Conference Talk by Baroness Nuala O'Loan

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'For I know well the plans I have for you... plans to give you a future with hope".

Good afternoon. I am honoured to be invited to join you today. It is somewhat daunting to face an audience as distinguished as this for someone like me. I am acutely aware of my lack of training in matters of theology and religion. I hope that what I say will be if some value to you.

A word first about hope and what it is. In Pope Benedict's encyclical, Spe Salvi, he wrote about what it is that gives us hope,  "To come to know God - the true God - means to receive hope...  Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present;  the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey." He tells us how hope, in fact, is a key word in Biblical faith -  so much so that in several passages the words "faith" and "hope" seem interchangeable". We should remember that.

CORI is a very broad family. It, and its member organisations have done great work in terms of education, justice, healthcare and Northern Ireland over the years. Your voice has been heard in the corridors of power. It comprises individual congregations with different charisms but with two particular things in common, it seems to me - the first is that you have chosen to give your lives to God in a unique way, and the second is that you have all been involved in a massive time of change which has lasted for over 50 years, and which has seen the Church in Ireland move from being all-powerful and all-pervasive to being humbled, challenged and on the way to renewal. I have no doubt that those years, in so far as you have lived them, have demanded much of you. An article on the CORI website, reporting on a survey of 11% of congregational leaders says "If you look inside your existing province the chances are that 80% of your members are over 75 years. The "young ones" of your communities, aged 40 to 74, are 18% of your membership. If you are lucky to have anyone under 40, they fall into the less than the 2% category. Overall, junior professed constitute 0.05%." Definitely a changed time and a disconcerting set of circumstances. What I want to do today is to encourage you to value the great goodness of the past, to cherish the opportunity and grace of the present, and to await the future in faith.

Sr Marianne O'Connor asked me to speak to you today, within the theme of your conference, "A Future with Hope" viewed from my perspective over against the present context of diminishment and fall out from Ryan. She said the whole question of the future of the church is also relevant - to say the least.  Sr Marianne, like all the religious I have known, has the capacity to make that which is difficult seem quite simple - a great characteristic.

I want to talk about your role as individual religious, and as congregations, in the context of that hope to which we are all called by virtue of our baptism.
There are two things that strike me about your role as individuals - the first is that each of you, like me, is on a journey home to the One who made us. That journey takes many forms. I cannot look at my life as just a life - I know it has many parts and I have been given many roles - some of them quite frightening - perhaps the most frightening of my roles is that of a mother, as you contemplate the precious soul whom God has entrusted to you and as you try to nurture them and to love them and to enable them to become all that God asks of them. You do it as best you can and sometimes you fail woefully.  I will always remember sitting around 4 in the morning with a very sick little six year old son whose terrible headache was causing him to vomit with his head absolutely upright, and knowing that this should be telling me something. When he asked me to get a doctor, I said that we would wait until the morning so as not to get the doctor out of bed. But he had meningitis, which I should have recognised. I remember, too, the long nights sitting, listening to angry, anguished teenagers for whom life was a struggle, and the challenge of students who wanted to talk to me when there were a thousand other jobs to do and I was employed not as a counsellor but as an academic, and yet the students did not care about that subtle distinction. We can never get it all right, and there is something in letting go of our failures, both sacramentally but also personally. The mystery of caring for others in their formative years and allowing them to be themselves, a mystery which many of you must have known as teachers, is beautifully articulated in Cecil Day Lewis's poem
"Walking Away," in which he describes his son walking into school,

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show -
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love proved in the letting go.

That is what so much of life is about I think. There are so many occasions on which we will encounter that need to prove our love by letting go, letting go of who we wanted to be, so that we can become who we should be; how we wanted our young people to be, so that they can become what God made them for; letting go of the things which we have built in this world and allowing others to take them over, just as you are allowing so much of that which you have built - schools and hospitals and residential homes to move into the care of others; letting go of our loved ones as they go home to God, and understanding that, in the words of the Dominican, Bede Jarrett "We seem to give them back to thee, 0 God, who gavest them first to us. Yet as thou didst not lose them in giving, so do we not lose them by their return. Not as the world giveth, givest thou, 0 Lover of souls. What thou givest, thou takest not away, for what is thine is ours also if we are thine. And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight."

