I suppose that it is normal for people to ask a Bishop the question “what is the Church like” in Ireland or in Dublin or wherever the Bishop comes from.

 People tend to think that I can produce in a few sound bytes a description of the Church in Dublin, its positive aspects, its challenges and difficulties.   If there is one thing that I have learned as Archbishop of Dublin, however, it is not to generalise.

 We have 200 parishes in the Archdiocese of Dublin and no two are alike.  We have urban parishes and rural parishes; we have old traditional inner-city communities and communities which are springing up in newly developed areas:  in one part of the diocese the population has increased by 51% since the last census five years ago.  In the past three years over 200.000 immigrants have come to Ireland from Poland alone.  And I have parishes which are being depopulated or are formed by young professionals living in the city alone who return to their families in other parts of Ireland each weekend and who have no connection with either community.

 We have parishes with an extremely high level of religious practice – over 75% in some cases – and many parishes where practice is around 5% and well below. I visit parishes where I see no one between the ages of 14 and 34, and other parishes where there is a small, yet solid and committed group of young people.   Regular Sunday Mass attendance is low in many parishes, yet attendance at daily Mass is among the highest in Europe.  

There is no generalised situation in my diocese and there are no generalised explanations.  Some would love to attribute the decline in Mass attendance to liberal theological positions.  Yet it is in the more liberal, affluent areas where Mass attendance is high.   I go to a major University each Ash Wednesday and thousands of liberal students come to get their ashes.  

The lowest levels of practice are among socially deprived parishes.  It is not that the people in these parishes have something against the Church.  They have simply been deprived of the basic infrastructure for any form of socialization.  They live in what I call “social deserts”, places where people survive and where a real sense of community has never emerged. They do not come to Church, or to any other community-focus except perhaps the pub.  In one parish recently the Parish Priest said that in his parish there were two pubs, two gambling shops and no pharmacy and no doctor.

Whatever the situation, we have great parishes, in some cases extraordinary parishes.  I can say without doubt that even though the level of religious practice has gone down, at times dramatically, most of our parishes have never been as dynamic in their entire history as they are today.

The Parish is a very durable and adaptable institution.   Every parish has its own character.  This comes from its history, its geographical location, and its demographic and social make up.  Each parish has its own spiritual tradition, bound up with those who have ministered there over the years, as well as with various events in its history.

But parishes are undergoing change.  In Dublin many of the current parish boundaries no longer respond to the realities of the day.  I am launching a mapping initiative trying to break down the figures which have emerged at the most recent national census to look at the real demographics of the diocese.  Two of my larger parishes put together would have a higher population than any one of the four smallest dioceses in Ireland.  But I am finding it hard to give those parishes a second curate.  To give a parish a second curate I have to take the only curate from another parish.  Some parishes traditionally had a large number of priests and still feel that the tradition should be maintained.  Planning the distribution of priests can only be done by knowing and facing the real facts.

Today, especially in the urban parts of the diocese, there is greater mobility.  People no longer live and work and enjoy themselves within parish boundaries.  People make different choices about the type of religious experience that appeals to them.   A single parish may not have the capacity and the variety of resources that are needed to respond to the varying and new spiritual needs of people.   Some people find the response to their needs outside traditional parish structures.  We have spiritual and renewal movements, charismatic structures whose characteristic is a certain freedom from structure.

One of the first surprises I had when I went to live in Italy, already nearly forty years ago, was to find on Sunday mornings parish Churches which were effectively empty and other Parishes, perhaps only a short distance away, where the people were overflowing outside the porch.  It did not take long to realise that this was very much linked with the quality of the service that parishes were providing.

It was something very different from my experience in Dublin in the fifties and sixties where Churches were all overflowing and it did not seem to matter really what kind of service was being offered, provided it was quick!

Those days are gone in Dublin also. 

It is important to take a clear look at the facts as they are.  But the facts are not just about numbers and statistics and demographics. The level of understanding of the faith is in many cases very low, despite years of Catholic religious instruction in schools.   Many young people are totally unchurched.  In one generation more they will have lost most of their faith culture.  Their parents may no longer attend Mass regularly but they still have some elements of residual good feeling towards the Church.  The third generation of the unchurched will have lost that sentiment. 

It is true to say that most of my generation have probably had a love-hate relationship with the Church.   We may not have gone to Church enthusiastically, but the Church was that space where we learned about the love of God.  We may have had difficulties with the commandments, but we also encountered the wonderful forgiveness of Jesus.  We may have been mediocre, but there were the wonderful moments when something of the message of Jesus changed our hearts and opened us to the service of others.

