Renewal in the Irish Church will not be achieved “by throwing books of dogma” at people, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has warned.
Speaking as he ordained three Jesuit deacons in Milltown in Dublin, the archbishop admitted that the Church in Ireland is living in “a challenging moment”, and it has to find a new way of communicating with the realities of today.
Contrasting the present and the past, the archbishop said faith in Ireland was imbedded in so many dimensions of personal and public life, but that this is no longer the case today.
“Our young people no longer automatically inherit faith. That may not be a bad idea. Faith must be sought. Faith must be intimately linked with the search for identity as a person and the search for purpose as a society and a world in which we live,” Said the archbishop.
He said service in the Church today was not simply about activism but about being alongside people in the critical moments of their lives – leading them into an understanding of the orientation of their lives and who Jesus is – “not a vague Jesus of our own liking and making”.
But he added: “We will not heal those whose lives have drifted from Jesus Christ by throwing books of dogma at them.”
Jesus, Dr Martin said, is to be found in his word and not “simply through social media and gadgetry”.
In a more pluralist setting, the Archbishop of Dublin said, the missionary may attract others to the Church’s views but not impose them and their journey must be one of respect and encountering cultures “which we may not always like” but which “we must always attempt to understand”.
Dr Martin recalled that one bishop at the synod in Rome last October said that the Church was not so much a field hospital for the wounded but often resembled the office of the state pathologist, analysing all the ways in which things go wrong.
In the field hospital, healing is not done in the first place by the technical experts, Archbishop Martin said, but was achieved by those people who pick up the wounded in their own arms and embrace them.
He said missionaries must have a special antenna that identified where the wounded are in the world and what the specific wounds of our times are.
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