On Brian D'Arcy and Media Hysteria: Some Musings

If this rambles, it's because I'm just trying to get my thoughts straight on something. Feel free to join me on my journey...

Fintan O’Toole’s column today is a forlorn but functionally ignorant piece that disregards recent developments in the Irish Church and comments with scant regard for current context; while I have some sympathy for his views, they should, nonetheless, be taken with more salt than doctors generally recommend.

His general thesis is straightforward. Back in the day, had such priests as Fathers Brian D’Arcy, Tony Flannery, Gerard Moloney, Seán Fagan and Owen O’Sullivan been censured for saying what most Catholics actually think about celibacy, women priests and homosexuality, he would have written a column about the Church abusing its power. Such a column was, as he puts it, ‘a reliable old standby’, the kind of thing Fintan could have written in his sleep, and probably often did.

Nowadays, however, he just sighs. He sees what’s happened as a tragic and humiliation generation of a generation of priests who were full of hope and openness to the world, ‘infused with the energy of reform and renewal’.

Like a legion of lesser journalists, Fintan then turns to the cliché that is the abuse issue, something he has elsewhere recognised is not a Catholic issue or even a clerical one, and says:

‘This is the institution that told us that it was unable to control child rapists in its ranks because it couldn’t just issue orders... Remember the stuff about how bishops were lords in their own dioceses and religious orders were their own kingdoms?

When priests were raping children, the institutional hierarchy was wringing its hands and pleading “what can we do?” The Vatican was very busy and very far away. But when a priest makes some mild suggestions that women might be entitled to equality, the church is suddenly an efficient police state that can whip that priest into line. The Vatican, which apparently couldn’t read any of the published material pointing to horrific abuse in church-run institutions, can pore over the Sunday World with a magnifying glass, looking for the minutest speck of heresy.

An institution so stupid that it thinks its Irish faithful is more scandalised by Brian D’Arcy than by Brendan Smyth is not worth anyone’s anger. It is doing a far better job of destroying itself than its worst enemies could dream of.’

Hyperbole and nonsense, I’m afraid. Hyperbole and nonsense, without a shred of understanding of how things have changed, or any attempt to grasp why this is so.

A Network, not a Monolith

All the stuff about bishops being lords in their own dioceses and religious orders being their own kingdoms was true. Ian Elliott, the Protestant head of child protection for the Catholic Church in Ireland, put it well back in 2009 in a speech on child protection in the Irish Church:

‘Although it is described as a single Church, it is more easily understood as a single communion with close to two hundred different constituent elements. There is no one person who is resident in Ireland and holds the authority to direct all the various parts of the body to act in a particular way...

The most difficult issues for the Church to overcome are those that arise from its structure. It is the largest membership organisation on the island of Ireland with over four and a quarter million members. There are 1366 parishes, 2646 churches, 5069 priests, 942 brothers, and 8093 sisters. By any scale, it is a very substantial organisation. However, it is not a single body but rather a number of quite separate ones that are linked. There are dioceses, religious congregations, orders, missionary societies, prelatures, and religious institutions. In all, there are 184 different parts to the Church in Ireland and each has its own head. Many have their own constitutions and relate to head quarters located in Italy, France, the United States, or some other part of the world.’

Structurally speaking, then, the Irish Church is much better understood as a network rather than a monolith, with that network existing within the much larger network that is the global Church with its roughly 5,000 bishops, 400,000 priests, 750,000 sisters, 220,000 parishes, 5,000 hospitals, 17,500 dispensaries, 15,000 homes for the elderly, and so forth.

Of course, if people don’t believe Elliott, the man whose investigations in Cloyne led to John Magee’s ‘resignation’ and the subsequent Cloyne Report, they could look to the first national investigation of the institutional Church, that being 2005’s Ferns Report, which has a hugely informative section on the institutional structures of the secular diocesan priesthood; of course, I’ve explained all this at some length before.

A System Wholly Dependent on Honesty...

The crucial thing about Church structure that the Ferns Report rightly identified is that contrary to popular mythology it is incredibly decentralised, and communication is almost always a bottom-up rather than a top-down phenomenon. With the all-important exception of doctrine, given the teaching authority invested in the Pope as successor to Peter, the flow of information goes from the parishes to the dioceses and from the dioceses to Rome and does so on a voluntary basis: the quality and comprehensiveness of the information being supplied is wholly in the hands of the supplier.

Putting it another way, in the normal course of things the Pope knows only what the bishops choose to tell him, and the bishops know only what their priests choose to tell them.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Even if it were theologically appropriate to do, as John Allen, the most astute of Vaticanistas, commented last October, Rome simply doesn’t have the tools to micromanage the Church: the total workforce for the Church’s central bureaucracy is 2,170 people, who rely on a budget roughly half that of UCD’s to serve a Church of 1,200,000,000 Catholics.

Sadly, as we know from the two Murphy Reports, as well as interviews with the likes of Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who Marie Collins has described as someone who ‘gets it’ when it comes to the problem of abuse, an awful lot of important information has historically not been passed upwards or even sideways.

Indeed, in terms of abuse, it looks as though the tendency of the Church at a local level – at least during the sixties, seventies, eighties, and early nineties – has almost always been to deny its reality and to hide it from others in the Church. Everything was dealt with, as much as possible, in-house. And, of course, it was usually dealt with badly.

Enter the Visitation

In Mach 2010, in the aftermath of the first Murphy Report, the Pope wrote a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, in which he expressed great concern about developments in Ireland, saying that he was ‘deeply disturbed’ by what he had learned about the abuse of children and vulnerable young people, and shared in the ‘the dismay and the sense of betrayal’ that so many Irish Catholics felt on learning of what had happened and how the Irish Church authorities had dealt with reports of abuse.

He apologised to abuse victims for their sufferings, saying that he was truly sorry for the wrongs abuse victims had endured, the betrayal of their trust, the violation of their dignity, and the failures of so many in the institutional Church to listen to those courageous enough to speak out.

Commenting on changes within the Irish Church he talked of how traditional sacramental and devotional practices had been increasingly neglected, noted the increasing tendency of Irish priests to engage with the world without sufficient reference to the Gospel, and condemned Ireland’s bishops and heads of religious congregations for grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership, which – among other things – had seriously undermined their credibility and effectiveness.

Listing various actions the Pope was going to take in order to facilitate a renewal of the Irish Church – a renewal that ought to ensure that such horrors as the abuse crisis not happen again, the Pope announced that he was going to organise an inspection or investigation of the Church in Ireland.

‘Furthermore, having consulted and prayed about the matter, I intend to hold an Apostolic Visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations. Arrangements for the Visitation, which is intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal, will be made in cooperation with the competent offices of the Roman Curia and the Irish Episcopal Conference. The details will be announced in due course.’

In other words, the Pope announced that he no longer trusted the Irish bishops to tell him what was going on in Ireland, and so he would be appointing people to go in and find out directly. This, of course, is something that’s not normal practice. When Paul went to Corinth, Peter didn’t send a sceptical Thomas after him to check that he wasn’t hiding something, just as Jesus hadn’t chased after the Seventy Two to make sure they were doing their job. Nicholas I may have invited Cyril and Methodius to come to Rome, but he didn’t dispatch spies after them when they went back to the Moravia and Pannonia, and neither Paul III nor Julius III sent monitors to Indian and Japan to find out what St Francis Xavier was playing at.

