The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin says it feels like the Lord has abandoned Ireland’s Catholic Church.

This “confronts us with something new, but something we do not clearly understand.

There are hardly any priests or practising Catholics.

“We feel perplexed, even that the Lord has abandoned us. We feel that we have lost our way,” Archbishop Dermot Farrell told a group of Catechisists.

“These are important parts of our journey,”

The “memory of huge numbers, and of a secure, strong Church”, can be “a very painful learning for us,” he said during a ceremony where 45 lay people received certificates after completing a year-long course in Catechesis (teaching Christianity).

“Generously, you have given of your time – to engage with your faith,” he said.

But the ceremony – and the need for it in the first place – is something new for the Church, he pointed out.

“Even 20 years ago, hardly anyone here could have imagined an evening like this.

We’ve changed

“Our country has changed, our lives have changed, and the expression of our faith – which is an expression of our lives – has changed,” the archbishop said.

The Church “happens in our lives. As we change, our Church changes. We are called to recognise how the Church is changing, and discern where the Good Shepherd is leading us,” he said.

Farrell compared human life to a journey. Our faith lives are also journeys, he commented, and “the Church is our journey in faith together,”.

The journey’s current stage is in a new environment with a diminishing number of priests available to serve in the Archdiocese’s parishes and other ministries.

At the same time, there are fewer and fewer people who celebrate the sacraments regularly, plus a need for increased resources required to maintain the existing parish infrastructure, he said.

Parish cooperation

The changes in priestly and congregational numbers, combined with today’s infrastructure costs mean “it is no longer possible for me to appoint a resident priest to every parish,” the archbishop said.

That means parishes will have to step up their cooperation to provide sacraments and pastoral care, Farrell explained.

Lay Catholics will need to help out.

It will require “a much greater involvement of the lay faithful in the partnerships of parishes to enable them to fulfil their mission and ministry.”

It would always be “a little flock that takes the way of Jesus to heart; it will always be a little flock that will have the courage to follow him, and the generosity to give as he gives,” he said.

New generations are needed to “lead new generations on the way of Christ, to guide and empower their peers to receive the gift of God”.

It was “not about who will say our Masses, or who will ‘teach the faith’,” he said.

“Let us pray for people – young women and men, who would ‘hear his voice,’ entrust themselves to it, and witness to it, and show us all how God is near,” he said.

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