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| What does it mean to be a Catholic? |
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 Breda O'Brien, lecturer and columnist for the Irish Times, was the keynote speaker at the Developing Parish Seminar at All Hallows, Dublin in February 2006. We are delighted to be able to make her address available to you. Seamus Dooley of the National Union of Journalists once told me cheerfully that it took a monumental ego to be an opinion columnist. How could anyone possibly believe that they had something of value to say on a wide range of topics, fifty times a year for years on end? I am beginning to believe that it must have required a monumental ego to cheerfully accept an invitation to address the question, "What does it mean to be a Catholic?" That is particularly true, given that every time I raise my eyes I see someone in the audience who knows more about it than I do. However, for what it is worth, here is my take on what it means to be a Catholic in Ireland, including a few side-roads and diversions which are often mistakenly believed to sum up what it means to be a Catholic in Ireland today. Some of what follows may appear, in a favourite word of the teenagers I teach, a bit random, but I hope that it will make sense by the time I am finished. Firstly, I believe that being a Catholic is to be a member of a family, whose members are to be found on every continent, and whose history stretches back generations. It is a family with a difference. It is one that did not come into being in the normal fashion. Despite what Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame would have us believe, the evidence is that the founder was celibate. So already, the ties of blood and bone that bind most families together, are not central to this family. The ties that bind us are of a different nature. They centre around the founder, firstly, and his outrageous claim that he was the Son of God, that he came that people should have life, and have it to the full, and that to achieve that life in all its fullness, it could never be "business as usual" ever again. Instead, our lives would never be settled, because He is an unsettling presence. You never know what he might ask of you. The only consolation is that along with the unsettling comes that miraculous gift, grace. My husband is a U2 fan, and I am indebted to him for drawing the U2 song, Grace, to my attention. I have to sheepishly admit that I had heard it before he made me listen to it properly, and I had thought it was about a girl. That is only one of the reasons that my husband is being fast-tracked to sanctity though being married to me. Anyway, here are some of the lyrics, delivered without the raw passion of Bono's voice or the Edge's guitar. Grace She takes the blame She covers the shame Removes the stain It could be her name Grace It's a name for a girl It's also a thought that changed the world And when she walks on the street You can hear the strings Grace finds goodness in everything Grace, she's got the walk Not on a ramp or on chalk She's got the time to talk She travels outside of karma She travels outside of karma When she goes to work You can hear her strings Grace finds beauty in everything Grace, she carries a world on her hips No champagne flute for her lips No twirls or skips between her fingertips She carries a pearl in perfect condition What once was hurt What once was friction What left a mark No longer stings Because grace makes beauty Out of ugly things Grace makes beauty out of ugly things Music: U2 Lyrics: Bono "Grace makes beauty out of ugly things." "She carries a pearl in perfect condition." She carries the pearl without price, the one thing we were always looking for, and did not know it. She travels outside of karma, the belief found in Eastern religions that every action carries within it the seeds of retribution or reward. In the book, Bono on Bono, which is a long interview conducted by a French journalist, Bono says that he believes that karma is real, not in the sense of leading to reincarnation, which he rejects, but in the sense that actions carry consequences that are spiritual as well as tangible. However, he says that Christ conquers karma. In other words, after Christ, because of his death and resurrection, we do not get what we deserve, but something much better. Being a Catholic means that, as Gerald Manley Hopkins put it, "the world is charged with the glory of God." In other words, God speaks to us through physical things, through bodies, through ocean waves, through skies full of stars, though bread and wine. We are not brains who happen to be transported from place to place by bodies – we experience the world through our bodies, and we need the concrete and the physical to help us experience the intangible. The earth is not ours to destroy, but to wonder at, to be protected, and to be thankful for. Theologians might call that a sacramental sense of reality. Another way of saying it is that Catholicism is an earthy religion, a religion that responds to need wherever it is found. The mystical and the practical are intertwined inextricably with each other. Within our large, rambunctious family are many elder brothers and sisters who have helped us to understand either the mystical or the practical, and perhaps the greatest of them the inseparable link between the two. Brother Lawrence in his kitchen, and later the shoe repair shop; St. Therese in the laundry; Catherine McCauley among the poor and desperate women of Dublin, and St. Francis among the lepers. Each of them shows the