It’s been reported that the Irish bishops sought to limit the terms of the Visitation to two issues, these being the handling of child abuse allegations, and the formation of future priests in seminaries. Rome, on the other hand, took the view that such serious problems in the Church were likely to by manifestations of other problems, possibly ones with very deep roots, and that a much wider investigation was needed.

The press release issued by the Vatican made it clear that the Visitation would home in on the abuse crisis, its interest was broader and deeper: it was, rather, ‘intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal’, and would also have to ‘identify the explicit problems which may require some assistance from the Holy See.’

Following in the Footsteps of Giants...

Just over a month back, a summary of the Visitors’ report was published. It’s an extremely condensed version of a much larger document, which has been given to the bishops, which cannot be understood unless we read between the lines and recognise that it merely points towards things which will have to be worked on.

The essence of the document is that a renewed Church needs a renewed clergy and a renewed laity. In a sense, of course, this is always the answer. Here’s Westminster’s Archbishop Vincent Nichols, for instance, in his recent introduction to his four decades’ old study of the sixteenth-century bishop St John Fisher:

‘It is again popular to criticise the clergy. Has it not always been so? Of course now as then some of the criticism is justified. But its generalisation is not. Now as then there is much evidence of the untiring work of the majority of priests and those who assist them. There is ample evidence of the on-going formation of priests, of the resources and opportunities available to them. There is a need today, as then, to look at the facts of parish life rather than the popular impression.

‘It might also be a consolation to recall that in the fourteenth century too the question of clerical celibacy was contentious and its abolition proposed as a solution to many of the failings attributed to priests.

Fisher’s main effort in support of the clergy was in the area of education. He wanted a clergy that was better educated, thereby better able to inform and form itself for its important ministry. And in that ministry the task of teaching the faith was uppermost in his mind. He wanted his priests to be able and ready to study. He wanted them to bring the fruits of that study into their preaching. He wanted a laity that understood their faith and not be led astray by erroneous opinion and error.’

A well-educated laity wasn’t just something that was needed as error and confusion ran amok in the blaze of the sixteenth century. In his 1851 study, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, John Henry Newman famously wrote:

‘I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well, that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity; I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism and where lies the main inconsistencies and absurdities of the Protestant theory.

I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and saved. In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago and they betrayed the Church in England. You ought to be able to bring out what you feel and what you mean, as well as to feel and mean it; to expose to the comprehension of others the fictions and fallacies of your opponents; to explain the charges brought against the Church, to the satisfaction, not, indeed, of bigots, but of men of sense, of whatever cast of opinion.’

Newman, famously, was a great believer in the consensus fidelium, that idea that the view of the faithful was crucial for the maintenance of Christian truth. His thinking on this is often misrepresented, however, as though the consensus fidelium is a crude matter of opinion polls. In his 1859 work, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, he argued that it had been the collective mind of the faithful who had maintained the truth of the Nicene Creed during the fourth century when legions of bishops and priests had fallen into heresy. But this, he made clear, wasn’t a simple matter of Christians sticking to what they believed to be right:

‘For I argue that, unless they had been catechised, as St. Hilary says, in the orthodox faith from the time of their baptism, they never could have had that horror, which they show, of the heterodox Arian doctrine. Their voice, then, is the voice of tradition...’

In other words, for the consensus fidelium to be worth something, the faithful must have been catechised thoroughly, and this point is something that the Visitation hammers at.

The Visitors Speak...

If we work our way through the visitation summary we see, after all the stuff that obviously addresses the problem of clerical abuse and its mishandling, that a straightforward theme is apparent: that both clergy and laity need to up their respective games.

Look at the massive emphasis placed on the improvement of seminarians’ selection and formation, the urging of religious orders to focus on their scriptural and other sources, the hint at diocesan restructuring, and this:

‘It is vitally important that, at a point in history marked by rapid cultural and social transformation, all the components of the Church in Ireland hear in the first place a renewed call to communion: communion among the Bishops themselves and with the Successor of Peter; communion between diocesan Bishops and their clergy; communion between Pastors and lay persons; and communion between diocesan structures and communities of consecrated life - communion that is not attained merely through human agreements or strategies, but above all by listening humbly to God’s Word and to what the Holy Spirit gives and asks of the Church in our day. Only a united Church can be an effective witness to Christ in the world.

Among the pastoral priorities that have emerged most strongly is the need for deeper formation in the content of the faith for young people and adults; a broad and well-planned ongoing theological and spiritual formation for clergy, Religious and lay faithful; a new focus on the role of the laity, who are called to be engaged both within the Church and in bearing witness before society, in accordance with the social teachings of the Church. There is a need to harness the contribution of the new Ecclesial Movements, in order better to reach the younger generation and to give renewed enthusiasm to Christian life. A careful review is needed of the training given to teachers of religion, the Catholic identity of schools and their relationship with the parishes to which they belong, so as to ensure a sound and well-balanced education.

Since the Visitators also encountered a certain tendency, not dominant but nevertheless fairly widespread among priests, Religious and laity, to hold theological opinions at variance with the teachings of the Magisterium, this serious situation requires particular attention, directed principally towards improved theological formation. It must be stressed that dissent from the fundamental teachings of the Church is not the authentic path towards renewal.’

There’s a lot here, but look especially at that last paragraph, in light especially of the call to communion which the Visitation is intended to assist. That the there’s a widespread tendency in the Irish Church to hold theological opinions at variance with that of the Magisterium can hardly be disputed, especially in light of the results of the recent survey conducted by the Association of (800 or so) Catholic Priests.

It appears that the consensus fidelium in Ireland is out of step with the consensus fidelium of the global Church; it seems that we are slipping away from geographic and diachronic unity with the Church as a whole.

And it is that that brings us to the Passionist Father Brian D’Arcy, the Redemptorist Fathers Tony Flannery and Gerard Moloney, the Marist Father Seán Fagan and the Capuchin Father Owen O’Sullivan.

A Right to Leadership...

To listen to Fintan and others, with their hysterical talk of censorship and silencing, and with the unhelpful distinctions they draw between liberal and conservative clergy, it certainly looks as though there’s a massive clampdown going on in the Irish Church. This, of course, is hysterical nonsense.

Have any priests been laicised because of their views? Have any been excommunicated? Have any been denied their priestly faculties or in any other way suspended from ministry? Have any being denied whatever licenses they have to teach? Are any of them deprived of the incomes they’ve hitherto received through the work they do as priests?

Look at the case of Brian D’Arcy, about whom Fintan and Alison O’Connor and others are so exercised. In what way, exactly, is he censored? Put idle gossip aside, and ignore what journalists have written about this, just for a moment. Pay attention to his own words, as expressed to RTE’s Marian Finucane just the other day: It takes a lot of listening, as he does a lot of scene-setting and digresses a lot to charming effect, but at its core he describes how his ‘silencing’ has worked in practice over the last year.

