Dear Sirs,
Your article last week is interesting and offers a pause for reflection for all Catholics in the Diocese. Like all media outlets the emphasis is on the Church as an institution but of course it is so much more than that. Each person who was baptised into the Catholic Church should be an active part of the Church as we all one in the Body of Jesus Christ.
This "crisis" is not confined to Ireland or to our Diocese. And the crisis is for all of the people who have decided not to practice their faith and to buy into the secular lies particularly in the area of sexual immorality. This crisis is massive as our world has abandoned values which have underpinned society all the way back to the time Jesus walked the earth and even before.
We need to look to the wider world to see the problem in context.
In 1973 the US Supreme Court in a majority decision struck out the right to life of all unborn children determining that a mother could murder her child with almost no limitations. The reason for the pressure to allow abortion is that with the arrival of contraception the sanctity of marriage was abandoned as were the the fruits of the marriage ie children. Relationships became casual and everything was more important than the beautiful responsibility of bringing new life into the world as co-creators with God and building strong families based on faith which in turn bring about strong communities based on the shared values of faith in Jesus which in reality is the Church in action.
We see now in Ireland the pressure for us to fall into line with the "norms" of other jurisdictions in allowing abortion. And again it is on the basis of sex outside marriage and no commitment to relationships. This leads to huge numbers of "crisis" pregnancies and a demand that women should have the choice to terminate the live of the independent baby in her womb.
The real crisis is in abandoning faith because the truth can only be understood in relation to God. Choosing to have no relationship with God is the most unwise thing any human being can do. A path of self destruction.
Nothing about us as humans has changed one iota in all of human history. We are created by God and as spiritual beings we will all die at a time over which we have no control. In each moment God breathes us and each breath is just one item in the endless supply of God's bounty.
Since the 1960's and the advent of TV and huge increase in all media(now add in the internet) and the role models are no longer Saints but rather high profile actors, singers or sports stars all of whom are successful in a material sense but whose lives in general are train wrecks! But it is all made to appear so glamorous and attractive. By contrast people of faith who seek to emulate the lives of Jesus and Mary are seen as out of touch and old fashioned!
But the problems continue to multiply; addictions(pornography is now the biggest addiction), mental health issues particularly suicide are all huge problems. And will continue to build up massively as the distractions are incessant. And young people are drifting aimlessly with no clear picture of who they truly are - children of the living God Jesus Christ built in His image and likeness. What a catastrophic failure of parents and grandparents who have failed to withstand the lies and who weakened the practice of their faith. By contrast our forefathers withstood oppression for centuries and in the most difficult times of our history refused to give up their faith.
Women in particular are the biggest losers in all of this because very few of them are proud to be mothers of large families as in previous generations. They therefor do not fulfill their potential for which they were created by God.
So we have a world that in the past 37 years has slaughtered almost 1.5 billion babies and that means that whole future generations have been wiped out! And our world is suffering from a population winter where an insufficient number of newborns are arriving to replace the older generations.
100 years after Our Blessed Lady's apparitions in Fatima the world we have created is a wasteland and a sense of who we are as a nation/world with the values of the Divine abandoned for a fake world where integrity is gone.
Our only hope is to turn back to the truth of God and see that practicing faith is really the only viable option if we are to solve our problems
