Saved by the Laity
A review of Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity can save the Church, Paul Lakeland, Continuum, New York, 2007.
A review of Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity can save the Church, Paul Lakeland, Continuum, New York, 2007.
At the moment, the church in Ireland is drifting rudderless through a storm which has yet to run its course. The present model of the church is collapsing, and must collapse, before there can be a basis for a revival of Catholic faith. The longer the church clings on grimly, deluding itself on many fronts, the larger the opportunity it creates for Islam to offer Irish people an alternative to the present drift.
Would it be true to say that where attitudes towards homosexuality are concerned, the real dividing line is not between liberals and conservatives, but between those who do, and those who don’t, have in their family someone who is homosexual?
Priesthood is identified in many minds with what is only one aspect of it – the cultic. In the Bible, the prophets were people who “forth-told” the present rather than foretold the future. But the church is seen as a “non-prophet” organization.
Theology is not all “handed-down” from the “top” but is also a movement up from “below”. It moves from the general to the particular and from the particular to the general. God not only draws us from the past, he leads us into the future.
My thoughts on the declaration published in August 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
A review of Oracles of God: the Roman Catholic Church and Irish Politics, by Patrick Murray.
Benignus Buckley, a member of the Capuchin Province of Ireland, and a missionary in Zambia since 1959, was honoured by the President of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, for his work among the Angolan refugees in the country.
The biggest event in the life of the friars in Zambia since coming here occurred with the establishment of the Vice-Province in Zambia.
Written in 1991 on the occasion of the Centenary.