbishop said that even the outright hostility the Church has been experiencing from sections of the media, political establishment and some of the public has “curiously abated”. This, he suggested, was because “a great struggle, social, political, intellectual and profoundly cultural, has been fought. And that we have lost.”

He said that the clerical-abuse scandals had “only added force to the inevitable shrugging aside of values which had come to be seen as inhibiting and obsolete”.

Nevertheless, the archbishop drew hope from the positive reaction to Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. The Church, he said, would be smaller but more dynamically evangelical and would need “knights in shining armour”.

He said: “We need, more than anything else now, trained and committed personnel on the ground.  Priests, of course, but also full- and part-time lay evangelists … we need them urgently if we are to answer Pope Francis’ call.”