The Archbishop of Tuam, Dr Micheal Neary, has described the current situation in Ireland as, in the words of Dickens, "the best of times, the worst of times".
In a homily yesterday for the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage, he said the State was never so strong in socio-economic potential, while at the same time it was "rarely so vulnerable because of the lack of the humanising effective presence of the Christian values of social justice and charity".
He criticised "the most serious negative effect" of our times, a rugged individualism which undermined the social and collective solidarity that was "one of the most valuable manifestations of the Gospel values".
He said that for most of the last 500 years, the lot of the majority had been poverty, deprivation and denial of access to political power in their own land, yet the strength of "the local informal extended family and neighbourhood welfare system" expressed the core value of charity and hospitality in solidarity.
There was ample evidence today to show there were rural and urban communities which did not have their proportionate share of the current economic boom, he said.
He criticised an "elitist enjoyment of prosperity" which, he warned, led to social division and "to the painful experience of relative deprivation by those not numbered among the elite".
The great emphasis on material possessions was in danger of putting property before people and power before principle, "thereby generating a consumerism, an insatiable greed for goods and services beyond our needs".