Tony Philpot is a priest of the Diocese of East Anglia. He was ordained in 1959 and has worked in a variety of parishes, some in East Anglia and some in Northampton Diocese. He was until recently Spiritual Director in the English College in Rome. For five and a half years Tony headed the international team of the Jesus Caritas fraternity of diocesan clergy The current advert for Toyota Yaris cars says, coining a completely new word, that they are Bigsmall. Occupy little space, roomy inside. I want to spend a bit of time thinking about Big and Small as they apply to the Church, and to our ministry.
The story is told that once the Iron Curtain crumbled, even Fidel Castro felt he had to make some overtures to previous enemies. So he invited the Cuban Cardinal to come and see him, for the first time ever. Afterwards, commenting on the conversation to a friend, he said he was very disappointed. “I imagined,” he said, “that the Cardinal would want to talk about Cuban society, and how we could make it better; in fact he only wanted to talk about import licences so that his priests could get cars.” Now I don’t know if this tale is true. It may be entirely invented. Castro is a bloodstained and doctrinaire Communist, and the Cardinal is an honourable man. It could all be a piece of propaganda. And anyway, priests do need cars. But it is certainly true that we Catholics sometimes lose the plot because we think too small.
We used to explain our failure to convert England, or Scotland, by saying that the Catholic Church was really too great and too deep for many modern men and women to take on board. It took someone with a broad sweep of intelligence, like G.K.Chesterton, to see that the Church and only the Church had a true grasp of the cosmic and eternal realities. Ordinary people were so caught up in the mundane details of daily living that they never asked themselves the big questions, never looked for the big answers. The purpose and meaning of life passed them by. They were solely concerned with the price of fish. So the only handle they had on the Church was birth control and divorce, where Catholics seemed to be making life not easier but more difficult. Ergo, they said, whatever you do, don’t join the Catholic Church. Poor things, we would say: they cannot come to grips with what really matters. The Church is too big for them.
The physical big-ness of the Church is certainly something which amazes other Christians. I suppose it was John Paul II who invented outdoor religion, those great rallies in places like Dublin and Manila and Warsaw where literally millions of people gathered in a park, or on a university campus, for Mass. Even the Wednesday audience which the Pope gives in St Peter’s Square in Rome can induce waves of agoraphobia in visitors who are unprepared for the sheer size of it. I remember taking some Anglicans from Bath one Wednesday morning, and seeing the astonishment and alarm when we rounded the bend and the sweep of the piazza, with all the chairs in rows, lay in front of them. “I can’t go in there,” gasped one lady, “What would happen if I felt faint ?” Religion, for these people, had always been on a manageable and fairly intimate scale. So yes, from this point of view, the Catholic Church is big and generous in its scope and its sweep.
But in other ways it can be very small. And I suspect that these days, if people are not beating a path to our door to ask for instruction in the Faith, it is because they see us as small rather than big. Let me give you a couple of examples.
When the child-abuse scandal broke in all the English-speaking countries, and the publicity was at its height, a bishop went on TV and was interviewed by one of the usual Rottweilers. In a way it’s unfair to criticize people for what they say and don’t say on TV; interviewers can tie you in knots, and heaven knows what sort of performance I would have put up in similar circumstances. However: the Rottweiler got him to admit, humbly, that the Church was ashamed and sorry for the damage child-abuse had done. But then the Bishop rather spoiled it by saying that what caused him most distress was the harm done to the Church: to the Church’s image, to its credibility. He didn’t say what he should have said, that the heartbreak of the whole business was the damage done to the children. I’m sure he had a very accurate conception of the long-term injury inflicted on children by abuse; but he didn’t highlight it as one would have hoped, and gave the impression that in his view the dent in the Church’s reputation was more important. Now this may be very unfair to the bishop in question, and privately I’m sure he had enormous sympathy for the poor victims; however, what matters is what comes across, and the impression he conveyed to the public was that the Church looks after itself, and that is its top priority. Which, of course, helped to prove the Rottweiler’s point, that there had been shameful concealment of crime by Church authorities, and some furtive shuffling-round of men who were in fact a menace, all to stop the Church looking bad. The public would have come away from that TV programme with the conviction that the Catholic Church’s mentality is so small that it can’t appreciate what it owes to society as a whole, to the Common Good.
And if you look a little farther back in history you find the same phenomenon: the Catholic Church not realizing its nobility, not realizing its universal status, its leadership role. One of the great scandals of the social history of Europe is how the Church consistently allied itself with landowners, the propertied class, and was perceived by the poor as the enemy. (And this is modern stuff, in terms of the collective memory of peoples. In the first parish of which I was P.P. I had a man of 87; he had been born when his father was 75. Which meant that before my very eyes I had a link with the year of the Battle of Trafalgar. A couple more hops like this and we would be right back at the Reformation). During the French Revolution, which is comparatively recent, there were many undoubted martyrs for the Faith. But the Church as a whole incurred the bitterness of the mob by distributing bishoprics to the nobility, by behaving aristocrat-tically and richly in a time of blinding poverty. How did the Church incur that great bow-wave of hatred which broke loose in the Spanish Civil War, everywhere except in the Basque Country ? She was seen, rightly or wrongly, as being in the pocket of a heartless governing class. Not listening to the Gospel, in other words. Espousing the values of an effete and decadent society, and paying the price. Paying the price of being small, when she should have been great, and prophetic.
How slow the Church was to wake up to the scandal of slavery. We had our prophets, it is true. At least three Popes spoke out. But the social fabric of Europe was by and large too powerful for the Church to take up a position against the principle of slavery. The people who eventually denounced it and who moved the conscience of nations were Protestants. On the Catholic side, where the Popes were trying not to antagonize the Catholic powers, diplomacy took the place of prophecy. Make a point of seeing a film called ‘The Mission’. The Jesuits had set up a far-sighted and creative programme in South America, a network of townships in the remotest part of the jungle where native people could learn a trade and escape forever the risk of slavery; and while they were learning their trade, they learned the Gospel, they learned to be literate, and appreciate music, so that the foundations of an exciting and new Christian culture and humanism were being laid. Had all this been allowed to run its course, the history and present-day political climate of countries like Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil might well be very different. But the colonial powers of Spain and Portugal, trying to preserve the social status quo (which included slavery) put such pressure on the Pope that he not only suppressed the experiment, he also suppressed the Jesuits. The Jesuits were re-formed thirty years later. The South American missions were never re-formed. The Church had been fatally prudent, and fatally small.
How late the Church has been on the ecological front. We are talking here about the survival of our planet as a livable environment for human beings. Surely a matter of concern for Holy Mother Church. Surely she doesn’t want her children to live from crisis to crisis, enduring droughts, failed harvests, tidal waves, choking pollution ? Surely she can see that these are the things which sap people’s will to live, and thus their ability to believe ? It is true that in recent years the Vatican has spoken out on these issues. But late, so late in the day. Wouldn’t it have been grand if the Church had been at the forefront of the forces calling the world’s attention to the wreckage and havoc being wrought by heavy industry ? Not to do this was to fail to think in a truly catholic, i.e. planetary way; to think small, to act small. It seems we only manage to become radical when other people have established radicality as the norm.
Where the Church does exert her energy is in the matter of sexual morality and of attacks on the sanctity of life. But traditionally she has done so from the point of view of the individual, and the individual’s prospects of eternal salvation. Around the time of ‘Humanae Vitae’ David Lodge wrote a famous novel called “How Far Can I Go?” It was about the struggles of conscience of young Catholics who quite clearly wanted sex, and didn’t, for the moment at least, want babies. “How Far Can I Go?” sums it up neatly. The Church had spelled out very clearly what a person could and could not do, while remaining in a state of grace, and entitled to go to communion. Not only this, but she had also spelled out the reasons for her pronouncement: the natural law, and the indissoluble link between intercourse and procreation. The accent was on personal morality. It is a matter of history that many Catholics rebelled, and refused to accept this teaching; and that many non-Catholics perceived it as being plain daft, partly because they did not share our philosophical background, and did not believe that there was a natural law at all. If you base your moral decisions purely on expediency, which our civilization does, then inevitably you will see Catholic sexual teaching as plainly dotty.
It is interesting today, 38 years later, to reflect on the changes which have taken place in our society. Paul VI warned that contraception would lead to the exploitation of women; that it would give carte blanche to governments to implement immoral population policies; that it would lead to marital infidelity and a general lowering of standards. But in his wildest moments (do Popes have wild moments ?) he could not have imagined the shifts in public perception which were just round the corner. They are more profound and far-reaching than anything he mentioned, and they will not easily be reversed. In Western Europe, gay marriages have parity of esteem with straight ones. In Western Europe, marriage itself has become deeply unfashionable, and couples simply live together. A huge proportion of kids have only one identifiable parent. And lots of couples, married or not, have no children, or just one child. These are all the results of separating the love of husband and wife, and the pleasure of sex, from the possibility of children. The act of intercourse is viewed as an enjoyable, but mechanical act, one without consequences and without commitment, a private choice, a recreation.
