By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Telling the bishops of Ireland that he
wanted to hear their questions, concerns and even criticisms, Pope Francis
spent almost two hours in conversation with them.
In the continuing evolution of the “ad limina”
visits bishops are required to make to the Vatican, Pope Francis met Jan. 20
with 26 Irish bishops and set aside a practice that began with Pope Benedict
XVI: writing a speech to the group, but handing the text to them instead of
reading it.
Pope Francis did, however, maintain his practice of sitting
with the bishops and asking them what was on their minds.
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, the importance of
Catholic schools and methods for handing on the faith were among the topics
discussed, the bishops said. They also spoke about plans for the World Meeting
of Families in Dublin in August 2018 and hopes that Pope Francis would attend.
Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, Northern Ireland, president of the bishops’
conference, told reporters that Pope Francis led a serious 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 meeting this morning was quite
extraordinary,” said Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, one of the few
Irish bishops who had made an “ad limina” visit previously; the previous time the Irish bishops made one of the visits to report on the status of their
dioceses was in 2006.
“The dominant thing was he was asking us and
challenging us: What does it mean to be a bishop?” the Dublin archbishop
said. “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.”
The Armagh archbishop said meeting with different heads
of Roman Curia offices and with the pope, “we haven’t received any raps on
the knuckles,” but rather felt a desire to hear the bishops’ 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 rapidly.
“We are realistic about the challenges we are facing in
Ireland at the moment,” 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 — not the dominating voice or domineering voice
that perhaps some say we’ve had in the past — but we are contributing to
important conversations on life, on marriage, on the family, on poverty,
homelessness, education.”
One of the factors pushing such a rapid loss of public
status for the church in Ireland was the sexual abuse scandal, he said. And as he
told Pope Francis, just as the bishops were meeting with the pope, in Belfast leaders
of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry in Northern Ireland were making public
their report on the abuse of children in residential institutions, including some
run by Catholic religious orders.
One of the first meetings the bishops had in Rome, he said,
was with staff of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors,
sharing the steps the Catholic Church in Ireland has taken to prevent further
abuse, to bring abusers to justice and to assist survivors “affected by
the awful trauma of the sins and crimes of people in the church.”
Archbishop Martin told reporters there was a
recognition that Ireland had gone “through a bad time — not for us, but
particularly for children who were abused, and that anything that we did would
inevitably be inadequate in responding to the suffering they experienced.”
He also told reporters the bishops brought up the role and
position of women in the church during almost every meeting they had, including
at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where they discussed “the
areas within the church where a stronger position of laypeople is not only
licit, but is desirable.”
“One of the groups that is most alienated in the
Catholic Church in Ireland is women, particularly young women, who feel
excluded and therefore do not take part in the life of the church,” he
said.
The bishops, he said, found “a willingness to listen
and an awareness that we were asking a valid question rather than something we
should not be talking about.”
After about 90 minutes of conversation with Pope Francis, the
Dublin prelate said, the pope asked if the bishops were tired. In the past, he
said, that was signal that the pope was tired and the meeting was about to end.
Instead, the conversation continued for another 25 minutes.
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Follow Wooden on Twitter: @Cindy_Wooden.
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