Where have we failed in getting that message to our young people?  What must we do differently for the future?

We cannot answer the question about what the parish of the future is going to look like without answering the deeper questions about the nature of the Church and its mission.  These are the questions which determine what the Church, the diocese, the deanery or the parish will look like in the future.

I have been curious since becoming Archbishop of Dublin to learn about what is happening in different dioceses around the world.   On various occasions, I have picked up diocesan directories or guidebooks to see how others have done it, to see if I could find some models for structuring of a diocese facing the challenges of the contemporary society.

I have generally been disappointed.  In fact, most of these directories could be produced by some Management Institute.  Apart from the ecclesiastical titles, they could practically be the models of any secular organisation or administration. 

But church is not an administration like any other administration, even though it must have its structures and instruments of dialogue and policy making.  An administration is always the construct of its managers.  The Church is the place where we encounter God’s action. The Church is the place where Eucharist is celebrated, where sacraments are celebrated.  The Church is a community of prayer.  The Church is the place where Christian love is learned and practiced and where the Good News is spread.   The Church is a community of faith, a community of worship, a community of service and a community of mission.

Renewal in the Church is never something external or superficial.   It is never just a process about committees and working groups.  It is rather a process of renewed understanding and of meaning.  It involves a community day by day – in the changed and challenging situation of the world in which we live – entering into the mystery of the Word made flesh in order to see how we can sanctify the world around us, in all its corporeity, its bodily-ness, in its concrete expressions.

In any undertaking it is always useful to know who your competitors are and who are your alternatives.  The parish or the Church no longer has a monopoly of a vision of spirituality.  There are many forms of spirituality in today’s world.  Spirituality despite the seemingly obvious meaning of the word may in fact be entirely material, with no true openness to the transcendent.   Many turn to competing religious forms of spirituality, perhaps seeking a sign of the transcendent and this may be a first opening to faith. These forms of spirituality are our competitors. 

The competitor is the one who offers a similar product.  The alternative is the one which puts you out of business altogether.  Many young people feel that they can get along without religion.  They find their path in a purely secular spirituality and they will live out their worldview with dedication, idealism, generosity and satisfaction, without any felt need for a religious inspiration.    

The originality of faith is however that it is not of our construction, it is response to a personal action of God.  It is response to an invitation made to me in my personal situation.  Faith is the recognition that God loves me personally.

The parish community will have to be a community which has its own identity as the community of those who believe that Jesus Christ came to reveal God’s love to us.  It must look towards that Jesus who emptied himself and give himself for us.  The parish must therefore be a community which celebrates that belief in the Eucharist and in the saving work of the sacraments and which sends people out to live that same self-giving love in their lives and in the realities of the world.
The Church will always be a Church of saints and sinners. This is not something we should be ashamed of.  Indeed in a society which prizes above all success, possession, power and celebrity, it is good to remember that Jesus called the weak and that the Church is the place where each of us is embraced for our inner worth, rather than for the external appearance.  A world where only the successful and the competitive and the beautiful were prized would be an inhuman world.

The level of faith and the appreciation of faith will not be the same among all.  I like a quotation of Karl Rahner concerning the Church. “Persons are offended when someone appears to do God’s business and still is only a human.  They want messengers who speak more brilliantly, heralds who preach more persuasively, hearts that burn with a hotter flame…  But what is the terrible and happy truth?  Those who come are weak persons, who live in fear and trembling and must pray over and over ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’ and who must beat their breasts ‘Lord be merciful to me a sinner’” (Meditations on the Sacraments p.61).   And yet these same weak persons preach the faith that conquers the world and bring the grace that makes redeemed saints out of lost sinners!

Faith formation must become more and more central in the work of our parishes and communities:  faith formation for persons of all ages and backgrounds, to enable them to deepen their knowledge of the faith, to bring them to maturity in the dialogue between faith and life, to renew that freshness and enthusiasm about the faith and their commitment and abandonment to Jesus which must be the distinguishing mark of the believer. 

Parishes will no longer just tick over.  A tired Church community will fall into lengthy slumber.  A safe, careful Church will fossilize in its security.  The message of the Gospel is not yesterday’s message.  It is perennial newness to which we must respond with courage and enthusiasm.  We make radically new inroads today in terms of evangelization and do so today.  The parish is always new mission territory.

