Things are spiralling out of control in matters of moral and socio-cultural urgency on the Emerald Isle! It is a tragic scenario of events unfolding where the faithful are disillusioned with the Church’s modus operandi.
There is also a looming trend among the laity most particularly, to embrace a secularistic form of Evangelical Protestantism and to campaign so as to have it incorporated within the official structure of the Church! And this is terribly worrying and out of touch with the unique doctrinal call, mission, and witness of the Catholic Church in the wider world.
These trendy ideas (quoted in the article above) supposedly appealling to ‘younger generations’ are nothing but the substance of sensational hype influenced by ‘social-reform’ fads made popular in the worldly press and secular society over a span of a few decades beginning with the crass onslaught made by the sexual revolution of the 1960’s.
To put all younger generations into a single ideological rubric of people who supposedly think and act alike in view of the afforementioned popularized fads of indecently decadent ‘social reform’ is a grand mistake! It fails to take into account the immense plethora of diversity that exists in the younger generations of today, that is those people who fit within the demographic of “Gen XYZ”. Whilst technology is certainly an important factor, the assessment reported by La Croix on behalf of the Irish Nation also fails to take into account the equally diverse ways technology is already used by sweeping sections of the population be these people in the Church or be they decidedly outside of it.
If people are complaining now about how supposedly ‘irrelevant’ the Catholic Church has become for them due to the tragedy of the sexual abuse scandal, then how much more reason for complaint will there be when these people are confronted with the serious bedrock of morally compromised results that will stem from the formal adjustments which already have in some quarters been rolled out and are still in others, in the process of currently being made as a consequence of this very same rallying cry from manifold secularist think-tanks wanting all these reforms to be brought into effect!?
The effects of the first stages of such ‘reforms’ are already being felt in places like Australia, with the United States fighting for its life in the face of such sweeping changes. The Australian Church by contrast has lulled itself into a pathetic position of complacency and compromise when confronted with these changes to the point where much of the Church in Australia has sold-out point blank to them! Unlike our Church bretheren in the States, the Australian Church hierarchy and many (not all, but many) of the laity not only refrained from fighting such changes but instead took to embracing them on many levels.
This explains why the state of our Church here in Australia is by and large a sad and sorry one but hey – very few who claim to stand with and alongside of her are convicted wholeheartly about the reality of the tragedy which has beset her, so much so that the vast majority are either in denial about it or about the seriousness of its effects or they completely embrace the situation as though it was ‘heaven-sent’ when in fact it is clearly the opposite. This also explains why there has been a serious downturn in the number of religious vocations over the last few decades and even more so since the wake of the decisions to secularize certain aspects of Church life in the latter decades, particularly towards the year 2000 when it was becoming the “done thing” to discourage religious from wearing habits, at first out in public, and then to not wearing them at all! Added to this was the copious trend of selling off vast allotments of Church property to secular interests and developers thereby further dimminishing the activity, life-blood, and perceived relevance of the Church and her moral compass in both the inner-life of the Church and in public life. And now the sexual abuse scandal has just about ‘topped it off’!
The social fabric and morale of the Church’s inner life and outer witness has been so wounded that secular interests are now allowed to run rampant in the name of ‘protecting the vulnerable’ through the introduction of so-called safe-guarding measures whereby the flourishing of normal healthy Christian intimacy between people, be they clerics and laity together has been rigidly stifled in many cases and completely stamped out in others! And I’m talking here about the invasion of unwelcome abnegation of the proper space to build long-lasting robust Spirit-filled human relationships having taken root as a result of this abuse crisis only because the secular interests who have moved in to try and ‘advise’ the Church on navigating this very sensitive issue have also tried to impose their own world-view upon such matters thereby injecting a decidedly corporate work-place relational ethic into the inner-sanctum of Church life.
This ‘ethic’ is solely incompatible with Christian or truly Catholic relational dynamics for it supplants the core of spiritual and moral reciprocity and responsibility with a stiff, rigid, impersonal relational model that quintessentially takes the authenticity of natural love out of the equation. And here I’m talking about the kind of kinship love and bonding that is normally present between family members in the context of spiritually nurtured and morally healthy family relationships. This same kind of proactive bonding bound by the God-given wellsprings of natural law ought to be present between members of the Church whether religious or lay, and it ought to be fully functional between all – in the context of parish life and apostolic or missional life – be it between clergy and laity, within the clergy and religious orders or within the laity. Christ comnands that it be so. But the reality is far from it. And this reality has become less and less a reflection of Christ’s command to truly “Love one another as I have loved you” the more the decades have passed since the outset of the calamity of the sexual revolution in the 1960’s. Everso gradually, the inverse proportionality between genuine love that is supposed to be reflected by and through the inner life of the Church and the crass display of lewed lust common to the fiendish fantasies of the secular world has been becoming more and more marked whereby the genuine love that is supposed to be ignited “within the hearts of all men to make all men brothers” has now grown so cold that it has been outdone in proportionality to the prevalence in the world at large of engrossed profanity and misuse of the relational ties and emotional qualities God has given us. And for secular forces in the now time to further tighten their grip on the inner workings of Church life will not solve anything as regards to the sexual abuse crises but will instead only make matters worse.
And so, turning towards the cosmetic tenets of modern Anglicanism will not solve the problem either. It will only add to the already disfigured melting pot of worldly advice handed to the Church as ‘medicine’ when in reality it is nothing but poison in disguise. Therefore, it is time for the Church in Ireland and around the world, and particularly in the Asia-Pacific countries too, to wake up to the reality of this truly desperate moment in our historic struggle for survival. We are literally drowning not yet in the realization of a new birth in the baptismal waters of genuine renewal but in a distorted prefigurement that has potential for this renewal but has not yet willingly gravitated towards it en masse and so remains only a mis-shapen, yet unformed version of something that could prove catalytic in prefiguring authentic rebirth for the Church in our time.
Key Words: Socio-Cultural, Gen XYZ, Social Fabric, Sexual Revolution, Sexual Abuse Crisis, Ireland, Asia-Pacific, Catalytic
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