President voices impatience with Catholic Church

The President, Mrs McAleese, has said that "all" can sense "disappointment and impatience on many fronts" at a failure of the Catholic Church to realise more fully the promise of the Second Vatican Council.

Addressing the opening session of the National Conference of Priests of Ireland in Dublin last night, she said that among the reasons for such disappointment and impatience were "the mixed messages about ecumenical dialogue with sister Christian churches, and respect for other faith systems, the failure to utilise the full giftedness of women, the paucity of avenues for debate, and the sense of drift rather than direction in the face of the collapse of vocations in the Western world."

Acknowledging the changes that had taken place, she said disappointment and impatience were "vital signs of a people who care. As a source of energy they hold the promise of more pressure, more change. Left to fester, though, they generate a much worse enemy - indifference. And as Edmund Burke has remarked, `Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference'."

Mrs McAleese recalled her first visit to All Hallows College - where the conference is taking place - 30 years ago.

"We had gathered here, young people from all over Ireland, to contemplate a new vision for our Church. Blessed John XXIII had said emphatically: `I have come to cultivate a garden, not to guard a mausoleum.'

"We queued up to join his Ground Force team . . . the future was collaboration, priests and laity, men and women; the future was ecumenical, a sisterhood of Christian churches, a family of world faiths respectful of each other, the future was egalitarian, all God's creatures equal in his eyes and entitled to equal respect.

"We began to perceive the divine rallying call to unity as unity in diversity, not uniformity. The future was a place we could not wait to get to. And so here I am once again in All Hallows, much of our future already lived . . .

"It was hoped that the Second Vatican Council would lead to a revitalised church comfortably adapted to the modern world yet a profound centre of spiritual gravity."

There had been change, including the introduction of "a permanent diaconate in some places, though not in Ireland." But "set against the huge changes that have permeated daily life in the Western world in the same period, the church's own institutional adaptation to the signs of the times looks considerably less dramatic."

She noted that the thesaurus on her word processor suggested words such as "office", "bureaucracy", "department", "organisation" as alternatives to "ministry".

"They are particularly suited, I am sure you agree, to running a mausoleum," she said. She suggested another image of ministering - "caring, tending, looking after, nurturing - these are words a good gardener might use.

"In this month when Pope John XXIII was beatified," she prayed, quoting from a Second Vatican Council document, "may God help you to carry the responsibility of reading the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel."

Also addressing the conference, the Catholic Primate, Dr Sean Brady, said that "working with the laity is no longer an optional extra in parish ministry. It is the standard model nowadays, par for the course."

A Government spokesman said last night that the President's speech was not cleared by the Government.

He said: "It is not practical for all the President's speeches to be cleared by the Cabinet or the Taoiseach's office." If the President was addressing Government policy in a speech, then there would be consultation.