Although it’s a private choice, there are public consequences. You can’t avoid them. If you have a whole generation of children lacking fathers, or living with stepfathers and stepmothers, you are piling up psychological problems for our whole continent, big-time. If you have a population which is not growing but decreasing at the bottom end, who is going to pay the pensions of the elderly ? Already there is talk of postponing the age of retirement, and of encouraging people to supplement the state pension with private investment; but not everyone can afford to do this, and it is the poor who will suffer in the evening of their days. If you reduce the number of children born to the native population, you will have to revise your attitude to immigration, because otherwise there are lots of jobs which simply won’t get done. Such revision in itself might be no bad thing. But the nations of Western Europe must face up to it and devise a coherent policy. You cannot at the same time need immigrant labour, and despise and deport the immigrants. And finally (and I admit that this is the Church consulting her own interests again) if even practising Catholic families have only one child, or at the most two, where are the priests going to come from to serve the Catholics of the future ?
In other words, the neglected argument in favour of “Humanae Vitae” is the common good. To think about the common good is to think big. In the popular view, to talk exclusively about individual morality is to think small. You and I know that personal morality matters, that sin is a reality, that we are each accountable to God for what we do. But these arguments carry little weight with a secularized society. Arguments from the common good, on the other hand, do carry weight. A simple illustration. Think of the campaign against smoking, and how it has turned public opinion through 180° during our lifetime. The reasons adduced for not smoking are not just personal (“You’ll kill yourself”) but also communal: the harm done by passive smoking, the rights of non-smokers, the cost to the National Health Service. The Common Good.
I recognize how important it is to keep a proper balance in this discussion. Here is a quotation from what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote some years back .
It has become obvious that collegiality is one thing but that personal responsibility and personal intuition are quite different - that they cannot be replaced and cannot be suppressed. Collegiality is one principle of what is genuinely Christian and ecclesial: personality is the other. It is one of the lessons of this decade that only a proper balance of the two can create freedom and fecundity.
My point is that sometimes the Church loses the proper balance.
Let’s be fair to the Church. For something more than a century she has been pumping out a social doctrine which is truly great, a morality which goes beyond individual morality, which focuses fair and square on the common good. The first paragraph of ‘Gaudium et Spes’ still has the capacity to thrill and excite me.
The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community of people united in Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit in their pilgrimage towards the Father’s kingdom, bearers of a message of salvation for all of humanity. That is why they cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the human race and its history.
Here the Church appears in her true colours, preoccupied not just with herself but with the whole family of humanity. In “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis”, Pope John Paul’s encyclical of 1987, there is a tilt at the Communist regimes which were then in their death-throes, had we but known it; but this passage also points Catholics firmly away from navel-gazing and towards the health of the whole human race.
The right of economic initiative is a right which is important not only for the individual but also for the common good. (If this is denied, it) provokes a sense of frustration and predisposes people to opt out of national life. (SLR, no.15).
This mention of the ‘common good’ and ‘national life’ is characteristic of the whole of this document, one of the strongest the Pope ever wrote. It places the Church fairly and squarely at the heart of the world, leaven in the batch, soul and conscience to the body of the planet. Yet it is largely forgotten today.
The sad “I and Me” priority extends into the liturgy. How many people will say to you “Father, I have decided to go the Mass in the next town, or to the Benedictine Monastery up the road, because it is more convenient: the time suits me better.” To say to those people “But this is your parish, we need you,” would cut no ice. An enraged parishioner in the Liverpool Diocese phoned a radio chat show to complain that the Archbishop had closed her local church, “and now I have to go three bus-stops to get to Mass.” It never crossed her mind that the Archbishop had closed her church for the common good, so that there would be enough priests to serve the places really in need. I helped out in my sister’s parish this Christmas, and presided at the early Mass on Christmas morning. I was asked to choose a carol and ‘start it off’, but it was more of a solo than anything. The people were there more to fulfil a private obligation than to contribute to a collective celebration: singing went beyond the call of duty. All these glimpses are of your reality as much as mine, I know you recognize them, and they are evidence that Catholics, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, are often ‘cats who walk by themselves’.
When you are a cat who walks by himself you are small, and are seen as small, and no one much will want to join you. It is by contributing our sixpennyworth to the good of all that we achieve the most surprising things, and then people do want to join us. In the late sixties I made an abortive attempt at being a missionary, and went to Peru. I was impressed by the way the priests on the ground would encourage their faithful to band together to claim their rights. No electricity, no sewage, no paved roads ? If we got together, we could do quite a lot of this ourselves. We could dig the trenches for the cables and the pipes, and then we would have a stronger case to present at the Town Hall. Are there people with skills but no money to buy tools ? If we start a credit union we can lend them the money, and the result will be to everyone’s benefit. It is almost as if the collective were greater than the sum total of its parts. To have a care for the common good transforms not just the way we act but the way we are, and the way we feel about ourselves.
And it takes away for ever that perception that the Church is small, going up blind alleys, self-preoccupied, unconnected with the problems which concern the world, and not worth joining. In 1996 the Bishops of England and Wales published a document called “The Common Good”, which contained these observations:
The human race itself is a ‘community of communities’, existing at international, national, regional and local level. The smallest such community is the individual family, the basic cell of human society. A well constructed society will be one that gives priority to the integrity, stability and health of family life. It should be a principle of good government, therefore, that no law should be passed with possible social consequences without first considering what effect it would have on family life and especially on children.
Solidarity means the willingness to see others as another ‘self’, and so to regard injustice committed against another as no less serious than an injustice against oneself. Solidarity expresses the moral truth that ‘no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ (John Donne).
Sentences like those renew my hope that we can ‘demarginalise’ the Catholic Church in Britain, so that she is seen as big, and deep, offering a home to all. They bring us out of the closet and on to the main stage, which is where we belong.
Try these two for size. Let me say in advance that I am not, on this occasion, taking sides. I am simply rehearsing the arguments - presenting a synthesis of what, in inverted commas, People are saying.
1) The Catholic Church is going down the tubes.
She made a mistake at the Second Vatican Council which she had never made before, which was to identify herself with a passing culture, instead of remaining proudly aloof from all cultures. The switch in the liturgy, from Latin to the vernacular, is a symptom of this. The Church has turned a smiling face on the corrupt and fickle modern world, and lost her distinctiveness.
The results of the Second Vatican Council are plain to see. Or, more correctly, the results of the misinterpretation and misapplication of the Council. From the end of the Council, fewer men began to offer themselves for the priesthood. This downward trend has accelerated, and is still accelerating: from that moment on, the Church no longer appeared as the one Ark of Salvation for all, and to work within the Church was no longer a job with a clear focus. Before the Vatican Council, we were battling against formidable forces. We implacably opposed materialistic communism. We implacably opposed protestantism, both evangelistic and quasi-sacramental. We were unpopular, misunderstood, marginal and distrusted by the establishment. But we were growing, we had a proud history, and we had kept our integrity. No wonder men wanted to be priests. Today, there are so few vocations (or, to put it correctly, so few men respond to vocation) that seminaries are closing, parishes have to be amalgamated, and the average age of the active clergy is climbing steeply.
The Church has always prided itself on unity of doctrine, unity of moral code and unity of discipline. The guarantor of this has always been the Pope. Now, however, Catholics all over the world flout the authority of the Pope and nothing happens to them. It is an open secret that 'Humanae Vitae' is widely ignored. The rules in 'Familiaris Consortio' about refusing communion to the divorced and remarried are often transgressed. The papal regulations about priests and religious always wearing uniform have no effect. Papal nominations to bishoprics in various parts of Europe provoke revolt or near-revolt. The Pope has put the question of women priests beyond discussion, but people continue to discuss it. The old maxim 'Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia' has gone by the board. We are beset by a deadly pluralism within the Church.
At the Second Vatican Council we embraced ecumenism, and the edges began to blur. Things went from bad to worse. In 1986 the Pope met, at Assisi, not only non-Catholic leaders, but non-Christian ones like the Dalai Lama, Moslems and Jews, to pray together for peace. The Church's wise laws about 'communicatio in sacris', by which she asserted her uniqueness, have been sacrificed. No wonder the number of converts has gone down. The permission for Catholics to be married by ministers in non-Catholic churches, for example, is a fatal concession of principle. You even come across families which go to Mass in the Catholic Church one Sunday, and a eucharist in the church of a non-Catholic denomination the next, all in the name of harmony, and apparently without understanding the difference.
