Church suffers from huge inferiority complex
The Catholic Church has been suffering from a huge inferiority complex for more than 60 years. Many factors have helped to undermine its confidence in its mission.
These include, for example, scientific advances in technology, agriculture, travel, communications, all bringing obvious benefits for masses of people.
New medicines improve health care while insights in psychology and therapy bring emotional relief, a feel-good sense and a happier outlook on life.
Economic prosperity fosters a broad variety of consumer desires that are met by an endless supply of goods at a modest price.
A strong focus on autonomy has brought extensive freedom into people's lives: they can, within the law, cast off old customs, obligations and authority in order to think and act as they please.
Many esoteric practices, such as yoga and mindfulness, coming from the East but repackaged for a Western clientele, offer an exciting diversity for the spiritually hungry, whatever their taste.
Faced with all these developments, what the Church proposes is often viewed as out-of-date, gloomy, rigid, intolerant, oppressive, absolute, "dogmatic", anti-woman and irrelevant to the modern world.
Scandals
Making matters worse are the grave scandals the Church must face. And scandal, clearly, will always be an issue for a Church that welcomes weak, sinful people.
There is also the unjust image of the Church created by opponents who lie, twist history, distort the truth, take events or statements out of context.
Due to these and many other factors vast numbers of Catholics, in Ireland as elsewhere, including many leaders, have lost confidence in the Church: in the gospel she proclaims, the hope she offers, the salvation she brings.
We see this, for example, in the vast numbers who have given up the practice of the faith and do not hand it on to their children.
And in the collapse of the missionary movement, with Catholics showing little interest in bringing the gospel to those who have never heard of Christ. The mission emphasis now is on rights, development, economics.
The sense of inferiority is also evident in groups, agencies and organisations which play down their Catholic identity or dilute their Catholic convictions and mission. Little wonder vocations have almost dried up
Meanwhile a huge campaign is in full swing to establish Secularism or Liberalism as Ireland's state religion.
View of God
This new religion deserves far more scrutiny than it receives. Like all religions, it is based on a particular view of God, believing that he does not exist or is irrelevant to life, and it has its own morality, freedom of choice.
Choice morality shapes a way of life in which followers may do what they wish, be it missing Sunday Mass, fornicating, voting for evildoers in politics, marrying a person of the same sex, or killing unborn babies.
The secularist religion, fundamentally irrational, proclaims an anti-gospel of despair, yet it is embraced and vigorously promoted by the politico-media pack, the entertainment industry and, most remarkably, by our universities.
It is popularised in society by slogans which, at best, contain half-truths: be tolerant and non-judgmental, respect other people's views, I'm entitled to my own opinions, avoid "negativity", no one may tell me what to do, it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere, and so on.
Most shocking of all, the Church's lack of confidence in its mission has allowed Secularism to pervade the Church itself from top to bottom. It has diluted catechesis to the point that often what is being taught is fake Christianity.
Preaching
It has corrupted preaching which now often owes more to feel-good pop psychology, trendy "causes" or harmless do goodism than to the great mysteries of the Catholic faith.
God's commandments, for example, the call to repentance, the reality of final judgment and the hope of heaven, all feature little, if at all, in most homilies.
Yet despite this massive poisoning of Catholic teaching and life and of the whole society, the Church has offered virtually no dynamic response. Indeed, there seems to be hardly any real grasp of what is happening.
Or perhaps clergy, theologians and Catholic scholars are overwhelmed at the immensity of the task before them.
The first Christians too, faced a mighty task but perhaps they were different: they believed they had good news that the world needed to hear and they had confidence in the Holy Spirit and in the power of Christ's resurrection.
Few of them imagined the profound revolution beginning with their proclamation of hope and eternal life. But we can see its results.
We can see so clearly the transforming power of Catholic faith in individual lives, in the family and in a whole civilisation, the immense blessings it brings.
