The head of the Catholic Church in Ireland has said that one of the groups most alienated in parish communities are young women.
Speaking to reporters after the Irish Bishops’ Ad Limina meeting with Pope Francis in Rome last week, Archbishop Eamon Martin said the role and position of women in the Church came up during almost every meeting they had, including at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where they discussed "the areas within the Church where a stronger position of laypeople is not only licit, but is desirable".
"One of the groups that is most alienated in the Catholic Church in Ireland is women, particularly young women, who feel excluded and therefore do not take part in the life of the church," he said.
The Pope spent two hours speaking to 26 Irish bishops on Friday 20 January as part of the ten-day visit to Rome that occurs every five years. In addition to the role of women in the Church, the bishops said the topics covered included clerical sexual abuse, the need to engage young people, the changing status of the Church in Ireland, the importance of Catholic schools and the methods for handing on the faith.
They also spoke about plans for the World Meeting of Families in Dublin in August 2018 and hopes that Pope Francis would attend.
"We are realistic about the challenges we are facing in Ireland at the moment," Archbishop Martin said, after the meeting. "But we are also hopeful that we are moving into a new place of encounter and of dialogue in Irish society where the Church has an important voice - not the dominating voice or domineering voice that perhaps some say we've had in the past - but we are contributing to important conversations on life, on marriage, on the family, on poverty, homelessness, education."
One of the factors pushing such a rapid loss of public confidence in the Church in Ireland was the sexual abuse scandal, he said. And as he told Pope Francis, just as the bishops were meeting with the Pope, in Belfast leaders of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry in Northern Ireland were making public their report on the abuse of children in residential institutions, including some run by Catholic religious orders.
One of the first meetings the bishops had in Rome, he said, was with staff of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. At this meeting, the bishops shared the steps the Catholic Church in Ireland has taken to prevent further abuse, to bring abusers to justice and to assist survivors "affected by the awful trauma of the sins and crimes of people in the Church", he said.
Archbishop Martin told reporters there was a recognition that Ireland had gone "through a bad time - not for us, but particularly for children who were abused, and that anything that we did would inevitably be inadequate in responding to the suffering they experienced."
The Irish Bishops’ Ad Limina Apostolorum ends on Wednesday 25 January.
PICTURE - Archbishop Eamon Martin (far right) led the delegation of Irish bishops to Rome.
Loading ...