Abandoning the penny catechism was a mortal blow for the Church. Our children now grow up without knowing their faith. In the '70's and '80's, teachers and catechists experimented on the children with new educational methods and new texts. The result is now two whole generations who have been deprived of their birthright. Catholics have lost hold of the vital concepts which enshrined the Faith. They have also lost the terminology which guarded the vital concepts: they will even refer to the Holy Mass as a 'service'. The sermon at Mass has become a 'homily', generally based on the scripture which has been read. This has replaced the systematic catechetical instruction by which adults were reminded of the basic content of their faith, year in, year out. The books used by Catholic teachers for RE in Catholic schools are insufficiently clear and directive, and waste too much time on the study of other religions. 'Religious Studies' has become the subject which, in Catholic schools, replaces the teaching of the catechism. It can be taught by uncommitted people intent only on imparting information, rather than sharing their faith. Indeed, it can be taught by people who have no personal faith at all, and often is.
In the wake of the Council, the sense of sin and the fear of judgment has vanished. Very few Catholics go to confession any more. People no longer seem to have a conscience about sexual sin, about receiving communion in a state of mortal sin, about going to Mass on Sundays. Priests seldom preach moral sermons, detailing what is sinful; you never hear any mention of Hell. Disclosure of sex-abuse by priests is just a symptom of this abandonment of an objective morality, and the grave damage this can inflict on the Body of Christ. The clergy have also become, in the name of 'understanding', fatally permissive and non-directive, and talk too much about people following their consciences without taking any steps to inform the said consciences.
The Catholic Church has fallen prey to a liberal blight. There are liberals in the episcopate, liberals among the priests and sisters, liberals in the catechetical field, liberals in the marriage tribunals. Until they are rooted out, the downward trend can never be reversed.
The Catholic Church is going down the tubes.
2) The Catholic Church is going down the tubes.
For too many years, the Church studied her own books of rules - the Code of Canon Law, the catechism - and neglected the Gospel. The Gospel has a fire and a beauty and a power to inspire which speaks to the world in a way that safe-sided discipline does not. There are still, however, too many people, including Church leaders, who have no ear for the Gospel. If we are not careful, they will destroy the spontaneous generosity and the heartfelt compassion which should be our badge and our hallmark, all in the name of orthodoxy and conformism.
The people with influence in the Church are too interested in power. They fail to listen to what Jesus said to the Apostles at the Last Supper about power. They are intent on protecting their own authority, and this in its turn produces a clerical caste. Too many priests and bishops are determined to safeguard their place on the pedestal, with all the privileges which go with it. They remind us of the pharisees who like to be greeted in the streets, and who wear long phylacteries. They forget that in the New Testament the whole Church is the priestly people of God, and that includes the laity !
Jesus in the Gospel is nothing if not compassionate. The Church is not compassionate. The Church is quick to condemn priests who leave the ministry, people who are divorced and remarried, homosexuals unable to lead a celibate life. The Church is judgmental, but fails to be Christlike in compassion - above all, by admitting those who step out of line to communion - and fails to see the scandal this causes.
Bishops, priests and religious say the psalms every day, but fail to take on board the full message contained in those psalms about justice . The Church continues to be grudging in her support for the struggling millions of the Third World. The European and American Church is a middle-class Church. She fails to denounce loudly enough or often enough the monetarist policies of the rich West, which condemn whole continents to misery. The Church in fact exists on the back of rich Germans and Americans. The voice heard by the rest of the world is the voice which says 'No condoms for those with HIV' and 'Avoid liberation theology', while it should be a voice which prays with the Psalmist, 'Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and the cruel. For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth...' The Church encourages individuals to be charitable to the poor. She does not, however, make world justice a sufficiently basic plank in her teaching.
The Church is obsessed with control, and in the interests of control wants to centralise all authority in Rome. The teaching of the Council about the local bishop as a successor of the apostles in his own right, and the local Church having its own identity, has gone by the board. The Vatican departments too easily override diocesan bishops. If the Pope appoints a man a bishop, he should trust him. The Vatican listens easily to delating voices. The Church has become too comfortable a home for sneaks, informers and whistle-blowers. The Vatican causes grave scandal by the way it disciplines people like Hans Kung, Leonardo Boff and Tissa Balasuriya, and by the way it treats bishops like Romero, Casaldaliga, Weakland and Gaillot. If the local Church, diocesan or national, is to have any dignity and validity, it should enjoy a certain autonomy, always of course in unity with the Pope, without constantly looking over its shoulder. The Vatican offices should be there to service the Church on the ground, not constantly stand in judgment over it. We rightly have great respect and reverence for the person of the Pope, and fully accept the Petrine Office, but there are moments when this topples over into a kind of idolatry. Acclaiming the Pope does not exhaust the meaning of Catholicism.
The Church wastes a lot of energy over what is happening in her own back yard, while being insufficiently aware of humanity as a whole. Issues like that of women priests, of married priests, of communion for the remarried, of clergy not accepting political office, are all to do with what takes place inside; the vast majority of humanity is outside. We risk having no energy left for evangelisation, because we have used it all up on internal wrangling. The spectre is looming of a Catholic Church which has become totally irrelevant to the world around it, because it is so concerned with its domestic agenda. A real betrayal of the second Vatican Council. No wonder the young vote with their feet.
II. It may seem that these two points of view are implacably opposed to one another, all the more so because they are not calm and clinical points of view, but hot and passionate ones, where emotion and feeling are mixed up with objective judgment. Even in the setting out of the arguments I found myself getting caught up: they touch a lot of nerves.
However, the mindsets I have sketched are really the back and front of the same coin. They both have a vision of Church which is profoundly functional and non-mystical. A Church which is more like a political party (political parties, too, have their ideologies). A Church which can easily be wrecked by the carelessness or the malice of her leaders or members. A Church like a delicate piece of porcelain: if you drop it, it will break. A Church which depends on us.
And this is a profoundly mistaken view of the Church.
If it is anything, the Church is the chosen and spirit-filled People of God, the People of the New and Everlasting Covenant. Almighty God has bound himself to us. He has poured his Spirit into us, not as a passing phenomenon, but as a living and perpetual power. Listen to Irenaeus, writing about the beginning of the 3rd century, who had to battle with dissensions and misunderstandings quite as threatening as those of our own time. (Against the Heresies 3,24,1):
The gift of God has been entrusted to the Church (Jo.4,10)
like breath to the clay model (Gen.2,7)
so that, in receiving it,
all her members may be made alive;
within the Church is contained communion with Christ,
in other words the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit is the pledge of incorruptibility (Eph 1,4; 2 Cor 1,22)
strength for our faith (Col.2,7)
and the ladder which takes us up to God (Gen.28,12).
It is in the Church that God has placed
apostles, prophets and doctors
and all the further works of the Spirit.
All those who do not have recourse to the Church
do not share in the work of the Spirit.....
Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God;
where the Spirit of God is, there you will find the Church,
with all graces.
The Spirit is truth.
Thus those who do not share in him
fail to receive nourishment for life
from their mother's breasts,
and fail to find the pure spring (Ap.22,1; Jo 7,37)
which bubbles up from the Body of Christ,
but dig themselves leaky cisterns (Jer.2,13).....
They flee from the faith of the Church
by not letting themselves be guided
and they refuse the Spirit
by not letting themselves be instructed.
It is clear that for Irenaeus, it is not the Church which is at risk - the Spirit will take care of the Church: it is people who refuse the ministrations of the Church, who put themselves outside the Church, who are at risk. And the Spirit can be trusted to raise up men and women for the needs of the Church. Listen to Gregory the Great, preaching in St Peter's on Whit Sunday:
I want to consider what a marvellous craftsman the Spirit is,
but I can't find the proper words.
He fills a harp-playing youngster
and makes him a psalmist.
He fills a shepherd who raises sycomores
and makes him a prophet.
He fills a shy child
and makes him judge over the elders.
He fills a fisherman
and makes him a preacher.
He fills a persecutor
and makes him the teacher of the nations.
He fills a publican
and makes him an evangelist.
What a craftsman the Spirit is !
It makes our feverish anxiety about vocations quite out of place. Either God does not forcefully summon people to do his particular will, in which case you wonder whether he's worth serving it all; or he does, and we can leave the matter with confidence in his hands. We do our little best, of course, but then we relax. It's his Church, and he is quite capable of deciding whether there is a personnel problem, and solving it. He is also quite capable of deciding what kind of Church he wants; maybe the model we have had up to now has run its course, and he has something else in store for us. If we had more ardent trust, we priests and sisters, if we were more able to wonder open-mouthed at the power of God - like Gregory the Great - if we were more clearly God-centred, if we more transparently believed in the provident God we preach, if we were closer to God, we would have a more objective view of the Church. We would know that it is not our creation, and its survival does not depend on us.
Here, let's remind ourselves, is what we really believe about the Church (LG2):
'Established in this last age of the world,
and made manifest in the outpouring of the Spirit
it will be brought to glorious completion
at the end of time.
