Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin made news earlier this month for his remarks about a young priest wary of ‘the Francis Effect.’ His words as reported — and the response from Ireland’s Association of Catholic Priests — were, I think, justly criticised.

To be fair, I haven’t read the Archbishop’s speech in full. It seems to me that his broader point about ideology was a good one, but his example was imprudent. Be that as it may, when Archbishop Martin speaks, I listen. His 2011 address at the University of Cambridge related to the state of the Church in Ireland, but it is equally applicable to the Church in Australia.

More recently, he shared a compelling vision of what the Church can become in the wake of the clergy abuse scandal:

The Church must not just be transformed into a place where children are safe.  It must also be transformed into a privileged place of healing for survivors. It must be transformed into a place where survivors, with all their reticence and with all their repeated anger towards the Church, can genuinely come to feel that the Church is a place where they will encounter healing.

Ireland co-hosted the 2014 Anglophone Conference in Rome, which brought together bishops from all over the world who shared best practice on how to respond to clerical abuse. I think Archbishop Martin’s introductory speech is worth reading in its entirety. Here’s another worthy extract:

The words of Jesus about leaving the ninety-nine to go out to find the one who is lost, refers also to our attitude to victims.   To some it might seem less than prudent to think that the Church would go out of its way to seek out even more victims and survivors.  There are those who say that that would only create more anguish and litigation and that it would be asking for trouble and would be more than a little ingenuous. The problem is that what Jesus says about leaving the ninety and going out after the one who is lost is in itself unreasonable and imprudent, but, like it or not, that it precisely what Jesus asks us to do.

Gold.