unbreakable link between the eternal and the now, between doing small things well and believing that every action has eternal significance. Being a Catholic means having a reverence for the scriptures and a reverence for authority. In a world that believes that the only authority to be respected is that of personal autonomy, Catholics still believe that there is a collective wisdom that should not be lightly ignored. We are not called to invent a new way of believing, but to deepen and enrich what has been given to us. Being a Catholic means not just intellectual assent to beliefs, but giving our hearts, too. We are like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, whose hearts burned within them, as the Christ they did not recognise talked with them. And we are also like those disciples, who finally recognised him in the breaking of the bread, only to have him vanish again. Being a Catholic means having our own hearts touch the infinite heart of God, and to know that the God who created the galaxies is concerned with every hair of our heads. It means that we gather with others at least once a week, to do what Christ asked us to do, to break bread, and in that breaking of bread, to have our eyes opened to Christ, who is both with us and beyond us at the same time. Thus far, most of you are probably in tune with what I am saying, even if my presentation of central Christian beliefs is a expressed a little differently. My seventeen or so years in the classroom leads me to believe that most of you understand what I am talking about, because the vast majority of the audience here is over thirty-five. Most people younger than that, and certainly those who are still in their teens and late twenties, would answer very differently if you asked them what it means to be a Catholic. Skipping over for a moment the negative answers, most of the positive answers would centre around "being nice to people." If you are a Catholic, it means being nice to people. The idea of being a family centred around the outrageous, the unsettling, the puzzling, the endlessly fascinating figure of Christ would be met with mild embarrassment on behalf of the teacher who has gone even further off the deep end than usual. Believe me. I know. I am very familiar with such responses! Why is there such a vast cultural divide? Perhaps it is because for some forty years, we have been living off accumulated capital, without replenishing it. Our young people do not know the story of the founder, much less of all those elder brothers and sisters in the faith, and perhaps more importantly, their hearts have not been touched. By heart I do not mean a shallow kind of emotionalism, but the heart in the sense that of the mystics and poets – as Yeats put it, the "deep heart's core." Being slightly tongue-in cheek for a moment, sometimes I think that for a lot of people in their teens and twenties, the world is flat, and they believe if you go back further than say, 1990, you will fall off the edge of the world. Many of them seem to have been afflicted with cultural amnesia. It is not just in the area of religion. It is everywhere. However, it is particularly strong in the area of religion. I belong to a generation of catechists who are due to have a book dedicated to us any day now. It will be called The Book of Heroic Failures – The Catechists. Or perhaps I should speak for myself. It may be a slim volume, dedicated only to me. We thought we could redress the massive religious indifference in our culture through our work in the classroom. Bishop Donal Murray put it brilliantly once. He said that religious knowledge has become like Latin irregular verbs were say, thirty years ago. You learned them, and went away for a summer holiday where you never used them and they had no relevance to your life, and came back in September, and it was as if you had never learned them in the first place. Actually, I think irregular verbs in Latin had a higher retention rate than religious knowledge has nowadays. I don't think we are too far away from the situation in a British school two years ago, when a teacher was trying to explain Christmas to a class of children around eight who did not have a clue about the Christian story. She was going along fine until she came to the part where Mary and Joseph called their son Jesus. One child, genuinely horrified, asked why any mother would call her child after a curse word. I heard a home grown version of that from a fellow catechist, who was showing the film, Jesus of Nazareth to her class coming up to Easter. One of her class turned around to her, very angry, and said accusingly, "You never told us he died at the end!" You could call it a disaster, or a teaching moment never to be surpassed, but I suppose those of you who have tread the boards of a classroom would know, that your response would depend on how many classes you had had that day. In a recent pastoral letter, the bishops said that faith is best nurtured when the home, parish and school work together in partnership. That is true, but it is a rare combination nowadays. All schools can do is reinforce what is found in the home. Conversions due to the example or exhortations of teachers are rare. Homes as sources of faith shrivel up if they are not sustained by connections to the wider world, first and perhaps most importantly at the local level. You cannot go to God alone. Catholicism is not a religion of personal enlightenment, but one where the personal interweaves with the communal, in a kind of seamless garment. We have relied so much on the school, that we are at a bit of a loss