At that moment, as the Father put it,
all the just from the time of Adam,
"from Abel the just one to the last of the elect"
will be gathered together with the Father
in the universal Church.'
The Church is not a political movement, then, but a mystery, a people miraculously brought together by the immediate power and influence of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit gathers it now so that the Church may prepare itself for then. 'Then' is the moment when Christ will say to his Father, 'Here are all those who gave me to save; by the grace of God not one of them is lost; I return them to you, from whom they came.' or in the words of I Cor. 15: 'After that will come the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, having done away with every sovereignty, authority and power.' The Church is preparing for that moment. Do you recall the words of the Preface for the Feast of Christ the King ?
'As King he claims dominion over all creation
that he may present to you, his almighty Father
an eternal and universal kingdom;
a kingdom of truth and life,
a kingdom of holiness and grace,
a kingdom of justice, love and peace.'
Read LG4...
'The Spirit dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful,
as in a temple (I Cor 3,16;6,19)
In them he prays and bears witness
to their adopted sonship (Gal.4,6; Rom 8,16-16 & 26).
Guiding the Church in the way of all truth
and unifying her in communion and in the works of ministry,
he bestows upon her varied hierarchic and charismatic gifts,
and in this way directs her;
and he adorns her with his fruits (Eph 4, I Cor 12, Gal 5).
By the power of the Gospel
he permits the Church to keep the freshness of youth.
Constantly he renews her
and leads her to perfect union with her Spouse (Col 3)......
Hence the universal Church is seen to be
'a people brought into unity
from the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.'
And here is Cardinal Ratzinger, writing in 1982:
‘The centre of the oldest ecclesiology is the Eucharistic assembly - the Church is communio. Not only is the very specific structure of unity and plurality evident from this perspective, but the unity of Christ and Church is also established - the impossibility of separating the visible Church from the spiritual Church.’
The Church is inhabited by the Spirit, is constantly renewed, looks forward to its glorious consummation, and has the freshness of youth. That is not a sketch of a Church which is going down the tubes.
Christ is not indifferent to his Church, does not tire of her, does not wash his hands of her when her members are imprudent or misguided. Ephesians - and LG7 - describe Christ as 'loving the Church as his Bride, having been established as the model of a man loving his wife as his own body'. S. Paciano, a 4th century bishop of Barcelona, wrote: 'In these last days, Christ took a soul and body in the womb of Mary. It is this flesh which he has come to save. He did not abandon it in hell, but joined it to his own spirit, making it his own. This is the marriage of the Lord, joined to the flesh of man - a great mystery uniting the two - Christ and the Church - in one flesh.' There is sexual imagery there, and it is there on purpose. It is something we understand. We know that the torrential nature of love is such that nothing stands in its way. John of the Cross invokes the Song of Songs when he pictures the soul united with God: he uses sexual imagery. So does Ephesians 5, in that passage we know so well because of weddings, and picking the scripture for them. Christ loves the Church as a good husband loves his wife: he gives himself up for her, that's how much he loves her. It's a love best typified, exemplified by the physical and corporal affection of married people. That's the closest we can get to an accurate picture. Let's not try to bowdlerise it, to sanitise it. The relationship between Christ and his Church is of this level of passion: two becoming one flesh: the bonding between them is like the bonding between people vowed to one another, who sleep together. The Lord is in love with this Church, for whom, incidentally, we use a feminine pronoun, and that love is to be consummated by union.
This is the authentic picture of the Church. Not the one muddied by chronic anxiety, or by mutual excommunications on the part of conservatives and liberals.
The famous 'Thou art Peter' episode in Matthew is prefaced by a dialogue between Jesus and the disciples. 'Who do people say the Son of Man is ?' They come up with a series of wrong answers, until in the end it's Peter who gets it right. 'Who do you say that I am ?' 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.' The man to preside in charity over the whole 'ecclesia' must get this right. The question of the identity of Jesus is absolutely key.
Well, so is the question about the identity of the Church absolutely key. What do men say that she is ? What do you say that she is ? Is she basically a human entity, or a divine reality ? Is she just a historical construct, or the mystery of God's continuing presence among people ? It is important to be clear about this, because what is true of the universal Church is also true of us as a diocese, is also true of my parish. I have the impression that a lot of people have swallowed whole a kind of Protestant ecclesiology which says that the Church is no more than the incidental grouping of individuals conscious of their personal salvation, a convenient vehicle for common worship. Our belief is something quite different. A diocese is a sacramental mystery. A parish is the place where 'two or three are gathered together in my name.' Christ pours his Holy Spirit into these very human groupings, these unlikely assortments of all-too-human human beings, and makes them divine. If this were not true, they wouldn't be worth maintaining. Since, however, it is true, why are we afraid, we men of little faith ? My feeling of stress and strain, of anxiety and pessimism, stem in part from the fact that my faith doesn't go all the way down to the roots of me.
We are beset by administrative anxieties. How is a bishop to man the communities of his diocese ? How is a priest to serve two or three parishes at once without going mad ? How are the people to be properly looked after ? How is a diocese to raise the money to pay indemnities to the abused ? How can one man be a governor of three schools, serving on committees and sub-committees as well as attending the plenary meetings ? Has a priest areas of competence which are peculiarly his own, or is everything to be shared with laity, ultimately devolved ? If everything is to be shared, then we are faced with a further question of identity: what is a priest anyway?
It would be a pity if we let this last question be the main one. Indeed, we can't let it be. It only makes sense in the context of the bigger one, which is 'What is the Church, and how is it supposed to be ?' We said a minute ago 'The mystery of God's presence among the people.' Does that mean that he's present in all the people, or does he have to be mediated downwards by the clergy ? Even to ask the question makes us realise how ridiculous it is. The whole Church came to be from the side of Christ, and was something quite, quite new. It was a priestly people vowed collectively to worship, sacrifice and evangelisation, something they had never had before, something the Jews had never dreamed of. Under the old system, you let the Levites get on with the holy job on your behalf. In the new covenant, the whole people is baptised into the great High Priest, and inherits his priestly character. If we want a Church that really works in the 21st century, how important it is for us clergy to ditch the kind of clericalism which says that Father does it all, and only when he has destroyed his health does he grudgingly let the parishioners do a bit. Being the Church is a shared enterprise. Theologically, you have to be ordained to preside over the assembly, and to be the pastor; and to absolve, to baptise solemnly, to preach and anoint. You don't actually have to be ordained for almost anything else, and sometimes you can do things better if you're not ordained. There is something comical and absurd about the parishioner who comes up to you on a rainy day and says "Your roof's leaking." He may think he's remarking on dirty water dripping into a bucket. In fact he is disclosing an entire ecclesiology. If you share responsibility, truly share it, you are making the Church in your neck of the woods the right shape. You are not doing something daringly progressive. You are restoring to its proper form something which, over the ages, got wrenched out of shape. Collaborative ministry is not a concession. The Spirit is not looking exclusively for people with collars. Above all the Spirit is looking for men and women of expectant faith.
All these things. We can't dodge them. Underneath them all, however, is a profound and beautiful reality. By membership of the Church, I am in union and communion with Christ. He imparts the Spirit to me. I am part of something bigger than myself, indeed bigger than the sum total of all its members, something with its own way of being, its own memory, its own burning hope and expectation, its own indestructible life. In the Nicene Creed we say that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, and in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We put these beliefs on a level. We say them, so to speak, in the same breath. The Church is a mystery of faith, an object of belief, not just something we belong to.
We ought to love the Church. This remark may cause the cynics to snort. And of course, it does not mean shutting our eyes to The Church’s incidental absurdities and pomposities. She is in constant need of reformation. Any outfit as big as this is bound, on the law of averages, to have some personnel who are not up to their jobs. We may, at some time or other, have been personally hurt by personalities in the Church, and this has rocked us back on our heels. The absurdities, pomposities and less-than-adequate personnel are, however, not the Church. The Church is the mystery of God pitching his tent among his people, and the glory of the Lord hangs over the tent. Think of this, and of the way it affects the way you work. If you don’t get on with the Bishop, does that mean that the Church has lost her meaning, that you have lost your loyalty and love for the Church ? If the CDF silences or reproves a promising Latin American theologian, or an Indian spiritual writer, does this mean the Church has lost all value for you ? Only if you are wearing the most terrible and ill-fitting blinkers. We all need to see over the top of what is incidental and transient, to the beauty of Christ’s Body on earth.
'O Lord, I love the house in which you dwell, and the place where your glory abides.' (Psalm 26,8)
When you are a priest, it may easily happen one day that you watch the news on the TV, and it will be pretty grim. More mass graves discovered in Bosnia, more Rwandans accused of genocide, a kamikaze killer in Tel Aviv, a financial scandal in the City …. And you will switch off the TV, look at your watch, and realise it is time to go through to the church for Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Your most devout people will be there, tranquilly kneeling and waiting. O Salutaris Hostia.