We have to learn to let go in life in order to make the space for things to change and grow, and for new life to emerge. And as we let go - of our attachments to others, and to things and places - we make space for that to which we are now called. It can be a most unnerving process. It can be marked by grief and anger and fear, as well as resignation and peace. We must allow things to happen, acknowledging, as Teilhard de Chardin wrote of this process of change, that "Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling in suspense and incomplete." Thus it is for me, and I expect it has been for you. We have to be ready to step out into the darkness and uncertainty, confident that even though we cannot always see it, the light is with us, Jesus is with us. Sometimes we just have to recognise him, as St Patrick said, "Christ in hearts of all who love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger."

The second thing that is remarkable to me is that in your role as individual religious, there is that which it is some way comparable to what we saw as a consequence of the recent Royal Wedding. Witness! From that glorious state occasion emerged a witness to the sacrament of marriage, not just because of the pretty dress and the great carriages, and the millions of people who watched it, but because at the heart of it were two young people who knew only too well the perils, as well as the privilege, of their situation. Yet they were prepared, after what appears to have been much commitment, to pledge themselves to one another in the sight of God, and in so doing they did not find it necessary to engage with such things as pre-nuptial agreements designed to care for the division of the spoils in the event of the failure of the marriage. It seemed to me that in entering marriage they really were committing one to the other in the sight of God. There was witness too in the dying of Pope John Paul 11, whose eloquence was silenced by Parkinson's Disease but who communicated so lovingly and so vividly the great value of each person, especially the old and disabled, in this world of ours. So wherein lies the comparison? It lies, I think, in your faithfulness and constancy over probably in most cases many years, decades even, to that to which you committed your lives. In a rapidly changing world in which constancy and faithfulness do not seem to merit the regard which they once evoked, true religious are a walking testament to the value of commitment, and in the faces of so many religious whom I have come to know, one can see contentment and ongoing witness to God, even when they are in what a dear friend of mine referred to in his final Christmas card, as "God's waiting room". That sense of a life lived for others, a life which will almost inevitably have involved its share of challenge, its sense of failure, its moments of consternation and perplexity, a life which continues to bring a sense to others of commitment to faith and to the presence of the Lord in the world, is profoundly important. It is the living of the Gospels - that "you should love one another as I have loved you."

I want to talk now about the role of religious congregations in the world. I am aware from what I have read and heard in recent years of the extent of concern among Irish religious congregations about the future. Let us think for a moment though about where we are and where we have come from. The contribution of Irish religious across the world is well documented. The generosity, energy and commitment that built hospitals, schools, churches, children's homes, homes for the elderly can be seen in so many distant places. I have seen it in Brazil, in Kenya, in Timor Leste, in Manilla, in Singapore, in so many places. As Brendan McMahon, Ambassador to South Africa, Zimbabwe and DRC stated recently on the Embassy website "Our work is assisted by the continuing activity of Irish associations, and the tremendous contribution of Irish religious and NGOs".  That contribution is also recognised in the Irish Religion curriculum which aims to ensure that students will "be aware of the particular contribution of Christianity and its denominational expressions to Irish culture and society."

I was in both All Hallows and Maynooth recently. The pictures on the walls there show the young men who went out to the missions to serve, knowing that it was most unlikely that they would ever see home again, and that their likely end would be from yellow fever, blackwater fever or malaria in some hot, dusty, lonely distant place. It was the same among the religious congregations too. Young men and women who left home in their early 20s and were dead just a few short months or years after reaching their mission. Yet their combined efforts led to so much which was beneficial to the people whom they served. We can be proud of them, and grateful to them and to all those who followed them. It is not easy to go and live in an alien culture in a country in which one cannot speak the language, where there is no respite from the heat, the dust, the insects and the snakes.
Yet in those far places there is often beauty beyond compare, goodness and cheerfulness, caring for the elderly and the young from which we could learn.

Here in Ireland too the religious congregations enabled education which set many Catholic people free of the shackles of poverty and discrimination. They did so often at great cost to themselves, working long hours, putting all their money back into the institutions which they ran, rarely getting a holiday and by virtue of their rules often unable to see their families for long periods, if at all. You know how much was achieved by ordinary men and women doing heroic things. That generosity is still needed on the mission fields and at home.