‘I tried to work with it, in other words to do subjects that were non-contentious insofar as possible, and those subjects that were contentious, not to avoid them, but certainly if I was writing an article for the Sunday World that I would ask an appointed censor–’

 ‘Who appointed the censor?’

‘The Provincial – to read over them. The other man obviously didn’t want to do it, but he took it as his duty to do it. So if there had been articles that I thought needed that, they’d be passed to him, and he’d pass them back.’

‘Was any not passed?’

‘No, but I would have done that anyway, to be honest, you know? He was a good journalist. I would have done that if there was an area that – and I would still do it as a good journalist.’

Now, as a friend put it the other day, what this seems to consist of Father D’Arcy passing articles at his own discretion over to another priest, presumably within his own order and chosen by his superior, for the other priest to look over. This is something he says he would have done anyway, and is something that is normal practice among other orders. And, of course, not one of Father D’Arcy’s articles over the past fourteen months – on no matter how contentious the topic – has been blocked from publication, and despite his claim that he’s not supposed to talk about what’s happened, he’s evidently been talking about it to all and sundry over the last week or so.

If this is censorship, I can’t see what Orwell was so bothered about. Talk of Father D’Arcy being ‘gagged’ is clearly rot.

Granted, other priests seem to have had somewhat sterner fates, though again, none have been denied their priestly faculties, their incomes, or whatever licences they have to teach. Even Father Tony Flannery’s enforced six-week retreat is best understood as medicinal, for want of a better word: a chance for him to take a sustained period of time to reflect and pray and see if he could in conscience bring his heart and deeds into union with the mind of the Church.

Whatever else they may be – journalists or whatever – Father Flannery and Father D’Arcy and the rest are priests first and foremost. That defines them. As priests they have a privileged position, in that they’re given a pulpit from which to speak, but they have responsibilities to that position, one of which is that they much speak not merely from the heart but in accord with the Church. They don’t have days off from being priests; they’re always priests and are always called upon to represent Christ and his body the Church.

It’s not good enough to say that they subscribe to the Nicene Creed; plenty of Protestants subscribe to the Church’s historic creeds, but devout though they may be as Christians, they’re certainly not Catholics. There are, after all, Catholic and Protestant ways of understanding the ancient creeds, and there’s more to Catholicism than the Creed. The Creed never mentions the Eucharist, and it never mentions the Priesthood, to take two obvious examples.

The faithful are entitled to orthodox leadership, to priests who will teach in accord with what the Church teaches. That’s not to say that there’s not room for legitimate dissent on loads of things, but there are a fair few topics on which Rome has spoken and the case is indeed closed.

As Benedict said in a homily back in 1979:

‘To say that someone’s opinion doesn’t correspond to the doctrine of the Catholic church doesn’t mean violating their human rights. Everyone should have the right to freely express their own view, which the Catholic church decisively recognized at Vatican II and still does today. This doesn’t mean, however, that every opinion must be recognized as Catholic.’

That’s the key thing. Aquinas used to argue that hypocrisy was a worse sin than heresy, and while people are fully entitled to disagree with the teaching of the Church, if in conscience they cannot accept the teaching of the Church, then this has consequences. Certainly, if one disagrees with the Church on an important issue, then one can hardly stand as a priest, an ordained representative of the Church who acts in persona Christi, and teach something which the Church does not believe.

Irish Catholics are entitled to be led into their faith by people who hold to all the Catholic Church teaches. It’s as simple as that.

So is this why there’s a clampdown?

It’s far from clear that there is a clampdown going on. It seems that there were at least a handful of priests whose names were sent to the CDF for one reason or other a while back, but we need to be wary of assuming that just because all the stories are breaking at once, this means that there's a frenzy of anti-dissident action going on in Rome.

After all, the abuse stories started to break from the mid-1990s on, but they reflected abuse that had taken place in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

It's more than likely that there are those in Rome who are watching what's going on in Ireland with a very keen eye, largely due to the abuse crisis, which as the two Murphy Reports so ably demonstrate, was almost wholly concealed from Rome.

Rome has taken plenty of steps over the past twelve years or so to try to eradicate the problem of sexual abuse within the Church, but it's clear that this can't be enough: the best policies in the world don't mean anything if those charged with implementing them are lax about doing so, and so Rome has been forced to step in. It's been encouraged by the fact that the Irish Church has been in the main handling the abuse issue well over the last decade or so; although this is terribly, tragically, heartbreakingly late, it nonetheless is happening. 

However, it's evidently become clear that there are other problems in the Irish Church, problems that are in dire need of being seriously tackled, and an open climate of ‘undeclared heresy’, as Diarmuid Martin has put it, is central to this. So, having belatedly tacked the abuse issue, it makes sense that the Church start to tackle those priests who teach people that certain unCatholic things are fully compatible with the faith.

That said, Rome is hardly putting the boot in. A handful of priests have been – in practice – either cautioned or had their writings restricted in the most lenient of ways. Nobody’s been excommunicated, or expelled from the priesthood, or deprived of a livelihood or an income, or even suspended from ministry for a while.

And there's a serious school of thought that even this is to paint too hysterical a picture. It may simply be that Cardinal Levada, head of the CDF, is about to retire and move back to America, and has been clearing out his desk so his successor has a fresh start. I'm not just saying that because my editor says so, though he does; John Allen says so too, pointing out that this is normal practice for heads of Vatican offices as they approach retirement, and Cardinal Levada will turn 76 on June 15.

Moral Markets

Dug from the files, and in response to a tweet...

Future World Leaders and Opinion Formers...

Some years ago, for reasons both convoluted and improbable, I attended a conference along with – among others – Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev. The two giants of the late Cold War debated the brutality of the Soviet system and the sometimes deeply exploitative nature of our own. As they drew to a close, Mr Walesa gestured dramatically across the stage, and said perhaps communism could have been a good system after all, if only it had always been run by people like Mr Gorbachev.

Afterwards my room-mate, a rising star in a leading American accountancy firm, flatly dismissed this. “He’s wrong,” he said, “it didn’t matter who was in charge; the markets wouldn’t have worked.”

Although I thought my room-mate was probably right, I’d felt some of Mr Gorbachev’s criticisms weren’t far off the mark; should wealthy countries really be able to bolster their own positions by hiring the best and brightest from poorer countries for salaries unimaginable at home? Didn’t that deprive developing countries of the very people they most needed to build their own economies, thus undermining real competition and perpetuating global inequality?

And, of course, as we all learned so painfully in 2007, any cockiness we had about the efficiency of our own system was completely unfounded; our markets, it turned out, didn’t work either. Our house was built on sand.

Catholic Social Teaching

In 2009 Benedict XVI issued his third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, building on more than a century of Catholic social teaching to place the Church at the service of the world in terms of love and truth. Offering a Catholic vision of economics, politics, and society, Benedict rejected the idea that left to its own devices, an unfettered market would serve humanity at large:

“Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.”

It would be too easy to dismiss this as utopian idealism. Catholic social teaching, aside from being deeply rooted in Sacred Tradition, overlaps remarkably with the observations and theories of such luminaries as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prizewinners who have long criticised traditional economic theories as lacking on both ethical and methodological grounds, seeing them as missing the point of what it means to be human.

