Helping to see a Brighter Future

I’d a lot of catching up to do in Dublin over the Christmas, not having been home from England since February, so it’s probably not surprising that my oldest friend and I sat up talking till past six in the morning when I went to visit him.

My friend’s father, who’d always been an important figure in my own life, had died during the year, and as we talked of him my friend spoke fondly of the sisters who’d looked after his father in his last months. He marvelled not merely at the care and devotion they’d shown him, but at the prayerful life in which their work was rooted. Recollecting the beauty of the hypnotic call and response of the Rosary, he said how we’d grown up taking such things for granted and had taken to dismissing it as superstitious nonsense.

‘If we saw that sort of thing in Tibet or somewhere like that,’ he said, ‘we’d think it was really cool.’

My friend says he’s but a cultural Catholic now, but it was with genuine regret that he added, ‘And it’ll all be lost soon. That generation’s dying out.’

I’m not sure he’s right. The Church in Ireland is bound to get smaller over the next decade or two, but even in the short time I was home I could see real signs of hope for the future.

I attended Mass several times over the holidays in my local parish Church, and was struck by the size of the congregation each time; sure, there are fewer Masses now than in my childhood, but even allowing for that it didn’t take much more than a couple of simple sums to establish that rather more people go to Mass on a typical Sunday in my home parish alone than have become paid-up members of Atheist Ireland.

If the days of lots of people standing along the side aisles are long gone, so too are the days of lots of people chatting in the porch, heedless of what was being read from the ambo or taking place at the altar. In the main, if people are going to Mass nowadays it’s because they want to be there; this was borne out even last Sunday by an uncharacteristically real, if uneven, attempt by the congregation to sing their parts when called to do so, and to engage fully with the improved translation.

That’s not to say that everybody got the new words right every time, but that’s to be expected. Old habits die hard, and we’ve only been using the newly-translated responses for four months; four decades after the Ordinary Form of the Mass was introduced by Paul VI there are no shortage of people who still respond to ‘Lift up your hearts’ with the long-supplanted ‘We raise them up to the Lord.’

Though the congregation tended towards the middle-aged, it wasn’t bereft of younger people; indeed, last Sunday saw a young man who can’t have been more than twenty years old reading at Mass and another commissioned as a new extraordinary minister of the Eucharist, while among the other ministers present at the time was a young mother holding an eight-month-old baby.

A visit to the Dominican Priory in Dublin’s city centre bolstered my belief that the Irish Church may yet have a bright future. An erstwhile student of mine is in formation there, and at his invitation I joined him and his brothers for midday prayer and for a fascinating and highly entertaining lunch.

Whilst praying with the community, drawn into the same beautiful rhythms that had been prayed before me by St Thomas Aquinas, St Catherine of Siena, St Martin de Porres, and so many more, I was struck by the timelessness of the Dominican tradition and by the youthfulness of the Dublin community. With twenty friars in formation at the moment, more than there have been in many years, it’s clear that the Dominicans will play a dynamic and vital part in shaping the Irish Church of the future.

In truth, just listening to my friend speak in the early hours of that December morning, it seemed that even in his own family green shoots were breaking through the frost.

His siblings in America were adamant that their children should go to Catholic schools, he said, because Catholic education ‘grounds them in reality’. Regardless of his own doubts about God, he said he agreed with them, and wanted his own children to experience the opportunities and the grounding in reality that he felt only a Catholic education could offer them.

After decades of bad catechesis of home, such that most of us hardly know our faith, it says something when those who’ve lost their faith still feel there’s something of value in the faith they themselves have lost.

 

 

-- from The Irish Catholic, 19 January 2012

CAFOD and Boris Island

Father Ray Blake raises an interesting question on his blog about why CAFOD has objected to the prospect of a new London airport in the Thames Estuary; whatever is the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development doing commenting on a development in Britain, regardless of the ecological damage such a development might cause? CAFOD's mandate, after all, concerns overseas development.

All told, he feels this objection goes beyond CAFOD's mandate, and raises the question of whether this is simply another instance of CAFOD alligning itself with left-wing politics in general.

