Michael KellyEditor’s Comment, Michael Kelly
The Dominican preacher Fr Timothy Radcliffe once observed that much of salvation history can be seen as just one crisis after another: expulsion from paradise, the flood, the destruction of Babel, periodic exiles, the destruction of the monarchy.
The history of the people of Israel as recounted in the Old Testament is one of being gradually stripped of everything that gave her identity.
And yet, Fr Radcliffe pointed out, every crisis led to a new intimacy.
Israel lost the Temple, so as to discover God closer than they could have imagined, in the law. Now God was present wherever they were, even in exile. They lost their nation only to discover God as King of all nations.
“And then this cross-grained man Jesus turned up and broke the law, and touched lepers and cleansed the Temple. He seemed to put the axe to all that seemed to make God near. But this was so that God could be even closer than we could have imagined, in a human being just like us.
“And then we have the worst crisis of all, the Last Supper, when it became clear that the disciples would lose him, that they would deny him, run away and their fragile little community would collapse. And in this darkest moment, when all seemed lost, then he gave them himself. ‘This is my body given for you’.”
It’s striking that the ultimate intimacy of the Eucharist was borne out of apparent crisis. We know a lot about crises in the Church in Ireland. I was 12 years old when the Bishop Eamon Casey scandal broke in 1992. Of course, much worse was yet to come.
Exaggeration
It’s no exaggeration to see recent Irish ecclesiastical history as just one crisis after another. Younger people, for example, have scarcely seen a Church not mired in controversy. This has taken a heavy toll on the morale of Catholics – priests and people alike.
And while there are definite green shoots – including an increasing thirst for adult faith formation – there is also a sense that the Church in Ireland will never be the same. At one level, this is simply a truism since the wisdom of Heraclitus that “you cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in” remains.
Despite this there are some who would like to turn back the clock. Interestingly, this is something that one often finds amongst self-described liberals and self-described conservatives – for very different reasons.
Sometimes, a simplistic narrative sees all of the ills of the Church today as a result of not sticking rigidly to tradition. Vatican II is seen with extreme suspicion, and the reform of the liturgy is blamed for the mass exodus of many from the Church without reference to the enormous cultural shifts.
Many others – often people who would identify themselves as liberal Catholics – have a nostalgia for the past for very different reasons. They long for a time when the Church was a respected pillar of society and was thought well of by the political and media elite. They cringe when they see the Church out of step with contemporary thought on issues like same-sex marriage, abortion and euthanasia.
There is almost a sort of neo-clericalism at work as regret is expressed over the fact that priests and bishops are no longer sought after guests at fashionable dinner parties.
There is pleasure when Pope Francis appears to be saying things that people agree with and embarrassment when the Holy Father boldly reasserts Church teaching on controversial subjects.
Reality
We too often fail to see the reality that the Church is always at its most vulnerable and compromised when it seeks to be thought well off by contemporary culture. The place for a Church with a prophetic voice is often a place of exile. Exile is not a particularly pleasant state; it’s understandable that some priests and bishops might like to ignore the parts of the Church’s teaching that our contemporary culture finds unpalatable.
The danger, of course, is that we lose the courage of our convictions and become what one might call ‘house-trained Catholics’, knowing our place and not expressing any view that may appear controversial, and all out of a desire to be thought well of. This, to paraphrase Pope Francis, turns the Church in to little more than a pathetic has-been.
And of course, the paradox is that, rather than gain respectability, the Church becomes even more a subject for bemusement and even ridicule. House-trained Catholics may see themselves as the respected faces of the Catholic Church while, in reality, they are seen as little more than useful idiots who know their place and can be relied upon to lend their voices to popular campaigns and keep quiet when the Church really should be speaking truth to the political and media elite.
Only a Church that is comfortable being out of step with conventional wisdom can be a prophetic voice.