Category Archives: Leadership

This Must Not Happen!

Abuse of Power, Accusation, Articles, Bishops, Christology, Clericalism, Courage, Kingdom of God, Leadership, Renewal, Satan, Scandal, Secrecy, Sexual Abuse

And yet it must…
~*~

Peter tells Jesus he is a Sinner

How the Easter story explains the continuing inability of Catholic bishops to be fully transparent about the cover up of clerical abuse of children.

First drafted in 2020 – on the brink of the coronavirus pandemic – this summary of my own understanding of what scripture is telling us about God’s reason for the Crucifixion of Jesus is now re-edited and published in 2024.

On the way to Jerusalem Peter the apostle proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, the great promised leader of the Jews, and the Son of God.

He was stunned when Jesus then told him that he expected to be crucified in Jerusalem – the cruel punishment meted out by Rome to intimidate and shame rebellious slaves.

Then, taking Jesus aside, Peter started to rebuke him. ‘Heaven preserve you, Lord,’ he said, ‘this must not happen to you.‘
(Matt 16:22)

This advice was itself instantly rejected by Jesus in the strongest possible terms:

‘Get behind me, Satan!’
(Matt 16: 22,23)

• Q1. Do we understand fully why Peter was appalled by the prospect Jesus had just unfolded – of his own crucifixion?
• Q2. Secondly, can we grasp why Jesus responded to Peter as he did – identifying the first person to call him ‘Son of God’ with the personification of all evil – ‘Satan’?


Believing that this passage in the Gospel is pivotal in helping us to understand the complex predicament of the Church at this time, I offer here a summary of the argument.

Q1. Why was Peter so anxious to persuade Jesus to turn away from Crucifixion?

That Peter was intent on saving Jesus from physical torture and death on the cross, and that Jesus was convinced that he must suffer that fate, is a familiar understanding of the passage.

Consider also, however, the probability that Peter was horrified on his own behalf.

Moments earlier Peter had proclaimed Jesus to be the son of God – the God who was bound by covenant to the cause of the salvation of Israel. For Peter that must surely involve freedom for the people of Israel, as we still tend to understand freedom – the expulsion of the hated occupying Roman legions and their flaunted eagle battle standards, the defeat of all Jewish collaborators with Rome (such as King Herod) and the recreation of the independent Kingdom of Israel.

The inexplicable disaster foreseen instead by Jesus – Rome’s humiliation of yet another Jewish rebel by crucifixion – would surely also now mean Peter’s own climactic public failure and disgrace.

Peter had not signed up for that.

Is Physical Suffering Our Greatest Fear?

By a process that is mysterious, the Gospel story has come to be read as though only physical suffering could have been at stake in crucifixion. Always unremarked is the human emotional dimension within which all high enterprises are conceived and evaluated – our acute worry about ‘what people will think’ – if, on the one hand things go well or, on the other, they do the very opposite.

To proclaim Jesus as Son of God was to bind oneself to the full consequences of ‘what people would think’ if this story was to end as Jesus had foretold – that Jesus was just another crazy ‘loser’, shamed and obliterated by Rome, and that Peter had been crazier still to follow him.

What About Shame?

This dramatic context of all vital decision-making is the never-absent issue of honour and shame. We ignore this dimension at our peril if we suppose it to be unimportant in the interpretation of scripture. Fear of shame is fear of ‘what everyone will think’ if something shameful happens to us. Aware that a multitude of others – gazing – will judge and jeer at us, we fear their scorn and contempt.

And crucifixion was designed by the rulers of Rome to be the most shameful possible death.

That Peter is constantly aware of this dimension is also revealed in that passage from the Gospel of Matthew. Those three words ‘taking him aside’ alert us to Peter’s realisation that to question Jesus’s judgement in the hearing of the rest of his closest followers would be to diminish him in the eyes of others, and that his own role should be that of respectful and unobtrusive adviser.

Peter obviously hopes that if he first takes Jesus aside this great leader – who has attracted the poorest in Galilee for his compassion and wisdom, and worked miracles to strengthen their faith – will rethink his dire prediction of crucifixion and announce a change of plan.

Must Not Jesus be Greater than David?

Peter must surely have thought that this Messiah could easily call on the wisdom and almighty power of the God of Israel – the power that – according to the Jewish scriptures – had drowned the entire army of Egypt, had helped Gideon to triumph over the Midianites with just three hundred men, and had guided the aim of David’s sling when faced with the giant Goliath.

Surely Jesus was simply testing his followers’ understanding of this history, and would appreciate Peter’s tactful hinting at it?

Obviously much more could be said on this by those with a more detailed understanding of what Peter’s own experience of Roman occupation could have been – including the Roman taxes that crippled people of his social class. For now I want to reflect on the rule that guides the plots of all superhero movies still today. How many would turn up to watch their chosen hero finally stripped naked, beaten flat and humiliated by his most terrifying adversary?

This must not happen!

Q2. Why did Jesus reject Peter’s advice so vehemently, and identify this very first person to recognise his stature in God’s eyes, with Satan – the source and instigator of all evil?

Most of us can have a shot at this question, I suspect, based upon the theological understanding that informed our own early education, an understanding shaped by St Anselm of Canterbury in the 1090s CE1Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm of Canterbury, c.1098 CE. Jesus had to undergo crucifixion to undo the huge offence to his Father given by all of the sins of us humans throughout the past, present and future – because our own sufferings are insufficient to repay this enormous debt.

