On an August Sunday morning, I slipped quietly into a Dublin
city-centre church, curious to experience its liturgy for the first
time. Yet scarcely five minutes into the Mass, the visiting celebrant
remarked almost casually that here, in this place of “faith and
reason,” there was no need to believe in “the silliness of a literal
creation.” Here was a priest who freely affirmed the resurrection,
the virgin birth, and the very existence of God, yet dismissed the
possibility that the same God could create directly.