Diarmuid Martin: Catholic Church needs reality check

[rug]

Church needs to ask if it has drifted from the young in wake of marriage vote, says archbishop Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said: “It’s very clear that if this referendum is an affirmation of the views of young people, then the church has a huge task in front of it to find the language to be able to talk to and to get its message across to young people, not just on this issue, but in general.”

Sat, May 23, 2015, 19:48

The Catholic Church needs “a reality check” in the wake of the same-sex marriage referendum and needs to ask if it has drifted away from young people, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.

“I think really that the church needs to do a reality check, a reality check right across the board, to look at the things it’s doing well, to look at the areas where we really have to start and say, ‘Look, have we drifted away completely from young people?’ ” he told RTÉ News.

He said the referendum result was “an overwhelming vote in one direction” and he appreciated how gay men and lesbian women felt after the endorsement of same-sex marriage - “that they feel this is something which is enriching the way they live”, he said.

‘Social revolution’

“I think it’s a social revolution... It’s a social revolution that didn’t begin today,” he said. “It’s a social revolution that’s been going on, and perhaps in the church people have not been as clear in understanding what that involved.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/diarmuid-martin-catholic-church-needs-reality-check-1.2223872

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

1. Archbishop Martin is quite familiar with the fairly recent history of the Irish Church

I do not need to send him the URL of Joni Mitchell singing "Magdalene Laundries".

Nor do I need to remind him about the way the Irish hierarchy handled the clerical sexual abuse crisis. He knows all that. What he needs to do is get on the right side of the moral problems affecting Ireland. He should have denounced, as best he could, Pope Benedict blowing off the Murphy Report. He should take a page from Pope Francis, and start "smelling like the sheep".