Rite and Reason: The choice facing the Irish Catholic Church is change or decay, writes Father Brendan Hoban
I was ordained a priest over 30 years ago. Just after the second Vatican Council the message ringing in my ears was that the Catholic Church was anxious to connect with modern culture, engage with the world, renew its structures.
The buzz words were "co-responsibility", "collaboration", "collegiality" and the expectation was that they would transmute into their modern cousins, "openness", "transparency" and "accountability".
A new church for a new world.
At the time 90 per cent of Catholics attended weekly Mass; seminaries were full; bishops, priests and religious had the wind on their backs. Why change a winning formula? Well, this time our church had read the signs of the times. Or so we thought.
Thirty years on, a full tide has gone out for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. Attendance at Mass is in free-fall; vocations have virtually disappeared; and, after a recurring nightmare of betrayals of public and private trusts, our credibility is at floor level. Now the wind is on our faces and the hill is rising before us.
There are many reasons for this: incompetent leadership, maladministration, over-reliance on centralised control and legal solutions, a secretive church culture. But the most obvious truth is that we have failed, indeed refused to manage change.
We underestimated the need for radical change; we refused to trust those who could have driven change; and the road-map that God gave us to find our way in a changing world has been torn up into little pieces by clerical gods who refused to accept its import.
Now as the institutional church implodes around us we recognise the price we have paid for the philosophy and actions of those who insisted on turning us again in the dismal direction of the Council of Trent.
If you sense a mounting anger in my words, you read them well.
Because, after 30 years of priesting, it is clear that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is dying on its feet. It gives me no pleasure to say that. And I know that many others, from within the church, will read my words as a form of disloyalty and betrayal.
But I make no apology for them. Nor should I. If, in the wake of the council, we had owned the road-map, we would have put in place a structure that would have turned our church into a people-driven institution with a participative and collaborative ethos, a structure that would have built into it processes for dealing with the failures of the past, an analysis of present needs and a way of devising strategies for the future.
That didn't happen because there was a failure in leadership among bishops and clergy, a lack of commitment to and a palpable discomfort with the road-map of Vatican II and a disheartening return to an ethos of control and infallibility.
In short, the change that would have allowed the Catholic Church to engage imaginatively with a changing world was torpedoed by bishops and clergy. We refused to let go. And we are now reaping the whirlwind of that failure.
My conviction is that, even now, we need to ask the hard questions and to name the hard truths. Why is the Irish Catholic Church so out of touch with the lived experience of its people? Why did the clerical church see the developing role of the laity as a threat to its power? How did so many highly intelligent, moral and committed church-people get it so wrong over child abuse?
What prevents us from recognising the changing face of authority and the changing demands of church leadership? Why are we afraid to explore the darkness at the heart of priesthood? Why was the energy and vision of the second Vatican Council strangled at birth? Why have we so much difficulty with concepts like accountability and democracy?
Why has an aged, male, celibate, clerical coterie to control everything, to decide everything?
We need to embrace change so that we can remake, recreate, re-imagine a new and very different church: a church that listens to itself by listening to its people; a church that loosens the stranglehold of control exercised by the clergy and releases the gifts of lay people; a church that facilitates new forms of authority and leadership; a church that makes celibacy in priesthood a voluntary choice; a church that opens up a debate on women priests; a church in tune with the rhythms of our time; a church that cherishes diversity and celebrates difference; a church that names the truth, regardless; a church that implements the teachings of the second Vatican Council rather than ambushes them along the way.
A feudal church is incapable of conversing with today's world and unless we change radically the Irish Catholic Church will turn over and die.