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Last July, the Taoiseach spoke in the Dail at length about the Church in the wake of new revelations in a diocese here. He accused the Vatican of undue interference in Irish affairs. Following this watershed moment, the Minister for Foreign Affairs closed the residence of the Irish Ambassador to the Holy See. He claimed that it was for financial reasons, although it later transpired that the saving would amount to just over €700k per annum which doesn't seem to stack up as a good reason.
Having said all that, if the closing of the Ambassador's residence was genuinely for financial reasons, then I would accept it. However, I don't believe that it was for financial reasons that it was closed. I believe that it was closed because it was politically expedient to do so. We may not be Soviet Russia where people were murdered by the ruling elites for political expediency, but what is happening to the Church here is a form of politicide.
It is politicide because the Church has held political power in three ways: in the areas of health, of education and of sexual morality. We have lost our moral authority to speak on sexual morality. This was the first step in the politicide of the Church, although here the greatest wounds were self-inflicted by means of the abuse crisis. Now the continuing annihilation of the Church in the political, cultural and social life of Ireland has created a power vacumn where the Church once stood strong. The focus of the current politicide of the Church has now shifted to the eradication of the Church from the area of education and it will gradually focus on the removal of Church influence in our health system.
Meanwhile, since the mid-1960s the institutional Church has been greatly depleted by rapidly falling vocations, not to mention the number of clergy and religious who have left ministry and/or religious life. So, to use an analogy of the military, the standing army that the bishops and superiors once stood as Generals of, no longer exists. What remains is a skeleton crew, taking turns at keeping watch, hoping against hope that the cavalry will come riding over the hill to relieve the situation.
So, here we are. What are we to do? We don't have enough 'troops' to fight off those who are stripping us of our power, although this is not stopping us from trying to use lay-people in this way. They are, understandably, wary of being ushered into the trenches where certain annihilation appears to be just over the next parapet. To stand and fight appears to be the only option because there is nowhere for us to fly to.
I think that it is important to tell the story like this, because that is what it feels like to be a priest or a Catholic in Ireland today. At times it feels like being hung, drawn and quartered, but of course, not physically but rather emotionally and therefore spiritually. And so we do not know where we are. Has our God abandoned us to the wolves? Where is the Chief Pastor, the one who promised to be there with us, to protect us? For faithful and committed Catholics it can feel as though God and Church have abandoned them.
So, how are we to chart a course forward? We have only a sketchy map and instruments that we have not used for generations. These are the ancient ways. They are to be found in the Gospels, in the letters of St Paul and in the Acts of the Apostles. They, in turn, draw deeply on the Scriptures of what we call the Old Testament. First and foremost in this is that the Christian Way leads all of us, at some time or other, to the Cross. And second is that no person has ever volunteered for the Cross. Even the Lord himself, we are told, struggled with the prospect of what was ahead of him, and sweated blood.
So, we have to be ready to sweat blood also. This means that when we contemplate what the future holds for us, we have to be real about it. Being a Christian can be a very painful experience. There is no point to hiding that from ourselves. So, if we are looking for virtual religion, then we are in the wrong place. What happened to Jesus can, does and will happen to us.
This is one of the key weaknesses of our Church today. We operate in the world as if the Cross never happened. We are surprised and 'saddened' when the world moves in a way that is not in-keeping with the Church's beliefs. And yet, from the ancient ways we know that all of this has happened before. None of it is new.
What should be the focus of the Church's mission now? For many years the focus has been on upholding the Church's total power in the areas of health, education and sexual morality. And, it is good to be clear about this, the Church did hold almost total power in these areas. So, I think we have to at least propose that it is not such a good thing to hold total control over any area of public life. A brief look at any authoritarian or totalitarian political system gives good reason for this. That there are other viewpoints and perspectives in the world challenges us to understand ourselves more and more.
An example of this is that up until the present time in the field of education, Catholic ethos was not articulated, but was simply presumed. This created a situation where the majority of schools were Catholic in name but not clearly in identity. So, there is already some good coming out of the current moves by the State to propose change in the patronage of schools. And, already some parents are beginning to articulate their desire to have their children educated in a specifically Catholic school. This is good. It gives freedom of expression to schools that are Catholic to be explicitly Catholic in their identity, outlook and ethos.
So, what we should be convinced of now is that the Church's total power in any area is not a good thing. It breeds complacency and commands the resources of the Church to uphold a false total structure. As that 'totality' is usurped we are coming to realise that now the Church can choose the mission it wants to focus on. And that mission is surely the one that Christ entrusted to those whom he had gathered around him. It is the mission of evangelisation.