According to this theory, in trying to persuade Jesus to avoid crucifixion, Peter was unknowingly standing in the way of God’s forgiveness, and so serving Satan – the malignant power intent on frustrating God’s plan from the very beginning.

This understanding, first put into words by St Anselm of Canterbury c. 1098 CE, and still repeated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church2 Catechism of the Catholic Church 1994, Article 615 can certainly be presented in a way that does some justice to the compassion and mercy of God.

Was God the Father Dissatisfied?

However, in my experience, it can also mislead us into thinking that the Father whom Jesus called Abba is a distant and disapproving parent, more concerned about his own dignity than to affirm the dignity of every single one of us, right now.

If we think of God the father as self-absorbed rather than bent upon releasing us from the power of evil right now, this is not the best of Good News – the news that the Kingdom of Heaven is still at hand for all of us, in this present moment.

Before even trying to make sense of St Anselm’s answer we must first of all remember what Jesus said: ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14: 9) and… ‘the Father and I are one’ (John 10: 30), and ‘Anyone who loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home in him’. (John 14: 23)

The Father is Always Close

Any explanation of the crucifixion that separates God our Father from our brother Jesus who comes to us in our deepest pain, falls short of the Gospel. Led in by Jesus, the Trinity wait even now to make their home within us, if that is our dearest wish.

Moreover, to every one of us they offer a role in making themselves known, as family, to those who need them most. They wish to free all of us from the fear that we have lost that love, or could lose it. It is an urgent desire, because no one just now should be without a sense of the Father’s nearness, compassion and presence – or of their own importance in the story now unfolding.

We need above all to try to understand why we doubt our own value, and then tend to look in the wrong place for self-respect. And how scripture – the Old and New Testaments – is always the guide to home.

Where do doubt and shame come from?

Two stories from the Old Testament help greatly here.

I. Genesis and the Roots of Shame

‘Who told you that you were naked?’ the Lord asked. (Gen 3: 11)

Straight away what Christians came to call ‘original sin’ is linked in the Genesis allegory with sensitivity to shaming, to possible ridicule and loss of both the respect of any observer and then of self-respect also.

The storyteller is suggesting that earlier, in Paradise, Eve had not known shame, but somehow the idea has come to her that there is something wrong with her. She should not be just a ‘creature’, something ‘made’ by God, the maker of all things. She should be ‘like Gods’ – equal to God. She is held back, some voice has assured her, only by her obedience to God’s ban on the ‘forbidden fruit’.

Notice how close that is to the pitch of any car salesman when you have just turned up for a service and find yourself looking at the latest gleaming apparition from the design studios:

“Great choice, that model, Sir, the xf469. Heganu designed it to help them figure out the optimal settings for the dynamic twosome in the boggle transcender that gives the next model – the xf475 – 50% more power for 20% less fuel. You probably weren’t aware of that, so no matter – very few people would notice the difference. Funny, though, one of those xf475s came in this morning – just to show a very excited customer later today… You wouldn’t believe the inertial dampers!”

Our biggest human problem down the ages has been our uncertainty about our own value and judgement, our chronic fear that we are insufficient as we are – our status anxiety. It always tells us that we lack something important, and to want whatever that is.

Eve could not have been influenced by this voice if she had not already been vulnerable in her self-esteem, and ready to believe that she needed something she did not already have.

This is our ‘original weakness’, and – as we are human – it never completely leaves us.

Self-Consciousness – the Source of Status Anxiety

How could we not be uncertain, coming to a uniquely human kind of consciousness at the dawn of time, tiny beings under the great dome of the stars, in a world that we ourselves have not made?

We call this vulnerability to shame ‘self-consciousness’, but it is not merely ‘consciousness of self’. It is our problematic awareness that others are aware of us – and our fear of the value judgements they will make about us.

Moreover, are we not surrounded from our birth by really important people whom many admire, while nobody is interested in us because we are nobodies? What must we do to become a somebody?

In the ancient world the greatest of all somebodies were the Gods. There just had to be far more powerful beings in charge of everything out there. Who wouldn’t want to be one of them?

That’s why we humans tend to be wannabes – until we discover that this is a serious mistake – that from the beginning nobody was a nobody.

Notice that this passage in Genesis is also insisting that our ‘maker’ is not the one who told Adam and Eve they were nobodies, by pointing in scorn at their nakedness. We have all been made, the text tells us, in God’s own image and He has already blessed us, naked.

Satan the Source of Our Status Anxiety

This passage in Genesis is clear also on where our doubt about our own value comes from – not God, the source of all that is good, but Satan, the serpent, the source of all evil.

In saying ‘This must not Happen‘ – to Jesus – Peter is giving voice to the power that evokes fear of the judgement of others, the power that had also overwhelmed the greatest of Israel’s kings.

II. King David of Israel

“You have worked in secret, but I shall work this for all Israel to see, in broad daylight.”

This, delivered by the prophet Nathan, is God’s warning to King David, following the latter’s seduction of Bathsheba and his underhanded murder of her husband, Uriah – to avoid the scandal of Bathsheba’s pregnancy. (2 Samuel 11 & 12).

Far from denying this charge, David admits at once to grave sin. In doing so this heroic defender of Israel against the Philistine giant Goliath confesses to surrender to an even greater terror – his fear of shame – of ‘what people would think’ if they came to hear the full story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah.

