Sarah Mac Donald
Sun 18 Jun 2023
The new bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnois has acknowledged that the temptation to despair is “great” when people look at all the difficulties the Church is currently facing.
Addressing his new flock at St Mel’s Cathedral in Longford, Bishop Paul Connell highlighted the “ageing priesthood” and said “the model of Church we have been living with will not survive what is happening now”.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, he revealed that the youngest priest in the diocese is 50-years-old.
“We have a large number of priests coming towards retirement and we have no seminarians at the moment. That is the structure we have known: where there were priests in every parish and there were priests to take the place of those who retired or died. That is no longer the case. We don’t have enough personnel to do what has been done in the past,” he said.
“We are going to have to look at how best to maintain the Church going forward.”
The former president of St Finian’s College in Mullingar, who has worked as executive secretary of the Bishops’ Council for Education, he said the Irish Church must become “a listening Church” and try to discern its future direction in the midst of “this necessary change”.
In the presence of the new Papal Nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Luis Mariano Montemayor, the leader of the Irish Church, Archbishop Eamon Martin, as well as other bishops and local civic and educational representatives, Dr Connell told the packed cathedral that Irish society was “in danger of losing the sense of the sacred” as its “moral compass is imperilled with an increasing stress on the rights of the individual to the detriment of society as a whole”.
He made his comments on the Irish Church’s Day for Life. Asked by the Irish Independent about the current debate on assisted suicide, the 65-year-old Mullingar native said he felt that the stress on the rights of the individual was very often to the detriment of society as a whole.
“While we have great compassion and understanding for people who find themselves in very difficult positions with regard to wanting to end their life because of illness, really, for the good of society as a whole, we have to have respect for life from birth to death,” he said.
In his homily for the ordination, Fr Michael McGrath appealed to the new church leader to “help us to think big” though the task is “enormous, and though the labourers are indeed few”.
Addressing the congregation in St Mel’s, which was rebuilt after it tragically burnt down on in the early hours of Christmas Day 2009, Fr McGrath acknowledged that “too often religion is seen as divisive”.
He asked the incoming bishop to help people to work together to “bring back the stray, look for the lost and bandage the wounded of our world” and build a Church of solidarity with “the haunted faces of refugees and the voiceless victims of injustice”.
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