Evangelisation comes from the greek word for the good news: "evangelion". So, to be evangelised means to be "gospelified". It means to be completely immersed in the gospel. In an ideal world evangelisation would come before the ritual and sacramental baptism where we are literally immersed in water. We were all sacramentally baptised and initiated into the Way of Christ. The question is: were we all sufficiently evangelised beforehand? I wasn't, mostly because I was baptised as an infant. So, we don't live in an ideal world. We live in the real world. So, here in the real world, sometimes the cart does go before the horse, and sometimes, perhaps most of the time, our evangelisation occurs after baptism. Indeed, it often occurs after we have been baptised, confirmed, received holy Communion and the Sacrament of Penance, maybe even been married or ordained as a priest!
So, we must be careful that we do not evangelise people into contaminated water. The water that we use to baptise people symbolises both the death and the resurrection of Christ. We are to be baptised into Christ. We must be clear that at one and the same time as we were baptised into Christ, we were baptised into his Body, the Church. There is no gap between these two. We cannot be baptised in Christ, and not be baptised into the Church. Similarly, our evangelisation draws us deeper into the love of God, and also into love of his Body, the Church. While the water of Christ is pure, the water of the Church can be impure and contaminated. This is the human side of the divine institution that the Church is, and it was so from the very beginning. If we briefly consider Judas' betraying role in the story of Jesus' life, then we know how our human weakness very often determines the direction the Church takes. And also, the Church at times can be contaminated with the desire for power, which the Lord specifically condemns in Matthew's Gospel:
Jesus called them together and said, You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Matthew 20:25-28)These are just a couple of examples of what can distort Christ's mission in the world. Each one of us must be aware of ourselves. Do we perceive that the Church is under attack, and therefore must be defended at all costs? Or, do we recognise the call to journey to the Cross that is at the heart of the Christian journey of life, not forgetting that the Cross leads to the Resurrection?
This Sunday we celebrate the Solemnity of Pentecost, which is the time when we commemorate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles and to the Church. What is the Holy Spirit? There are some stock answers: the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the creator Spirit that we read about in the book of Genesis:
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:2)I think, however, that on the feast of Pentecost we are celebrating the Spirit of Christ, which is at the same time the creator Spirit of the Old Testament and the third person of the revealed Holy Trinity. I say this because the gospel for the Vigil of Pentecost reads:
He [Jesus] was speaking of the Spirit which those who believed in him were to receive; for there was no Spirit as yet because Jesus had not yet been glorified. (John 7:39)
To say that there was "no Spirit as yet" means to say that Christ's Spirit had not yet passed to his adopted brothers and sisters. They were not yet imbued with his Spirit. So, as Christians, compared to all other non-Christian peoples, we are promised to be imbued not simply with a vague "Holy Spirit", but rather the Holy Spirit of Christ – the Spirit that through him, through his life on this earth, we came to be part of. It was that Holy Spirit which came upon Mary enabling her to conceive the child Jesus; that same Spirit that awoke in Elizabeth when John jumped in her womb as Mary greeted her. And yet, there is some characteristic difference for all of us who follow on after Jesus walked on this earth. And this is the Spirit of Christ that we are exposed to, for it is through Christ, through Jesus that we are gifted with the Holy Spirit. Christ is the lens through which we encounter the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit of Christ is also in some sense Christ's soul – it is that which animated him while he was on the earth. And in giving his own Spirit to the Church, Christ imbues each one of us with his own self. And it seems that not one of us gets exactly the same bit of that Spirit – some of us are beautiful singers and musicians, some of us are teachers and preachers, others are involved in ministry to priests and to the liturgy, more of us are making discoveries every day about who we are and what we are called to be and do in the Church and in our world.
So, in short then, as people of faith we are called to be converted and converted and converted, over and over again. That is to say that we are to be immersed in Christ, which is to be evangelised or gospelified over and over again. Our sacramental baptism and our sacramental confirmation are not ends in themselves but rather are beginnings. And, like an inspirational song, we have to tune in all the time to that one true Spirit that Jesus promises us. It is his Spirit. And it is to be found in Scripture, in the Sacraments, in the Church understood as the gathered people of God, in other people, in people that we minister to, and in people that minister to us. The Spirit of Christ is real, perhaps it is the most real experience we ever have in life – the most true experience that we ever have in life. And Christ's Spirit is with us always, we simply have to open our eyes and ears, reach out and touch other people, pray, sing, be gospelified, evangelised, converted, whatever you want to call it. And Christ's Spirit always draws us together – gathers us into the "ekklesia", the great gathering unto Christ that the Church actually is.
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