A CATHOLIC bishop has warned “there is little progress in condemning clerical dominance and replacing it with a new high priesthood that claims omniscience or a bland philosophy that stands for nothing and falls for anything”.
Speaking at the concluding Mass of the Knock Summer Youth Festival yesterday, the Auxiliary Bishop of Down and Connor, Donal McKeown, pointed out that “it is important to ask questions about past horrors – but it is equally important to learn from them and to question present horrors as well”.
He also took the opportunity to state that for most people “the experience of growing up in Ireland was not one that recognises the late Frank McCourt’s dismal view . . .”
Bishop McKeown recalled reading last week “about hunger, destitution on the streets of Dublin, while we throw out about 30 per cent of the food that we buy after much of it has been transported half way round the world, at enormous cost to us and to the environment”.
He had read “about the assumed only possible responses to the credit crunch that involve cutting money on hospitals and education . . . and about the breakdown of relationships and community and the assumption that long-term faithfulness or generous service are impossible”.
“Unless our society engages with these realities, we risk living in a world of soap opera politics,” he said.
The bishop is chair of the Youth Ministry subgroup of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference Commission for Pastoral Renewal.
The youth festival began last Thursday and was attended by an estimated 700 people from Ireland, Scotland, Spain, France and the US.
In Ireland today “there are many people who need healing, for they have suffered as a result of the harsh culture that pervaded parts of this country and church over many decades . . . toughness without love is merely brutality and bullying. It was a shallow spirituality and a poor knowledge of Jesus that believed that harshness was part of the Gospel.
“But it is also important to remember that, for most people, the experience of growing up in Ireland was not one that recognises the late Frank McCourt’s dismal view of a damp and heartless Ireland,” Bishop McKeown said.