when the whole Catholic school idea becomes a centre of debate and controversy. We have the INTO on the one hand suggesting that sacramental preparation be taken out of schools, and on the other hand, politicians from the Left and the Right suggesting that churches should get out of education and leave it all to the state. That is why these two days you are spending here, looking at parish renewal, are so vitat. Homes are where faith is "caught", and that "catching" is fatally weakened unless it is reinforced by a living, vibrant group outside your family for whom it is also equally important. For most people in Ireland, parish will be that community. Could you find many parishes that fit that description? Perhaps more than you might think, but only if you know where to look. Despite the injunction not to do so, Catholics seem to specialise in hiding their lights under a bushel. I often daydream about an Internet Web portal where you could access information about successful parish initiatives, complete with contact numbers and email addresses. Why not have a Catholic parenting website, where you could access with equal ease a web page about the mystery rash that has just appeared on a child's back, and a web page with suggestions about what to do when your six year old tells you that mass is boring, and she is not going to go. It used to be sixteen year olds, didn't it? The personal record in my house among my children is held by one who marched up the centre aisle of the church at the age of three, chanting "Mass is rubbish. Mass is rubbish." Meanwhile, all around you could see thought bubbles popping up above people's heads, that read, "I blame the parents." Which brings me to another point. The Mass must be the greatest gift that Catholics have, and yet a lot of the time there is no energy there, no joy. Those wondering about renewing Catholicism could begin by renewing the liturgy, by building on the habits that Irish Catholics still have of attending mass. Certainly there are areas where attendance is as low as 7-10%, but in many areas, even in urban areas, it is as high as 65%. Why not feed the people who make the effort to get to Mass? That is particularly true of those with young children, who often wonder why they made the effort to get there in the first place. There are so many models around the country of successful initiatives for family masses. They include everything from withdrawing the children for the liturgy of the word, to involving children in everything from the readings to the offertory, to offering a cup of tea after mass for people to feel some sense of community. Parishes need to be welcoming places, and the welcome must also extend to those who still faithfully attend. It should not end there, of course, but extend out to newcomers, like the Poles, Philippinos and Nigerians who now come to our churches, and extend still further to those who almost never come. It must extend, as it naturally does, to where ever there is need, whether that be in our own communities or one of the many disasters that seem to hit the developing world in with appalling regularity. It means helping people to see the world as one. Catholic, after all, means universal. The primary problem facing most of us today is fragmentation, too many demands on our lives that leave us simultaneously feeling stressed and bored, alienated and half-demented. Catholicism has so much to offer: a unified vision of life, in which everything, from taking a shower in the morning to visiting an elderly neighbour, has significance, and potentially shows us the way to God. A unified heart has the unexpected bonus of also being a heart that withstands stress better. We see a world where people are trying everything from yoga to Buddhist meditation as part of a search for meaning. When, exactly, did we lose confidence in Catholic ways to find meaning? When, exactly, did we start feeling slightly foolish about mentioning casually something we heard at Mass, or offering to pray for someone? One thing I am certain of: it began long before the current crop of scandals. It was long before the Celtic Tiger. It may have had a lot to do with the confusion following Vatican Two, but I think it pre-dates even that. Irish Catholicism had a lot of strengths, but one of the unfortunate side-effects of our extraordinarily high number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, was that religion was seen as something which was primarily the business of experts, not for the vast majority of us. There was as much stigma attached to being a Holy Joe or Joanna in the 1950s as there is today, and the adjective "priesteen" meaning a lay person who acted like a miniature priest was not invented in the era of the Celtic Tiger. One of the great strengths that grew out of Vatican Two, was the idea that faith and belief were matters, not just for religious professionals, but for everyone. It was an idea which had been there for centuries, but which had been lost to some extent. There might have been a lot of talk about the importance of families, but there was a highly under-developed theology of family. Reading works written about family from, say thirty years ago, you often find an idealised vision of family that never existed anywhere, which was bound to make people feel like failures before they started. Celibacy is a strength in our tradition, but one that it extraordinarily difficult to live, and one that is not supported adequately, given the challenge that it presents. ( By the way, I have yet to read an article suggesting the Dalai Lama is leading an unhealthy, repressed