The Bishop of Limerick, Dr Donal Murray, has said that "there are no guarantees that Ireland will remain Christian". In a Lenten pastoral, Companions on Our Journey, he said it was entirely possible this might be the generation "which allows the torch to fall".
"Our faith today has come to us through ancestors who retained their belief through hardship and persecution, through war and famine. That long heritage could have been broken at any point by a generation which failed to live the Gospel with conviction," he said. We must choose whether this will happen now, when it is possible to live for days, even weeks, without ever really stopping to think about deeper truth.