There are, of course, problems in our past too. We have only to look at the Ryan Report which records the experiences of almost 1,100 people who passed through various institutions run by religious congregations, and who came forward when the Commission was established. It tells a story of depravity and terror. Reading it (and it is a very lengthy and complex document, which has been made completely accessible through the internet), one is overwhelmed by the experiences recounted by the witnesses. Some of the incidents are so horrible, one would want to say that no human being could do this to another, let alone to a little child, and yet one finds the incident confirmed by the perpetrator to the Commission.

It is not just the Church or the religious congregations which were responsible; other institutions and people played a part in the failure to protect these children. They are many - their roles were well known: the Garda responsible for failing to prosecute, failing to recognise the signs of serious assault on children who ran away from, and were returned to, their places of detention; the Inspectors who failed to inspect properly; the government departments which allowed the religious orders, using untrained and unskilled people, to take children into their care without proper procedures and checks, and who did not respond to the letters and cries for help over the decades; the nurses and doctors who were aware of the consequences of the ill-treatment of children but who set the fractures and bound the wounds, and sent the children back again without reporting what they had seen to the Garda, the teachers, lay and religious, who saw the cruelty and were unwilling or unable to confront those responsible, and so many others.

Successive Irish Governments allowed the children under their care to be deprived of safety and security, they permitted children to be held in institutions in which there was effectively torture, and in which inhuman and degrading treatment were systemic. For those children and for the unfortunate women who conceived children outside marriage and who were often forceably separated from their babies permanently there was little protection from wrongful loss of liberty, loss of privacy, loss of family life, loss of education - so many breaches of the human rights to which every person is entitled according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made by the United Nations, of which Ireland became a member in December 1955. It was not just the religious congregations. There is an extent to which, I think, the religious congregations have been made the scapegoats for the failures of all. To my mind the procedures of the Institutional Redress Board left much to be desired.

In making reparation for the sins of those within their congregations, and in acknowledging the crimes which were committed, the congregations have acted with integrity. They must continue to do so. The National Board for Safeguarding Children has an important job to do. Much of the damage to the Church which was done by the abuse scandal resulted from the actions of those who failed to respond properly, and who covered up what happened. I really only realised the extent of that damage when I contemplated the fact that from the time my youngest son, who is now 23, was able to understand the world, he has been subjected to a constant stream of information about serious wrongdoing within the church which we were trying to teach him to love - information which continues to emerge to this day. On Thursday as I wrote this, the Vatican issued a Press Statement regarding the case of the former bishop of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, Raymond Lahey who pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography. Such exposure to evidence of the extent of the lack of faithfulness, the lack of living of that which was taught by the Church could only result in what has happened - that huge movement of young people away from a Church they conceive of as hypocritical and worse. That steady disclosure of failure and criminality must have had its impact on vocations too - both to religious orders and to the priesthood. What is absolutely vital for the Church in Ireland now is that all those in authority ensure that they do nothing which could be conceived of as cover up, as failure to act, as obstruction of the National Board for Safeguarding Children. One of the sad realities about the massive reach of the modern communications media, is that stories once reported are hard to counter or deny and where they are based even on a semblance of truth they have such impact.

I am sure that, like me, you have experienced senses of betrayal, distress, shame, loss and grief as a consequence of the revelation of what happened. It is undoubtedly the case that there is yet more to come, and that is why it is so important that the independent audits of each organisation, be they diocesan or Congregational, be conducted as thoroughly and as rapidly as possible. Otherwise another generation of children will grow up hearing endless stories of the Church's failings and even more damage will be done. We must ensure that all our people will experience the reality, in the abuse context, of the words "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

I have counselled the victims of sexual abuse. They often fear that the terror which they have known in the past will overwhelm them when they begin to acknowledge the truth ofwhat happened to them. It takes great courage for them to walk the road of admitting the truth and realising that it was not their fault, but was abuse. Then they are set free, but at what cost in terms of pain! I am sure that you will all do everything within your competence to ensure that that pain is not compounded by any further wrongdoing on the part of that element of the Church which is your congregation or society.