lifestyle, and he is celibate. Nor have I read very much speculation by the average journalist about how a non-celibate priesthood would handle marital breakdown. That is just an aside. ) There are drawbacks to a focus on celibate ministry, and one of them is that it does not come naturally to most celibates to think of families when they think about spiritual renewal. Yet if families, in all their varieties, are not strong, there is little hope of strong parishes, and schools will be at their wits' end trying to fill the gaps. If you look at the strong possibility that a young teacher today is two generations away from any kind of clear Catholic identity or formation, and yet he or she is supposed to help form kids in a Catholic identity, you can see that with the best will in the world, and there is plenty of goodwill out there, that helping children mature in faith is not going to be easy. The most recent INTO survey that I am aware of, showed that 60% of primary teachers are willing to undertake religious education. That does not mean that they are adequately equipped to do so. That is not to undermine the wonderful work done by teachers, or the excellent formation that they receive in training, by the way. It is simply to state that it is difficult to give other people a profound sense of God, of belief, of heart-changing knowledge if the person attempting to transmit belief, has grown up without such an environment him or herself. Kevin Williams, in his new book , Faith and the Nation, quotes Mary McCarthy, who though she eventually thought of herself as agnostic, was still grateful for her Catholic formation. She believed it was of far less value to study theology in order to understand, for example, metaphysical poets, because that did not "stick to the ribs" the way a Catholic formation did. She claimed that most American students have no other recourse than to take these vitamin injections to make good the cultural deficiency. The kind of faith that "sticks to the ribs" is found first in families, who are connected to each other in parishes or communities, and it is reinforced in schools. As I said before, schools cannot shoulder the burden alone, and it is amply clear that they cannot be expected to do so. They are already expected to do too much, with insufficient back up. One very clear sign of hope that I have seen in recent times, is the use of Mass as a base for other initiatives, notably, the "Do this in memory of me" programme of preparation for first Holy communion. Adult education is important, but it will remain the province of the few, not matter how much somewhere like All Hallows thrives. You can run a course for thirty people, or you can utilise the opportunity presented by still having hundreds of people attend Mass. I was fascinated to see a proposal to emerge from the last Synod of Bishops, that the link between catechesis and liturgy be strengthened. The document issued by the Synod contains fifty propositions. Among them is a practical suggestion to draw up a series of themes for the homilies, related to the readings, to cover the Creed, Sacraments, Commandments and the Our Father. (No19). Other initiatives could also be tied to the Liturgy. One which I have floated before is the idea of the ten-minute task, during the seasons of Lent and Advent. Families could be encouraged to do a ten-minute task together every week. Such tasks could range from praying together, to having a simpler meal than usual and donating the difference in money saved, to visiting a church. There could be a special emphasis on reaching out to those who live alone, and on the sick and elderly. A sense of solidarity can be could be fostered by the realisation that there were lots of people, all trying to mark these seasons by doing something slightly different to the everyday. You may wonder how I have got this far in the talk without once mentioning media, given that I make my living at least in part in writing for a newspaper. Well, to be quite honest, I think we probably pay too much attention of the wrong kind to the media, and too little of the right kind. The media are not an invention of the devil: they are not huddled together in corners plotting the overthrow of the Catholic Church. They simply have a different agenda, and anything smacking of the mystical or the transcendent frightens them into fits, unless it is sufficiently sensational to interest the tabloids, like bleeding statues or a visionary being silenced by an irritated bishop. Scepticism is the calling card of the journalist, and he or she sees it as no part of the task to endorse faith-based interpretations of the world without rigorous interrogation. E. J. Dionne, a Catholic columnist for the Washington Post, referred somewhat humorously to probable reaction of a journalist to the resurrection. "Have you got two independent sources for that claim? Has anyone interviewed the guards who were at the tomb? Find me a disciple who is willing to say that the whole thing was faked." Dionne suggested that St. Thomas would make an excellent patron saint for journalists. In fact, as many of you probably know, it is St. Francis de Sales. The media can certainly be unbalanced. I personally abhor RTE's latest tactic of headlining the news with priests who have had to step aside from ministry at a stage when allegations are still unproven. However, I think that they provided a valuable service in bringing the issue of clerical abuse of children to public attention. Also, I would like to make it clear that I support fully the idea that anyone making an allegation