Dear friends,
In recent weeks, our Church has experienced considerable turmoil. This has occurred internationally as certain claims involving the highest levels of authority in our Church have been given publicity; it occurs more locally as we continue to come to terms with the implications of the recent Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that delivered its final report last December. I appreciate that these issues can be disturbing, and that they can create a great deal of heartache; they raise many questions about the workings of the Church. I wish to convey to you that I appreciate the various reactions and feelings you may be experiencing.
Therefore, I have thought to share with you some reflections that might assist us as we continue to engage the matters with which we may be struggling. I recognise that what I would like to share below may not be immediately accessible to everyone. I remember my mother once sharing with me that when she read my first book she had to go and buy a dictionary to understand it, only to find that the dictionary did not have the words I used! However, I also think that the times in which we find ourselves demand that we step back and seek the largest picture possible so that we can situate what we are going through with the most informed context.
So, I invite you to come on something of a journey with me as we try to consider our experience in the fullest way possible. I appreciate that not every section of the journey will have meaning for everyone, and that some of the language I use will be technical and foreign – as my mother experienced. However, notwithstanding this, us begin our reflection together. And let us do so by going right back into history.
Almost at the beginning of the Church’s Tradition, there arose a particular interpretation of the nature of Jesus called ‘monophystism.’ Monophystism taught that Jesus had only nature, a divine nature. It was countered at the Council of Chalcedon in 471AD, but monophystism still lingers in the Christian heart which forever struggles with the affirmation that Jesus is true God, true man. The humanity of Jesus, and therefore his vulnerability, can become something we wish not to focus too intensely upon. We want to maintain our reflection on his divine nature that promises us something more than our own fragility. This tendency had its implication for the Church itself in yet another heresy called Donatism which flourished in North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, and against which St Augustine fought. The Donatists argued that clergy must be faultless for their ministry to effective and for the sacraments to be valid. The Donatists could not accept that the Church was made up of sinful people. It was really an argument about the tension between grace and nature. The Donatists’ position was that to be in the Church one had to be sinless: grace had to eradicate nature.
We are those who proclaim that Christ lives! However, if we want to touch the Risen Christ we must be prepared to confront an all too human reality - the present community of disciples, the Church: this stumbling, stuttering, motley group of people, full of idiosyncrasy, vulnerability and ambiguity which is the sacrament of the Risen One, the body of the One whom we proclaim to live even now. This is, what I might be as bold to suggest, is the scandal of the Resurrection. The Risen Christ incarnates, enfleshes in an historical reality that can be experienced with ambiguity: the Church holy because it is the sacrament of the life of the Risen Christ; the Church in constant need of conversion and redemption because it is a social body fully human.
Against this background, the late English Benedictine writer, Sebastian Moore suggested, “We need conversion not so much from sin as we need conversion from innocence.” What he meant by this is that any illusion to idealism needs to be shattered if we are truly to receive the call of the Spirit. Before his death in 1945, the German Reformed theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, put such a necessity in this memorable passage in his little book, Life Together, which I have found to be especially helpful, personally:
Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.
By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.
The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.
When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So, he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily.
And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day?
Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Christ Jesus? Thus, the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by the one Word and Deed which really binds us together--the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship . . .
These words have always had special meaning for me, because the truth is I have never experienced evil as I have from within the Church itself. And yet, alongside evil, I have also witnessed exquisite beauty in the Church. I have come to know the truth about which John Henry Newman penned, “There is nothing on this earth as ugly as the Catholic Church. And nothing so beautiful.” It is the truth of this paradox, and our full engagement of it, that alone offers us a future. The beauty we hold as a Church does not negate the ugliness we experience; the ugliness does not negate the beauty. Both exist. And both must be engaged. If we only engage the celebration, the beauty, the light, we have no guarantee that we do not get caught up in a grand illusion of ourselves – something which is the opposite of gospel humility. If we only engage the ugliness, then we can become overwhelmed by the darkness, and we may be left paralysed and in despair. The ugliness we face ensures that the beauty has realism; the beauty that we celebrate ensures that the ugliness is not the whole, or the final, word.
