Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin asked Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Dominicans, to lead the priests of Dublin in a day of reflection last December. Here are some of the challenging things he offered – they certainly warrant our reflection and discussion.

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Friendship with Jesus – intimacy – means learning to be gentle and lowly of heart; then we shall find rest for our souls. But if one thinks of the Catholic Church, the first word that springs to mind might not be “humble”.

The vast majority of priests and bishops whom I have met are simple and unpretentious people who just wish to serve the people of God. But this personal humility has to be sustained in the teeth of a clerical culture, common to all Christian denominations, which stresses rank and power.

Every institution always seeks to preserve and augment its power; however, the philosopher Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, has traced the genesis of “a culture of control” from the 17th century onwards. Society is seen as a mechanism rather than an organism, which needs to be adjusted and manipulated. Monarchs claimed absolute power even over the church. Imperial powers took possession of the world; millions of people were enslaved and treated as commodities.

Once society has ceased to believe in God’s gentle providential government of the world, then the state must take his place and impose its will. (This culture of power is perhaps one reason for the widespread abuse of children in our society.) The church, alas, has often been infected by this same culture of control. This happened partly because the church has for centuries struggled to defend itself against the powers of this world who want to take it over.

From the Roman Empire at the time of its birth until the communist empires of the 20th century, the church has fought to keep hold of its own life, and often ended up by mirroring what it opposed. We will not have a church

which is safe for the young until we learn from Christ and become again a humble church, in which we are all equal children of the one Father, and authority is never oppressive.

At the end of the Middle Ages, the priesthood was in crisis. It was unable to respond to the challenges of a new world of widespread literacy. The parish clergy were poorly educated, sometimes barely able to celebrate the Mass, often living with concubines. The response to this crisis led to an extraordinary renewal of the priesthood, with a new spirituality, new seminaries, a more profound theological formation, a new and stricter discipline. Without this, the Catholic Church would have found it hard to survive the rise of Protestantism.

But this Tridentine understanding of priesthood is in its turn showing signs of crisis, of which the sexual abuse scandal is just a symptom. Its stiff clericalism and authoritarianism, unsurprising perhaps in the context of our past battles, do not help the church now to thrive and be a sign of God’s friendship for humanity. And so we need a new culture of authority, from the Vatican to the parish council, which lifts people up into the mystery of loving equality, which is the life of the Trinity.

Crises are not to be feared. It is through repeated crises that God drew closer to his people. Israel’s worst crisis was the destruction of the Temple and the monarchy, and exile to Babylon… Israel lost everything that gave her identity: her worship, her nationhood. Then she discovered God closer to her than ever before. God was present in the law, in their mouths and hearts, wherever they were, however far from Jerusalem. They lost God only to receive him more closely than they could have imagined.

Then that difficult cross-grained man, Jesus, turned up, breaking the beloved law, eating on the Sabbath, touching the unclean, hanging out with prostitutes. He seemed to smash all that they loved, the very way that God was present in their lives. But that was only because God wished to be present even more intimately, as one of us, with a human face. And at every Eucharist, we remember how we had to lose him on the Cross, but again only to receive him more closely, not as a man among us, but as our very life.

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So Timothy Radcliffe invites us all to face the diminishing numbers and role of ordained priests, to face the scandal of sexual abuse by some of our brothers, to face the dwindling numbers of interested people in some parishes – with courage and faith in a gentle God. The opportunity is upon us to enter into the journey of Holy Week, the criticism, the abandonment, the pain and anguish and dissapointment of Jesus and allow ourselves to be liberated from all the harmful ways power is used in the Church.

These are excerpts from an article in the London Tablet, January 2, 2010, and is reprinted with kind permssion.