That scene has been set in the account of David’s earlier triumphant return from the victory over the Philistines, when the women of Israel sang: ”Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands”. (1 Samuel 18: 7)

This is the role of ‘fame’, ‘celebrity’, or ‘status’ in ramping up our fear of shame. Acclaim by a multitude, by the crowd, will inevitably turn to disgust on the part of that same multitude if David does not hide his disgraceful behaviour! It is his horror at this prospect that entraps David into something far worse than adultery.

That David – Israel’s greatest hero king – could not overcome his fear of shame is central to the story. So is the implication that it is Satan who ‘enters in’ to exploit that very fear: David’s attempt to hide his disgraceful behaviour is the equivalent of the ‘covering up’ to avoid shame by the first humans in Genesis. It had been Satan, not the God of Genesis, who had precipitated the problem of shame.

And that is why Jesus saw Peter as ‘channelling’ Satan when the former said ‘this must not happen’ on the road to Jerusalem. Faced with the prospect of crucifixion – of what would be seen as total failure and disgrace – and assured by Peter that he must not accept this denouement, he responds with:

‘Get behind me Satan!’

Satan Enters In

Why call Peter ‘Satan’?

Because, obedient to the Father and the Holy Spirit, it is Jesus’ intention to overthrow the power of Satan, the ‘prince of this world’, the power to shame us. Peter does not know that he is simply repeating a human pattern of behaviour – the pattern that had overwhelmed David also – of giving in to fear of shame.

Peter is doing what David had done and what almost everybody does when faced with the possibility of public disgrace. He gives in to the fear of total condemnation and of the shaming that crucifixion symbolised for every subject people in the empire. Peter is sure that at all costs it must not be Jesus who is shamed. Someone else must suffer that fate – those opposing him – but Jesus knows that this is why violence almost always begets violence, and he and the Father are bent on teaching us this.

For Jesus and the Father there was no other way of taking all of us, as quickly as possible, to the realisation that it is those who do the shaming who are always in the wrong – and that no one can truly shame those who are innocent. By rejecting his offer of the kingdom of God they have proven to Jesus, and the Father, that the limits of human power must now be revealed.

What Easter Means – the Overcoming of the World

Here we can see why the event commemorated by Christians at Easter – Jesus’s determination not to be overwhelmed by fear of shame, and to submit, forgivingly, to the worst that we humans can physically do to one another, was the pivotal moment in human history. (John 16:33)

Reflect right now on your own uncertainty. If you are unsure of your own judgement, have you any good reason to rely on the judgement of others – especially when those others can see only what you see – appearances – and know nothing about your inner self?

This is to know that the judgement of the world – of the multitude we mistakenly tend to look to for reassurance of our own value, for ‘fame’ – is totally unreliable and can never be trusted to pass a true verdict on ourselves.

At its worst it can lynch us, simply because in its blind anger and fear it often needs someone to blame and punish. Worse still, if we can find no reassurance from others that we have some worth, we may turn against ourselves, fatally.

To know why Jesus reprimanded Peter is to know also why the world can never shame you, or anyone else, in God’s eyes and in truth.

Jesus is Greater than David

Certainly Jesus knew that even Israel’s greatest hero king – David – had been defeated and disgraced by the temptation to let someone else die so that he, the Great King David, could avoid shame. He knew also that the first murder story told in the Jewish scriptures was of a competition between two brothers, Cain and Abel, for greater favour in the eyes of God. And he also knew that this theme of competition or rivalry between two men who want the same prize, leading to conflict between them, was an ever repeating pattern in the recorded history of his own people.

Jesus also knew well that the Roman Empire that held his own land captive had arisen from the same process of rivalry, beginning with Roman envy of the Greek hero Alexander the Great and followed by warlord rivalries and civil war under the Roman Republic. The assassination of Julius Caesar in BCE 44 had been caused by the same resentment of Caesar’s dictatorial power and was followed by the expansion of the Roman Empire by Caesar’s heir, Augustus, and his successors – the very tyranny that was holding Jesus’s own people, the Jews in captivity in his own time.

Who Satan Is

Satan is history’s name for the fear that can grip any of us, and can grip a multitude simultaneously, if we are in danger of being shamed by the dramatic crises of our own lives – scorned, derided and pushed out into the dark.

Especially vulnerable is anyone who has both an elevated position in society – and knowledge of any secret that could bring disgrace.

The Predicament of Catholic Bishops in the 1900s

Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, c. 2003

That was precisely the predicament of all bishops of the Catholic Church in the late 1900s CE. Once inducted into that office every bishop soon learned that among his most important duties was the keeping of a secret that had been kept for generations: solemn ordination to the priesthood had not prevented a significant minority of ordained clergy from abusing the trust placed in them by Catholic parents and children.

No one knew what people would think and do if everyone learned this secret. Possibly this would mean not only the disgracing of the abusive priests and every bishop who had shielded them – but the total dissolution of the church. For every individual bishop there was therefore the additional fear of being the first to ‘drop the ball’ – and therefore they all believed that …

This must not happen!

The Bishops’ Predicament in 2024

Almost four decades after the first widely publicised revelation of Catholic clerical child sex abuse (in Lousiana, USA, in 1985) the historical origins of the cover up of clerical child sexual abuse are still unknown in the detail that full transparency calls for. Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of all Christian churches, was far more clearly opposed to any adult abuse of a child than he was to his disciples marrying (Matt 18: 6) – so the protection of the reputation of professedly celibate priests never justified the keeping of a secret that endangered every Christian child.