In Ireland most of our efforts of faith formation up to today have been directed to schools.  Children run the risk of thinking the religion is something for school children.  Vast amounts of research and money has been put into providing catechetical books for schools, much less has been provided for use in parishes and in families.

The family is the first parish, the first Church.   When we talk about the family today we tend to talk about the difficulties which the family encounters in society.  That is a chapter in itself into which I will not enter this evening.
 
What I want to stress is that the family is the first place of evangelization.  The family is the primary place where lay Christians live out their baptismal mission as transmitters of the faith.  It is the place where faith is transmitted and lived in a real, existential context.  So many parents have lost confidence in their ability to transmit the faith to their children.  Some have given up; others just hope that somehow their children will pick up the elements of their faith later in life in some other way. 

I am amazed at how often when we in Ireland talk about Catholic education and strategize about the future of Catholic education, very often at the end of a strategy paper someone asks:  and what about parents?    Our strategies tend to be built up around the “professionals”.  But it is parents who are the primary educators of their children, not the bishop, not the teacher, not the catechist.  Parishes must invest in parents and restore their confidence.

Passing on the faith to young people today is a very time-consuming task.  There are high moments in such a task.  This is part of the success of World Youth Days.  Young people come together and talk among themselves and with priests and bishops about faith.  They receive support form their peers.  They have an opportunity to talk to and challenge their bishops.  But when they return, their parishes are too busy to offer them the same type of engagement, yet this is what they need.    At times I feel that we offer all sorts of engagement with young people hoping that somehow they will turn back towards their faith.  We need to be offering direct engagement with young people about their faith.

The Parish is centred on the celebration of the Eucharist.  It is in the Eucharist that we fully encounter Jesus and recognize his message.  Today as in apostolic times we only fully recognise the Lord in the breaking of bread.

The celebration of the sacraments and the Eucharist is the constitutive element of being Church. The quality of our parish liturgies is vital. In Dublin we have too many Masses. Reducing the number is not just a question of responding to the smaller number of priests.  We need to bring a real sense of community celebration to the Eucharist where the different communities which construct a parish come together on Sunday to celebrate and give thanks together.

Much depends on the quality of the liturgy.  I was struck by Pope Benedict’s reference in Sacramentum Caritatis about beauty in the liturgy: “Like the rest of Christian Revelation, the liturgy is inherently linked to beauty”.   The God of revelation does not reveal himself in anger or fear, as the God’s of the pagans did.  God’s revelation is a revelation in beauty.

God’s first self-revelation – the first glimpse we get of what God is like – is in the beauty of creation, which must still be explored and which we have a responsibility to maintain.  In fact, in our time there is a growing awareness of the damage which humankind has done to the integrity of that beauty.

Our first glimpse of God is in his creation.  Christian revelation is about a deeper dimension of beauty.  The Christian message is not a collection of rules.  It is an encounter with Jesus Christ who through his own self-giving love until the end, shows us how love can transform darkness and distastefulness, and even the darkest mystery, that of sin and death, into the radiant light of the resurrection.   God’s revelation is a revelation in beauty, because beauty is in the first place an attribute of God himself.  Liturgy requires beauty and a sense of the mystery we celebrate.
 To achieve that, our worshipping community must be a prayerful community, a community where personal prayer and prayer in common will be the hallmarks of those who are the followers of Jesus. We need many new prayer initiatives.

One of my favourite saints is Saint John the Baptist.  I like, in particular, the Gospel story where the disciples of Jesus ask him to teach them to pray “as John teaches his disciples”.  It is as if the disciples of Jesus were jealous of the disciples of John, because John seemed to be better at teaching prayer than Jesus was.  We need many John the Baptists in today’s world, people who can teach prayer and who are attractive to others for that reason.

It is very obvious that many young people have lost the capacity to pray, except in very special circumstances.  But we should also remember that the Lord listens just as much to imperfectly formulated, simple prayer as to the mystical prayer of the Saint.  Again parents are very often lost when it comes to talking to children about prayer or about praying with their children at home.  When a young person does not encounter persons he or she respects in prayer, then they will have great difficulty in understanding what a community of prayer must look like.

The Church is the place where the love of Jesus is encountered and lived.  Church must be all those beautiful values of caring, sharing, carrying, supporting, forgiving, reconciling and healing.  It must be so because it is the place where we encounter Jesus who cares for us, who shares his life for us, who has carried us in moments of difficulty, has supported us, has healed us and shown us forgiveness.  Jesus loved us first.  It is in encountering his gratuitous love that we are enabled to love.

