Pope Francis spent almost two hours talking to Ireland’s bishops last week, telling them he wanted to hear their questions, concerns and even criticisms.
Pope Francis set aside a feature of bishops’ ad limina visits that began with Benedict XVI: writing a speech to the group, but handing the text to them instead of reading it.
Instead he sat with the 26 bishops and asked them what was on their minds.
Topics the bishops said they wanted to discuss included the ministry of a bishop, the clerical sexual abuse crisis, the role of women in the Church, the need to find new ways to engage with young people, the changing status of the Church in Irish society, and the importance of Catholic schools and methods for handing on the faith. They also spoke about plans for the World Meeting of Families in Dublin in August 2018.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, one of the few Irish bishops who had made an ad limina visit previously, said: “The meeting this morning was quite extraordinary. The dominant thing was he was asking us and challenging us: what does it mean to be a bishop? He described a bishop as like a goalkeeper, and the shots keep coming from everywhere, and you stand there ready to take them from wherever they come.”
Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, president of the bishops’ conference, told reporters that Pope Francis led a reflection on “the importance of a ministry of presence, a ministry of the ear where we are listening to the joys and the hopes, the struggles and the fears of our people, that we are walking with them, that we are reaching out to them where they are at.”
The archbishop said that in meeting different heads of Curia offices and the Pope, “we haven’t received any raps on the knuckles”, but rather they had felt a desire to hear their experience and their ideas for dealing with a situation in which the voice and authority of the Church in the lives of individuals and society has diminished.
“We are realistic about the challenges,” he said. “But we are also hopeful that we are moving into a new place of encounter and of dialogue in Irish society where the Church has an important voice.”
The archbishop said they were moving away from “the dominating voice or domineering voice that perhaps some say we’ve had in the past”. Instead, “We are contributing to important conversations on life, on marriage, on the family, on poverty, homelessness and education.”
Reformation left ‘legacy of mistrust’
Anglican leaders have urged Christians to “repent” for the divisions of the Reformation.
In a statement, the Most Rev Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Most Rev John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, recalled “the lasting damage done five centuries ago to the unity of the Church”.
They said: “Those turbulent years saw Christian people pitted against each other, such that many suffered persecution and even death … A legacy of mistrust and competition would then accompany the astonishing global spread of Christianity in the centuries that followed.”
This year’s commemoration of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary, they said, should lead Christians to “repent of our part in perpetuating divisions” and to act to reach out to other churches.
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