Why and when was it first decided that any priest known to have sexually abused a child should retain his priestly status – and that such infractions should be dealt with in strict secrecy?

No one knows – even though this could quickly be discovered by historical investigation.

If St Peter Damian in the mid 11th century 3St Peter Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus, c. 1050 CEcould strongly condemn the secrecy maintained by some bishops over abusive sexual behaviours by priests under their jurisdiction, and could advise that abusive priests should be laicised – and have his efforts at reform praised by Pope Leo IX – why were these efforts apparently in vain by the late 1900s?

Why, finally, has the papacy made absolutely no effort to initiate a full discovery of the historical origin of the procedures that have so scandalised the church and now been discontinued – especially when it has initiated a process of synodal discussion that led to the following advice about the need for transparency in July 2024:

“A synodal Church requires both a culture and practice of transparency and accountability, which are essential to fostering the mutual trust necessary for walking together and exercising co-responsibility for the sake of the common mission.”4How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73

Defeating this call to transparency, continuing denial of the obvious need for full historical disclosure can suggest only one conclusion: it is thought by those who keep the church’s historical secrets that what is still unknown would cause even more trouble if it were known than what has so far been revealed – so that, yet again this must not happen!

The Expanding Church of Lost Sheep

The devastating impact of the abuse revelations upon churchgoing in Ireland, the USA and elsewhere conceals a vital truth: those revelations have been the most important learning experience for Catholic Christians since the 2nd Vatican Council of 1962-65.

And the most important lesson we have learned is that while some priests are indeed holy it is not ordination that has made them holy – for otherwise all priests would be holy.

Was it this truth above all that the bishops of the church wanted to keep from us? Did they think that belief that every priest is holy was the bedrock of our faith?

That we don’t know the answer to this question even yet is another mystery! No bishop anywhere has sat down with his flock – including the many living faithful departed – to explain, frankly, why he believes this secret was kept. And so we become, increasingly, lost sheep.

Yet this does not mean that we have forgotten Jesus, the one who told the parable of the lost sheep – or the assurance he gave:

“See that you never despise any of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in heaven are continually in the presence of my Father in heaven. For the Son of Man has come to save what was lost. Tell me. Suppose a man has a hundred sheep and one of them strays; will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hillside and go in search of the stray? In truth I tell you, if he finds it, it gives him more joy than do the ninety-nine that did not stray at all. Similarly, it is never the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.”
(Matt 18:10-14)

Awakened to the weakness of the clerical church by both clerical abuse and the cover up of clerical abuse, those of us who become lost sheep are very well placed to experience the truth of this parable. Everyone reading this also knows that the Lord who goes in search of the lost sheep does not go in vain – for we, those who believe the Creed – in spite of the failures of bishops – are the lost sheep who have been found.

If you, the person reading this, have realised that you too are inexpressibly loved by the Lord of the Gospel, you are also well placed to explain to any bishop why the fear of shame was the fear of Peter in the beginning, and the root cause of the cover up that has devastated the church.

And, as Jesus forgave Peter for abandoning him, He will forgive also the concealment of the truth that still continues – the cause of the very worst schism the church has experienced.

To understand why Jesus had to overcome his fear of the world – his fear of shame – is to overcome in that moment the same fear in ourselves.

Apparantly paralysed still by fear of shame in 2024, Catholic bishops need to realise that the truths of the Gospel are greater than all of us, and that they too need to overcome that fear, as Jesus did – to agree to a complete discovery of the roots of the catastrophe that has nearly overwhelmed us.

For the Trinity are as busy as ever rounding up the lost sheep, and need the help of every Christian to complete that task. It is time for all Catholic bishops to realise why complete honesty and transparency must now happen.

Notes

  1. Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm of Canterbury, c.1098 CE
  2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, Article 615
  3. Liber Gomorrhianus, St Peter Damian, c.1050 CE
  4. How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73

Views: 520

2024: Irish Catholic Vocations Office Mired in Clericalism

Articles, Baptism, Church Dysfunctions, Clericalism, Evangelisation, Leadership, Ordination, Recent
 Front page of the Irish National Vocations Office website in January 2024

“Is God Calling You to be a Diocesan Priest? Come and See. Take the Risk for Christ.” This is what faces you when you click https://vocations.ie/ the website of Ireland’s Catholic “National Vocations Office”.

Asked by Ardal O’Hanlon on his RTE documentary what risk was involved in opting for the celibate priestly vocation today, the National Vocations Coordinator, Fr Willie Purcell, responded:

“Anyone who is presenting himself for priesthood nowadays is really being counter-cultural. It really is a radical decision. The risk really is giving yourself completely to Christ that others might come to know him through you.  There really is a lot of humility involved in it, of self-sacrifice involved in it, but most important of all a vocation is a selfless decision, to give yourself to Christ and then to give yourself to others.”

Yet again we are being asked here to ignore what the Gospel clearly tells us about Jesus, viz.:

  • That he was never a member of the priestly religious institution of his own time and place;
  • That his definitive role in ‘salvation’ was not sacramental or liturgical (i.e. symbolic) but the direct prophetic challenging of a religious system he saw as both exploitative and hypocritical, to the danger of his own life;
  • That it was therefore his integrity, not his celibacy, that constitutes the central sacrifice that he did indeed ask us to repeat in memory of him;
  • That the definitive Christian calling to ‘follow’ him was therefore NOT to males only to join an exclusively male religious institution but to the same self-giving and integrity in whatever social role we baptised Catholic Christians find ourselves – whatever our gender, age or occupation.