Will Hutton’s 2003 The World We’re In, recognising the American economy of the day as the unstable chimaera it was soon proven to be, called on Britain to move away from neo-liberal economics towards the more stakeholder-focused varieties of capitalism found in such countries as Germany and the Netherlands. Unlike shareholder models of capitalism, which hold that a corporation’s sole social responsibility is to make profits for its shareholders, stakeholder models of capitalism recognise that a wide range of interest groups have a stake in corporations, and thus that corporations have duties to a larger society.

Hutton had been pleasantly surprised to see John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, apparently embracing such a view:

“The purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavouring to satisfy their basic needs and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society.”

Addressing a 2008 Vatican conference, Hutton argued that the modern “knowledge economy” has made such an approach even more important than when John Paul II first outlined it. Our challenge, he said, is to try to shape capitalism “so that it does things in its own long-term interests and those of society”.

Caritas in Veritate had been partly written in response to such challenges, and it is interesting that both leaders of Britain’s main political parties appear now to be channelling aspects of Catholic social teaching, albeit indirectly. The Anglican Phillip Blond and the Jewish Maurice Glasman have been profoundly influenced by Catholic social teaching, and it is clear that their ideas are taken seriously – if not always fully understood – at the higher echelons of both Conservative and Labour parties.

Reciprocity -- the Missing Ingredient?

A few months back I attended a talk in London by Professor Daniel Finn, a prominent American scholar of economics and Catholic social thinking. Having already that day met the Archbishop of Westminster, Finn led a public discussion of whether markets could be made to operate in a way that would serve the common good rather than simply generating wealth for a relatively small number of people.

In exploring how we might assess a market’s morality, Finn asked us to consider what he called its “moral ecology”, this being a combination of its regulatory framework, the provision of essential goods and services, the morality of individuals within organisations, and the presence of a vibrant civil society.

Focusing on the central issue of morality, Finn quoted Caritas in Veritate:

“The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion.”

Finn observed that although these “relationships of gratuitousness” are central to our humanity, such reciprocity is almost wholly absent from economic textbooks, centred as they are upon exchanges and contracts.

Describing how we hold doors open for each other, Finn explained that reciprocity is a hybrid of contract and gift; we do such favours in the general expectation that people will either return the favour or perform similar favours for others. Highly ethical companies, he argued, tend to be notable for the role played within them by reciprocity. It builds trust, boosting social capital such that business thrives and everyone gains.

Finn’s idea that the promotion of a culture of reciprocity – rather than regulation – could hold the key to making markets moral might seem naïve, but the necessity for such an organic approach was foreseen in 1992 by Peter Drucker, probably the twentieth century’s most influential management guru. Identifying a host of problems that would face us now, Drucker said:

“All of these will be central concerns, especially in the developed world, for years to come. They will not be solved by pronunciamento or philosophy or legislation. They will be resolved where they originate: in the individual organisation and in the manager’s office.”

It may be that making people moral remains our best hope for making markets moral.

Contemporary Catholic Perspectives: Reaping the Harvest

One of the most absurd features of Enda Kenny’s notorious Cloyne speech last July was his quoting from an obscure Vatican document, penned in 1990 by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, to create the false impression that the Pope believes that the Church is above the law.

Wondering how the Taoiseach had come across such a document, I speculated that the passage might have been drawn to his attention by his close adviser Frank Flannery, whose brother, Father Tony Flannery, was one of the founders of the Association of Catholic Priests, and is currently under investigation by the Vatican.

The relevant document, On the Ecclesiastical Vocation of the Theologian, describes the Church as a mystery of communion, in which we share a bond of faith with our fellow Christians throughout history.

As the faith of the Church today must remain essentially that of the earliest Christian community, polling public opinion to determine what to think or do and opposing the Church’s sacramental teaching authority on the basis of such polls is specifically warned against: we cannot impose our opinions on the truth.

Leading questions, dodgy answers, and shocking grammar...

It’s somewhat ironic then that this week the Association of Catholic Priests has published the results of an opinion poll assessing people’s opinions on such matters as ecclesiology, whether women can be priests, translation from Latin into English, and the Church’s teaching on sexuality.  It seems that the ACP either didn’t get Rome’s memo, or didn’t bother reading it.

As published, Contemporary Catholic Perspectives is a disappointing document, rife with grammatical errors* and revealing a readiness among Irish Catholics to embrace theological errors thus divorcing themselves from the fullness of Christian teaching, the wider Church, and their fellow Christians through history.

I can't help but wonder what the leaders of the Association of Catholic Priests  –  the leaders, now, not ordinary members who've joined out of a sense of frustration with the hierarchy  –  think when they pray the Nicene Creed and say they believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. 

• 'One' in what sense? Do they really believe the Irish Church should be united in faith with the Church everywhere else in the world, or indeed throughout history? The Irish Church and the Church in Ireland are one and the same, after all. There's no distinction between the two, much though some might want to wish there were, with their cries for Rome to keep out of our affairs and stop trying to tidy up the mess we've made. Don't they believe that the English translation of the Mass should say the same thing as the Irish, German, French, Spanish, and other translations of the Mass? Don't they think Irish Catholics and Filipino Catholics should pray the same prayers?
• What about 'holy'? 'Holiness' means a lot of things, but at its basic meaning is the notion of being set apart for a special purpose  –  should a Church that's to be set apart to serve God be bending over backwards to accommodate itself to the passing whims of  modern society, whether in one country or a batch of them?
• And 'Catholic'? Attested to as a way of describing the Church as far back as 107 AD when Saint Ignatius of Antioch was en route to his martyrdom in Rome, the word means 'universal' or 'according to the whole', but do people understand that their faith should be a comprehensive totality, and one that's to be found everywhere rather than being merely a modern Irish phenomenon? 
• And as for apostolic, don't they understand that the faith of the apostles and our connection with them through our bishops and especially our communion with Rome cannot be selected from according to our own arrogant desires without breaking that link? How important to they think our communion with the See of Peter is?

In what sense do the likes of the ACP see themselves as Catholic? I'm not saying they're not, of course, as sacramentally they'll be every bit as Catholic as, well, the Pope, but what do they understand the Creed to mean?

And yet...

Sloppy and depressing though it is, the survey is nonetheless far from useless. It shows just how right the Apostolic Visitation was when it observed a widespread tendency among Irish clergy to hold theological opinions contrary to the fundamental teachings of the Church, and stressed the desperate need in Ireland for deeper formation in the content of the faith for young people and adults. Of course, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew this anyway, but it's good to have numbers. I trust numbers.

84 per cent of people living in Ireland, according to the latest census, self-identify as Catholic, but it seems most of these have little idea of what it is that Catholics are expected to believe and do, let alone why, while many of those who criticise the Church waste their energies raging against a phantom Church that exists only in their imaginations.

I always find it hard to supress a wry grin whenever people start to rant about children being indoctrinated in Catholic schools. If it’s indoctrination that Catholic schools are engaged in, then they’re obviously not very good at it. We’re reaping the harvest of decades of bad catechesis, and when we consider how we should rear our children in our faith, we need to face this fact.