And as we look forward to your diminished numbers, your aging congregations, your dwindling energy, where is hope?

In the words of the psalmist,  
"It is you 0 Lord, who are my hope,
my trust 0 Lord, since my youth.
On you I have leaned from my birth,
from my mothers womb you have been my help.
My hope has always been in you."

And thus I think it is for us all today. There is a reading from the Letter of St Paul to the Romans which I have read at a number of funerals, "For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. "

As you know I sit in the House of Lords now, and one of the things of which I have become aware is the extent to which the Catholic Church in England and Wales is in a very different place from the Catholic Church here in Ireland. The Church in England and Wales is very much a minority church - only about 10% of the population are Catholic and there is still there some sense in England and Wales that Catholics are different. Yet they are happy in their Catholicism. There is pride. There is looking forward and engagement with society. I attended a meeting called by Archbishop Nichols in Westminster last month. There were 500 people there and they were discussing the role of the Church and David Cameron's Big Society. The thing that struck me was the confidence in the English Catholic Church. We need, having acknowledged our failings as a Church, to find again throughout our Church, some confidence and that sense of the divine purpose which will make us the church we should be.

We must not forget it is His Church - "thou art Peter and upon this rock
I will build my church" We are simply its members, its custodians, passing through. Others will follow. It was here before we were. It will be here after us. The important thing, as Pope Benedict said, is that at the heart of it lies each of our individual relationships with Christ.

Speaking after he became Pope he said 'Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?  No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No!
Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ - and you will find true life.'

Therein lies the answer to the future. Of course entering into that total openness to Christ will inevitably mean that we put away the things which distract from that relationship. In so doing it seems to me our prayer must be that we will "see Christ more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly,"  as Richard of Chichester said.

In doing that we are called to action. As Newman wrote,
"God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him. Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him;  in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about."

I read a review recently of a book called "Where the hell is God? "  It was written by the Australian Jesuit Richard Leonard SJ.  He does not seem to accpet Newman's thesis. The reviewer wrote that Leonard says "There is no heavenly blueprint for my life. God out of love for me wants me to live out the virtues of faith, hope and charity and to embody the fruits of the Holy Spirit - love, joy, peace,  patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness and self control - but after that he has no specific plan for my life." You may agree with Leonard, but on the basis of, I suppose, anecdotal evidence, it has seemed to me that the Lord has prepared me in the course of my life for that which comes to me to be done. I do not see the world as haphazard but as purposeful.

I am content to echo Newman who said in conclusion, , "Let me be thy blind instrument.  I ask not to see - I ask not to know - I simply ask to be used."

I think that understanding that we do not need to know why we do it, we need only to want to do it is profoundly important. And we must accept that at different times of our lives this service to God will take different forms. The challenge for us is to accept the now of our lives - as Rabindranath Tagore told us.  I asked for strength that I might achieve greatness, I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey;  I asked for health that I might do great things;  I was given infirmity that I might do better things. I got nothing that I asked for - but everything that I hope for; almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered. I am among all men most richly blessed."

And that is how it is for the Church in Ireland today, I think. Our challenges are enormous.

In essence I think it is to transfom this Church of His which "wears man's smudge and shares man's smell" as best we can, so that it is a place in which Jesus himself would feel at home. I think that that must start in each of our hearts. I know that you have spent much time reorganising, re-structuring, amalgamating, closing, discerning and that is all necessary. You will face further change.

We have work to do to make the Church a stronger, fair, caring compassionate, more open and accountable church, and above all a loving Church, which values each of us equally and which respects each of us equally. Our Church was founded by Christ and He told us that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Just for a moment think about what it must have been like for the disciples. Even before the crucifixion Jesus was sending them out, two by two, to teach with no extra clothes, no food, telling them to stay where they were made welcome and to leave where they were not welcome. They had no churches, no books, no vestments, no sacred vessels, no tradition, no liturgy, no long years of formation and training. Then he was crucified and they were on their own (for a few days) until he appeared to them on the road to Emmaus, in the upper room, by the lakeside etc. And so the Church was established and grew. It faltered, became corrupted, has lurched from crisis to crisis, but has grown and survived.