We can regard the Blessed Sacrament as a refuge from what is intolerable and unthinkable. Some of your devout parishioners will be doing precisely this. I don‘t watch the news any more, it is just too depressing, they say. ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine, ark from the ocean’s roar’ they sing. The things that happen in our world are at the same time so painful and so massive that the well-intentioned individual feels helpless in the face of them. Here before the monstrance on the altar I can at least say “Those things aren’t going on here. Jesus is all that is merciful and pure.” There is a very respectable strand of spirituality which follows this line. Think of some of the traditional hymns we sing:
Jesus who gave himself for you
Upon the cross to die
Opens to you his Sacred Heart
O to that heart draw nigh.
or
Jesu, the very thought of thee
With sweetness fills my breast;
But sweeter far thy face to see
And in thy presence rest.
There is nothing wrong with this kind of devotion: in order to concentrate on the abiding presence of Christ, whether dwelling within us by baptism or enthroned in the Blessed Sacrament, we have to shut out extraneous concerns. In doing so, we become like the rifleman practising his markmanship at the butts. Between sessions, he rests his eyes on the green grass, because it is such a welcome change from straining forward at a tiny target. To think of Jesus brings relief. Matt.11,28: “Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.”
Religion, however, is not meant to be an alternative world: it is meant to be integrated with daily life, painful though this may be. Religion should never be a way of pushing reality under the carpet, simply because we find reality brutal and untameable. You see, that word ‘exposed’ can be understood in two ways. The Blessed Sacrament is exposed to our gaze for adoration - that’s the obvious meaning. At the Jubilee, the Queen rode in her golden coach through the streets of London so as the be seen and acclaimed by the crowds: it’s the same idea. But the Blessed Sacrament is also exposed to the modern world, face to face with all its ambiguity and ugliness, reminding us of the truth of the Incarnation in which Christ confronted evil and overcame it. Becoming human meant that the Son of God exposed himself to the worst the world could do to him. Nazareth wasn’t a bolt-hole. (Think of the number of Italian families who have ‘Esposito’ as their surname. I imagine that way back in the family tree there is someone who was an unwanted baby, and who was dumped in a basket on the doorstep of a convent or an orphanage: exposed to whatever the elements might do to him). Jesus came to his own and his own received him not. He confronted the wayward world and put himself at his mercy, and in its own way the world took stock of who he was and tried to eliminate him. Indeed, it thought it had eliminated him. By submitting to this process he saved the world. One of the Fathers of the Church paints us the picture of Christ who makes himself the bait which the Devil devours, and by which the Devil is destroyed.
There is a link between the eucharistic Body of Christ and his Body which is the Church. It is hard to think of one without the other. The Church, however, is something of an enigma. On the one hand it is all those things Vatican II said it was: God’s vineyard, God’s field, his spouse, his pilgrim people, the prelude to the Kingdom of Heaven. One the other hand it is earthy and imperfect. It is vulnerable to sexual scandal, to financial scandal, to hypocrisy and careerism, to clerical cover-ups, to unkindness and exploitation. The Church is a great mystery. It is shot through with the divine, the recipient of divine guarantee. Simultaneously it is only too human, and sometimes you want to weep for the Church. It is not so long ago that it was castrating boy sopranos, executing criminals in the Papal States, being complacent about the slave trade. You wonder: “Is the Church still only in its infancy? It seems that it has such a long way still to go before it measures up to the standards of the Gospel.” We can say this as loving members, without a shadow of disloyalty. It is hard to behold the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance without thinking of the Church, and of how the Church fails to live up to its identity as the Body of Christ. If the Church was in all respects what it should be, it would be so attractive that people would be knocking our doors down all day and all night long, saying “I want to join. What must I do ? Where do I sign ?” The RCIA would be so oversubscribed that you would have to run it every evening of the week. This is, I regret to say, not the case. It is hard to worship the Sacred Host without praying for the Church.
Scripture has that lovely expression for God the Son throwing in his lot with us. “He pitched his tent among men” it says. In Exodus the Tent of Meeting was a rather grand affair, because it contained the Tabernacle. It was designer-built, and God was the designer. There were elaborate instructions for its erection. In the New Testament, however, Our Lord opts for a much more ordinary tent. If you have been to the Holy Land and have followed the road from Jerusalem down to the Jordan, you will recall the little settlements of Bedouin tents in the desert, low-slung goat-skin and camel-hide affairs without any glamour, quite the opposite of the splendid ones in which today Scandinavians invade Mediterranean watering-places. Jesus assumed human nature in its lowliest and simplest mode. That was his tent. He pitched his tent among us, and was indistinguishable from the rest of the anawim, the voiceless ones. He faced up to the mighty of the earth, the religious authorities and the Roman governor: eye-to-eye contact with Caiaphas and Pilate. From the standpoint of humility he engaged with the world. He took on the mess. Not just the exterior mess of fallen humanity, but the interior mess of Judas, his intimate, who should have known better. “But it was you, my own brother …. We walked together in the house of the Lord.” What is true of God Incarnate is true of the Blessed Sacrament. It is God’s statement, where it is generally accepted that might is right, God’s statement of fragility, God’s expressing solidarity with ordinary people who are not at all mighty.
Diocesan priests are secular priests. Secular means of the saeculum, that is, non-religious human society. We actually belong in that ambiguous, and sometimes ugly, world. We are like the indigenous natives who are at home in the bush and the rainforest, at home with the alligators and the hyenas, knowing the ways of the world, being worldly-wise, knowing the worst that the world can do. We are like Crocodile Dundee in the outback. Diocesan priests are largely unshockable. Because we are first and foremost men of the Eucharist, we bring the power of the Eucharist into confrontation with all that is fallen in our world. We are nourished and energised by the Eucharist. We nourish and energise our people with the Eucharist. Thus nourished and energised, we, with them, confront the fallen world and help it claim its redemption. The French bishops held a meeting at Lourdes in 1981 entitled “Pain rompu pour un monde nouveau”, bread broken for a new world. The Eucharist is the bread which sustains us for the major enterprise, not a vehicle of escape from what is unendurable. Remember Elijah in I Kings 19, who panicked when the murderous Queen Jezebel marked him down for liquidation, and lay under the broom tree and hoped to die. The angel woke him and fed him. “And he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights.”
Did you ever see that film ‘The Mission’ ? It is about the 18th century Jesuit settlements in South America, on the borders of Paraguay and Brazil, places where they did not just read the Gospel to people but tried to live it with them. The Jesuits fell foul of the colonial governments, because they were giving the Guarani Indians a sense of their own dignity, and subtracting them from the slave market. The Spanish and Portuguese governments therefore put pressure on the Church authorities to close the settlements down. The climax is a grim shoot-out in which the Indians are massacred in their hundreds by superior fire-power. In the final scene the priest carries the Blessed Sacrament out of the burning church, and for a moment the soldiers hesitate to shoot him; but only for a moment, and then we see the monstrance tumbled in the dust. The same thing happened when Charles de Foucauld was murdered - the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance was thrown into the sand, and discovered weeks later by two French soldiers. It is like a parable. Jesus took his chance by becoming man, faced extreme hostility and was tumbled in the dust. Phil. 2,7: “And being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised him high …” The Eucharist is our assurance that if we face up to the world in all its injustice and cynicism, however humble and helpless we may feel, God will give us the victory.
The Church, which is just as much the Body of Christ as the Sacred Host is, should dare to be exposed to the world without being contaminated by it. There is a Chinese game which children play sitting on the kerb. Three hand-signals for scissors, paper and stone. The game revolves around the question “What is the hardest, the most resistant ? What can cut into what? How can you avoid being softer than your opponent ?” We have to be able to sit on the kerb with the pagan world and dare to play, but not to be softer than it. We are supposed to be the leaven in the batch, the yeast which turns the dough into bread. To do its thing, the yeast has to allow itself to be inserted in the mix. But ultimately the yeast has to be stronger than the dough. If we are mousy and compliant about the vital issues which affect us all … pro-life issues, third-world economic issues, the right of children to religious education, the cynical promotion of the arms trade … we are being softer, we are being contaminated. The Eucharist should animate and strengthen us so that we dare to look utilitarian society in the eye and say “It will not do - people deserve better.” We in the Church receive the Body of Christ in order to become more authentically the Body of Christ, to present a courageous and saintly face to the world, not run away from it. I suspect that in the past too many priests, in the interests of obedience, have had the autonomy and the spirit knocked out of them, so that they wait always for higher authority to take the initiative, and the result is that collectively we get rolled on by our secular world. We’re too torpid, not assertive enough. The Eucharist will put some fire in our bellies if we let it.
