Fr Mark Patrick Hederman OSB 
The Irish Church faces “collapse” if the Faithful don’t do “something daring and immediate”, according to the former abbot of Glenstal in Limerick in his new book.
In Crimson and Gold – Life as a Limerick, Dom Mark Patrick Hederman OSB says there is a “famine in the land”.
“People all over this country, and, indeed, further afield, are looking for spiritual sustenance,” he writes.
“How do we here in Ireland, in this 21st Century get closer to our God? Much of the social pathology which contaminated Ireland in the 20th century sprang from a spiritual and moral paradigm forced upon us as an island of ‘Saints and Scholars’.
“We had what has been described as an Irish Jansenism and it presented a grim theology, rigid, authoritarian and moralistic. It was certainly responsible for much fear, guilt and pessimism.”
He says that the Church as an institution is “prone to every form of political intrigue and power-seeking corruption”.
“Let us retrieve our birth right and take back the Church which we inherited and which we are. Either we do something daring and immediate or the whole edifice may collapse.”
The book is available at www.columbabooks.com and in bookshops.