The Church must witness to that love of Jesus also in the face of hurt; especially those who for various reasons encounter Jesus in a situation of hurt.  Jesus teaching is demanding.  But it must always be presented and understood as part of his teaching of love.

Charity however is not hand outs.  It is bringing something unique and irreplaceable to our society.  Jesus’ love is gratuitous.  It asks for nothing in return.  Gratuity finds its place with difficulty in a society marked by individualism and utilitarianism.  A world where people would only think of themselves and their personal advancement or a world in which market calculation dominated every sphere of life would be a very inhuman world.  The gratuitous giving which characterises Christian love is the antidote to an individualist, consumer, utilitarian society.

The parish must appear to outsiders as a place where people gather together not just to carry our ritual and return back to their individual concerns.  Parish must be a place where people encounter a different relationship between people; a relationship which draws its inspiration from the Eucharist and the unique form of community that liturgy can produce.

If we believe in the message of Jesus we have to bring it to the world in which we live.  Most people are attracted to the message of Jesus in the first place by the coherence of life and love of those who profess Jesus name.   We have to witness in our time, in our culture to that love, that justice, that forgiveness which spring from the Gospel.  We have to witness to values different from the values of a world closed in on itself.  We have, through our life style, to witness in the world to the fact that being a believer makes a difference in our lives.

This task of mission and evangelization is a task for the whole Church.  Each of us, with our own charisms and talents must bring our specific contribution.  In speaking of the parish I have tried not in any way to talk about the distinguishing feature of the members of the parish community.  Being a Christian means belonging to the Church and the Church is the successor of that community which Jesus formed around himself with the task of bringing his name and message to all parts of the world and to every future generation.

We cannot be solo Christians.  We must be Christians in community, but a special community which is communion with Jesus and with one another.  

The parish of the future?  I have no concrete model, because there is no one-size-fits-all model.  There will be various models.  No individual model, no individual spirituality, no one strategy or structure has a monopoly role in the Church.  We need to be open to new models, diverse models.  We may not find ourselves totally at home in some models, but others might!  

This does not mean encouraging exclusiveness or sectarianism among movements or ecclesial groups.   Parish must become the primary place in which these various communities will come together in communion.  The parish will be a community of communities.  It will be that place open to all, where all will come together, with different talents, with different charisms, with different individual God-given capacities and bring them to the one table, the one sacrifice which embraces, nourishes and saves.  Christian community is a community of the committed, a community where every true talent is recognised, enhanced and blessed.

Parishes face huge challenges.  The ones which rise to the occasion with innovative responses do well; the parishes which remain closed in on themselves, where there is no conversation, not even among priests, are those where the signs of tiredness are patently evident.

Evangelization is the task of the entire Church.  Shaping the structures for a new evangelization is a task for the whole Church.  It requires a renewed sense of formation and a renewed sense of mission.  Parishes must identify their priorities in the face of this evangelization.  They must collaborate.  They must find out what can be best achieved in structures below or above parish level.  Parishes must be open to experiment and to welcome experiences which may be unfamiliar or are not to the current Parish Priest’s liking! 

Parishes are communities, but not islands. A diocese needs intermediary groupings call them deaneries, call them pastoral units, where certain pastoral services can function more effectively because of the question of scale.  On the one hand it is necessary to move quickly to establish these and not be imprisoned by old structures or personal preference.  On the other hand new structures will only work when they have the full support of the communities involved.   This requires consultation, but also leadership.   If the initial consultation of the Irish Bishops concerning the Second Vatican Council is anything to go by, I can see that it was as well that Pope John had announced his decision to hold a council before he consulted.

Changing pastoral structures will require consultation and leadership.  It will require a new relationship between priests and laity.    Enhancing the place of the laity, women and men, in the Church will also enhance the specific vocation and service of the priest, who is chosen to ensure that the Church can celebrate “in memory of me” and in “the person of Christ” the saving actions of Jesus Christ.

`One of the characteristics of that relationship should be optimism.  If you were to get my daily mail bag you would see that I have every reason to be pessimistic and to share the pessimism of many who write to me.  I remember an old superior of mine whose by-word I used to describe as “I am happy to tell you that the situation is even worse than we had thought”.   Even if that it true, our optimism comes from knowing the Lord’s hand is with us and if we abandon ourselves to his power, if we do not place the obstacles of our anxiety and temerity, our insecurity and unwillingness to let go,  in its way, the Lord’s hand will guide us on the right path.