“Turn away from sin – repent and believe in the Gospel”
What does this mean for us in 2023?
Archbishop Eamon Martin
ZOOM – 16th Feb 2023 – 8.00 pm
With the world facing multiple challenges – from climate change to war in Ukraine, mass migration and crippling inflation – the Catholic Church is in the midst of its own struggles – in Ireland as in the West more generally. Secularising forces are very ready to speak of ‘the historical sins of the Church’ while our seminaries speak of an impending scarcity of ordained ministers of the Eucharist. Meanwhile the Irish Bishops Conference has itself endorsed the view of Ireland’s National Synodal Synthesis that a ‘reckoning’ has still to be achieved on the issue of clerical child abuse. The same synodal synthesis lamented the ageing and shrinking of congregations and our apparent unreadiness for ‘evangelisation’.Vocal personally on issues of child poverty, immigration, the threats to peace in Northern Ireland and the challenge of climate change to the Christian understanding of ‘sacrifice’, how will Archbishop Eamon address the challenge to us all to ‘Repent’ as we approach Lent in 2023? With Pope Francis lamenting a ‘fixation’ with sexuality do we need to broaden our understanding of sin, to include even a tendency to despair of the Church when, as the Pope insisted in 2019, ‘Christus Vivit!‘ – Christ lives and is still with us in all tribulation?
An audio recording of Archbishop Eamon’s talk will be available here shortly.
Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh is President of the Irish Episcopal Conference. He also represented Ireland at the Continental Synodal Assembly in Prague in February 2023, part of the Universal Synod on Synodality 2021-25. A short biography is available here.
Thank you to the ACI team for inviting Ab Eamon to speak tonight. I did think of it, as the Ab said, as more of a mini retreat, thought provoking and challenging and EM was an engaging speaker.
There were so many more points I wanted to make but hopefully there will be more opportunities in the near future. For now we are all in the early stages of this Synodal process, learning to listen to and engage with each other, and learning firstly to listen to the Spirit within!
I look forward to the next two Zoom sessions. Míle buíochas arís!
Thanks Mary, and for your question on the night also.
As you say Archbishop Eamon covered a lot of ground, and in a way that no one preparing for a Lenten ‘rethink’ could quarrel with. It was a good evening for getting to know one another too. His emphasis upon the clerical church’s need to ‘rethink’ was welcome also.
All in all we are making progress, I think. Michael Kirwan SJ (March 30th) will be speaking on the relevance of Girard’s insights to the problem of inequality in the church and society, a problem that so far secularism has not solved either. I am greatly looking forward to that.