Obligatory autobiographical bit, with comic anecdote...

My own experience of Irish religious education in the 1980s would have been typical of the era.

Preparation for my first Confession and first Holy Communion was clear and comprehensive, as was that for my Confirmation, but whatever I was taught in between was unsystematic and not the sort of thing to stick. In secondary school I only ever heard the word 'transubstantiation' in history class, with reference to Martin Luther and the Council of Trent, with me having picked up a smattering of other information from doing the likes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in English class. 

My abiding memories of religious education in secondary school consisted of watching lots of films, raising money for Concern and the Simon Community, a school Mass or two, a couple of afternoons in the school oratory during one of which we all sniggered when someone broke wind, and one memorable visit from the local parish priest.

'Morning lads,' he said.

'Morning, Father,' we replied.

'What are you doing in religion now, lads?'

'Gandhi, Father,' we said.

A look of utter confusion waltzed across his baffled face. 'Oh,' he said, after a moment. 'That’s good. Because Gandhi was a good man. Now he wasn’t a Catholic, mind, but he was a good man.'

And, to be fair, he was. We weren't learning about Gandhi because he was a Hindu, mind, or because his actions had deep roots in his religious faith, though they very definitely did. We were learning about him because he was nice. 

My teachers were talented and dedicated people who meant well, and I’ve fond memories of them, but the fact remains that in a good Catholic school, run by brothers, religious education boiled down to five years of well-meaning agnosticism with a hint of Catholic seasoning.

I always think folk should be wary of meddling in things they don't understand...

That Catholic education in Ireland is in need of a comprehensive review is something the Visitation highlighted, but such an urgent project seems to have been pre-empted, at least for now, by the Government’s drive to encourage schools to be divested from Church patronage.

Ruairí Quinn’s ambition that half of Ireland’s Catholic schools be so divested looks set to be neutered by the report of the advisory group to the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector. The group has recommended, not that 50 per cent of schools should be transferred from diocesan patronage, but that fewer that one school in 50 should.

More worrying, however, is the advisory group’s recommendation that rule 68 of the Rules for National Schools, requiring teachers to inculcate Christian values throughout their teaching, should be abolished, and that each faith-based school should be obliged to display images reflecting all the school’s students’ religious traditions.

While I’d disagree with those theologians who’ve described these proposals as a frontal assault on faith-based education, I’d certainly agree that they could prove a devastating flank attack with the potential to deal a mortal wound to Catholic education in Ireland.

In his 1919 book Irish Impressions, G.K. Chesterton commented on the sincere assurances given by English socialists to Irish Catholics in 1913 that they would care for Irish children in England and would refrain from interfering with the children’s religion:

'Those who offer such a reassurance have never thought about what a religion is. They entertain the extraordinary idea that religion is a topic. They think religion is a thing like radishes, which can be avoided throughout a particular conversation with a particular person, whom the mention of a radish may convulse with anger or agony. But a religion is simply the world a man inhabits. In practice, a Socialist living in Liverpool would not know when he was, or was not tampering with the religion of a child born in Louth. 

If I were given the complete control of an infant Parsee (which is fortunately unlikely) I should not have the remotest notion of when I was most vitally reflecting on the Parsee system. But common sense, and a comprehension of the meaning of a coherent philosophy, would lead me to suspect that I was reflecting on it every other minute'

There is the little matter of the Constitution, not to mention the ECHR etc...

Religion is a holistic thing, and the right of Irish parents to have their children raised in their faith – whatever that might be – is something that should not be lightly disregarded.

It might be argued that this is not the job of the State, but the Constitution recognises that the family is the primary educator of the child; if economic reality requires parents to outsource education to the State, then it is only reasonable that they should exercise their democratic right to influence the State to educate their children as they would wish. 

Our right to observe, practice, teach, and otherwise manifest our beliefs – save when it's necessary that that right be curtailed – is enshrined in the Constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights. That doesn't  –  indeed, it mustn't  –  mean imposing their faith on others, but it does mean having the confidence to stand up and say 'no' when people representing a small minority of the population try to reform the national education system as though their views were normative for Ireland as a whole, rather than, say, just 6 per cent of people. 

Ruairí Quinn believes that the requirement that Irish national schools inculcate Christian values in their students is at the core of what’s wrong with the current system.  Perhaps, though, in a country which is 84 per cent Catholic and more than 90 per cent Christian of one sort or another, the problem is not that Irish schools are too Christian; it’s that they’re not Christian enough.

_____________________________________________________________

* I'd list them, but that might be a bit off-topic. There are four on the first page alone, though. And in case you're wondering what I'm doing posting at such a crazy time of night, I've been on a boat, and am currently sitting in a rather jolly ferry terminal, waiting on a train. It's a couple of hours away yet.

The historical Easter

Gore Vidal tells a story of how he once met the late Sir Moses Finley, one of the twentieth century’s leading ancient historians, and asked him whether a colleague of Finley’s was reliable.

“The best in his field,” replied Finley, his great dentures shifting slightly in his mouth, “Of course he makes most of it up, like the rest of us.”

Finley wasn’t being entirely facetious: much modern analysis of ancient history is necessarily speculative, deductive, and tentative. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and a puzzle with most of the pieces missing. Sometimes we have a corner piece and can confidently build outwards, but more often than not our picture is patchy and fragmented.

It always astonishes me when modern historians follow the consensus established in the late eighteenth century and assume that the Gospels were written between 65 and 95 AD. That this is unproven should go without saying, but what’s striking is that this consensus has profoundly ahistorical foundations.

The theory has three important elements: the ancients knew that John was written after the three synoptic gospels; textual analysis suggests that both Matthew and Luke are heavily dependent on Mark; and Mark 13 records Jesus as saying of the Temple that “there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down,” in an apparent reference to the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD.

Modern writers tend to hold that Mark wrote in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction and anachronistically attributed these words to Jesus, because it would have been impossible for Jesus to have so predicted the fall of the Temple.

Impossible? Yes, as it’s become customary for New Testament historians to approach their texts from an implicitly materialistic or atheistic stance, such that miracles, prophecies, and all intimations of divinity must be discounted as pious or superstitious elaborations.

Fantasies

Even Christian scholars tend all too often to begin their studies from the prejudiced position that their principle sources are fundamentally unreliable in their most important respects.

This doesn’t happen with other branches of ancient history. Thucydides, widely regarded as the greatest of ancient historians, predicted that had they but a few disparate ruins to go by, future historians might be inclined to doubt that Sparta had ever been one of the mightiest Greek powers. Scholars of fifth-century Greece don’t approach Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War by observing that the modern ruins of ancient Sparta are indeed sparse and unspectacular, casting aspersions on Thucydides’ prediction, and dismissing out of hand all accounts of Spartan force projection as Thucydidean fantasies.

If we approach the New Testament from an honestly agnostic position, we have to concede the possibility that perhaps – just perhaps – Jesus could have predicted the destruction of the Temple. Remove this keystone from the modern consensus and the entire hypothesis collapses, forcing us to look at the facts afresh. In particular, it’s worth considering how Acts ends.

