Chai Brady
People must return to community and leave their online bubbles, Fr John Harris tells Chai Brady
When Fr John Harris OP looks at the Irish Church today, he does not see a story of inevitable decline. Instead, the Provincial of the Irish Dominicans insists that this is a moment of transition, of “painful” change perhaps, but also of genuine hope: “The only one who had to die has risen.” For him, the task now is not to cling to a model of Church that no longer fits Irish reality, but to recover the deeper traditions that sustained Irish faith for centuries, and to preach the truth with courage in a culture where truth itself is contested.
Asked why young men are still drawn to the Dominicans, Fr Harris admits he does not know the full answer, but “I think people are searching for something they can take seriously in their lives”.
Many arrive with real questions about God, philosophy, and truth, according to Fr Harris, who said: “They want answers that take their questions seriously. It’s an intellectual reawakening.”
This, he adds, is quintessentially Dominican. The Order’s motto is contemplare et contemplata aliis trader – “to contemplate and to share with others the fruits of contemplation”. For centuries, Dominicans have studied not as an academic exercise but to encounter truth and share it. “There’s something going on in the Western world at the moment, and maybe we were sort of ahead of it,” Fr Harris says, “Young men are looking for something in their lives and ask real questions about God. And they really want to share that with others, it’s not just about themselves or what they’re interested in, but sharing what they have found.”
Central to that tradition is St Thomas Aquinas and “his sense of reality”. Fr Harris notes that some new Dominicans today “have actually read themselves back into the Church, or read themselves into the Order”.
“So I think that Thomistic element, that intellectual element is very important to the revival, if we want to call it that,” he adds, and in an age of relativism, ideological battles, and digital illusions, Aquinas’ sober grounding in truth is a powerful draw.
But the intellectual element is not enough on its own. Young men are also encouraged when they see others their age. “When they come to St Saviour’s in Dublin and see other young men they can identify with, and can talk their language and understand them, that has been a factor,” says Fr Harris. In the past, devotion to Mary through the Legion of Mary also drew many into the Order, showing that both intellectual and devotional strands have their place.
Digital isolation
People now rarely need to leave their houses due to everything being available online, such as practicalities like grocery and clothes shopping, paying bills and more being possible through a few clicks on a laptop screen. This world has created “a very dangerous situation”, according to the provincial. The Dominicans have embraced digital evangelisation – through YouTube, podcasts, and their website – but Fr Harris is clear-eyed about the risks of a life lived online.
“It’s a very dangerous situation,” he says. “As a priest hearing confessions for 40 years, I’ve seen what the growth of the internet has done. People are living in their own world.” The problem, he explains, is the narrowing of horizons: algorithms feeding people only what they already agree with. “It’s desperately dangerous, utterly not humane,” he insists.
By contrast, he points to the example of Aquinas, who always began with questions and opposing arguments before answering them from within the Catholic tradition. “Being in a sort of enclosed world of your own ideas is totally dehumanising,” he warns.
Artificial intelligence adds another layer of danger. “The machine can’t really love,” Fr Harris says. While AI can simulate human connection—even offering AI lovers for lonely people — it cannot replace real relationships. “The human spirit isn’t meant for isolation – ultimately it is meant for God – but community. I think that was one thing for the younger brothers coming in, there was a community of real people, you’re not just staying in your own room doing your own thing, following your own experiences and listening to what you want to hear – that is not human. If you go back to Socrates, Aristotle, that whole Socratic method of questioning and answering and talking, that is the beauty of the human mind. This is the beauty of the Church, that we meet in community.”
I think that can be the mistake some of the televangelists make, that it’s OK just to listen to these people on the internet”
Looking at restrictions placed on people during the Covid-19 pandemic, Fr Harris recollects “we all saw during Covid, sitting at home watching Mass on the television and thinking ‘this is OK’, it is not, you can’t live your life on a screen”.
For Dominicans, the task is to meet people online initially, but not to leave them there. Fr Harris says: “I think that can be the mistake some of the televangelists make, that it’s OK just to listen to these people on the internet. You have to interact with everyday real people in your life. I would hope that the communitarian aspect of our Dominican life – something that Pope Leo has brought up very much so as an Augustinian – is a very important antidote to this living in an unreal world.”
Despite concerns about the online world, Fr Harris says that they are putting their money into reaching people online because “that is where they are at”.