Fifty years ago a Passionist priest came to the seminary in Rome on a visit. He was working in Sweden, and was one of the first foreign priests to settle there for any length of time. This was a new kind of missionary. In fact he had come to Rome to do a course in missiology, but he told us that it was a waste of time, because all the lectures were about Africa: no one seemed to have a clue about labouring as a missionary in post-Christian Europe. He and his colleagues had set up a parish in a market town some distance from Stockholm, and had begun to experience in a new way what it felt like to be irrelevant. Swedish society simple did not understand what they were about. It wasn’t downright hostility, or the working-out of historical grudges. It was, if anything, a monumental boredom and lack of interest in what the Catholic Church stood for. This was coupled, of course, with a good dose of suspicion about anything which had to be imported. Life in Sweden was so good, so prosperous, and protected by a superb welfare state. What could the Church of Rome offer, or add ? So, not today thankyou, don’t call us, we’ll call you. Then, one warm Sunday afternoon, the priests arranged Benediction for their tiny flock, and they left the door of the church open because it was hot. By the end, there was quite a group of Swedes clustered in the porch, watching intently, and some of them were crying. “What’s the matter,” asked the priest, and they replied, “That’s the most beautiful thing we have ever seen in our lives.” The music, the candles, the vestments, the reverence, but above all the mystery of the Eucharist had struck home, even in an unpretentious chapel in an unpretentious country High Street. The Eucharist is beautiful, and we are so incredibly fortunate to be the heirs to it. It speaks so powerfully and so eloquently.
May our world make its own what Luke 26,35 says about the men on the Road to Emmaus: “Then they told their story of what had happened on the road, and how they had recognised him at the breaking of bread.”
EUCHARIST IN A TIME OF CHANGE
This talk might seem simply like a bit of spiritual uplift. Well, I hope it will be that - but more than that. It has a practical edge to it, affecting how we live and work. Because it addresses something which is forcing itself upon us, whether we like it or not, and that is change. Our security and our comfort is being dismantled as we speak. So is that of our parishioners. How do we integrate this with everything we know and believe ? The sub-text of Catholicism has always been stability. Now it can no longer be this. If God promised the Israelites that he would lead them into the Promised Land, and make them, instead of warriors and nomads, a peaceful nation of prosperous landowners, he is inviting us to reverse the process: instead of placid, comfortable, routine Catholics, he says, I want you to become pilgrims again 'The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the
The Last Supper shared by Jesus with the Twelve marked a similar moment of transition. Within a few hours Jesus would embark upon his Passion, and nothing would ever be the same again: the whole history of the planet was about to take a dramatic and permanent turn. The death and resurrection of Christ would re-constitute not just the Jews, but the whole People of the New Covenant and potentially the whole human race, as redeemed instead of damned, as adopted instead of alienated. Here is Paul to the Ephesians: 'Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the
There is, inset in the Eucharist, in every celebration of the Eucharist, a summons to march out, to change, to embrace a new reality. The Eucharist is never a placid celebration of the status quo. The French bishops, planning the Eucharistic Congress in 1981, were at pains to emphasise the dynamism contained in the Eucharist, a dynamism which they describe most forcefully. "In offering his life for us, Christ opens humanity to the coming of a world transformed in his image and renewed by the power of his Spirit."[3] And they speak of "Jesus Christ who died and was raised to life, present and active in the sacrament of the Eucharist so as to transform our life in its entirety."[4] A world transformed; our life transformed. When we think of it like that we may well be filled with despair. We feel so impotent to tidy up our own lives, let alone reform the world. But the Spirit is present in the Eucharist, with force and with power. 'For nothing will be impossible with God.'[5] Every time we celebrate Mass, we expose ourselves to the power of the Spirit, we join in a great act of hope, and at the same time hear again the call to conversion. This is expressed in the penitential rite at the beginning: our trust in God's merciful forgiveness, our plea for grace that we may change. Every time we receive communion, we receive the Christ who is broken open for us and within us, so as to release measureless power. How sad if we only half believe it.
It is interesting to reflect a little on the key idea of 'assembly' in our religious history. In
Well, if the drawing-together of the people is so important, then there has to be a convener, someone to call them. That key person is you. Long before you get to the preaching of the word, or the 'confection' of the sacrifice, you have done something of huge significance. You have called the people together. You have greeted them as what canon lawyers would call a moral person, an entity. In 'Pastores Dabo Vobis' the Pope said 'In so far as he represents Christ as Head, Shepherd and Spouse of the Church, the priest places himself not only in the Church, but at the front of it.'[6] This is true both metaphorically and literally. You place yourself at the front of the Church as Moses placed himself at the front of the Israelites at the Exodus, showing them at a time of profound change and bewilderment that God can and must be trusted, for he will never abandon his people. You summon them to put their faith in God.
A fine example of such faith is found in an Elizabethan document called the 'Relation of the Sufferings of Mr Thomas Woodhouse'.[7] Thomas Woodhouse was one of the martyrs who was later beatified. This is the story as told by one of his flock. 'He said Mass daily in his chamber and the heretics knew it well and yet he would never leave it, although the Doctors [the divines of the Established Church] willed him not to be so bold. Once being at Mass with him, a heretic lodged in the next room having perceived he struck fire [to light the candles] did call the rest of his friends and had thought to have taken us all, who were eight in number, and came and bounced at the door several times so hard as the door was like to be laid on the floor. Mr Woodhouse turned unto us before consecration, and bade us be of good cheer for (his life upon it) they should have no power to take us: after which words we all thought ourselves so sure as if we had been in a castle, and as he promised we were safe, for they went away.'
I quote again from the French bishops. 'This great initiative of God [meaning the celebration of Mass] is exercised through the agency of men. To bring his people together and to preside at the Eucharist Christ continues to choose servants for himself in the line of the Apostles. He makes a gift of them to his Church so that she may never forget that she is not a club, but a summoned gathering. It is Jesus Christ who invites us and brings us together. The man who receives ordination, and for whom the Church asks the gift of the Spirit, does not act simply out of his personal talents, but in the name of Christ who sends him. In his whole person he becomes the living sign through which the Christian community is called to recognise its true identity.' Summoning, convoking, convening, drawing together, inviting, calling. That's us. It is because of this that the liturgical language of the present time talks about 'presiding at Mass' rather than 'saying Mass'. If you are going to convoke the assembly of God's people, you have to be visible, you have to be aware of the great dignity bestowed upon you, you have to remember that the Church has formally asked God to grant you the gift of the Spirit, and you have to do your presiding with a certain self-confidence and solemnity, while avoiding like the plague anything so self-indulgent as a theatrical ego-trip. At Mass it is a huge, awe-inspiring thing that is happening. In your parish on a Sunday there may be several hundred people there. They have dropped their normal pursuits and made their way to this particular church in order that through the Sacrifice of the Mass the Holy Spirit may fill them with hope, and enable them to alter their lives and transform their world. To preside over that, to say the words that bring it about, is the greatest of privileges. Don't sell them short!
If you want a hint of the importance of convoking and presiding, look at Moses in Exodus. 'On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now
Well, that's you. You bring the people out of the camp to meet God; and you speak to God on their behalf, like Moses. And in this way you help the people of God to manage inevitable change, to keep their faith alive in spite of change, even to plan change, change for the better. The Eucharist is their strength - and yours. It is not an expression of the immutability and cosiness and sameness of things. Far from it. In his Encyclical "Ecclesia de Eucharistia" the last Pope, talking about the uphill path of ecumenism, insists that Catholics will be strengthened for this by the Body and Blood of Christ. He says 'We have the Eucharist, and in its presence we can hear in the depths of our hearts, as if they were addressed to us, the same words heard by the Prophet Elijah: "Arise and eat, else the journey will be too great for you."'[8] Well, it isn't just the journey of ecumenism which might be too great for us, is it ? It is the journey of finding a language to communicate the faith in a secular world. It is the journey of keeping the parish and the diocese alive despite falling numbers and few vocations. It is the journey of wading through the atmosphere engendered by child abuse. It is the prospect of a different shape of Church which it falls to us to bring to birth. "Arise and eat, else the journey will be too great for you." In the same letter the Pope, thinking back on his priestly life, says: 'Each day my faith has been able to recognise in the consecrated bread and wine the divine Wayfarer who joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and opened their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope.'[9] On a Sunday, from the president's chair, you beckon dozens of diverse people into unity, so that the Eucharist may open their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope.