Luke and Acts are, to all intents and purposes, two halves of the same document, and the inconclusive ending of Acts, with Paul teaching freely while under house arrest in Rome, strongly suggests that Acts was written before 64 AD. How better can we explain Luke’s failure to mention the outcome of Paul’s trial, the Great Fire of Rome, the Neronian Persecution, or the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem? And if Luke wrote in the mid-sixties, drawing by his own account upon earlier narratives, then does it not seem likely that Mark and perhaps an early version of Matthew must have existed before 60 AD?

Scholars differ on the date of the Crucifixion, but generally date it between 30 and 36 AD. If Mark was written in the mid-50s, as seems likely, then we can’t dismiss this as an unreliable account, written long after the events it describes. It would be no different from somebody today writing about life-changing events in 1990.

Even Luke is no further removed from the events he describes than we are from the Hunger Strikes, the Falklands War, and the wedding of Charles and Diana, but we put the cart before the horse if we assume that Christianity began with the Gospels or is based upon the Bible. It’s not. It’s based upon the reality of Christ, as experienced and witnessed to by the Church, and as reflected in the Gospels and other New Testament writings.

Reality

Popular critics of Christianity tend to forget that the Pauline letters are widely recognised as predating the Gospels, with 1 Thessalonians dating to around 50 AD. Widely regarded as the earliest extant Christian document, it’s a remarkable testimony for Christian belief within two decades of the Resurrection.

Paul describes Jesus as the Son of God who has risen from the dead and will return from Heaven, but he doesn’t describe Jesus’ teaching, or explain how the Crucifixion and Resurrection were the fulfilment of the Old Testament. He doesn’t need to. Paul’s letters were, in the main, designed to fill gaps and clarify points: the main lines of Christian teaching were already present and accepted in the churches he and others had founded.

In 1 Corinthians, written a few years later, Paul declares the importance of accepting the historical reality of the Resurrection:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve... Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”

Paul was taught this and more when being catechised in the nascent Church, the Church we see in Acts as having been born in the jaws of persecution.

Beyond Acts, the Jewish historian Josephus mentions the stoning to death in Jerusalem of James the “brother of the Lord”, and the Romans Tacitus and Suetonius testify to how – scarcely three decades after the Resurrection – huge numbers of Christians went to their deaths in Rome as a witness to the truths they held, being crucified, torn apart by animals, or set alight to serve as human streetlamps.

These were the first generation of Christians, including such eyewitnesses as Stephen and Peter who gave up everything to serve Jesus. It makes no sense to claim they willingly died for something they knew to be false.

People miss the point when they question the likelihood of the Resurrection.

They should instead ask how, if we deny the Resurrection, we can explain the Church.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 5 April 2012.

Ninjas, Vikings, and Celtic Fancy

Those of you with long memories may recall how last summer I enlightened you both by exploring a remarkable episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in which the viridian foursome visited the Emerald Isle, there to stroll inconspicuously through a Dublin as empty as though the Queen were visiting, before shacking up in a castle that had somehow evaded the tender cares of An Taisce and thwarting an assault on my home city by the denizens of Dublin Zoo's pets corner.

No, really. Go and look.

Anyway, early in the lads' adventures Splinter takes them through Fusiliers' Arch -- that's Traitors' Gate to the more unreconstructedly nationalist among you -- into Stephen's Green, there to tell them of Ireland's history, with the aid of the many statues in the park. He homes in straight onto a statue of Ireland's principle patron saint, there to tell the boys that Ireland is a land of magical legends, including that of Saint Patrick, who drove all the snakes and other reptiles out of Ireland.

No, really, that's what Splinter says. 

Now, there are at least four things wrong with this. First, although there's legendary accretion around the character of Patrick, he was a real historical figure, rather than a magical legend. Second, Patrick supposedly drove the snakes -- and only the snakes -- out of Ireland, with the few lizards we have being left to roam freely. Third, there is no statue of Patrick in St Stephen's Green. Fourth, if there were, it probably wouldn't look like this:

So, anyway, I was reminded of this recently after reading a letter in the Irish Times a few weeks back.

I would have loved this when I was in primary school...

Seemingly the American O'Brien Clan Foundation has decided that there ought to be a statue to Brian Boru, the victor of Clontarf, in Dublin; in principle this is a nice idea, and one that I espoused myself in school when I was eleven years old. The letter begins:

'The Victorian ambiance of St Stephen’s Green seems perfect for a classical equestrian statue of Ireland’s greatest High King, Brian Boru, the millennium of whose death is fast approaching. 

We believe Brian Boru deserves the place at the centre of the park, where the statue of King George once stood. Once in place, it would appear to visitors as though the park was designed around the likeness of an Irish leader, rather than a foreign colonial ruler, or bed of flowers. 

In his address to the assembled troops before the Battle of Clontarf, Brian Boru spoke of Irishmen fighting for their country, surely the first ever mention of the notion of Irish nationality? Brian Boru was the first and only High King to unite the warring tribes of Irish into a nation. His was the greatest Irish life ever lived. Were the Office of Public Works to permit a monument to be erected, people would have the chance to pause and reflect about the sublime achievements of Brian Boru, and drawing inspiration from it, enrich their own lives.'

And it concludes:

'Texas Pastor Terrell O’Brien, who is also an accomplished monumental sculptor, famous for his statue of Rev Billy Graham, in front of the university he founded, has been chosen by the O’Briens to carry out the project. 

A photograph of a rough model he is working on is viewable at obrienclan.com/raising-a-monument-to-brian-boru. The scheme is simple: We will pay for the statue, and its erection, and hopefully the Office of Public Works, and the art adviser can help with the proper permits and approvals.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but remarkably aquiline features aside, isn't this statue of Brian just a bit similar to the fictitious statue of Patrick in the Ninja Turtles cartoon? I'm not suggesting for even one moment that Terrell O'Brien copied his maquette from the cartoon's take on our patron saint, but it seems to me that it might be a bad idea to have a statue so similar to the cartoon Patrick in the very spot where the cartoon Patrick is supposedly located. It could confuse tourists, after all. Especially the sort who like to wear Hawaiian shirts and play frisbee in cities so desolate that Cillian Murphy could show up any minute.

Seriously, look how similar the statues are: you'll note that Brian appears to have inherited Patrick's clothes, and is brandishing two cruciform shapes just as Britain's greatest son is portrayed as doing. The horses are a mirror image of each other, once you correct for the fact that only a miracle could explain how Patrick's horse is balancing so elegantly on its left legs.

What might have inspired this pose, you might ask, other than that mounted Prima Porta rip off we know as the Marcus Aurelius statue on the Capitoline? 

Ah, folklore...

Well, the centrepiece of the Irish Times letter reads as follows, quoting, it says, from the Annals of Innisfallen to describe the 73-year-old High King engaging in a fine piece of battlefield exhortation:

'Their ranks had been formed before daylight, and as the sun rose, Brian rode through the lines of his soldiers with a crucifix in one hand, and a drawn sword in the other; he reminded them of the day selected by the pagan invader to offer battle, and exhorted them to conquer or die. Standing in the centre of his army, and raising his powerful voice, his speech was worthy of so great a king and so good a man:  

"Be not dismayed my soldiers, because my son Donough is avenging our wrongs in Leinster; he will return victorious, and in the glory of his conquests you shall share. 