“Very often that is where people meet us now… but these are the initial things, but we must bring people deeper… bring them into community, to meet real people. That is why parishes are so important,” he says. He recollects someone telling him about the number of older people in parishes, “how wonderful it is, because where would you get this wisdom of old age? To be able to talk to people who have been through everything, and that in actual fact older people are a great gift to us, not something to be embarrassed by”.
He adds: “The modern world began in doubt – with Descartes. The classical world began with the affirmation of reality. I think that is what the Church has to have the courage to preach: reality, not false worlds.”
Sometimes I wonder – are we losing the people who are in the pews? Are we helping them to deepen their faith, to deepen their relationship with the Lord”
At a recent General Chapter in Kraków, Poland, he found unity of purpose among Dominicans worldwide: “Preaching the gospel, preaching the truth of the gospel, having the courage to speak into all spheres of life – not just those coming to church, but those who have left the Church, those who want to deepen their faith. I really think that is an issue for the Irish Church.”
But he also warns that the Irish Church cannot neglect the faithful who remain. “Sometimes I wonder – are we losing the people who are in the pews? Are we helping them to deepen their faith, to deepen their relationship with the Lord. If we lose them, we won’t be able to go to those at the peripheries. I don’t think it is either or,” he says.
Beyond culture wars
In a society where even stating Catholic teaching on marriage or gender can provoke outrage, Fr Harris is wary of getting dragged into “culture wars”, but to “go deeper”. He prefers to meet people where they are, recognising that even those he disagrees with are still searching for the Lord. “Somewhere in that person, they are seeking God,” he says. “How can I help them get to that point? I think that is the big challenge.”
“We need good theology: of goodness, of the beauty of creation, of the beauty of the human person, that we are not all evil…
Pluralism
“I do think there is a great challenge for pluralism. They say the Church in the old days did not allow people to be different, now it is the opposite way around, you can’t be anti-woke at the moment in Ireland, why not? If you can be anti-Catholic, why can’t you be anti-woke? Let us talk about it, discuss it and give everybody a fair hearing, and I don’t think we do it,” says Fr Harris.
Modern heresies
Asked about St Dominic, who founded the order not only to spread the Faith but also to tackle heresy, Fr Harris says the founder sat up all night discussing the Faith with an innkeeper who was a heretic and with the rising of the sun the innkeeper accepted the truth of the Gospel. “But look at the effect it had on Dominic, preaching the Faith against the heresies, he had a conversion experience himself. He decided to leave his old way of life and become an itinerant preacher, so even in the conversation of conversion it wasn’t a one-way street,” Fr Harris says.
“Yes, Dominic got the man to accept the truth of the Catholic Faith but the man in his asking the questions got Dominic to question himself. It’s a dynamic, against this ‘them and us’, heresy is a wilful rejection of the truth but now we live in a ‘post-truth world’.”
Worry
“Heresies of today? My big worry is always God – that great phrase, ‘God made man in his own image and likeness and ever since man has been returning the compliment’. We tend to create God in our own image and likeness… we have to be constantly battling that about man, recreating God in ‘my’ image, that his enemies our my enemies, what I like he likes, what I understand he understands, rather than really entering into an openness to the God of truth…
“That to me is the biggest question we have. This dismissal of the divine, and I think part of what we’re seeing in people is they have tried everything else… there’s more. There is either God or nothing, there is no middle ground,” he says, adding that “we still just preach the Gospel and we tell the stories of Jesus, let him do the rest. We try our best, we do our best, and God’s grace works in people’s lives. If I’ve learned two things in my life as a priest, prayer works, and God works – grace works in ways you don’t expect it to.”
Mission
One of the sharpest challenges facing the Irish Church today is the decline of religious congregations and the legacy they leave regarding their hospitals, schools and missions for the poor. Fr Harris is concerned about their future in a secular Ireland.
“An NGO can’t bring Jesus,” he says. “In everything the Church does the face of Jesus has to be there somewhere, and sometimes we may be embarrassed by that, and I don’t think we can be. There should be something that the Christian brings into that hospital, be it patience, kindness, joy, be it an understanding of suffering that is fundamentally Gospel, Kingdom orientated… I don’t think the Church can franchise out her mission. Lay people can do just as well as I can, I have no doubt, I know wonderful lay men and women who can bring the Gospel and are most courageous, so it doesn’t have to be the nuns and the priests. I used to work with Youth 2000, that was the greatest gift of
my priesthood, I worked with the young men and women and we were all in it together and it was terrific – I brought my own priesthood and my own opinion into the middle of the situation but I worked with them but it wasn’t me telling them what to do, quite the opposite. But we can’t franchise out the Faith, it has to be believers.”
