GROWING SECULARISATION in Irish society was “not entirely a bad thing”, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin has said. “Very few of us would wish to return completely to the type of society many of us grew up in, where the church dominated so much of Irish culture, and where the bishops and the clergy dominated the church,” he said.
Speaking to the Catholic Primary School Management Association annual conference in Dublin yesterday he stressed however that religion must not become “the poor relation in a changed and more secularised society”.
People of faith “should be stressing that a pluralist society, as any other society in history, benefits from the presence of religion. We should not forget or deny what was wrong. We have, however, to be more confident in ourselves about the contribution we make to our society through being men and women of faith”.
He acknowledged that Christianity might become a minority culture in Ireland, but what was important was that “the church becomes an active and creative minority and never an irrelevant one in a changed culture”.
Where schools were concerned it was a “unique and unusual situation” that in Ireland “the vast majority of primary schools are Catholic schools”. The longer “the Catholic school system remains an almost monopoly situation in the provision of publicly funded primary education, the stronger the pressures will be to advance the State school part of the balance, and to downplay not just the Catholic identity of our school, but even the possibility of maintaining truly Catholic schools,” he said.
But a system of plurality of patronage “must leave space for truly Catholic schools”, he said. “If we believe in the value of Catholic schools then we have to stand up for the raison d’etre of Catholic schools” and “make explicit our conviction that even in a more secularised and pluralist society religion plays an important role in educational policy”.
The archbishop said that “the real roots of the religious crisis in Ireland . . . are linked with a crisis of faith”. The church faced “change and lives in difficult times. But our church has also set out with determination on the path of the most profound renewal. There is no turning back,” he said.
June’s Eucharistic Congress would be “a fundamental element of our journey”, he said. “We have to showcase for our guests what is best in Irish Catholicism . . . not in any form of triumphalism but in a balanced display of what is best in the Irish church and in what the church is achieving. Without wishing to deny or put aside the darker sides of what happened within the church of Jesus Christ in recent years in Ireland, I believe that we have much to showcase.”