Why does the National Vocations Office see only the risk to clergy?

Why is it not obvious to the Irish National Vocations Office that any social role, in any society, can and does involve these challenges to integrity – and that risk can attach to any of these?

It isn’t only the lives and trials of outstanding Irish individuals such as Veronica Guerin, Maurice McCabe and Martin Ridge that demonstrate this. Public service, especially for women, has become notably more risky and challenging for anyone who approaches it with integrity in the age of the Internet. With Pope Francis now calling all of us, even teenagers, to ‘mission’ today – and with Irish Garda, nurses, firefighters and paramedics at risk on every callout in certain locales in Ireland  – why was this not obvious to whoever dreamt up the slogan ‘Take the risk for Christ’ – implying that the risk of Christian witness attaches solely to the male celibate sacramental calling?

Lessons of the Pandemic

Did not the Pandemic teach us that in an interdependent society the lives of all of us can depend upon those who risk turning up even to man the check-out in the local supermarket or the counter in a dispensary?

Isn’t even any Irish teenager who stands in school against sexual harassment or homophobic bullying – or online trolling of a friend – at risk, and is not this the risk that attaches to the common priesthood of the people of God, the risk that comes to all who affirm their Baptism?

Why does Fr Purcell imply that only the diocesan priest has the responsibility to bring the message of Christ to others, when the key message of synodality is that this responsibility comes to all of us with Baptism?

The Priests who spoke out

As for the specific risks that do indeed attach to the sacramental priesthood, how would Fr Purcell account for what happened to those Irish priests who did prophetically challenge the injustices of church policies in relation to women, the LGBT community and the mishandling by bishops of the issue of clerical sexual abuse of children in Ireland, back in 2012?

What a shame that Ardal O’Hanlon did not think to ask if that was indeed the ‘risk’ that the National Vocations Office has in mind!

Child Safeguarding and Risk

And if he had asked that question, would Fr Purcell have recalled  that we have never yet had an open conversation on the role and obligation of private conscience when faced with an abuse of authority in the church, as could happen, for example, to any of the child safeguarding personnel we now depend upon?

With synodality far from firmly embedded in our Catholic culture, and canon law still a mess, the risks for every servant of the church that are still posed by the church itself are far from merely notional or historic. Does Ireland’s National Vocations Office truly serve the church by apparently forgetting all of that?

Why in 2024 can we not instead have a properly balanced understanding  of ‘vocation’ that does not associate counter-cultural Christian self-sacrifice and ‘humility’ solely with the male celibate sacramental priestly role or imply that for all lay people the risk of Christian witness must be secondary?

Is it not to this clericalist talking-up of the sacramental role alone – and the consequent forgetting of the priestly and prophetic calling of all of us – that we must ascribe the incomprehension of so many young people about the Christian call to themselves?

Baptism the Primary Sacrament of the Priestly People of God

Finally, given the paramount importance of communicating the meaning of our common priesthood, why is the restoration of the primacy of Baptism still lagging totally in Ireland? Is that no concern of the National Vocations Office, or of the Irish Bishops Conference?

In its singular concern for the survival of the sacramental Catholic priesthood in Ireland the Irish National Vocations Office has presented us yet again with an understanding of the Christian vocation that is stridently and essentially clericalist.  This can only undermine the central message of synodality and delay the emergence of the co-responsible church we so badly need.

17th Jan 2024

Views: 1741

Is Archbishop Diarmuid Martin failing Dublin?

Articles, Bishops, Church Governance, Church Renewal, Leadership

“I could spend all my time being concerned about the people who come to church, but they’re — you know I don’t want to be nasty — but they’re a dying breed. … The situation is changing, but Irish Catholicism hasn’t changed with it.”

Attributed to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, this quote from an article in the New York Times on December 2nd 2017, came in for strong pushback from the Irish Catholic on December 7th.  In an article headed “Archbishop accused of demoralising effect on priests“ the paper quoted copiously from the psychiatric criticism of Professor Patricia Casey of UCD.  She argued that the reference to observant Catholics as a ‘dying breed’ was both negative and unlikely to spark the interest of young people – whose absence from so many of his churches was observed by the Archbishop as early as 2006.

Archbishop Martin has justly won international praise for his handling of the acute crisis that faced the Dublin Archdiocese in 2003 when he was named as coadjuter to Archbishop Desmond Connell, then under siege.  For victims of clerical sexual abuse in the archdiocese he represented a distinctly ‘new broom’.  Adept in responding to the media storm in the years that followed, he is credited by some with the following admission by the Irish Bishops’ Conference in December 2009, in the wake of the Murphy Report:

“We are deeply shocked by the scale and depravity of abuse as described in the Report. We are shamed by the extent to which child sexual abuse was covered up in the Archdiocese of Dublin and recognise that this indicates a culture that was widespread in the Church. The avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children. This should never have happened and must never be allowed to happen again. We humbly ask for forgiveness.” 

This marked a substantial shift in the readiness of Irish bishops to admit the term ‘cover up’ in their handling of allegations of abuse, and must never be forgotten in any assessment of Archbishop Martin’s term in Dublin.