We can’t get away from original sin, and thinking we can get rid of the Lord and rid of Christianity and everything is going to work smoothly – no it will not”
He worries that Ireland is living off the “fumes” of Christianity, assuming virtues like kindness and compassion will continue without their Christian roots. “You can’t be a Christian without Christ,” he insists. “We can’t get away from original sin, and thinking we can get rid of the Lord and rid of Christianity and everything is going to work smoothly – no it will not. It was bad enough when we had it!”
A Church in transition
Fr Harris does not deny the pain of church closures and declining numbers, but asked about the Church declining or even dying in Ireland he said that “the only one who had to die has risen, Jesus is risen”.
He explains: “We’re celebrating emancipation in 1829, that model of the Church that we have got used to from say 1800 to some 1990, we think that is the successful Church. That lasted 200 years, that is not the model of the Irish Church. For the previous 300 years we were in persecution, back into the first millennium we were a monastic Church, we had no parishes. So this idea that the Cardinal Cullen Church is the only model of Church – no it isn’t. I think we’re coming into something new. We think a successful Catholic Church in Ireland is the Church of Cardinal Cullen, the Synod of Thurles? That is why history is so important.”
Asked what he believes is a successful Church he said: “I think it is a believing church, a Church where Jesus is alive, where the Sacraments are celebrated: a praying Church.
“I remember being at a meeting one day and we were closing one of our churches and a woman said to me ‘where will I go to Mass?’, and I said ‘the parish church is literally six minutes up the road’, she said she had never gone to it, and I said you had better start. I do think that old Church is dying, but the history of the Irish Church is not 1800-2000. How did we manage through persecution which is a much longer story for us than the last successful 200 years?”
The territorial parish model may be fading, he suggests, but new forms of “worshipping communities” are emerging. “Where is your worshipping community? That’s what’s important – not just where you live” adding that he believes the ‘eircode’ idea of parishes is over. “If you’re not coming to church, and not part of this worshipping community, that is what is important: Where is your worshipping community?”
The biggest problem we have with the Church in Ireland is buildings. We have too many. We have far, far too many churches. The Church needs to be a worshipping Church, God based, God centred”
In this light, church closures are painful but not fatal. “If you really want Jesus, you will find Him,” he says. “We need a believing Church, a worshipping Church, a praying Church—not just a Church of institutions and buildings.”
“The biggest problem we have with the Church in Ireland is buildings. We have too many. We have far, far too many churches. The Church needs to be a worshipping Church, God based, God centred. It’s not about keeping buildings open, it’s not about keeping institutions open, it’s about worshipping God in the sacraments. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but we have to have the courage to say the wheel actually works,” he says.
Renewal
Against the narrative of decline, the Dominicans have chosen renewal. Two decades ago, they decided to invest seriously in vocations, appointing a full-time vocations director and re-establishing their studium in Dublin. “It wasn’t about ‘completion’ or closing down,” Fr Harris explains. “It was about how do we renew and encourage the future.”
The results are modest but real. At present, around 15 Irish men are in formation, alongside students from Asia and Hungary, and ordinations have continued steadily in recent years. “We regrouped not to die, but to grow,” he insists.
This is no small achievement for an 800-year-old Order in a secularising Ireland. “Very few congregations are that old,” he notes. “People come and go, but if the initial inspiration is still there—if you were founded to preach the Gospel of truth—that will never disappear.”
Signs of hope
Fr Harris is not naïve about the challenges. Numbers are down; scandals have left wounds; secularisation is accelerating. Yet he remains hopeful because he has seen young people respond to the Gospel with joy. “Last year we had ten university students on retreat. This year we had thirty-six. These are wonderful things happening.”
He recalls his own ministry in Youth 2000, when scandals were dominating headlines, yet he was working with young people “filled with love and joy and wanting to spread the Gospel”. Such experiences convince him that grace is still at work.
“The hardest thing for people to believe,” he reflects, “is that they are loved. That’s the wound of original sin – that we don’t believe we’re loved. Only the Lord can tell us that. But prayer works, grace works, often in ways we don’t expect.”
For Fr Harris the Church is not dying. It is being reshaped, called back to its roots.
He adds “ultimately what we want to do is to know God, to love him more, and the more we know him, the more we love him”.