On the face of it, this seems a reasonable question, but I'm not sure it's a fair one. Leaving aside how I can't see that opposition to this development could in any way detract from any of CAFOD's more obvious and immediate projects, such that it surely does CAFOD's objectives no harm, it's striking that in objecting to the 'Boris Island' project, CAFOD, Christian Aid, and others specifically said:

'A new hub airport in the Thames Estuary would be a disaster for the environment, and, as a result, for people and wildlife in this country and globally. [...] Aviation is already responsible for more than a fifth of the UK transport sector's greenhouse gas emissions, and an airport accommodating 180 million passengers each year, as proposed by Boris Johnson, would be much larger than any airport in operation in the world today. Such a scheme would effectively be the death knell for the Government's promise to be the greenest ever, and would undermine its ability to show international climate leadership. That's why we will be opposing it every step of the way'

In other words, CAFOD is adamant that isn't merely a local or national issue; it seems to be taking the view that the planned development would be detrimental to the environment in a global sense, in that traffic through the airport would itself contribute in no small way to greenhouse gas emissions, and perhaps more importantly in that it would undermine Britain's credibility as a leading voice in international campaigns to care for the world we live in.

And is this a Catholic concern? I'd think so, yes. After all, if we look at the Pope's 'State of the World' address to the Vatican's Diplomatic Corps, as discussed here a couple of weeks back, you'll see how he drew his speech to a close by speaking of our need to care for our world, stressing a fundamental link between our duty to care for our world and our duty to care for each other.

'Finally I would stress that education, correctly understood, cannot fail to foster respect for creation. We cannot disregard the grave natural calamities which in 2011 affected various regions of South-East Asia, or ecological disasters like that of the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Environmental protection and the connection between fighting poverty and fighting climate change are important areas for the promotion of integral human development. For this reason, I hope that, pursuant to the XVII session of the Conference of States Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change recently concluded in Durban, the international community will prepare for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio + 20”) as an authentic “family of nations” and thus with a great sense of solidarity and responsibility towards present and future generations.'

That seems pretty clear: 'environmental protection and the connection between fighting poverty and fighting climate change are important areas for the promotion of integral human development.' If the proposed 'Boris Island' development would indeed harm the environment and Britain's ability to show real leadership on climate change, then it would undermine the Church's intrinsically connected campaigns to fight against climate change and poverty.

I don't think this is just about left-wing sympathies. It looks to me that it's about loyalty to the teachings of the Church.

The Pope and the Diplomats

Rumour, it’s said, can be halfway round the world before Truth has got its boots on. Rarely does that adage seem more apt than in the world of religious journalism. 

Yesterday morning the Pope gave his annual ‘State of the World’ address to diplomats accredited to the Vatican; the speech was remarkably broad, taking in such issues as the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, the situation in Iraq, the family as the basic social unit, recent European decisions on human life in its early stages, the importance of education, the right to religious freedom and the duty to resist religiously-motivated violence, humanitarian crises in Africa, and how we must respect the world in which we live.

Despite the wide range of issues covered in the address, it’s a tightly woven piece of work, unified by the idea that we must recognise ‘the inalienable dignity of each human person and of his or her fundamental human rights’. As the American Declaration of Independence recognised, our fundamental rights are inalienable precisely because they are given us by our Creator, and in exploring this central idea the Pope followed the logic of this by locating our dignity and rights within the context of our place in creation:

‘Truly the world is dark wherever men and women no longer acknowledge their bond with the Creator and thereby endanger their relation to other creatures and to creation itself.’

In other words, we have been created not merely with fundamental rights but with fundamental duties, duties that require us to live rightly in relation to God, to each other, and to the world. We are our brothers’ keepers, and we’re called to till and keep the world not just for ourselves but for each other and for our children and their children.


Oh, Ambassador, you're spoiling us...

The diplomats who were present understood what the Pope was saying. The Canadian ambassador, for instance, summed up the core of the Pope’s address as being:

‘It boils down to a respect for the dignity of the human being is really the key to resolving the financial and economic crisis, and to give hope to millions of youth who find themselves a bit in a desperate situation in many countries. It is very interesting that the pope started from that point, the situation of youth in many countries, to go to North Africa, the Middle East where he talked about specific situations.’

The Australian ambassador likewise homed in on Benedict’s focus on youth, describing the speech as sober and commendable, saying:

‘What I picked up most from the Pope’s speech was his return to the theme of education. Education for young people, education as part of religious freedom and cultural progress in the Middle East and around the world.'

