THE POPE IN IRELAND

I am in Ireland and Pope Francis is about to land.  When Pope John Paul arrived almost forty years ago it was to a tumultuous welcome and was billed “The Greatest Day for Ireland”.  This time it is as though the pope is landing in a war zone.  In the build up to his coming the media has been relentless in emphasising the abuse of the vulnerable by clerics and consecrated people, the subsequent cover-up and the failure to bring those accountable to trial.

Francis has written a forceful letter to the universal Church calling for conversion through fasting and prayer leading to a complete change of heart.  In the strong words he used to the Chilean Church about the blight of clericalism he reminded us that, “whenever we have tried to replace, or silence, or ignore, or reduce the People of God to small elites, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives.”

These are strong words about the way we create groups (elites) where the members become untouchable.  This is true of the Church but also of the state.  Yet we can begin to see that this desperate tragedy (abuse of the vulnerable) can be turned into a call for a transformation of the Church and ultimately of society through processes of accountability.  Ultimately the awful suffering of so many may be the seeds of a conversion that leads to a new way of being community.

But the media in Ireland is having none of this and it seems nothing Pope Francis will say or do will satisfy them.  People have suffered and continue to suffer and we have to absorb this.  But there appears to be a note of bitterness and a desire for retributon in some of what the media presents to us. This seems neither helpful nor healthy.  But having said this, our hope must be that we are so shaken that we will indeed set up those structures of accountability which our brothers and sisters are pushing us to do. At the end of the day the media has done us a great service in persistently calling for action.  .

26 August 2018                                               Sunday 21 B

Joshua 24:1 … 18                                Ephesians 5:21-32                               John 6:60-69