What we need, then, is to stir up our zeal and confidence, to purify our thinking, ponder God's word and commit once again with fearless joy to the great mission given to the Church by Jesus.
These include, for example, scientific advances in technology, agriculture, travel, communications, all bringing obvious benefits for masses of people.
New medicines improve health care while insights in psychology and therapy bring emotional relief, a feel-good sense and a happier outlook on life.
Economic prosperity fosters a broad variety of consumer desires that are met by an endless supply of goods at a modest price.
A strong focus on autonomy has brought extensive freedom into people's lives: they can, within the law, cast off old customs, obligations and authority in order to think and act as they please.
Many esoteric practices, such as yoga and mindfulness, coming from the East but repackaged for a Western clientele, offer an exciting diversity for the spiritually hungry, whatever their taste.
Faced with all these developments, what the Church proposes is often viewed as out-of-date, gloomy, rigid, intolerant, oppressive, absolute, "dogmatic", anti-woman and irrelevant to the modern world.
Scandals
Making matters worse are the grave scandals the Church must face. And scandal, clearly, will always be an issue for a Church that welcomes weak, sinful people.
There is also the unjust image of the Church created by opponents who lie, twist history, distort the truth, take events or statements out of context.
Due to these and many other factors vast numbers of Catholics, in Ireland as elsewhere, including many leaders, have lost confidence in the Church: in the gospel she proclaims, the hope she offers, the salvation she brings.
We see this, for example, in the vast numbers who have given up the practice of the faith and do not hand it on to their children.
And in the collapse of the missionary movement, with Catholics showing little interest in bringing the gospel to those who have never heard of Christ. The mission emphasis now is on rights, development, economics.
The sense of inferiority is also evident in groups, agencies and organisations which play down their Catholic identity or dilute their Catholic convictions and mission. Little wonder vocations have almost dried up
Meanwhile a huge campaign is in full swing to establish Secularism or Liberalism as Ireland's state religion.
View of God
This new religion deserves far more scrutiny than it receives. Like all religions, it is based on a particular view of God, believing that he does not exist or is irrelevant to life, and it has its own morality, freedom of choice.
Choice morality shapes a way of life in which followers may do what they wish, be it missing Sunday Mass, fornicating, voting for evildoers in politics, marrying a person of the same sex, or killing unborn babies.
The secularist religion, fundamentally irrational, proclaims an anti-gospel of despair, yet it is embraced and vigorously promoted by the politico-media pack, the entertainment industry and, most remarkably, by our universities.
It is popularised in society by slogans which, at best, contain half-truths: be tolerant and non-judgmental, respect other people's views, I'm entitled to my own opinions, avoid "negativity", no one may tell me what to do, it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere, and so on.
Most shocking of all, the Church's lack of confidence in its mission has allowed Secularism to pervade the Church itself from top to bottom. It has diluted catechesis to the point that often what is being taught is fake Christianity.
Preaching
It has corrupted preaching which now often owes more to feel-good pop psychology, trendy "causes" or harmless do goodism than to the great mysteries of the Catholic faith.
God's commandments, for example, the call to repentance, the reality of final judgment and the hope of heaven, all feature little, if at all, in most homilies.
Yet despite this massive poisoning of Catholic teaching and life and of the whole society, the Church has offered virtually no dynamic response. Indeed, there seems to be hardly any real grasp of what is happening.
Or perhaps clergy, theologians and Catholic scholars are overwhelmed at the immensity of the task before them.
The first Christians too, faced a mighty task but perhaps they were different: they believed they had good news that the world needed to hear and they had confidence in the Holy Spirit and in the power of Christ's resurrection.
Few of them imagined the profound revolution beginning with their proclamation of hope and eternal life. But we can see its results.
We can see so clearly the transforming power of Catholic faith in individual lives, in the family and in a whole civilisation, the immense blessings it brings.
What we need, then, is to stir up our zeal and confidence, to purify our thinking, ponder God's word and commit once again with fearless joy to the great mission given to the Church by Jesus.