If there is a poverty in our Church today, it is above all, a poverty of imagination, the Archbishop of Dublin has said. “Renewal in the faith is not going to come because we adopt some new management strategy that will address our current shortcomings in ministry and mission. Renewal in faith requires a new way of imagining what it means for us to follow Christ together.”
Speaking at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral on St Patrick’s Day, the Archbishop said St Patrick’s “passion for the good news, and his desire to reach the Irish have shaped Patrick’s imagination. He has developed what we might call a “pastoral and spiritual” imagination.”
That imagination he said was hard won. “Such imagination is not forged in the shallows; one has to put out into the deep for such a catch. In our own time, think of the pastoral imagination Pope John XXIII who to the amazement, even horror of the College of Cardinals called a Council. Or of St John Paul II, with his many initiatives, totally in tune with his long years of reflection on the character of human life, and his passion for the vibrancy of the faith of the young. The imagination of Patrick, and that of John XXIII, and of Pope John Paul II are rooted in the hope that only the horizon of Christ can bring”.
He said that the responsibility of ensuring the next generation knows Christ falls to us. “Offering Christ to new generations demands a re-imagining of how our communities work together, a re-imagining how we are nourished and resourced, how we “receive and offer the Bread of Life from the [one] table both of God’s word and of Christ’s body,” as the Council teaches. What Patrick and his companions did, was only the beginning: the cultivation of the faith, living it so that the next generations may have the opportunity to come to know Christ falls to us.
He added: “You may say that the Church is poor, that it has no people, that we are old and weak. But the living Church – the Church on the way to life – has never been afraid of poverty. The Church that is close to Christ knows all about weakness.
This is not the horizon of the strong, but it is the horizon of Patrick, and it is the horizon of Christ. It is a horizon which is not possible without a profound confidence in what God is doing among his people. It is a horizon which is not possible without the hope that comes from the conviction that God is close.”
