It’s now timE For Church to embrace diversity

IHAVE considerable sympathy with people planning to savour this second papal visit and who are irked by a recurring tone of negativity in our national discourse about the upcoming events.

Many are people who have a strong Christian faith and abhor all forms of abuse, but revere their own church leaders, who they believe are without fault in that or other important areas of life.

All those people want is to, one way or another, join in the events on Saturday and Sunday, see a warm welcome for Pope Francis, and be enriched and re-energised by the entire experience.

I hope and believe that this will be the overall outcome of Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland. And yes, events of recent days have drowned the more positive communal aspects of the visit.

But let’s not end up shooting the messenger in appraising the noisy events of the past week. Above all, please let us not attach any blame to survivors of clerical abuse, and we must note the church’s continued failings in relation to redress.

Those of us raised in the Catholic faith were often reminded about its “universal” nature.

Thus the resonance of the horror stories of last week, especially the issue of Church leaders’ cover-ups, for Irish people. It has been reinforced by Irish-American people’s role in all of that. And it has revived memories of such recent horrors much closer to home.

In fairness, we must acknowledge there were was unfortunate timing in these revelations hitting a more felicitous papal visit. But we

cannot ignore the slow and lumbering response by the church authorities.

The Pope is just one man trying to make sense of the centuries-old apparatus within which resides real Vatican power.

But Pope Francis has shown little interest in pomp or money and sides with ordinary people.

Doubtless, we will show him acknowledgement of this over the weekend in Dublin and Mayo. Doubts, however, will persist around his and other reform-minded church leaders’ ability to rise above existing power structures in Rome to deliver real change.

Many of the ruminations about the changes in Ireland since the last papal visit in 1979 have focused on social issues. We could be here for a while re-hashing even a small flavour of these.

But we must note the import of the data revealed by the Children’s Minister, Katherine Zappone, in this newspaper today.

This tells us that one in three Irish families no longer fit into the traditional father, mother and children definition of the family used by the Catholic Church. The data contrasts with the strong message by the leader of the Irish Church, Archbishop Éamon Martin, when he told the World Meeting of Families the State must support the traditional model of family.

Ms Zappone urges further separation between Church and State.

She rightly points out that sexual identity, or other factors in life, cannot be allowed to exclude people from acknowledgement that they are living as a family.

The Irish Catholic Church must be more articulate about the need for a more inclusive definition of what family means in reality.

‘Pope Francis has no interest in pomp and backs ordinary people’