On your valor rests the hopes of your country today; and what surer grounds can they rest upon? Oppression now attempts to bend you down to servility; will you burst its chains and rise to the independence of Irish freemen? Your cause is one approved by Heaven. You seek not the oppression of others; you fight for your country and sacred altars. It is a cause that claims heavenly protection. In this day’s battle the interposition of that God who can give victory will be singly manifested in your favour. 

Let every heart, then, be the throne of confidence and courage. You know that the Danes are strangers to religion and humanity; they are inflamed with the desire of violating the fairest daughters of this land of beauty, and enriching themselves with the spoils of sacrilege and plunder. The barbarians have impiously fixed, for their struggle, to enslave us, upon the very day on which the Redeemer of the world was crucified. Victory they shall not have! from such brave soldiers as you they can never wrest it; for you fight in defence of honor, liberty and religion – in defence of the sacred temples of the true God, and of your sisters, wives and daughters. 

Such a holy cause must be the cause of God, who will deliver your enemies this day into your hands. Onward, then, for your country and your sacred altars!".'

Stirring stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Still, without wanting to be a party pooper, I think it mightn't be a bad idea to inject some reality into this narrative.

A touch of history...

Firstly, I'm far from convinced this is from the Annals of Innisfallen. It might be from the eighteenth-century farrago of fact, folklore, and full-blown mythologising that's known as the Dublin Annals of Innisfallen, but if you look at the year 1014 in the actual Annals of Innisfallen, you'll find the following passage:

'Great warfare between Brian and the foreigners of Áth Cliath, and Brian then brought a great muster of the men of Ireland to Áth Cliath. After that the foreigners of Áth Cliath gave battle to Brian, son of Cennétig, and he was slain, with his son Murchad, royal heir of Ireland, and Murchad's son, namely, Tairdelbach, as also the princes of Mumu round Conaing, son of Donn Cúán, and round Domnall son of Diarmait, king of Corcu Bascinn, and round Mac Bethad son of Muiredach, king of Ciarraige Luachra, and also Tadc Ua Cellaig, king of Uí Maine, and many others. There were also slain in that battle Mael Mórda son of Murchad, king of Laigin, together with the princes of the Laigin round him, and the foreigners of the western world were slaughtered in the same battle.'

It's a bit dry, isn't it? It's certainly not the Mel Gibson-esque patriotic fantasy that the O'Brien's are quoting.

Here's the thing. Clontarf, contrary to popular belief, wasn't what we think it was, and it didn't really matter all that much.

The Vikings had been a spent force in Ireland for decades before Clontarf. Under Olaf Sigtryggsson, Dublin had ruled over a big chunk of north Leinster in the mid-tenth century, but at the battle of Tara, fought in 980, Máel Sechnaill II, King of Meath, defeated Olaf, forcing the Dubliners to pay tribute to the Irish henceforth; it was Tara, not Clontarf, that had decisively ensured that Vikings would not rule in Ireland.

Clontarf, on the other hand, is best understood as a battle between rival Irish kings. Máel Mórda, king of Leinster, had rebelled against Brian Boru, the High King of the day, and although Vikings made up a large part of his army, the Vikings of Dublin did not take part in the battle on their doorstep; indeed, although Sigtrygg Silkenbeard, king of Dublin, was Máel Mórda's son-in-law, he remained neutral in the conflict between the two Irish kings. And well he might, for Vikings served in Brian's army too, and Brian had been the third husband of Sigtrygg's mother!

The tale of Clontarf grew with the telling. Vikings remembered it as a heroic encounter between champions, while as time went by Dubliners grew embarrassed about their Viking heritage and recast the battle as a clash of nations. The reality is that the Vikings were an important presence in medieval Ireland following their defeat at Tara. Though they remained an important -- if decreasingly distinctive -- element in Irish life right up to the arrival of the Normans in 1169, after Tara they would never again threaten to be an dominant one; the Irish and Norse nobility were deeply intermingled, and it's schoolboy nonsense to think of Clontarf as a heroic Irish victory against sinister foreigners. 

Then again, schoolboy nonsense has its charms. I suspect Chesterton would have said that there's truth buried there, the kind of truth that academics too often forget. 

Stationary at the Cross: A Good Friday Meditation

The Cross, says John O’Donohue in Eternal Echoes, is a unique axis in time. It is where time and timelessness intersect. All past, present, and future pain was physically carried up the hill of Calvary in the Cross, so that it could face the new dawn of resurrection, and be transfigured. This, he says, is the mystery of the Eucharist, which embraces Calvary and the Resurrection in the one circle:

‘In Christian terms there is no way to light or glory except through the sore ground under the dark weight of the Cross.’

O’Donohue describes the Cross as a lonely, forsaken symbol, with the most terrifying image in Christian theology being a state of absolute exclusion from belonging. We all know that moment from the Passion accounts, of course, the moment when Jesus cries out ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ – My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

This, says Pope Benedict in the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, was no ordinary cry of abandonment. Misheard and misunderstood by some of those nearby, the faithful recognised this as a truly Messianic cry, the opening verse of the twenty-second psalm.

‘Jesus is praying the great psalm of suffering Israel, and so he is taking upon himself all the tribulation, not just of Israel, but of all those in this world who suffer from God’s concealment. He brings the world’s anguished cry at God’s absence before the heart of God himself. He identifies himself with suffering Israel, with all those who suffer under “God’s darkness”; he takes their cry, their anguish, all their helplessness upon himself – and in so doing he transforms it.’

Given the suffering that’s ever-present in our world, and how at times we seem awash in a sea of tragedies, it staggers me that I have only ever seen one artistic attempt at expressing this moment of divine agony and isolation.

This may seem trivial, but just as how we talk of things reveals how we think of them, so too does how we picture them. Theology is not simply a matter of what we say. I’ve known Protestant friends purse their lips at the thought of crucifixes in Catholic churches, arguing that representations of Christ on the Cross are expressions of his suffering that fail to recognise that the sacrifice of the Cross is finished, and that Christ is now glorified in Heaven. They’ve misunderstood what the crucifixes represent, but they’ve recognised something very important nonetheless.

Iconography matters.

Before the eleventh century it was relatively rare to see crucifixes on which Christ was not depicted alive and looking ahead, his eyes wide open. Such iconography expressed an understanding of the Cross prominent in all sermons on salvation in Acts and which was, in one form or another, the early Church’s dominant understanding of the Crucifixion: that the Cross was not a defeat, but was the path to resurrection and God’s supreme triumph over sin, death, and the Devil.

While the landscape of early medieval iconography wasn’t as smooth as he thought it was, the Swedish Lutheran bishop Gustav Aulén hit on something very important when he wrote in 1931 of how things changed during the Middle Ages.

‘What was lost was the note of triumph, which is as much absent in the contemplation of the Sacred Wounds as in the theory of the satisfaction of God’s justice. This is reflected very significantly in later medieval art. The triumph-crucifix of an earlier period is now ousted by the crucifix which depicts the human Sufferer.’

