NEW YORK
Georgia Bulletin

Published: April 25, 2013

NEW YORK (CNS) — Renewal of the Catholic Church in a “post-Catholic” Ireland depends on a homegrown effort by the laity to overcome clericalism and witness the Christian message in a secular society, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin told a New York audience. Once considered “one of the world’s most deeply and stably Catholic countries,” Ireland, like other parts of Europe, can now be classified as post-Catholic because of sociological changes and lingering fallout from the child sexual abuse scandals that swept the country in recent years, Archbishop Martin said April 24 in a speech at Fordham University. “You can only define post-Catholic in terms of the Catholicism that has been displaced,” he said. The prelate described the Catholic Church in Ireland as being trapped in an illusory self-image when he became the archbishop of Dublin in 2004, but that the…