“The current service model of providing Masses, funerals, baptism and blessings on demand is not going to be possible into the future,” the Catholic Bishop of Derry has said.
Bishop of Derry, Most Rev Dr Donal McKeown. Photo: Stephen Latimer
The newly-installed Bishop, Most Rev Dr McKeown, was speaking during the Mass of the Chrism in St Eugene’s Cathedral during which he said the Church needed to be rebuilt.
In his homily, Bishop McKeown said priests were “launching out into new and uncharted waters” and that some younger priests wondered how they would cope in the future with extra work and fewer colleagues.
And he warned: “The current service model of providing Masses, funerals, baptism and blessings on demand is not going to be possible into the future.”
He added: “A Church that seems to prioritise the welfare of the pious and the well-off will not bear witness to the Jesus who died on the Cross.”
He said Pope Francis had given the faithful permission to acknowledge that the Church needs to be rebuilt. “Not just repainted or tinkered with – but rebuilt.”
He said Catholics lived in a world which, in many places, no longer speaks or understood the language about God.
“The vocabulary of so many of our contemporaries is formed, not by Church but by popular culture. And the world, whose imagination is pickled in the language of silky shampoos, celebrities and salvation by self-indulgence, does not understand words like sin, salvation, sacrifice or sacrament.”
He said, in this context, Pope Francis was calling the faithful to be a missionary Church, as Pope John Paul II in Ireland 35 years ago said, “to go out to our generation as if it were a new continent to be conquered for Christ.”
He added: “But if our new circumstances mean that priesthood will have to let itself be remade in the potter’s hands, then that also means that our parishes will have to evolve in this new missionary Church.”
He said the Church would have to move away from a customer model where most of the lay faithful were periodic consumers of the religious services provided by often over-stretched clergy.
“That is not a sustainable way forward,” he said.
That confidence in the Lord’s power gives us the freedom not to be afraid of looking forward rather than back and hankering after some mythical Golden Age in the past, he added.
Tags: