THERE IS a touch of the masterly where the Catholic Church is concerned about the announcement that the 50th International Eucharistic Congress will take place in Dublin, in 2012. It gives a battered, bruised and demoralised institution here in Ireland a positive focus for the immediate future, while also allowing it to redirect its gaze from horrors past. To some extent, the next four years will see the first concerted attempts at rebuilding Irish Catholicism on an island-wide basis as it enters a post-scandal era.
The effects of those scandals will continue to be felt for some time, however. Two major reports on clerical child abuse have yet to be presented and are expected to be published either later this year or in early 2009. Since 2000 the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has been investigating the treatment of children in institutions run by religious congregations, while the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation, set up in March 2006, has been hearing evidence about clerical child sex abuse which took place there between 1975 and May 2004, and of how it was handled by the archdiocesan authorities. Both reports are expected to have a major impact but may not be as shocking as the findings of the Ferns Report in 2005. People are already familiar with much of the evidence presented to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and, where the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation is concerned, the archdiocese itself has already published figures concerning reports of clerical child sex abuse there going back 60 years – twice the length of time being investigated by that commission.
Where other critical matters for the Church are concerned – the decline in priest numbers; the fall-off in Mass attendance; the refusal of so many young people to engage – this 50th Eucharistic Congress will allow for a determined, focused, and island-wide mobilisation of laity at parish level. That is clearly an intention of the bishops. It will be a lay event, predominantly, particularly appropriate for a Eucharistic Congress which will also mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.
But it is unlikely that numbers attending will be on a par with those which took part in the 1932 congress or which attended events during the visit to Ireland of Pope John Paul in 1979. Nor does that appear to be an ambition. As Cardinal Seán Brady and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said in a joint statement last Sunday, “We live in different times now…”.