Christians should subvert the closed shop of the modern world with the unbounded generosity of God, the Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary has said. Speaking to pilgrims on Croagh Patrick for the annual Reek Sunday climb, he said that many feel they are strangers in a strange land, but pilgrimages, “provide an opportunity to take stock but also a time to discover new heart.”

He said that just as in the Roman Empire, the Church is again small, peripheral, suspect and despised, and it faces a brilliant, glittering and self-assured civilisation. However, that civilisation is consumed by short and medium-term goals where in politics, business, entertainment and sport careers are made, unmade or simply just die unnoticed, all at a tremendous pace. Even the educational system, he said, “makes fewer and fewer bones about the socio-economic goals of learning and there is less and less value placed on knowledge for its own sake and wisdom as an end in education.”

To counter this, he said the Church must go to whatever avenues remain open to it.

“Just as once we were consulted and heard in the most powerful circles, now we must get used to preaching on street corners and making the Gospel heard over the incessant hubbub of the public square,” he said.

“If we have one mission it is surely to subvert the closed shop that is the modern, western world view and to startle that careful, calculating world with the unaccounting largesse, the generosity, the hospitality of God.”