It was a celebration of diversity at the 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin last Monday, with the main event focusing on the importance of Christian unity.
Several thousand pilgrims from Ireland and abroad attended morning Mass in their native languages at the RDS and 34 host churches in Dublin city under the theme of ‘Exploring and Celebrating Our Communion through Baptism’.
“The importance to me of this Eucharistic Congress is in its hope of an outworking of this principle,” said Archbishop Michael Jackson of the Anglican diocese of Dublin and Glendalough. “It speaks of the broader picture of the life of communion flowing from baptism.
“Once we accept that mission is, first and last, God’s mission, questions have to be asked about how we enable this gift of God to be the spiritual activity and the active spirituality of the church of today.”
He added that all Christians need to be mindful that “God speaks through the world to the church, as also to the world through the church. Both need each other and both are enriched by the interchange of care and concern.”
Earlier on the day, congress president Archbishop Diarmuid Martin delivered an address discussing the place of the Catholic Church in the modern world.
“The particular challenge in Ireland is to learn to know who Jesus is,” he said. “Many nominal Catholics… have never reflected personally on the faith they have assimilated through societal and familial influence.”
Archbishop Martin noted that the Catholic Church has to find “new ways of being present in a new Irish society. To do that the church must rediscover its own sense of communion and sense of common purpose, overcoming its internal divisions in a spirit of love of the church and in a dialogue of charity.”
He expressed his hope that the congress “may be a signpost as to how our communion with Christ in the Eucharist can generate a new understanding of our communion with each other in a modern world which is today very different to that of the 1960s, and in a future which will be even more different and challenging.”
Meanwhile, the opening of the Eucharistic Congress on Sunday 10 June was marked by a number of protests by gay rights campaigners and victims of child sexual abuse.
A sore point among many protesters is the refusal of Cardinal Seán Brady to resign as Primate of All Ireland following revelations about his handling of abuse cases involving paedophile priest Brendan Smyth in the mid 1970s, some 20 years before his eventual conviction.