It will survive the horrors of the terrible wrongdoing that saw vulnerable people and children abused, without anywhere to go for help. We have seen change, we have seen listening processes. We have seen parish reports to bishops containing material which was in some cases unpleasant reading for the recipient. We have seen some movement towards the reality of diocesan pastoral plans in some areas. But so much needs to be done. We do need rigour and accountability and proper governance processes. We need communication processes. We need real charity. We need to be able to ralk about how change should occur. There should be nothing about which we cannot talk. Bishops should not be sacked for suggesting that we might think about married priests, etc. We already have them, and there is no purpose to be served in refusing to acknowledge where the Holy Spirit has led us or in refusing to think about things which the ordinary people of God can contemplate without fear and with hope.

What I see among the ordinary religious with whom I engage is a gentle dignity and strength. I see energy and determination to try again different ways to engage people and to bring them into a relationship with God. I see much love among the people in towns across Ireland for their parish sisters, for the religious who work among them, for the elderly who are retired in their midst and yet labour on in the vineyard. The disconnect which seems to exist to some degree between ordinary clergy and laity, and some bishops is not as obvious in the context of most of the religious congregations. There is much to be built upon, even yet. Yes, some of the orders may have done that definite service for which Christ created them. If that is the case, then we thank God for what has been achieved.

For some of you the work which you have done in the past is ongoing, or has metamorphosed into a different application of the charism - in a world in which one in four of the people in our world live in extreme poverty on less than about 75p a day there is work to do. In a world in which a child dies every 30 seconds of malaria, and 500,000 women die in childbirth each year. There is work to do. In Ireland, although poverty levels are not as extreme as they are in the 3rd world, where 25% of people in Ireland cannot afford basic requirements, there is work to do. The Child Poverty Coalition states that "in 2009, there were more than 96,000 children living in consistent poverty in Ireland - 28,000 more than the year before - and there were more than 205,000 children at risk of poverty."  The statistics are there and they indicate very clearly that there is huge deprivation here, and there is also a loss of hope. So there is work to do.

The economic forecasts are so bad that people cannot see the way out. For about 10 years we saw an increasing focus on materialism. Happiness lay in money and clothes, holidays and assets. And there is something true in that, because there is happiness in security, and in having the things which make us warm and comfortable. Ireland needed the Celtic tiger to make it a country in which there was employment and in which many people, but not all, had a decent standard of living. But that is gone now. And whether there is affluence or poverty nevertheless there is in people a searching for God - as St. Augustine says "You have made us for yourself, 0 Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."  But there is work to be done to help people to find the way to the Father.

If the church in Ireland is to have credibility in the future, it will do so because of the actions of each member of the Church. I firmly believe that the Church will be rebuilt from the bottom and that it will be rebuilt in the individual relationships we have with our God and with each other. Those relationships as we can see can be very flawed, and mending them and healing them will take time and energy, gentleness and compassion. Many of the Protestant evangelical churches are packed to overflowing with young people who come to worship joyously with song and dance. Worship and spirituality are not alien to people, but in our Church much of the joy and blessedness of our worship eludes so many people. We can make more of our liturgical celebrations; we can more consciously and consistently welcome people into our Church, watch out for them and care for them. There is much work to do. You as congregations, because of your charisms, your experience, your learning and your grace are well placed to help in this work. And as we seek to plan and to discern we must remember as Benedict says, that we must learn to hope again and "A first essential setting for learning hope is prayer. When no one listens to me any more, God still listens to me. When I can no longer talk to anyone or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God. When there is no longer anyone to help me deal with a need or expectation that goes beyond the human capacity for hope, he can help me. When I have been plunged into complete solitude ... if I pray I am never totally alone."

In closing then, I want to thank you for listening to me today, to wish each of you well on the next stage of your journey, to thank you for all that you have achieved in life and to encourage you to believe that your contribution is important and necessary and that as God holds each of you in the palms of His hands, so he expects you to live your lives to the full in his service.

As Hopkins wrote:  Thee, God, I come from, to thee go,

All day long I like fountain flow
From thy hand out, swayed about
Mote-like in thy mighty glow.
What I acknowledge of thee I bless
As acknowledging thy stress
On my being and as seeing
Something of thy holiness."

Thank you,

Nuala O'Loan
07 May 2011