Compassionate listening is essential to the abortion debate
■ I hope and pray that the abortion debate will rekindle and reignite the moral imagination rather than nurture and intensify long festering antipathies. For all of us, it is a real struggle to escape from habitual modes of thought and expression.
We are now in a precarious relationship with what is referred to as ‘the Church’s teaching’, teaching that demands unquestioning obedience.
Obedience is not a virtue and never was, leading, as it does, to relationships of subservient dependence. Sadly, even our relationship to God has drifted away to being one of anxiety, subservience and fear rather than one of love.
Pope Francis has sought to redirect the Church’s attention from teaching to learning. Gone are the days when the bishops of Ireland tended to manifest power rather than insight and inspiring leadership.
In their appointment, the essential requirement in the job description was that they possessed a safe pair of hands with minimal attention to a more essential requirement – the possession of an active critical mind.
As increasing numbers gained access to secondary and university education, the Church came under relentless critical scrutiny.
Ireland has not escaped from the persistent drift towards secularisation. The Church has tended to confront this as an attack on all it stands for. The secularist movement seeks to focus on the realities of daily living, attending to issues of deep human concern, particularly that of poverty, generated by the fact that far too few people grab far too much.
The Church, itself, needs an injection of secularist thinking. It has become far too other-worldly. Though it claims to be in the world and not of the world; surely, it must make sense to the world.
What is crucial in the discussion on abortion is compassionate attentiveness to the disparate voices that seek to inform public opinion, listening and not silencing, as we become enriched by debate and challenge.
Philip O’Neill Oxford, England