(The Nationalist, 2 July 2004)
I have lived in Belfast for three years, and, each year, have taken part in a novena at Clonard Monastery. It is attended on a daily basis by ten thousand people, or more. The harvest is indeed rich, as Jesus said in the Gospel.
The theme of this year’s novena was, “Everybody’s got a Hungry Heart”. And the truth of that is known to every person who stops long enough to search their heart.
Along with saying that the harvest is rich, Jesus also said, ‘The labourers are few’. That, too, is true.
This year eight men will be ordained in Ireland to the priesthood of the Catholic Church. In the Church of Ireland there will be twenty ordinations. And between 1991 and 2001, membership of the Church of Ireland grew by 100,000, reversing a pattern of decline since 1922.
Clearly there is something wrong in the Catholic Church (as well as something right, like Clonard.) There is in the Church a feeling that responses to its needs are being stifled from the top, and that no one there is listening. We seem to be unable to face difficult facts. There is a lot of burying of heads in the sand.
It has been said that those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. That is only one possibility, but revolutions require energy, and energy seems noticeably absent from the Catholic Church at present. It is tired. The voices coming from Rome are pointing back to the past – the proposed restoration of archaic, “sacral” language in the Mass is one example – and the faithful are not following. Many of them, perhaps the best, have given up in despair and gone, leaving only the elderly and those who live on nostalgia for the “good old days” of the past, a Golden Age that never existed. The same may be true of the clergy.
The other possibility is simple collapse. It is a real possibility, though not one to be frightened of. It may be a necessary step on the way to the Kingdom of God. Sometimes the old order is beyond reform and simply has to go in order to make way for the new. Perhaps we are at such a time.