‘Our parishes are burying far too many young people’ - Derry Bishop

In his Homily preached at the weekend, Bishop McKeown said that today, as in Jesus’ time, “there are many in our community who feel far from God”.

“Our parishes are burying far too many young people whose lives have been lived in chaotic circumstances – often more due to the bad decisions of others than merely to their own mistakes,” he warned, adding: “Addiction and mental illness are cutting swathes through families. Funerals can be accompanied by a mixture of grief and hollow cheers in the face of apparently overwhelming odds.

“ The holiness and effectiveness of the Church’s witness is measured not just in time spent in church but in how our prayer life sends us out to venture into alien territory. Faith affects our heads, our hearts and our hands. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son. A faith that is overburdened with building walls to exclude others is less than authentic.

“Jesus calls me to examine my own conscience and not just to judge that of others. In fact, our secular world is very prone to precisely that Pharisaic desire to label people as believers or heretics when it comes to the new orthodoxies about sexuality, immigration or wealth.”

The Bishop said that the last thing that Jesus’ followers should be doing is adding to fragmentation and antagonism. “In fact, both Jesus and St Paul were condemned for going not merely to the pure but to the pagans. The uncomfortable mercy of Jesus for the outsider is more important than the false security of human certainty,” he said.

“Jesus built bridges of divine mercy not walls of human anger. He asks us to continue that work today through the power of his faithfulness and mercy – whatever the cost.”