Quote:

 

Archbishop Martin used the Phoenix Park ceremony yesterday to challenge criticism of the "institutional church".

In a Good Friday reflection, Archbishop Martin said that if individual believers and the believing community did not live the essential Christ-centred nature of the Church, then the Church would be emptied of its meaning.

"It will quickly be reduced to just a mixed bag of providing welfare, of being nice to people, of doing good, of being a depository of values from which we can pick and choose at will," he told the procession.

"If that is all the Church is, then it becomes just one benevolent organisation alongside others, with all the good points and the imperfections of any other organisation," he warned.

"In such a situation, it is clear that if your experience with the Church has been negative, and then even the word 'benevolent' drops out, and Church becomes a distant, self-seeking organisation, useful on one occasion, irrelevant on others."

It was the seventh annual gathering organised by the lay movement, Communion and Liberation, during which he walked with a wooden cross across the Phoenix Park from the Wellington monument to the Papal Cross marking the historic visit in 1979 of Pope John Paul II.

Archbishop Martin, accompanied by several hundred pilgrims, followed the traditional Fourteen Stations of the Cross.

Being a Christian was about allowing imperfect human love, limited by egoism, self-centredness and sin, to be cleansed by the love of God made visible in Jesus, he said.

"Being a follower of Jesus Christ means witnessing in our lives to the fact that 'God is love'," he added.

"It is extraordinary how we have so often lost sight of this central fact of our belief."