Hundreds stopped to receive ashes during Bishop Cullinan’s six-hour mission — a sign that despite cultural shifts, the Catholic faith still stirs hearts in Ireland.
WATERFORD, IRELAND – On Ash Wednesday, Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan of Waterford and Lismore, Ireland, took to the streets of Waterford City, offering ashes to anyone who wished to receive them. In a country where faith is often seen as fading, the response was anything but indifferent.
“The reaction was humbling,” he told the Register, explaining that he was moved by the reverence of those who paused to mark the beginning of Lent. “Hundreds came for ashes. It is an extraordinary thing to make the Sign of the Cross on a person’s forehead, saying, ‘Remember that you are dust and into dust you shall return,’ and hear them reply — ‘Thank you’ or ‘Amen.’ What a mystery!”
Given Ireland’s current drive for an ever more secular country, was he surprised by the reaction?
“I was not at all surprised by the reaction,” says Bishop Cullinan. “I noticed the furrows on people’s brows — furrows of pain, worry, stress, anxiety. Jesus has come to ease our sorrows, to set the downtrodden free, and to release those who are imprisoned. That’s all of us seeking freedom and healing.”
The bishop feels what he did is simply what the Church needs to do, namely, go to the margins to proclaim Christ’s healing in a very public way.
“The Church has to go where people frequent,” he says. “Many people simply forgot or were unaware that it was Ash Wednesday, but on seeing the bishop with a bowl of ashes in the city square they were being reminded. Some people saw me, passed by, and then figured out what I was doing and turned back for ashes!”
The 65-year-old Bishop Cullinan was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Limerick in 1994. Since being appointed bishop by Pope Francis in 2015, the bishop has not shied away from challenging new orthodoxies currently abroad in Ireland.
His first pastoral letter in May 2015 questioned whether a ‘Yes’ vote in a referendum on permitting “same-sex marriage” was “pandering to the desires of adults” with little regard to the rights of children. He went on to state unequivocally: “The union of a man and a woman is different to any kind of relationship between two men or two women.”
When, in 2018, Ireland’s abortion laws were liberalized following a referendum, Cullinan stated in a radio interview that Catholics who voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum must acknowledge that they have sinned and repent before receiving Holy Communion.
In the same interview, he also pointed out that by legislating for abortion access, Ireland “had effectively accepted euthanasia.”
In another radio interview, Cullinan said that he agreed with Pope Francis that the devil was the cause of the sexual abuse crisis within the Church. The bishop’s comments provoked condemnation from politicians, as did his subsequent comments on yoga and so-called “mindfulness” — both of which he described as “unchristian.”
For Bishop Cullinan, his country’s spiritual health is a cause for action, not spiritual lamentation.
“Ireland still has the faith,” he maintains. “There are fires of faith lighting all over the country — new shoots of good green growth where new things are happening.”
That said, he is far from naïve about the challenges ahead, saying, “It is true that publicly we are very secular. The main media outlets and social and political leaders have, by and large, built a world without God. And the results are always the same. Some economic progress and worldly success alongside despair, family breakup, social breakdown, rising mental health issues, loss of meaning in life. … But there are strong pockets of faithful people who are seeking authentic faith in Jesus Christ. They know it when they see it, and they have the courage to follow.
“Ireland,” he says, “is not lost forever.”
