Twenty-five years ago at Knock, addressing Our Lady in a sweeping prayer, Pope John Paul put all facets of Irish life before us: "Help this land to stay true to you and your son always.
"May prosperity never cause Irish men and women to forget God or abandon their faith. Keep them faithful in prosperity to the faith they would not surrender in poverty and persecution. Save them from greed, envy, from seeking selfish or sectional interests, help them to build a just and peaceful and loving society where the poor are never neglected and the rights of all, especially the weak, are respected."
That prayer presented us with a challenge for the future. Ireland has changed dramatically since then. We need not dwell on the tired litany of our failures as a church or a nation over the last quarter of a century. Knowledge garnered from victims' experiences and from tribunals has revealed the extent of the pain and the suffering which as a society we tried to push out of sight and therefore out of mind.
Faith in the structures of the church, in the institutions of state, and even in God himself has grown weak in the face of one scandal after another. So many false voices are heard that conflict with the word of God. They tell us that truth is less important than personal gain; that comfort, wealth and pleasures are the true aims of life.
Sadly, these words depict many aspects of Irish society today, where there is an absence of the sense of eternity. Too often truth has been sacrificed on the altar of expediency or has been declared an irrelevancy in the never ending march to riches and the building of an earthly heaven. All the time the timeless word of God reminds us in the heart of all our preoccupations: "Man does not live on bread alone, but on everything that comes from the mouth of God."
Could Pope John Paul ever have guessed on that September day in Knock that our land would discover a new prosperity, which has not healed many of our anxieties but in many cases has added to them? Television documentaries pry open the secret world of drug dealing and abuse, and take us into a world of sex and its exploitation. Often too they point to the endless abuse of the elderly, the exploitation of the immigrant and uncover greed in many areas of modern living.
All of this leaves us with a feeling of helplessness; for the promised land of a wealthy nation was an illusion. There is still a hunger in the heart which cannot be eased by material things. An Indian writer, Tagore, summed it up: "Set the bird's wing with gold and it will never soar again in the sky."
It is good to remember. There was a rich expression of faith which previous generations have bequeathed to us. There was a deep trust in God during times of hunger, poverty and endless emigration. There was deep love of family given expression in self-sacrifice, in care for the sick and the elderly. All that has been kept in the mind of those who go on caring for the poor, the broken, the homeless and the stranger in this land of ours.
In an age of space exploration, we cannot be but impressed by the quality of the pictures beamed across the millions of miles between Mars and earth. If we turned our telescopes to earth, however, we would find life and bare existence on this planet.
Across the globe we would still see starving peoples depending on manna from heaven in the relief planes which drop some hope. We see generations weakened by AIDS, where world debt cripples the advance of healing and, in the last year, we have seen women in Iraq powdered by the dust of destruction, having their salvaged hopes in old prams lost in the harsh words of war.
We see too in our own land the generosity towards all the support agencies unsurpassed anywhere. We see men and women risk life and health to go to the lands of poverty and want, to bring food, healing and hope. We have not totally forgotten our own Famine.
An eclipse of the sense of God leaves people disorientated, fearful, uncertain and without hope.
In the Knock address the Pope went on to speak of the lack of vision which taught that justice may be achieved without any personal involvement by the Christian; that violence can be a means to a good end; that unity can be built without giving up hate; "we cannot stand back and do nothing, for evil will always thrive if good men and women remain silent". We must be a support to all who work for justice in our communities; we must seek the Kingdom of God in its justice.
It would be too easy to lose our way forward in the face of the many adversities of today. We could lose heart in face of falling numbers, in half-empty seminaries, in the winding down of many religious orders and houses. We might only see the dark side in the growing number of priest-less parishes and the seeming allergy of many young people to religion.
But the God whom we believe in is one who, in the midst of that darkness, futility and meaninglessness, invites us to hope. The power of God is capable of finding hope when hope no longer exists, and a way where the way is impassable.
This is an edited version of the homily delivered by Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam during Mass at the summit of Croagh Patrick yesterday