The Christ who is present in tabernacle and monstrance is the Risen Christ. This is his present reality. The French bishops talk about 'the great liturgy of the Kingdom where Christ, standing before the throne of God, surrounded by his apostles and a numberless crowd of witnesses, gives thanks on behalf of a saved humanity; from now on this humanity shares in the life of God and pleads for the coming of a world made new.' The Eucharist, they say, reflects this present reality: Christ standing before the throne of God. So: not Christ in the manger, or Christ on the
In Deuteronomy 16, when God is telling the people through Moses how they are to keep the great feast of the Passover, he says they are to eat unleavened bread for seven days. And he says that this is - and here is the NRSV translation - 'the bread of affliction'. The French Jerusalem Bible talks about 'le pain de misère' and the Italian Paulist Bible says 'il pane di miseria'. But the English Jerusalem Bible talks about 'the bread of emergency'. Now I don't know Hebrew, and I cannot say which is the best rendering. But all these words - affliction, misery, emergency - express something extreme. An extreme situation, extreme emotions. In later years, when the Hebrews observed the Passover in their families, and shared unleavened bread, they re-lived that extreme situation and those extreme emotions. Their Passover took place at a time of anguish and of risk.
So does ours. Things in the Church, in
[1] Exod.12,1 (NRSV)
[2] Eph.2,12-13,19
[3] 'Jesus Christ, Pain Rompu pour un Monde Nouveau', Paris 1981.p.18
[4] ibid.
[5] Luke 1,37
[6] PDV no.22
[7] cf Caraman, The Other Face,
[8] Ecclesia de Eucharistia no.61
[9] ibid. no.59
[10] ibid. no.14
[11] Sermo IV in Hebd. Sanct.
[12] Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no.22
[13] Jésus Christ, Pain Rompu pour un Monde Nouveau, p.37
EUCHARIST IN A TIME OF CHANGE
This talk might seem simply like a bit of spiritual uplift. Well, I hope it will be that - but more than that. It has a practical edge to it, affecting how we live and work. Because it addresses something which is forcing itself upon us, whether we like it or not, and that is change. Our security and our comfort is being dismantled as we speak. So is that of our parishioners. How do we integrate this with everything we know and believe ? The sub-text of Catholicism has always been stability. Now it can no longer be this. If God promised the Israelites that he would lead them into the Promised Land, and make them, instead of warriors and nomads, a peaceful nation of prosperous landowners, he is inviting us to reverse the process: instead of placid, comfortable, routine Catholics, he says, I want you to become pilgrims again.
'The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months: it shall be the first month of the year for you.' Thus the narration of the Passover begins with a brand-new calendar. This month, says God, counts as the first month of the year. And these instructions of God to Moses and Aaron proceed to describe, in great detail, the eating of the Paschal Lamb. 'This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the Lord.' Ready to march out at any moment, eating in haste, the Israelites contemplated an uncertain future in which all their familiar props and supports would no longer be there: gone for good. This meal marked a seismic shift in their lives, from forced labour with a degree of security, to a nomadic existence in which God alone would sustain them. 'It shall be the first month of the year for you.' The Passover made all things new.
The Last Supper shared by Jesus with the Twelve marked a similar moment of transition. Within a few hours Jesus would embark upon his Passion, and nothing would ever be the same again: the whole history of the planet was about to take a dramatic and permanent turn. The death and resurrection of Christ would re-constitute not just the Jews, but the whole People of the New Covenant and potentially the whole human race, as redeemed instead of damned, as adopted instead of alienated. Here is Paul to the Ephesians: 'Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ .... So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.' By the blood of Christ we are brought near. We receive the Blood of Christ at Mass, and it makes us members of the household of God. Nothing less than that. This radical rescue of you and me from a loveless and purposeless futility, this insertion of you and me in God's domestic circle, also started with a meal. It started with the Last Supper.
There is, inset in the Eucharist, in every celebration of the Eucharist, a summons to march out, to change, to embrace a new reality. The Eucharist is never a placid celebration of the status quo. The French bishops, planning the Eucharistic Congress in 1981, were at pains to emphasise the dynamism contained in the Eucharist, a dynamism which they describe most forcefully. "In offering his life for us, Christ opens humanity to the coming of a world transformed in his image and renewed by the power of his Spirit." And they speak of "Jesus Christ who died and was raised to life, present and active in the sacrament of the Eucharist so as to transform our life in its entirety." A world transformed; our life transformed. When we think of it like that we may well be filled with despair. We feel so impotent to tidy up our own lives, let alone reform the world. But the Spirit is present in the Eucharist, with force and with power. 'For nothing will be impossible with God.' Every time we celebrate Mass, we expose ourselves to the power of the Spirit, we join in a great act of hope, and at the same time hear again the call to conversion. This is expressed in the penitential rite at the beginning: our trust in God's merciful forgiveness, our plea for grace that we may change. Every time we receive communion, we receive the Christ who is broken open for us and within us, so as to release measureless power. How sad if we only half believe it.
It is interesting to reflect a little on the key idea of 'assembly' in our religious history. In France and Italy now, people talk easily of 'the Sunday assembly', meaning the coming-together of the people for Mass. In English it still sounds strange. Is this because we still think of Mass-attendance as primarily an individual duty ? Surely the primary obligation is on the people as a whole, to come together to hear God's word in obedience and to celebrate his goodness with thanksgiving ? It is as part of the people that the obligation trickles down to us as private citizens.
Well, if the drawing-together of the people is so important, then there has to be a convener, someone to call them. That key person is you. Long before you get to the preaching of the word, or the 'confection' of the sacrifice, you have done something of huge significance. You have called the people together. You have greeted them as what canon lawyers would call a moral person, an entity. In 'Pastores Dabo Vobis' the Pope said 'In so far as he represents Christ as Head, Shepherd and Spouse of the Church, the priest places himself not only in the Church, but at the front of it.' This is true both metaphorically and literally. You place yourself at the front of the Church as Moses placed himself at the front of the Israelites at the Exodus, showing them at a time of profound change and bewilderment that God can and must be trusted, for he will never abandon his people. You summon them to put their faith in God.
A fine example of such faith is found in an Elizabethan document called the 'Relation of the Sufferings of Mr Thomas Woodhouse'. Thomas Woodhouse was one of the martyrs who was later beatified. This is the story as told by one of his flock. 'He said Mass daily in his chamber and the heretics knew it well and yet he would never leave it, although the Doctors [the divines of the Established Church] willed him not to be so bold. Once being at Mass with him, a heretic lodged in the next room having perceived he struck fire [to light the candles] did call the rest of his friends and had thought to have taken us all, who were eight in number, and came and bounced at the door several times so hard as the door was like to be laid on the floor. Mr Woodhouse turned unto us before consecration, and bade us be of good cheer for (his life upon it) they should have no power to take us: after which words we all thought ourselves so sure as if we had been in a castle, and as he promised we were safe, for they went away.'
I quote again from the French bishops. 'This great initiative of God [meaning the celebration of Mass] is exercised through the agency of men. To bring his people together and to preside at the Eucharist Christ continues to choose servants for himself in the line of the Apostles. He makes a gift of them to his Church so that she may never forget that she is not a club, but a summoned gathering. It is Jesus Christ who invites us and brings us together. The man who receives ordination, and for whom the Church asks the gift of the Spirit, does not act simply out of his personal talents, but in the name of Christ who sends him. In his whole person he becomes the living sign through which the Christian community is called to recognise its true identity.' Summoning, convoking, convening, drawing together, inviting, calling. That's us. It is because of this that the liturgical language of the present time talks about 'presiding at Mass' rather than 'saying Mass'. If you are going to convoke the assembly of God's people, you have to be visible, you have to be aware of the great dignity bestowed upon you, you have to remember that the Church has formally asked God to grant you the gift of the Spirit, and you have to do your presiding with a certain self-confidence and solemnity, while avoiding like the plague anything so self-indulgent as a theatrical ego-trip. At Mass it is a huge, awe-inspiring thing that is happening. In your parish on a Sunday there may be several hundred people there. They have dropped their normal pursuits and made their way to this particular church in order that through the Sacrifice of the Mass the Holy Spirit may fill them with hope, and enable them to alter their lives and transform their world. To preside over that, to say the words that bring it about, is the greatest of privileges. Don't sell them short!
If you want a hint of the importance of convoking and presiding, look at Moses in Exodus. 'On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently. As the blast of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses would speak and God would answer him in thunder.'
Well, that's you. You bring the people out of the camp to meet God; and you speak to God on their behalf, like Moses. And in this way you help the people of God to manage inevitable change, to keep their faith alive in spite of change, even to plan change, change for the better. The Eucharist is their strength - and yours. It is not an expression of the immutability and cosiness and sameness of things. Far from it. In his Encyclical "Ecclesia de Eucharistia" the last Pope, talking about the uphill path of ecumenism, insists that Catholics will be strengthened for this by the Body and Blood of Christ. He says 'We have the Eucharist, and in its presence we can hear in the depths of our hearts, as if they were addressed to us, the same words heard by the Prophet Elijah: "Arise and eat, else the journey will be too great for you."' Well, it isn't just the journey of ecumenism which might be too great for us, is it ? It is the journey of finding a language to communicate the faith in a secular world. It is the journey of keeping the parish and the diocese alive despite falling numbers and few vocations. It is the journey of wading through the atmosphere engendered by child abuse. It is the prospect of a different shape of Church which it falls to us to bring to birth. "Arise and eat, else the journey will be too great for you." In the same letter the Pope, thinking back on his priestly life, says: 'Each day my faith has been able to recognise in the consecrated bread and wine the divine Wayfarer who joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and opened their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope.' On a Sunday, from the president's chair, you beckon dozens of diverse people into unity, so that the Eucharist may open their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope.
