The key to
renewing the Church is fidelity, Catholic theologian, George Weigel, told an
audience of almost 300 people at a meeting hosted last night by The Iona
Institute.

Dr Weigel,
author of the best-selling biography of John Paul II, ‘Witness to Hope’, said
that even the scandal of clerical child abuse was ultimately the result of a
lack of true faith in Christ.

He said that all authentic
Catholic reform is a “re-form,” a recovery of some forgotten or corrupted
aspect of the “form” given by Christ to the Church.

Therefore, authentic Catholic
reform does not mean changing Catholicism into another liberal Protestant
denomination.

The real battle for control of the
re-form of the Church was not between liberal and conservatives, but between
what is true and what is false.

True reform meant an authentic
reform of the episcopate, an authentic reform of the priesthood and an
authentic reform of the laity.

Giving an overview of recent
Catholic history, Dr Weigel said the deep reform of the Catholic Church has
been underway since the election of Leo XIII in 1878.

Leo XIII, he explained, was the
first Pope in centuries to lack any direct political power after the loss of
the Papal States. He said that Leo had developed the social teaching of the
Church.

He explained that over the past
130 years the reform begun by Leo has slowly brought to an end the era of
Counter-Reformation Catholicism even as it is slowly giving birth to the advent
of Evangelical Catholicism – a Catholicism that, with John Paul II sets out
from the “shallows” of institutional maintenance and sets forth “into the deep”
of evangelization.

 He said Ireland had once
sent missionaries out into the world, and the world was the better for it

Ireland must now be reconverted,
or in many cases, converted, and that will set the path to the renewal of the
Church.