A journey of faith

The basic Christian task is to help people live fully, Bishop Brendan Kelly tells Greg Daly

Few issues are as pressing or more commonly raised in discussions about the state and future of the Church in Ireland than declining numbers of clergy, with the Association of Catholic Priests’ claim that the Irish Church is heading for a ‘Eucharistic famine’ being perhaps just the most stark expression of this.

For the newly-appointed Bishop of Galway, Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora, however, to focus on a lack of clergy is to miss the broader point that there is a lack of active laity too nowadays.

“It’s a time in the Church, it’s very clear, when there are major changes taking place, particularly in the practice of the Faith,” Bishop Brendan Kelly tells The Irish Catholic, noting that “the numbers of people attending church in rural areas is probably under 30% at the present time and even smaller in the cities”.

With such a low rate of practice in general, a small number of people responding to God’s call to priestly ministry might not be surprising, and Dr Kelly suggests that the real crisis facing the Irish Church is a crisis of Faith.

Connected

“I think we have to look after the question of Faith first of all, and the delivery of it, because they’re both connected. As the number of priests has declined, so have the crowds in the churches. They’ve gone in tandem, as far as I can see, over the past 40 or 50 years,” he says.

“That could turn around really fast,” he adds with a note of surprising optimism, before reiterating, “I would say that our challenge is a challenge of Faith.”

Part of this, Dr Kelly suggests, is that Irish adults can find prayer difficult, and can see it as almost a childish thing.

“I spoke a lot about prayer yesterday,” he says of his homily at his Mass of Installation in Galway cathedral where he commented on how cries from the heart are hallmarks of believers, with Faith and prayer being inextricably bound together.

“Because I think that very often what happens in life is that somehow prayer is confined to children, and once we grow up we grow out of that. Maybe that’s what we need to be doing with adults – it’s a call to conversion,” he continues.

One way or another, he says, now is a time when both creativity and courage are seriously needed if the Church is to succeed in what he calls “the really fundamental challenge of reimagining the way we present the Good News and the Gospel to people”.

“The huge call for us all now, and perhaps this was always the call, is the fundamental hearing of the Good News: how do we make Jesus known today? The real gift of our Faith is that we know Jesus who is alive,” he says.

Our Faith, he continues, is “fully based on the Resurrection – the passion, death, and resurrection event – and the fact that that connection is there intimately between the suffering and the limitation of this world that we all experience, and the fullness of life emerging out of that powerfully”.

The Resurrection, he stresses, is utterly central to Christian identity, saying “that’s what we are: we’re people who passionately believe in life, not just now but forever, and that’s who we are as Christians”.

What’s more, he later adds, this isn’t simply one of Christian identity but of Christian mission. “The mission of the Church is very much to love your neighbour, particularly the one who is afflicted in any way,” he says, continuing: “The real call – the great call – of the Christian will always be to enable people to come to the fullness of life.”

Speaking at his Mass of Installation, Dr Kelly, a Galway native who is in a sense ‘coming home’ after ten years as Bishop of Achonry, raised such challenges for the modern Christian as our need to be stewards of our world rather than simply consumers of its fruit, the desperation of migrants clamouring at Europe’s shores, the arms trade, and our deafness to those who call on us for help.

“Pope Francis has written much about the cry of the poor – and of all people whose lives in their defenceless innocence and vulnerability – being under threat in these times,” he had said.

There are few more fitted to being described as having a “defenceless innocence and vulnerability” than unborn children, of course, and Dr Kelly is ardent in his conviction that Ireland’s constitutional protections for these most vulnerable human beings are a good thing.

No
 burden

Maintaining that “children are not a burden – they were never seen as a burden”, he says it’s very clear to him that the Eighth Amendment has saved lives, and stresses the importance of helping mothers, especially in times of need.

“We need to support them in every way that we possibly can if there’s a child on the way – and it is a baby that’s on the way from the very first moment,” he says.

“That’s how people see it when they want a baby, that’s how it’s always described. Other terms, other language is used, perhaps, when people want something different,” he adds, noting how care needs to be taken about “the sort of language that would be used around this area”.

“I’d be very, very clear that we have to love both mother and child, and I think we can offer much more to mothers who are in difficult situations than simply abortion,” he continues.

“We have to take better care of our women, of our mothers, than that. There are so many other supports that they can be given.”

Dr Kelly cites CURA, the Church’s national crisis pregnancy counselling service, as just one of the services that can be offered to help expecting mothers in difficult situations, adding: “The taking of infant life deliberately – I have never accepted this, and we as a Church can never accept this.”

Much debate around the threat to repeal the Eighth Amendment has concerned the eugenic effect of abortion being legalised – in some cultures girls are more likely to be aborted than boys, being seen as burdensome, while in various European cultures it has been those with such conditions as Down Syndrome who are most likely to be disproportionately the victims of abortion regimes.

Even aside from the basic unacceptability of abortion, for Dr Kelly this misses how those with disabilities or other weaknesses can help enrich their society and those around them.

“Where would we be without people who are ill, where would we be without people who are weak,” he asks, continuing, “how can we ever become the people that we’re capable of becoming if we don’t reach out to others and give of ourselves to them?”

Noting how a willingness to miss the value of human life and what even the weakest can offer has become clear in jurisdictions with established abortion laws, Dr Kelly says that such disregard can spread also to attitudes to older people, with this becoming an especially dangerous threat in an aging society.

A year spent working with people with severe intellectual disabilities in a French L’Arche community was transformative in his understanding of our duties to each other, Dr Kelly says, describing how he had learned to “look after and cherish and care for the very bodies of people” who had to “surrender themselves into your hands because they had no other choice”.

This profound sense of responsibility to our fellow human beings and to those who can care for them, he says, is “why we must help mothers and why our society must give every possible support to mothers and their lives”.