The Christ who is present in tabernacle and monstrance is the Risen Christ. This is his present reality. The French bishops talk about 'the great liturgy of the Kingdom where Christ, standing before the throne of God, surrounded by his apostles and a numberless crowd of witnesses, gives thanks on behalf of a saved humanity; from now on this humanity shares in the life of God and pleads for the coming of a world made new.' The Eucharist, they say, reflects this present reality: Christ standing before the throne of God. So: not Christ in the manger, or Christ on the Lake. The Pope, talking about the Mass in his encyclical, makes the same point. 'The Eucharistic sacrifice makes present not only the mystery of the Saviour's Passion and Death, but also the mystery of the Resurrection which crowned his sacrifice. It is as the living and risen one that Christ can become in the Eucharist the "bread of life"'. No wonder St Ephraim could say of holy communion, 'He who eats it with faith, eats Fire and Spirit.' Two words there pack the punch: "with faith". It is so easy for you and me to celebrate Mass correctly and genially, but without any great expectation. Routine takes over. The small-scale nuts and bolts of the operation can dominate us, the coordinating of music and servers and readers, the conducting of the orchestra. But of course, the greatest conductors are swept away by the beauty and the majesty of their music, and rise above the mechanics of the job. So must you and I. We are feeding our people with the Risen Christ, the principle of resurrection for their lives and for their society. We are feeding them - and ourselves - with fire and Spirit. Let us renew our faith in what we are doing, let us believe in the grandeur and the power of it.
In Deuteronomy 16, when God is telling the people through Moses how they are to keep the great feast of the Passover, he says they are to eat unleavened bread for seven days. And he says that this is - and here is the NRSV translation - 'the bread of affliction'. The French Jerusalem Bible talks about 'le pain de misère' and the Italian Paulist Bible says 'il pane di miseria'. But the English Jerusalem Bible talks about 'the bread of emergency'. Now I don't know Hebrew, and I cannot say which is the best rendering. But all these words - affliction, misery, emergency - express something extreme. An extreme situation, extreme emotions. In later years, when the Hebrews observed the Passover in their families, and shared unleavened bread, they re-lived that extreme situation and those extreme emotions. Their Passover took place at a time of anguish and of risk.
So does ours. Things in the Church, in Scotland and in England, are changing very fast, almost faster than we can plan for. Our parishes are merging, laypeople are being asked to take more of the load, the average age of the priests in each diocese is rising sharply, and men who in times past would have waited twenty years to become parish priests may now achieve these dizzy heights in two. And quite apart from the clerical scene, the media have become sharply critical of us and the public has moved away from all kinds of institutional religion. We are aware for the first time that our project is not simply a reclaiming of Catholics who have drifted, but the re-evangeli-sation of a whole country. It's a new scene, and becomes newer each year. What will the Church look like in twenty, thirty years ? What kind of people will want to join it ? It is the Eucharist which will energise and enthuse us for these coming decades. 'From the perpetuation of the Sacrifice of the Cross and the communion with the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the Church draws the spiritual power needed to carry out her mission,' says the Pope. It is vital that we celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass, and receive Holy Communion, with expectant faith and with joy in the power and mercy of God. We face, like the People of Israel on the night of the Passover, like the Apostles on Maundy Thursday, an opaque future. But in spite of all appearances, we lead our people under God towards the Promised Land. The French bishops said this in 1981, and it is true today. 'We live today in a world marked by uncertainty, a world with enormous needs. However, this world continues to be enveloped by and soaked in the tenderness of God who holds the ravines and the mountains in the palm of his hand, and who promises to wipe away every tear from our eyes.'
The Catholic Church has always found its principal strength in immigrants.
This is surprising, because we now are used to the Catholic Church in Britain as part of the Establishment. Not, perhaps, of the higher echelons of the Establishment, which have been tacitly reserved to the Established Church: but still as a permanent, stable part of the body politic. There is nothing zany or eccentric about a religious denomination which has chaplains in hospitals and in prisons and in the army, all paid by the Queen. We are part of the fabric of British society.
I have a Catholic Directory for England and Wales for the year 1854, which paints a very different picture. It breathes urgency and desperation. It shows that the Catholic population of big cities like London, Liverpool and Manchester was composed almost exclusively of destitute, illiterate, disease-ridden immigrants from Ireland. Bishops and parish priests begged for funds to build churches and schools for this great wave of helpless people. Economic refugees with a vengeance. Priests came with them, and sisters, and many of these died within weeks of arrival, from cholera or typhoid caught from the people they cared for. The west coast of England was as much the White Man’s Grave as the west coast of Africa. The irony is that the Irish were driven from their country by the economic policies of the nation to which they fled. England’s careless and unimaginative treatment of Ireland during the potato famine caused the biggest emigration ever known. It caused the Irish colonization of Boston and New York. And it was responsible for the shape of the Catholic Church in England, even today.
When I was a boy in the forties and early fifties, the superior joke about the Catholic Church was that it was “the Italian mission to the Irish”. As often as not, if you went into a Catholic church for Mass, it would be an Irish accent that you heard. Many of the clergy in those days had been recruited in Allhallows, Dublin. They still went back to Ireland for their holidays at Christmas and in the summer. And when they retired, it was home they went. Their centre of gravity was still there: some had never mentally unpacked, or only to the degree that even in England it was among Irish people they were working. My parish priest in Northampton, where I worked for five years as a curate, clearly had Irish parishes as the mental model by which he judged things, although he had been in the UK for forty-seven years. The majority of Mass-goers at the Cathedral there were young labourers from Donegal and Mayo who had come across the build the motorways and electrify the railways. They took it for granted that all priests were Irish. They would ask you questions like “How long have you been over ?” or “Where are you from, Father ?” expecting you to name an Irish county; and if you said “London” they would probe again: “Was it your mother who was the Catholic ? Where was she from at home?” Our ordinary Protestant neighbours could not be blamed for seeing us as a Church of immigrants.
About the same time, in the immediate postwar years, we witnessed another wave of immigrants, this time from Eastern Europe. The Poles stood out from the rest, because they were best organized. Many of them were young men who had fought in the Eighth Army as it advanced up Italy, they had been at the terrible battle of Monte Cassino, and the survivors had eventually reached the neighbourhood of Venice where they were demobilized. They were offered the choice of staying in the West or going back to what was now becoming Communist Poland. They realized that if they went home they would be viewed as damaged goods, contaminated and tarnished by capitalist values, and their lives might well be in danger. Reluctantly, many of them opted to come to Britain. They were simple young farmers’ sons who had been thrown up on a remote shore after the most cataclysmic experiences, like Jonah arriving on the beach at Nineveh. They married - some of them Polish girls, some of them local ones. The ones who married Poles were more likely to keep the Catholic faith. They had their own priests, many of whom had survived the concentration camp at Dachau , who had become army chaplains, and who simply accompanied their young soldiers into civilian life. They, too, were fish out of water in postwar Britain.
This wave of immigrants made heavy weather of the language. They started off in Displaced Persons’ Camps where hardly a word of English was spoken. The old joke tells of the distressed young Pole whose wife, it seemed, despite his best efforts couldn’t have a baby: and having a baby was one way of getting out of the camp and being given a council house. He asked his friends for advice and they recommended that he go and see the doctor. “Tell the doctor,” said the first one, “That your wife is impregnable.” “No no” says the second one, “this is wrong: tell the doctor your wife is inconceivable.” And the third one, who has been in England the longest, says with magisterial gravity, “You must tell the doctor that your wife is unbearable.”
It was part of Polish culture that to speak your own language was the sign of self-respect and independence, and that to speak the occupier’s language was a sign of surrender. The British in this instance were not their occupiers, they were their hosts; but the Poles felt that they were not here of their own free will, and they did not feel inclined to learn English properly. I recall an old lady outside the church in Brandon, in Suffolk, as late as 1976, saying to me proudly that she had been 31 years in the country and she still did not speak a word of English - she had resisted. She could do this because she lived in a Polish colony, a street of council houses where the local authority had put all the Poles together in a ghetto: and a ghetto they remained. The Polish Mass at 12 o’clock on a Sunday morning was a great social event, and at the end they would sing “Boze cos Pol