• A business executive with over twenty years experience as a Catholic youth leader

• A survivor of clerical child sex abuse and long term activist in favour of Catholic church reform to protect children

• A retired teacher and counsellor of child victims of sexual abuse

• A housewife often called upon by clergy to canvass for donations to church funds

• An author and long-term contributor to Catholic journals on the crisis of Catholicism in Ireland

• A parish worker in his seventies disturbed by the financial non-accountability and patronising attitude of his bishop

• A serving Catholic priest who wants to be part of a new beginning for his church

These are just seven Irish people who feel a need to belong to Voice of the Faithful in Ireland - to fulfil their own Catholic obligations at a time of crisis and necessary change in their church.

We are not driven by advanced ideas on theology.  We are not trying to set up an alternative church. We are merely trying to recover the church we thought we belonged to - a place of safety and trust in which adults fulfil their responsibility to protect and educate children in their own faith.

We are also deeply concerned by the wider crisis affecting our church in Ireland  - especially the drift of young people from faith and practice.

Together the clerical child abuse crisis and this wider crisis of faith are a challenge to the very continuity of the Catholic tradition in Ireland.   They have gravely weakened the authority of church leaders and clergy at a time when young people often feel at a loss for Christian role models they can relate to.

We share the creedal faith of our clergy, but believe that the merely passive role that Irish lay people are so often expected to play is itself one of the basic weaknesses of our church.  We want to stand and be counted, but we also feel the need to insist that many, many Catholics have been alienated from their native church by a minority of clergy who have no apparent respect for the intelligence and outlook of lay people. 

We believe that one basic cause of the betrayal of Catholic children and families by some bishops is this gulf that separates clergy and people.  Attempting to protect the reputation and social standing of clergy generally, some bishops have neglected their obligations to protect the integrity of the church - its reputation for practising what it preaches, especially in regard to children.  They have shielded abusers and endangered other children - and shamed our church in the wider community.

And although our bishops complain about the dangers of secularism, it is only because the secular media have kept us informed that we know about these failures of leadership.  And it is only because of the intervention of the secular state that they have come round to doing what the Bible itself insists upon - putting children first.

If our bishops can be answerable to us as citizens of the same state, why should they be totally unaccountable to us as equal members of their church, in which we are also commissioned lay apostles?  Why over forty years after the second Vatican Council do they still deny us the structures for communication and consultation that the council sought to establish?  Why, in other words, do they deny us adult membership of our own church - while continuing to expect us to support them financially? 

It is time for us lay people to insist upon being taken seriously by our leaders, for we too share in the prophetic, priestly and kingly role of the Lord.  We too were endowed with intelligence and vision for the future and are sustained by grace.  Commissioned by Vatican II to 'consecrate the world to God' we must now consciously empower ourselves to take on this role.

At a time when the secular world now speculates on the possible disappearance of our church in Ireland we can either walk away, or stand and help to restore the integrity of that church.  Voice of the Faithful is a lay movement for all those who want to do the second.  
 

VOTF™
Mission Statement

To provide a prayerful voice, attentive to the Spirit, through which the Faithful can actively participate in the governance and guidance of the Catholic Church.

Our Goals

2. To support priests of integrity

3.To shape structural change within the Catholic Church.

home | survivor support | clergy support | about us | press | contact us | site index

Copyright © 2006 Voice of the Faithful - Ireland.

Voice of the Faithful - Ireland
c/o 2 Greenhill Road, Coleraine, Co Derry, N.I., BT51 3JE.

Voice of the Faithful, VOTF, "Keep the Faith, Change the Church,"
VOTF logo(s), are trademarks of Voice of the Faithful, Inc.