RENEWAL IN the Catholic Church must first come from within, Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin has said.
“Conversion is not about fleeing from the realities of the world and society and culture and secularisation, it is about understanding them in a different light,” he said.
“Jesus is the light that enlightens us, but also the light that enables us to discern the realities of our life in a different way.’’
In his Christmas Eve homily at Mass in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, Dr Martin said Saint John had observed that Jesus was among his own, yet he was rejected by those who were his very own.
“When we reflect on the situation of the church, and the difficulties that the men and women of our generation encounter in believing, it is very easy to point the finger and say that it is all due to society or to culture or to secularisation, and even to hostility against faith and against the church,’’ he added.
“We have always to remember that the first rejection that Jesus encountered was rejection by his very own.’’
Dr Martin said the loving kindness of God appeared not in palaces, not in luxury hotels, not even in the simplest village hostel, but in what was, for the powerful, an insignificant space.
In today’s world, and Ireland, there were many who were seeking to see where God belonged in their lives.
“They seek to understand and, perhaps, rekindle the faith that they have inherited. That heritage had, however, for many lost its simplicity and had become entwined with establishment,” he said.
Dr Martin said the starting point of their search for adult faith was all too often still the abstract God of ideas and ideologies, and the theological formulas of their youth. “Today, all of us have to reorient our sights and our vision and look to find God in the person of Jesus, a radical framework in which often the mentality and the thought-patterns and the ideologies of the day do not hold centre-stage,’’ he added.
“If our God is a God conceived in terms of power or prodigies or judgmentalism, then we have made our own God; we have made our own God either to reject or onto which we project our own anxieties and fears,” he said.
In his homily at Christmas Day Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, Cardinal Seán Brady said he believed that, deep down, people yearned for the gentler, more compassionate, more forgiving society which Christmas represented. “My hope and prayers for Ireland 2012 is that we become, once again, a more caring and neighbourly place, especially in these austere recessionary times,’’ he added.
“May we rediscover more clearly the spirit of generosity, reverence of the sacred, respect for creation, that have been our hallmark since the time of St Patrick.’’
Dr Brady said the deepest happiness of Christmas was that God remembered everybody. “Even if we live alone, with only one or two cards on the mantelpiece, God’s gift to his Son is exactly the same for all of us. For nobody, absolutely no one, is an outsider to the happiness of Christmas.’’
