THE FUTURE of religious faith would be ecumenical in nature, and person-centred rather than hierarchical and institution-focused, Dr Pádraic Conway, the director of UCD’s International Centre for Newman Studies, said in the opening address of the Merriman Summer School in Ennis yesterday.
Earlier, during the school’s official opening ceremony, Bishop Willie Walsh said the Catholic Church everywhere faced an enormous challenge of responding in a more meaningful way to humanity’s hungers for the essentials of faith.
Dr Conway said it was not news that the traditional meaning-bearing institutions in society were almost all in crisis, most of all in the religious sphere.
His lecture’s title, What remains when disbelief is gone?, was Philip Larkin’s question in his poem Church Going, which describes a visit to an empty church.
In answering that question, Larkin had pointed to a “spirit irreducible,” Dr Conway said. “But when we have completed our critique of such institutions and their leaders, when we have given voice to our moment of disbelief, this is when we face Larkin’s question, ‘What remains when disbelief is gone?’ This question speaks to the challenge of building new forms of faith, more credible forms that will inspire and enliven people in the 21st century.”
One answer was that what remained was faith, but a very different faith. “To endure in a mature fashion at the level of the community and the individual person, faith, like poetry, must be and be seen to be on the side of life,” he said.
Faith in the future would be ecumenical in ways that might be today called radical and unprecedented. It would be person-centred, but not in a way that promoted any cosy individualism.
The challenge for institutions and their leaders would be to possess the humility to see their raison d’etre as spiritual teachers to individual believers.
Dr Conway said the rallying cry for Vatican II had been ad fontes, or back to the sources. These sources were a sense that life was a gift and a creation; a conviction that God, however understood, was in the bits and pieces of everyday and is love; an awareness that to love one’s enemies was still the most life-giving path to follow; a lived assent that it was better to believe, to hope, to love than to indulge in the alternatives; and a story that told of all this in embodied, incarnate terms.