Some years ago, a famous Scripture scholar, Walter Burghardt put it this way in a homily he gave at a baptism. He said to the woman, Sonia Maria,
Sonia Maria, before we welcome your through symbol and ritual into this paradoxical people, this community of contradictions, let me make an uncommonly honest confession. In the course of more than half a century, I have seen more Catholic corruption than most Catholics read of. I have tasted it. I have been reasonably corrupt myself. And yet, I take joy in this Church, this living, sinning people of God; I love it with a crucifying passion. Why? In spite of all the Catholic hate, I experience here a community of love. For all the institutional idiocy, I find here a tradition of reason. For all the individual repression, I breathe here an air of freedom. In an age so inhuman, I touch here tears of compassion. In a world so grim and humourless, I share here rich joy and earthly laughter. In the midst of death, I hear an incomparable stress on life here. For all this apparent absence of God, I sense here the presence of Christ. I pray, Sonia Maria, that your life within this community, your experience of a strange God and a still stranger people, will rival mine.
This same engagement of the Church’s paradox is evidenced in a favourite prayer of mine by the spiritual writer, Carlo Carretto,
How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you.
You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone.
I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.
You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.
Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.
Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night I have prayed that I might die in your arms!
No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you.
Then too - where should I go?
To build another church?
But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects.
And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church.
No, I am old enough. I know better.
In our own time, this prayer presents with urgency. The exposure of the crime of sexual abuse in our community, the identification of our prizing of reputation over the safety of others, the disclosure of our ineptitude to lead responsibly, transparently, and with accountability, the revelation of the gulf between a proposed ideal and the mire of a reality, are all clear to see. The accounts of the way that people have been damaged, and of the way that people have damaged others, continue to shock us so much that apologies, tirelessly repeated, no longer have meaning. We wonder if we will ever come to the end of this crisis in credibility.
And into this mix, is now inserted the public manifestation of the political divide that characterises the human body of the Church. Discernment about what one reads, from where, has become critically important.
It is vital for each of us to return to the wisdom of St Paul writing to the people of Corinth, themselves faced with great internal divisions (1 Corinthians 3):
Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?
What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.
St Paul’s admonition is as current today as it was in the First Century. There is a part of us that wants to put our trust in persons. We look for an ideal Church, for the ideal community, for the ideal leadership. We project this aspiration on to certain figures, and fear the disillusionment when our ideals are threatened which is inevitable because the Church is, in fact, made up of ordinary men and women, each, without exception, with their graced and fallen nature. Of course, the ideal Church, and the ideal leadership, do not exist: they are an illusion. Leadership is always a mixture of possibility and failure.
Who can we trust, then? Our spiritual tradition is very clear: we trust the signs of the Spirit’s presence and activity. In the end, our trust is not in persons. Our trust is in God’s faithfulness, and in that promise of God which resounds through the entirety of the history of salvation.
It is critical that we do not stray from where our focus need be. To return to St Paul’s letter, most importantly, we are not a temple for ourselves. We are a temple to be a sign to others of the promise given to our world in Christ Jesus. The Church does not exist for itself; it exists to bring the life of the Risen Lord especially to those who are on the margins of our society, to those who are isolated precisely because of the play of power in the world. If we take our gaze off those crucified by the world’s greed – off our mission - and should we fasten our attention upon the internal dynamics of our community, then not only might we lose heart, but worse, we fail in our identity. And this indeed is the intent of evil.
Thus, our current situation demands that we renew our commitment to keep our gaze where it needs be: not on ourselves, but on those we are called to serve. In the battle that is being played out in such grand, public fashion, how easy it might be to ‘take sides’, to define ourselves by the camp that favours our own ecclesial perspectives and theological prejudices. However, let us take the example of Jesus himself in John 8. The people demand him to ‘take sides.’ He refuses this logic, bends down, and plays in the sand. May we, too, be drawn into the courage and freedom of his silence. This is a silence not of evasion, but of engagement, a commitment to something more than the distraction of politics. The primary answer to the problems that we experience in our Church at the moment must be a deepened dedication to the one thing that matters: that sacrificial love which is at the very heart of the Eucharistic mystery. It is our practice of this love that will finally guide us through the storms.
Our time in history is a fractious experience. Feelings of disillusionment, of anger, of loss are understandable. There may even be thoughts of disengaging with the Church altogether. We need to support one another, to encourage each other, to nourish the faith of one another. We need to continue to be inspired by the lived reality of faith in all our neighbourhoods of grace. As we do, together, though, let us keep going outwards, beyond ourselves, at the service of those in which the Poor Christ await us. Only if we do this, will we find life and hope, and will we recognise the blessing that it is to be part of the Church, so wonderfully complex, such a graced paradox.
With you in my heart and in my prayer especially in the midst of the shadows of our moment,
Fr David Ranson
Diocesan Administrator