RELIGION, like politics, is local, the Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, Dr Colm O'Reilly, has said.
Speaking yesterday at a National Conference of Priests of Ireland seminar, in All Hal lows College, Dublin, he was quoting Father Colm Kilcoyne, from his Sunday Tribune column. "You find a lot of very committed people in the local church," Dr O'Reilly said.
He was addressing the seminar on the theme of "A Journey in Leadership Today", during which he spoke about his experiences of parish visitations. He had found it good to meet people in an ordinary parish selling, meetings which generally tended to be at confirmations, the dedication of churches, or the funeral of a parish priest.
As a result, the meetings tended to be in an artificial context and he thought he might be "a remote figure for some people". There was, he felt, "great merit in being seen to be as human as the next". And he recalled talking to an agitated woman who wondered why, having reared six children as best she could, none now went to Mass. He told her of relatives of his own who didn't go to Mass either. "It worked very well."
He also felt it was good to live in a time when people were allowed to take initiatives and priests did not feel as threatened by that as they used to be, "though there is some way to go yet in places".
He reflected on the sometimes unhealthy symbiotic, co-dependent relationship that sometimes existed between priest and parishioners. When people feel free to speak out it is because their priest allows them to be," he observed.
