At the opening of recent John Main Seminar in Balally Parish, Bishop Donal Roche welcomed participants by reminding them that renewal in the Irish Church “will not come from programmes alone, but from recovering the spiritual roots that first brought the Gospel to this island.” He pointed to the early monks and communities who shaped Irish Christianity with a distinctive emphasis on hospitality, prayer, and a lived sense of God’s presence.
That theme was taken up by Fr Laurence Freeman OSB, who said that the Irish Church is standing “on a threshold,” and must learn once again to communicate the Gospel “as a way of life, not merely a set of doctrines.” He suggested that the Celtic Church offers a model well suited to this moment. “The Celtic tradition,” he said, “shows us an alternative form of the Church – contemplative, relational, not over-centralised, and missionary at the same time.”
Fr Freeman stressed that this was not about romanticising the past. “We can’t go back,” he said. “But we can reclaim the vision.” That vision, he argued, centres on an inner transformation that begins with silence and stillness. “Being comes before doing,” he said. “If we recover the contemplative dimension of our own tradition, the Church in Ireland can grow again from the inside out.”
Bishop Roche echoed this, saying that the Celtic imagination speaks powerfully today because it was “rooted in the ordinary, in community, in the natural world, in the rhythm of prayer.”
For more check out the WCCM website – Here.
For another article from the event – here.
