Church leadership’s job is to inspire laity into action – bishop

The bishop of Achonry, Dr Brendan Kelly, has said that the future of the Church lies with the ordinary members, and the challenge for clergy is to entice the lay people into greater involvement.

Dr Kelly said that one of the revelations he had seen in his time as a priest was the “strength and depth of the faith of ordinary people.”

“I meet it in visiting parishes here and in my encounters with people,” he remarked.  

“The future of the Church lies with the ordinary people, the baptised and people who take their vocation seriously. The challenge for those of us who are in leadership in the Church is to invite and support lay people in taking greater responsibility within their parishes.”

In an interview with the Sligo Champion newspaper, Bishop Kelly revealed that in his own time, it was the inspiring leadership of a bishop, the late Michael Browne in Galway, that impelled him to join the priesthood.  Even though he had a very religious upbringing, he harboured no thoughts of becoming a priest even though priests had been “very present” in his life.

“The thing that sparked it in a serious way was when the bishop spoke very directly to us in school and said very directly that the diocese needed us as priests,” he recalled.  “I heard it in a very direct way, in a way that I had to consider it.”

The bishop also cited the leadership of the Irish-born ‘Rosary Priest’, Fr Patrick Peyton, whose centenary coincided with him becoming bishop in Achonry.

“He gave his life to promoting family prayer in the home and it would seem to me that the future of the church and of faith is dependent on prayer in the home. If the home is a place of prayer, there will be a Church and Christianity,” Dr Kelly declared.

And he noted that Cardinal John Henry Newman had held the view that without ordinary people, the Church would look very foolish indeed.

SIC: CIN/IE