Press Releases
BISHOP CENSURES 'COSY CHURCHES'
Bishop Richard Clarke, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath and Kildare, warned that the Church appeared as “irrelevant, frozen-hearted and hypocritical” to those who had been left outside the Ireland of wealth and power. The Church must stop “cosying up to the mighty of state and market”, he suggested, if it were to fulfil its true vocation.
Speaking to the Diocesan Synod of Meath and Kildare on Saturday 28 September in Multyfarnham Co Westmeath, he warned that there were now two Irelands – “on the one hand, an Ireland of wealth but also of underlying fear, and, on the other, an Ireland of deprivation, but a deprivation allied to bitter resentment”.
Dr Clarke urged that churchmen should stop “sniping at the soft targets – politicians for their dishonesty, tribunals for their apparent inability actually to achieve anything, the media for their smug cynicism.. We should remember that the Church is itself an even easier easy target for others – for our lack of integrity, for our inability to do much else than blather, for our own smug churchy brand of cynicism and begrudgery.”.
He asked his hearers to help the Church fulfil its real role “in a society where people have become anonymous, where they are angry and fearful, a society where people feel vulnerable, where they feel distanced from decision-making.” “It is not”, he added, “a role which the Church can fulfil by cosying up to the mighty of state and market. The Magnificat has a great deal to say about where God is to found, and it is not in the corridors of secular power”.
“If the word ‘righteousness’ has meaning any longer, it is about making good relationships, making good relationships between people and God, creative relationships between people and community, even in helping broken and crushed people to relate to themselves. That has always been the task of the people of God. In a polarised and divided society, it has become both a more complex task but also a responsibility which if taken on with vigour will not ingratiate the Church to those whose interests lie in keeping society exactly the way it is. I believe that if the Church is ever to be what it is called by God to be, it will make itself vulnerable in order to speak with integrity to those who have been made vulnerable”.
The Bishop asked his Diocese to continue its policy of giving 0.7% of its total income to overseas aid, as a first call on that income. He urged public representatives to insist that the government reached that target with GNP now, rather than in 5 years’ time. Otherwise, he said, “millions of lives which we, as a country, might easily have saved, will have been needlessly lost to preventable disease and starvation”..
Speaking of Christian ministry, Bishop Clarke said that although the Church of Ireland was looking at Christian ministry, “it is, I rather fear, without any sense of either adventure or of radicalism”. He concluded – “As in this diocese we look at ministry afresh, I believe that much will depend on just how courageous we are prepared to be. If our vision for ministry is only a seeking of ways to deal with a shortage of clergy, or if our dream for ministry is purely to find ways of conserving our finances or of preserving our buildings for the indefinite future, then the bad news is that there won’t be any Church to require either our finances or our resources. We must approach this central question of ministry from the motive of working only for what is the best way of witnessing to Christ in this country in the years and in the decades ahead. That will require not only vision and courage, but also the willingness to “think the unthinkable”, to take great risks, and (perhaps of most importance) a determination to hold our nerve…
Further information from:
THE DIOCESAN COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER
"Rivendell"
Temple Mills
Celbridge
Co Kildare
Tel: 01 6275352
Fax: (01) 6270749
Email:Meath and Kildare Diocesan Communications Officer
DCO: David Seaman