In this Sunday’s gospel we hear Jesus' final command to his apostles: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” Ireland’s Catholic Church, host of the International Eucharistic Congress June 10-17, will need to start evangelizing closer to home. The church has suffered a dramatic loss of credibility in recent years, surveys indicate.

While a recent study by the Association of Catholic Priests found that weekly Mass attendance throughout the country is still one of the highest in Europe at 35 percent, the capital of Dublin—where Mass attendance in some parishes is 2 percent—has been hit by a combination of religious apathy, secularization, and disenchantment as a result of clergy sex abuse scandals.

David Quinn of The Iona Institute, a think-tank that aims to highlight the benefits of religion for society, believes it is wrong to present all of the church's challenges as being linked to clerical abuse scandals. The shift in public opinion, he said, is "driven primarily by the secularizing trends that would have overtaken the rest of Europe over the last century, and only secondly actually by the scandals, because the downward trends were in place before the scandals ever came to light."

Divine Word Father Vincent Twomey, a moral theologian, thinks the church has to look inward to find the root of its current difficulties. "Our real problem today is not caused by society or the current government's policies, which are quite clearly anti-church, anti-Catholic," he said. "The church itself has contributed to the secularization of society by failing to grasp the imagination of people, by failing to feed their intellectual thirst for the truth," he said.

Source: An article by Michael Kelly for Catholic News Service