 Discussing the speech at some length, the British ambassador noted the global role of the Holy See, and took the opportunity to stress how important the Holy See is as a diplomatic partner for Britain, especially in connection with environmental matters, peace negotiations, and the war on global poverty, with particular reference to the Millennium Development Goals. He said that although the speech was sombre, it was far from pessimistic, reminding the gathered diplomats that we should not allow the crises of today to deter us from pursuing our long term aims:

‘His Holiness was very clear that we should not despair in this moment of crisis but that we need to look forward with new commitment, new dialogue, new creativity for ourselves and for the younger generations. And he flagged up several specific areas including the Middle East, Europe and the European crisis, and strengthening of religious freedom around the world.’

Ah, Churnalism...

Given the wide-ranging yet unified nature of the address, it was a bit disappointing that insofar as the global media has reported the story, it’s done so through a tediously predictable and utterly misleading filter. ‘Gay marriage a threat to humanity’s future: Pope,’ declared Reuters, in a hastily dashed-off piece which claimed that the Pope had made some of his strongest comments against gay marriage in a speech that ‘touched on some economic and social issues’. 

More than 95 per cent of the address was dismissed with one simple phrase -- ‘touched on some economic and social issues’ -- so that the Reuters article could exaggerate one small point. And unfortunately, that one Reuters piece set the ball rolling...

I read a shockingly poor piece – since somewhat amended – about the address on the Digital Journal site last night, seemingly relying on little more than the original Reuters piece, a few tweets, and a couple of old and discredited news reports, and then today I saw that the Daily Mail had tweaked the original Reuters piece to make it look like their own work, churning it out under the headline, ‘Gay marriage is a threat to humanity, claims Pope’.

It's not surprising that people all too often think the Church is obsessed with sex, when all too often that's the only thing that's often reported about the Church. Still, the issue of marriage was mentioned in the Pope's address, so it's worth looking at how it's dealt with. The first thing that's worth noting is that the key passage that's been quoted takes up maybe two per cent of the speech. Whatever way you try to spin this, this wasn't the focus of the address.


Uniquely stable, uniquely balanced, uniquely valuable
The address runs to 2,772 words when translated into English, of which I’d say a grand total of fifty, buried in the middle of the speech, could be understood as an implicit attack on the idea of gay marriage, though even then the key passage is best understood as a passage praising marriage and encouraging us to work to protect it. The Pope spoke of how education should take place in proper settings, and that,

‘Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.’

The Pope wasn’t speaking specifically of Christian marriage here, but of marriage in a more general sense: theology aside, the Church sees marriage as an institutional reflection of a biological reality. We are, after all, a sexual species, reproducing sexually, with every single one of us being the product of a mother and a father; marriage reflects that reality and provides a setting in which we can be nurtured, protected, and raised with complementary male and female role models. 

The Church recognises that the basic structure of marriage as the bond that holds families together is deeply rooted in our nature, and that marriage makes an invaluable contribution to the common good of society, providing a uniquely stable and balanced setting in which children can be born and raised. Given the uniquely valuable role that marriage plays in human society, it’s hardly surprising that the Pope should argue that it should be uniquely supported and promoted.

Of course, it goes without saying that we can only preserve the status of marriage as the gold standard for family life if we also acknowledge that other forms of relationship, regardless of how good we might regard them as being in themselves, do not play so important a role in our society and are not equally deserving of protection and promotion. We cannot prize something as 'best' unless we take the view that all other comparable things, no matter how good, are less than that 'best'. To claim that other forms of relationships are identical to marriage or are as good as marriage, is to deny that marriage is uniquely special and uniquely worthy of protection; such denials undermine an institution that is fundamental to human society. And when we undermine the foundations of our society, no matter how noble our intentions might be, we undermine our society.

Addressing the gathered diplomats, and as just one small part of a much longer speech, Benedict warned that policies that undermine the family and that rationalise the destruction of human life in its earliest and most vulnerable stages threaten the future of humanity; instead, he said, we should be working to build a sense of universal fraternity, corresponding to the ‘lofty grandeur of our human calling’.


Even then people weren't listening...
Way back in his uneven first book, Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith, John Allen recognised that Benedict is a thinker with whom people need to engage, and generally fail to do so; instead, he said, people tended to react in a kneejerk way, either dismissing him out of hand, or cheering his proclamations without thinking seriously about what he'd said. I don't think that we can realistically expect Reuters to issue lengthy reports, or expect the Mail to offer reasoned comment, but what we can do, whenever stories like this hit the presses, the internet, and the airwaves, is to reserve judgement, find out exactly what Benedict said, and think about why he might have said it.

The 'State of the World' address isn't that long. It's worth engaging with. Read it and think.