However, if ‘Irish Catholicism hasn’t changed’ in the fourteen years of that term, can he himself be completely exonerated?  Granted, his strong performance on the Murphy Report was certain to alienate at least some of the Dublin clergy, and this in turn was likely to impede the lively development of parish pastoral councils, which he also strongly promoted.

However, why does the diocese still lack a forum for whole-diocese deliberation on its pastoral needs – if the archbishop is so strongly in favour of change?  And why is the capital of Ireland leaving it to e.g. Limerick diocese to experiment with a diocesan synod, when Archbishop Connell was known to have one planned for Dublin at the end of his term?

Time and again in the intervening period Archbishop Martin has asserted that the central problem of the Irish church is not structural but a matter of insufficient faith.  As early as 2005 he said the following:

“My primary interest … is in seeing that as many Irish men and women as possible in 2030 will be allowing themselves to be daily “surprised by the Gospel” and will be attempting to make that leap of faith and then shaping their lives coherently according to consequences of their belief.

” Whether that happens or not will be determined by the style and the pastoral structures of the Church today.   I believe, for example, that many in our society fail to make the leap to faith, because we, as Church, as an institution and as a community of believers, have never made that leap to the full.  We have never fully abandoned ourselves to the God who can make us free, but still cling on to the things we falsely feel can bring us security.  Faith is always a leap in the dark, but in the confidence that Jesus has not left us orphans.  We will never be able to lead others into the depths of faith and the joy of our hope if we remain entrapped in the limitedness of our current world vision.”  

Elsewhere the Archbishop has lamented the lack of an educated and vociferous Irish laity who could effectively stem the tide of secularism, as in his Würzburg address earlier this year:  “The Church in Ireland is very lacking precisely in ‘keen intellects and prolific pens addressing the pressing subjects of the day’”.

If the archbishop is so keen to encourage ‘keen intellects and prolific pens’ what efforts has he made to seek out and develop such talents in his own archdiocese?  Did he ever consider doing what Pope Francis has done – the creation of an entirely new personal advisory team, consisting of both lay men and women and forward-looking clergy?

And what of the apparent failure of Catholic Social Teaching to penetrate the minds of Dublin’s political intelligentsia – in relation to the problem of homelessness, for example?  Did it never occur to him to seek resourcing for a regular annual Dublin conference centred on that very fount of Catholic wisdom – as a means of addressing the very intellectual deficit he so often complains about?

Too glibly dismissed as ‘Blessed Martin of Tours’ by some Dublin clergy for his distant lectures on the state of the Irish church, the Archbishop must nevertheless bear some responsibility for the undeveloped state of what should be Ireland’s flagship diocese – especially when it comes to the obvious structural and dialogical deficit.  Was he himself over-inhibited by fear of a ‘leap in the dark’ when it came to faith in his own people?  And over-inclined to believe that he should accept a distant invitation to lecture abroad, rather than take that travelling and speaking time to listen at home instead?  Why can he not understand that the absence of regular, structured opportunities to listen to his own people is a clear barrier to the change he professes to support – and a scandalous barrier to faith also?

Given Archbishop Martin’s own age (72 this year), merely to dismiss observant Catholics as a ‘dying breed’ comes across to me as a combination of both arrogance and presumptuous ignorance – not to mention lack of faith in the power of the Holy Spirit to grant insight to any of the baptised.  Has he somehow concluded that only he could be a conduit of graced wisdom in his own diocese?

Too long out of Dublin to be sure of my own grasp of the detail of that whole situation I can only raise these questions here.  I am glad of Archbishop Martin’s frank courage on the abuse issue – but frankly disappointed that my own native city is not visibly much further advanced in developing the ‘role of the laity’ since I left it in in 1966.

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The ‘war’ against Pope Francis: where do Irish bishops stand?

Articles, Bishops, Church Governance, Leadership, Pope Francis, Prophecy, Service

“The central dispute is between Catholics who believe that the church should set the agenda for the world, and those who think the world must set the agenda for the church.”

So wrote Andrew Brown in the Manchester Guardian on Friday October 27th, 2017 – in an extended attempt to explain what he calls ‘The war against Pope Francis’. Brown calls the first of these camps the ‘introverts’, and the second the ‘extroverts’. Placing, for example, Cardinal Raymond Burke in the first camp, and Pope Francis in the second, Brown implies that the pope believes that the world must set the agenda for the church. Though Brown appears to be sympathetic to the pope, no description of the situation could better serve the cause of Cardinal Burke.  For that school of thought ‘the world’ is the church’s greatest threat – an advocate of ‘anything goes’ rather than the teachings of Jesus.  Cardinal Burke’s most outrageous supporters see Francis as a heretic because they too believe that ‘the world’ has taken him over.

What does Christian leadership require today?

Of course it is true that the usual ‘conservative v liberal’ analysis of Catholic differences is trite and misleading. So is ‘reformers v traditionalists’ – by implying that only those who oppose reform are true to the church’s oldest traditions. However, ‘introvert v extrovert’ is worse still, especially as it could imply that Pope Francis, as an ‘extrovert’, is a shallow populist bent on changing everything to please the masses, whereas Cardinal Burke is a stern and deeply thoughtful disciplinarian who stands for timeless truths. This is to turn the real difference on its head. It is the pope who has thought hardest about what timeless truths require of Christian bishops in the present era – and it is the pope who is most truly ‘counter-cultural’.

