The Irish Catholic: Archbishop Martin hopes papal visit could form part of ‘lost’ Ireland’s spiritual renewal
Archbishop Eamon Martin has said Ireland is “in some ways lost” and in need of a renewed spiritual conversation, expressing hope that Pope Leo XIV could visit Ireland as part of a wider effort to re-energise the Church during a period of reflection and transition.
Speaking exclusively to this paper about the Catholic Church’s place in contemporary Ireland, the Archbishop of Armagh acknowledged a sharp decline in the Church’s credibility and influence, but said this moment could also offer an opportunity for renewal.
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Archbishop Eamon Martin refers in that Irish Catholic interview to the church’s ‘credibility problem’ in Ireland but not to the ignoring by the Vatican so far of the call in the 2022 Irish National Synodal Synthesis for a ‘reckoning’ on the hiding by Catholics bishops globally of clerical sex abuse in the last century, before victims and secular courts and media revealed that child safeguarding had until then been ignored by the magisterium.
To invite a papal visit in the absence of such a reckoning – beginning with a persuasive historical explanation of this appalling disaster, based upon the Vatican’s own records – would be simply to remind everyone that so far that reckoning has been denied, and therefore also to embarrass the pope by the obvious questions that would arise if he turned up.
Is the archbishop supposing that we have already forgotten the 2022 National Synodal Synthesis – and what happened (and didn’t) when Pope Francis came in 2018?
Far too much is expected of papal visits in the continuing abysmal absence of magisterial transparency and integrity. Didn’t even Pope Francis know that the era of papal mystique and infatuation is finally over?
If Archbishop Martin were instead to remind Pope Leo of that call in Ireland’s 2022 synodal synthesis – and to appeal also for a review of the scapegoating sanctioning of five Irish priests in the wake of the diversionary Vatican ‘visitation’ of 2012 – that could directly address the credibility issue and prepare the ground for a papal visit before the important millennial jubilee of 2033.
To be calling for a papal visit now is to appear to be suffering from amnesia.
What nonsense! No surprise at the “sharp decline in the church’s credibility and influence”, the recent statement on women deacons marks the low point of this decline. Archbishop Martin had nothing to say about this. As others have noted the synodal process is effectively dead. No major jubilees or papal visits will change the decline.