Greg DalyQuestioning the borders we place on our faith can lead to growth, Cardinal Peter Turkson tells Greg Daly
If many in the developed world view Christianity in a tired and cynical way, according to Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson, this is in no small part due to how, for so many, “being a Christian has become a cultural mode of life, not always necessarily accompanied by union to the Spirit or the manifestations of the Spirit”.
Describing how Pope St John Paul II expressed admiration for Muslim dedication to their prayer lives, the cardinal, in Ireland to deliver Trócaire’s annual Lenten lecture in Maynooth and the St Brigid’s lecture in Belfast, cites how Muslim drivers will pull over in their cars when they know it is time to pray but observes, “you will not find a Christian filled with such a sense of need to respect the time for prayer to do that”.
“Why,” he asks, “is it that Christians are not filled with the same sense of devotion, commitment to the God of their faith as to want to so dutifully express their relationship with him? If there is a relationship, how come it’s taken so casually?”
Similarly, he asks, how can we have a businessman who is a Catholic or other Christian who still does business and does not feel the need to bring his faith into his business?
“How can we have politicians who are Christians,” he wonders, “and still feel that they can leave their Christian faith at the door?”
Defeatism
Pondering such questions can lead to defeatism, he admits, but he prefers to consider this an invitation to see where we went wrong. “There are moments in the Church’s history where we talk about the Holy Spirit as the ‘forgotten God’,” he says, when the presence of the Spirit in the everyday life of the Church was almost non-existent and Christian life was lived “without that vital sap”.
Rather than despairing, he says we should devote ourselves to “serious thinking”, so we can “rediscover what we could have done and done better, and then go to re-embrace Christianity in all its fullness”.
Arguing that we need a better critique of the idea that secularism provides a neutral space, he distinguishes between secularity and secularism, describing the former as “pretty neutral” but maintaining that when it becomes an ‘-ism’, it introduces divisions into our lives, denying our spiritual reality in favour of the idea that we should live as though all that matters is our material existence. This, he says, pushes us “to live only a one-dimensional life, instead of a two-dimensional form of existence”.
Citing Pope Benedict’s belief in a dialogue of faith and reason, where “the task of faith is sometimes to reveal the blind spots of reason to it, while reason also challenges faith to be concrete”, the cardinal notes how Pope Leo XIII recognised long ago that any division of the two, denying faith a place in the public space, is “a very nefarious separation, because it’s not true of the human person”.
Picking out Pope Francis’ belief that reality is more important than ideas, he points out that it is “so very easy to be filled – especially in religion – with a lot of ideas and faith positions without going into the concrete application of all of this in human life. We were warned about this by St James in his Letter: ‘faith without works is dead’”.
He describes how in 2009, when relator of the Church’s second synod for Africa, he listened to Pope Benedict warn against retreating from concrete realities into ideology and the mere formulation of ideas. That’s what Pope Francis means when he asserts that ‘reality is greater than ideas’, he says, pointing out that “ideas are ultimately meant to help and advance our existence and human life”, and “when that is missing, they simply become ideas, they don’t really pass into reality”.
Challenge
Asked whether the recent Extraordinary Synod on the Family was in part an attempt to apply in reality, in a pastoral way, the Church’s ideal teaching, the cardinal says this is part of the challenge, “but probably in reverse”.
Everyone knows what the Church believes and teaches about marriage, he says, but pastors are faced with all kinds of realities; the difficulty is how to accommodate such pastoral realities within “the existing long-formulated theological positions that we have”.
Describing the reality of people living in broken marriages who want to remain members of their parish family, he says the challenge is to come up with a way of making such people in such situations feel like full members of the Church, rather than second-class citizens, so that they do not feel oppressed by such events as marital breakdown and can “feel the mercy of God”.
Last year’s extraordinary synod exposed such problems in great detail and the hope for this year’s synod, he says, is that “with all of us praying together, we’ll be able to come up with concrete pastoral guidance and support for such groups”.
Although Pope Francis’ coming encyclical on ecology will ultimately be his own work, the Council for Justice and Peace, which Cardinal Turkson heads, laid much of the encyclical’s groundwork; the cardinal says Rome has two main hopes for the document.
Firstly, he says, “the Church is wanting to always remind us that the Earth was basically built as the home of the human person”, such that we always consider scientific statements about natural phenomena in a way that is “hand in hand” with the development and integrity of human life. Secondly, he adds, the Church invites us to consider the Earth as God’s creation, such that our respect for the Earth should reflect our respect for God’s work. “As believers and Christians who believe in God’s love,” he says, “we cannot profess our faith and belief in God when we disregard the work of his hands.”
Playing down the significance of the upcoming encyclical being almost part of a political process, written in advance of an upcoming financial conference in Addis Ababa, the UN setting new development goals, and especially November’s climate change conference in Paris, the cardinal points out that the encyclical’s theme reflects decades of papal teaching from Paul VI through St John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Encyclical
Rome’s hope with the encyclical, he says, is that “we will begin to recognise that we cannot go on doing business as usual”. He points out that the industrial revolution and subsequent technological advances have given humanity a sense of being able to do almost anything, without necessarily considering the wider implications.
One of the key messages of the encyclical, he says, will be to say: “Yes, let us celebrate human advancement, yes, let us celebrate technological advances, but let us also recognise that there is at the end of it an ethical consideration, which is: ‘to what extent does it support human life ultimately?’”
In the end, he says, it is about sustainability, “not only of processes in the world but sustainability of human life on earth”.