There can’t be many of us who haven’t seen myriad representations of the Crucifixion in our lifetime, but almost all of them – cinematic ones aside – will have been variants on a theme: a dead Christ, his head almost always resting on his right shoulder, his side bleeding from the spear driven into it by the Roman soldier when making sure that he was dead.

These pictures and sculptures all serve to express a truth – that God became Man and gave his life for us – that though all-important nonetheless omits something that was central to earlier Christian thought.

Of course, the sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross is a mystery, and it is a mystery that cannot be dismissed with a single neat theory. Tom Wright, until recently the Anglican bishop of Durham, has it right when he points out that ‘when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.’

It is through the mystery of the Eucharist that we actively participate in the memory of God; this was brought home to me with great force when in Leeds last November, for the second Catholic Voices training weekend.

Charles I’Anson’s crucifix in the chapel at Leeds Trinity University College is like no crucifix I have ever seen. Completed in October 1971, the crucifix was the fruit of eighteen months of work by the college’s then senior lecturer in sculpture; made from bronze and fibreglass, and modelled upon I’Anson himself, the crucifix depicts neither a Christ looking forward in confidence nor one in gentle repose after having given up his spirit.

People often don’t grasp just how agonising crucifixion was, or how it killed. It was a slow punishment, and killed – in most cases – by suffocation. The crucified needed to stay as erect as possible in order to breathe, and as legs and arms gave out, pressure gradually built on the chest, forcing victims of the cross to inhale constant shallow breaths simply to stay alive, until eventually even the shallowest of breaths proved too much.

I’Anson’s crucifix depicts Our Lord pushing himself away from the Cross, driving himself upward and forward and crying out. It portrays a dying man’s supreme act of will, showing Jesus forcing his limbs to support him so he can gather the air to cry out, whether to ask why his Father had forsaken him, or to commend his spirit into his Father’s hands.

It’s a representation of agony, but it’s not a representation of defeat; on the contrary, it is a magnificent, gritty, idealised rendering of triumph, and not just any triumph, but the greatest triumph there has ever been, that moment when history and eternity were as one, and God reclaimed what was his, defeating sin, death, and the Devil.

Too rarely in my life have I had more than the driest and most academic understanding of what the Mass meant, but on that November Saturday, as the Eucharist was held up before I’Anson’s Crucifix, I understood.

Britain's 'muddled' document on proposed gay marriage

It’s increasingly difficult to avoid the same-sex marriage debate in the British media, now that the government’s consultation on the redefinition of marriage has been launched.

A muddled document, to say the least, the consultation confuses marriage with marriage ceremonies, treats civil and religious marriages as though they’re legally distinct institutions rather than being exactly the same thing, avoids the question of how marriage is currently defined in law, and openly admits that the practical consequences of redefinition should be left up to the courts.

The very concept of such a consultation is itself highly irregular; parliamentary practice normally involves the drafting of a green paper to explore the possibility of changing the law, followed by a white paper putting forward government policy and inviting further comment, eventually leading – perhaps – to legislation.

In contrast to the usual process, the government seems to be trying to railroad through parliament a policy spectacularly absent from the electoral manifestos of both governing parties. The consultation really only addresses how this policy could be implemented, effectively disregarding the question of whether such a radical change in law and custom is desirable, practicable, or wise.

The consultation’s first two questions, asking whether marriage should be opened up to same-sex couples, are evidently intended merely to provide a veneer of legitimacy. The document stresses that those questions are asked only out of interest, and Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat equalities minister, has given a “cast-iron guarantee” that marriage will be legally redefined by 2015, regardless of popular opinion.

Popular opinion seems to be divided on the topic, to judge by the widely differing results of three recent polls, with one firm – ComRes – having found that 70 per cent of people believe that marriage should continue to be defined as the union of a man and a woman. There’s certainly no great enthusiasm for the proposed change.

It is notable that ICM, which found the highest support for legalising same-sex marriage, also found that the vast majority of people – 78 per cent – believed the issue should most definitely not be a parliamentary priority. ICM also observed a widespread unwillingness for schools to be allowed teach that same-sex marriage is identical to marriage between a man and a woman.

Divisive

So divisive a debate has naturally become almost ubiquitous in the media; I’ve discussed the matter on the radio myself, the first time with the feminist and lesbian journalist Julie Bindel, the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, and the LGBT activist Marc Delacour.

Part of the challenge in such discussions, I’ve learned, is to resist the urge to focus so much on “winning” that we fail to listen and truly engage with what others say. Julie Bindel, in particular, said something upon which I’ve since reflected quite deeply, given how acrimonious and polarised the general debate has become.

“Civil partnership provides what every single couple in the world is looking for in terms of legal protection and the right of next-of-kin, and I would extend that to brother-sister, two sisters, two best friends. I signed a civil partnership agreement with my partner ... we didn’t do it because we needed anyone to see that we have a good, stable, happy relationship.”

She argues that the State should abandon the marriage business altogether, because while it should protect committed couples – something it can do through a modified version of the civil partnership scheme – it has no business approving or withholding approval of people’s private relationships; if committed couples wish to have their unions religiously solemnized, that is their own business and no concern of the State.

Essentially a variant on the French system, it’s a similar argument to ones I’ve heard put forward by libertarian friends.

France

In France, religious marriages have no legal standing whatsoever; only civil marriages are recognised in law. People get married by a civil authority such as a mayor, and then – if they so wish – have their legal marriage solemnized afterwards in a religious ceremony.

The obvious advantage of Julie Bindel’s proposed system is that it would establish an indisputable legal equivalence between same-sex couples and unions of men and women, whilst also preserving long-recognised rights to freedom of religion and conscience by restricting the term ‘marriage’ to religious institutions; nobody would be obliged to recognise same-sex civil partnerships as marriages as the law would not recognise them as such, and clerics would not be obliged to celebrate same-sex marriages as marriages would be exclusively religious affairs.

It’s a tempting idea, and one I think I might subscribe to, were it not for one crucial problem, leaving aside how those already wed in civil ceremonies might be unhappy with no longer being able to call themselves married!

Just as the redefinition of marriage is not a “gay issue”, neither is it a “religious” one. Marriage is a social good, the one institution we have that exists to promote the idea that children should grow up with the love of a mother and a father. I’m not convinced that it should only be for religious bodies to make that case.

Of course, in practice the abolition of marriage is on the cards in England anyway. Since the seventeenth century, parliament has recognised marriage as the union of a man and a woman, primarily for the purpose of bearing and rearing children; marriage differs from civil partnerships also by requiring vows and sexual consummation.

The government’s consultation proposes that marriage should henceforth be recognised as the union of any two consenting adults, makes no mention of children, says that vows should no longer be absolutely necessary, and effectively abolishes the need for consummation as always understood.

In other words, if marriage to be opened up to everybody, every distinctive feature of the institution would need to be changed, such that marriage, as currently understood, would no longer exist, being replaced by a new institution called “marriage” but functionally indistinguishable from civil partnership.

Like the baby brought before Solomon, it seems marriage cannot be shared without being torn apart.

 

 

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 29 March 2012.