‘Archbishop Charles Brown, Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, outlines his vision for the renewal of the Irish Church.

‘So what is this future going to be like?  Before all else, I would say that the future needs to be authentically Catholic if there is to be a future.’

There the problem, its resolution, and the abiding difficulty for the Church in Ireland – and the West at large – has been set out in one idea.

‘Pope Benedict XVI has instituted a number of initiatives designed to help the Church move into the future.  He has established an office for the New Evangelisation, which means finding new ways of presenting and communicating the ancient faith, especially in those countries like Ireland which were first given the gift of Catholic faith many centuries ago.’

Catholic Truth – as our Holy Father, the awesome Benedict XVI, tirelessly witnesses – is not a mere opinion set among many other co-equal or approximate opinions, it is: the Truth; for Catholics in orthodox faith, yes, but also for those with heterodox leanings, for Protestants and other forms of belief, even for atheists, for all therefore = universally.

‘Brothers and sisters, the future of the Church in Ireland begins now.  We have all been revitalised in our faith by the unforgettable experience of the International Eucharistic Congress, which, pray God, has marked a turning point in the life of the Church in Ireland.  Certainly, the road ahead is not an easy one, but the road ahead for Catholics in Ireland did not look very easy in 1879 when Our Lady appeared here on that rainy evening in August.’

This dedication to The Truth, as to the Way and the Life, has never been the easiest of roads .. Ireland when true to her Christian witness has always understood an accepted this cross with the joy it requires (heavy, mortifying and pointless as it may seem – to the fleshly eye); it cannot ever be reduced to getting one’s own opinion across, having it accepted, or seeking to impose it – that is the very opposite of catholicity, yet neither is it so vacuous as to see itself as but one alternative way of life; for while not all may agree with heaven, or Our Lady’s indomitable message to modern man, and not withstanding human dissension, each soul is confronted with the painful reality of wrongdoing – our own as much as of others against us, of the cross – by our bearing it, and with its sole purposeful meaning – Jesus Christ in his church catholic = us: 

‘Yes, brothers and sisters: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be given you as well” (Matt 6:33).’

When Archbishop Brown et al realises he must be as a new Patrick to Ireland, not one more well meaning, hard-working, but easily dismissed Palladius, then this message of the Cross will once more make sense .. in Ireland as elsewhere. And when the likes of His Grace Noel Treanor invites the Transalpine Redemptorists to help re-enliven his depleted stock of weary priests, or seeks the joyful assistance of the FSSP, the Inistitute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, or the Franciscans of the Immaculate (and so many others), then we might begin to see a revived spirit actually at work. After all, while Ireland’s bishops seek to hide or deny their Roman communion in the Catholic Church – believing mistakenly that this wins them friends and influences people who loath them – no right-thinking soul can sincerely respect them .. in right judgement; true, they need not sink back into the siege mentality, political triumphalist, world-hating, protest-surging, anti-everything (but the bishop’s opinion); yet showing the same courtesy (or greater) to the SSPX as to the Anglican for instance, or the Vetus Ordo and to the Novus, or to Benedict XVI as to the Dalai Lamma and the Moderator of Irish Calvinists cannot be beyond the wit of man and that includes Ireland’s bishops .. or ought so to do (even if it seems beyond that of the wilder Irish presbyterate or worldly media).

http://www.fssp.org/