Papal nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown, delivered the 2015 Terrence R. Keeley Vatican Lecture at the University of Notre Dame in the US recently. These are some abridged highlights of his speech.
Ireland is one of the very few places in the World where a pervasively Catholic culture has existed within living memory. It is clear that the Church in Ireland faces unique challenges in society today, but having said that, we must also say that the Church in Ireland also possesses unique resources.
While it may certainly be very mistaken to suggest that there is in Ireland today any great nostalgia for the Catholic Ireland of the 1950s, there is a palpable desire in Irish people for an understanding of life which goes beyond the merely material and visible.
There’s a hunger and thirst to encounter the truth of our existence. A truth which liberates because it enlightens.
Evangelisation
One relatively overlooked element in Pope Francis’ teaching in the last two years provides us with a key to evangelisation in today’s Ireland. That key is the concept of freedom… and his insights are particularly relevant to the contemporary situation in Ireland.
The Pope’s fundamental point is that the Catholic faith is truly liberating, truly freeing. Of course there are moral and religious obligations which we as Christians have, but these moral and religious obligations are the consequence of, and not the prerequisite for, faith. In the end, the truth which liberates cannot be imposed.
This message of Pope Francis, basic as it is, has been extremely well received in Ireland, where in the minds of many the truth of Catholic teaching has been associated with control and perhaps at times even with coercion.
Spiritual geography
The influence of the ‘spiritual geography’ of Ireland, the influence even today of an archipelago of holy places in Ireland is quite strong. Of course, holy places were made holy by holy people and here Ireland almost has a unique antidote to the affliction of existential homelessness and emptiness which Pope Francis describes. That antidote is the living tradition of holiness, with its astonishing riches of 1500 years of Irish sanctity.
We need to go out of ourselves or better we need to allow God to bring us beyond ourselves to become fully human by becoming more than human. This call by Pope Francis for a missionary transformation of the Church by going forth is a theme which resonates very deeply in the Irish spirit which has sent missionaries all over the World for more than a thousand years.
Pope Francis is indeed asking the Church to be missionary in the sense of going forth to present the face of Christ to the World but he also conceives of this missionary dynamic in a more personal existential sense as our individual going forth from our own areas of comfort and security. Here we see the particular relevance of Pope Francis’ summons for the Church in Ireland.
This is perhaps the pre-eminent value of Pope Francis’ message for the future of the Church in Ireland. To resist the temptation of looking back in nostalgia to a time of apparent security and instead to be supremely confident that the truth of Christ, which as Pope Francis writes, “sets us free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness”.
Christianity will continue to infuse the hearts of Irish people with courage, compassion and joy in following the Lord in our own time. I’m convinced that this is the case because I have seen it with my own eyes in the Ireland of today.
That makes me confident in saying that, in spite of everything, the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland continues and will continue into the future.
A video of Archbishop Brown’s full speech is available online at www.irishcatholic.ie