The central dispute in the church is over the exercise of power and teaching authority, specifically the papal office. As the papacy is a model for all bishops, this dispute has implications for the role of Catholic bishops everywhere.

As revealed by both his behaviour and his writings, Pope Francis believes that Christian leadership has primarily to do with loving accompaniment of always fallible people on their journeys towards ‘the kingdom of God’. For Cardinal Burke on the other hand it is clear that the primary role of the Christian leader is verbally to define Christian obligations and to insist upon adherence to certain of those obligations as a condition of full access to the church’s central sacrament, the Eucharist. For Burke the accompaniment of the sinner can have only secondary importance.

In a sense the dispute is over the proper relationship between ‘teaching’, ‘ruling’ and ‘sanctifying – the three most important duties of a bishop.

Remembering that the word ‘companion’ is derived from the practice of sharing bread together, it would therefore be fairer to both parties in this dispute to describe them as idealising either a ‘companioning’ or ‘rule-making’ relationship with those they wish to lead to the living truth, Jesus the Christ.

How is conscience ‘formed’?

The difference is most clearly stated in article 37 of Amoris Laetitia, where Francis writes:

We have long thought that simply by stressing doctrinal, bioethical and moral issues, without encouraging openness to grace, we were providing sufficient support to families, strengthening the marriage bond and giving meaning to marital life. We find it difficult to present marriage more as a dynamic path to personal development and fulfilment than as a lifelong burden. We also find it hard to make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations. We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.

Formers of conscience rather than replacers of conscience. That is the fork in the road for Francis, and, by implication, for all bishops. To seek simply to legislate, to make up the minds of others by mere magisterial declaration, is, by implication, not necessarily to form conscience – and the Pope and the bishops must – according to the present pope – seek to do the latter.

To spend even half-an-hour contemplating the implications of this teaching is to realise the profound silliness of describing this manner of leading the church as a mere ‘style’. Pope Francis is instead advocating and leading an abandonment by Catholic bishops of the role of sequestered and elevated legalist, imposing rules from above – to take up the role of companion of struggling Everyman, a companion who begins by discerning the drama of that struggle before speaking to it of the risen Lord. Only in that way, he insists, can consciences be formed.

A Change of Era

For Pope Francis “we are not living an era of change but a change of era.” Another way of saying that is: “this is a different time“. Cardinal Burke’s liking for the full panoply of the cardinal’s attire – including the page-borne fifteen-foot silken cloak, the cappa magna, tells us that he tends to idealise the era when cardinals had the social and civil status of the highest nobles at the court of the king. That fits perfectly with his apparent tendency to think that to rule is also to teach and to sanctify.

For the pope, clearly, sanctity demands humility – and bishops should model the latter as well if they are to teach. Companioning was an essential aspect of Jesus’s ‘teaching style’ – he was both persuasive and edifying. Pope Francis’ teaching style therefore represents a return to the earliest teaching tradition of the church – centuries before bishops became aristocrats. Few people today take handed-down edicts – declarations of law – as effective teaching. They simply tune out.

The Irish Experience

It will take just another half-hour to realise that nowhere in the world has the truth of this conclusion been more clearly demonstrated than in Ireland. As distant rule-makers since 1968 Irish bishops have steadily lost the attention of the large majority of Irish people who describe themselves as Catholic. Never persistently trying to convince their people directly of the wisdom of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical banning contraception, they relied on the equivalent of a recorded message to convey this ruling and were proven ineffectual – as they have been on every similar stand taken since.

We are standing in the midst of the ruins that this ‘style’ of leadership has created – especially the bewilderment of unaccompanied younger generations and their incomprehension of key Catholic terms such as ‘sin’, ‘grace’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘priest’. Caught between that elevated legalism and a rapidly changing society, the generation of Irish clergy that welcomed Vatican II was left stranded, disappointed, tongue-tied and hobbled. Already, with congregations dwindling by the week, the closure of some Irish Catholic churches is under discussion.

To be companioned by a convinced Christian like Pope Francis is to be given both a glimpse and a promise of the ‘kingdom of God’ – that kingdom in which rivalry for status has been replaced by mutual love and support – true ‘family’. That is the choice that Francis is presenting to Irish bishops too, especially by his promise to attend the World Meeting of Families next year. Will our bishops be ‘up’ for companioning rather than aloof rule-stating – for the forming rather than the replacing of consciences? The near future of the Irish Church will depend upon their response. Megaphone Irish Catholic leadership, a leadership that considered regular dialogue unnecessary, has had its day. The Irish church is facing extinction because it has been deprived for half-a-century of a true communion of clergy and people.

As for the more distant future, the global popularity of the present pope is surely due to a recognition that his leadership is more closely modelled on that of the church’s founder than on the distant imperial bishops of the medieval church – and that no other ‘style’ can now bear timeless fruit.

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Revitalising the Catholic Church in Ireland: IV – Jesus the Layperson

Action, Articles, Christology, Church Renewal, Jesus, Laity, Leadership, Prophecy, Sacrifice, Service, Uncategorized, , ,

Sean O’Conaill © Reality 2004

We Catholics have always been taught to see the priest as an icon, or model, of Christ – as the best possible guide to how we should live our own lives. So, in our minds eye we may see Jesus as more of a priest than a lay person.

