The Bishop of Ferns, Dr Brendan Comiskey, has said he is not worried that young people are falling away from attendance at religious services. They were responding to the Holy Spirit in their own way, through various fund raising exercises etc., he said.
And when they and others say they don't believe in God anymore he would tend to respond: "Don't worry. As long as he believes in you, you're alright." Religion, he believed "clicked in at a more mature age." As people got older they sought a less comfortable God, he said.
He was speaking at the launch in Dublin yesterday of ThΘrΦse - The Visit, a 72-minute video of the tour of Ireland made by a reliquary containing remains of St ThΘrΦse earlier this year.
He described the visit as "the biggest religious experience in Ireland since the Eucharistic Congress in 1932 and the visit of the Pope in 1979 and this video is a wonderful record of that experience." He also said he was hoping to organise a study of the visit's effects.
It has been estimated that up to three million people visited the reliquary on its tour of Ireland's 26 Catholic dioceses between April 15th and July 2nd. Bishop Comiskey felt this had something to do with a spiritual hunger on the part of people. In rejecting religion, people could not throw away that part of their deeper selves which is nourished by the spiritual - that "seed of God-within", he said. Some chose to nourish it through the aesthetic, through contemplation of beauty in art or the countryside, but it had to be fostered if people were to be truly human. The soul needed to be nourished just as did the body, the emotions, and the intellect, he said, and it was each person's own responsibility.
All proceeds from the video will go to the Afghan Children's Relief Fund, through Tr≤caire. The agency has spent £700,000 on projects involving people in Afghanistan since October and hopes to raise £2 million in its current campaign.