is entitled to a full investigation, and that a person in ministry should step aside. All I would ask is that the process, which currently lasts at least two years, could be concluded more speedily, particularly in the case of allegations where a person has falsely accused others before. In no way would I wish to undermine the right of an abused person to be heard, but a balance must be struck. To return to the media, personally, I think we worry too much about them. It often strikes me that people want the media to like the church, say nice things about it, even promote its agenda. There is no chance of that ever happening. Except, of course, by oddities by myself, who have "Opinion and analysis" above our by-lines. ( I am quite proud of the fact that someone once commented that I must have the least hidden agenda in the country, that a person would have to be a moron not to see my agenda screaming at them!) The most we can expect from the media is fairness, and if we don't get that, we should protest and then move on. The real action is elsewhere, and if we get our real, core mission right, to be honest, it won't matter a whit what the media think. That is not to minimise the real damage done to individuals by irresponsible reporting. The major damage done to the church by the media is to reduce its esteem in the public eye, to question its integrity in every area, not just in the handling of sexual abuse. Some individuals have been greatly harmed by that, but most of us have not been harmed to that degree, either by the media or other opinion-formers in our society. We just have to put up with what I call "persecution by raised eyebrow", a kind of supercilious disbelief that anyone with a trace of modernity, much less post-modernity, could still be a Catholic. When you compare it to persecution by torture, or even death, a fate that still befalls many Catholics in countries such as China where people are imprisoned for their beliefs, it does not exactly compare, does it? Being Catholic does not mean winning popularity contests. Nor does it mean seeking to be unpopular. It just means doing your level best, that if you have to be unpopular, that it is for the right reasons, because you espouse the cause of the poor and oppressed, whether that be the child in the womb or the asylum-seeker, or the immigrant worker exploited and denied a minimum wage. The time for moaning is over, for whinging about the media, or the indifference of the young. The amazing thing about Catholicism is that just when you think it is dead, that suddenly you see flames spring to life on a distant hill. Those of us for whom it still makes sense, indeed, those of us who believe that it makes sense of our lives, need to deepen and renew our own faith, and our links with the faith community. We need to support each other. We need to educate ourselves and to pray our socks off , and teach others to pray. We need to aspire to a time where people are attracted to us for the same reason they were attracted to the early Christians. "See how they love one another". Instead of worrying about editorials or documentary makers, let's start applying that test. "See how they love one another." See how different they are. What on earth, or in heaven, motivates them? With apologies to Jimmy Rabbitte of the Commitments, there may even come a time when Irish people are willing to proclaim, "Say it once and say it loud, I'm Catholic and I'm proud." That means spending a little less time worrying about various kinds of orthodoxy. Bernard Lonergan put it well. "There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous centre, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait"(Bernard Lonergan, S.J, .Dimensions of Meaning). Ultimately, the liberal who scares the wits out of me by her seeming desire to throw out everything from the divinity of Christ to the real presence in the Eucharist, and the conservative who scares the wits out of me by seeming to believe that God embalmed faith in amber sometime around 1950 and there is no need for anything new ever to evolve, and the fact that I scare the wits out of both of them, is not so awful, if we can all be struck to silence by kneeling in front of a baby lying on straw in a stable, or by the Paschal flame lit on Easter morning. Certainly, we need orthodoxy, but an open-hearted orthodoxy, with room for growth and change. However, the words "deckchair' and "Titanic" do come to mind when I see Catholics fighting each other, at a time when there are young people who know nothing of Christ. I really believe that the time for whinging is over. In the Lord of the Rings, when Frodo complains of living in an evil, burdensome time, Gandalf replies: "So do I…and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." Instead of say, complaining that the young are un-churched, let us be grateful that they are also carrying less negative baggage, and that they are astonished when they glimpse the demands of being a Christian. Certainly, fewer of them will make a commitment to faith, but those that do are of a very high calibre. Finally, a slightly tongue in cheek suggestion. We need to dialogue with those who think the church is an irrelevance, or not to be trusted. Perhaps All Hallows could begin with inviting Liz O'Donnell for tea? She is a smart woman, and I would pay her the compliment of being open to the possibility that the church she is so angry at, is only one facet of a far deeper and richer reality which she may not be fully in contact with. It beats whinging, anyway! |
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