This is especially because the central ritual of the church, the Mass, is led by a priest who takes the place of Jesus at the last supper.

But Jesus was in fact, for almost all of his ministry, simply a layperson who attacked the snobbery of the Jewish priesthood of his time – for example in the parable of the Good Samaritan. And his own priesthood was of an entirely different kind – a kind that we lay people can – and must – imitate if we are to fulfil our own calling as Christians living in the world.

Moreover, the church has always taught that Jesus is prophet and king as well as priest – and prophets and kings were lay people also.

Jesus spent most of his ministry as a lay teacher or Rabbi, living among his disciples in the world. His priesthood began only on the night before he died. It was for his teachings as a lay person that he was disliked by the Jewish elites – and it was for these teachings that he was crucified. It was Jesus the priest who gave us the ritual of the Eucharist – but it was Jesus the lay person who hung on the cross. He was placed there because he had identified with those Jews whom the religious elites called sinners , because he had attacked the Jewish religious authorities for their lack of compassion, and had built up a large following who saw him as the Messiah, or deliverer of his people from oppression. Priests in Jesus time did not do that sort of thing.

Before Jesus all priests had offered victims other than themselves as offerings to God. They had wielded the sacrificial knife against human, and – by Jesus’ time – animal victims. In other words they had shed not their own blood but the blood of someone, or of something, else – to deflect God’s supposed anger from themselves and from those who had provided those victims.

Jesus put an end to this evasive process by replacing a religion of sacrifice with a religion of self-sacrifice.

Alone among the teachers of his time, Jesus had picked up on the profoundly important words of the prophet Hosea, words that Hosea placed in the mouth of God himself:   “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”  (Hos 6:6). Jesus reminded his enemies of this passage twice in the Gospel of Matthew (e.g. Matt 9:13).

This is profoundly important, because it makes it impossible for us to believe that God the Father, whom Jesus called Abba , wanted Jesus to die because he needed some kind of sacrificial blood offering. Quite the reverse: he gave us Jesus to stop us victimising one another – to replace victimisation with generosity. If we are hurt, bitter or angry we should never take this out on one another – but carry this cross ourselves.

Down through the centuries many Christians have somehow absorbed this message. Although all my life I have shuddered at the idea of blood sacrifice, I have absorbed from the Mass the conviction that Jesus wants me to take some pain for others. I believe that Jesus has subtly but profoundly changed the meaning of the word sacrifice itself.

When parents at Christmas time deny themselves luxuries so that they can buy expensive gifts for their children they will call that a sacrifice . The priests of Jesus time would not have understood them, but that usage of the word is now accepted and understood by everyone – because of the cross.

That simple act of putting ourselves out for others, if we can make it the centre of our lives, will fulfil our lay role as priests in the world. And since without it the world cannot be changed, that priesthood of generosity is the most important priesthood in the church. The ritual sacrifice of the Mass is an invitation to take the same holy spirit of self-sacrifice into the world – but only lay people can do that to the extent that it needs to be done.

Once, as a teacher, I reprimanded a young pupil for yawning in class. Somewhat hurt, she told me she had been up all night tending to her sick grandmother. That somehow stuck in my mind – as an example of the priesthood of the laity. But did she ever realise that?

It reminds me now to say something else. Although words are a beautiful way of expressing love, they are often useless and out of place. The world is awash with words today – but in desperate need of loving action.

I am now convinced that the leadership of the church is in serious danger of overvaluing words, and undervaluing action. I have found it extremely difficult to get priests to listen when I say that they undervalue the eloquence of Christian action, and make too little of the loving actions of their people – for example their potential to reach out to people in desperate need of self-esteem. The church will not be truly healthy, I believe, until it reverses this order of priority – and makes Christian action the centre of the church’s life.

Jesus was king and prophet as well as priest – and the first two of these are roles that can best be filled today by laity, as we too are baptised into the kingship and prophetic role of Jesus.

As Jesus was a king who insisted the last shall be first , it follows that lay Catholics are implementing that kingship when they work for an equal and just society. Prophecy was always far more a matter of speaking the truth to powerful institutions than of foretelling the future. Both of these roles are required today in a society that is becoming increasingly unjust and unequal, and in a church that has still to rise to the challenges laid down by the second Vatican Council.

Lay people were challenged by the council to consecrate the world to God – but have not yet been given ownership of this great task. The reason for this is the continuing – but now declining – power of clericalism, the mindset that accords to clergy a superior status and a controlling power in the church.

Consecrating the world to God should not, however, be seen as a matter of imposing our faith on others. Although we lay people too must participate in the New Evangelisation we need to avoid the fundamental mistake of coming across as holier than thou . Ireland has had enough of evangelists who do not fundamentally understand what the good news is: that all are loved unconditionally for themselves, even if they do not share our faith.

Despite our best intentions we Christians usually convey the message: “God will love you if you let us tell you how to run your life”. This is evangelisation as manipulation. It is counter-evangelical, because it presents our God as self-absorbed and manipulative.

Do we love our fellow-citizens unconditionally – even if they refuse to believe what we believe? Is our love superior to our need to have our faith confirmed by the conversion of others? If not, we are spiritually unready for evangelisation. We are also intellectually unready, because we have not fully understood what unconditional love means.

It means service that does not require payback of any kind: the kind of service that Jesus gave.

And that, above all, is what we Catholic laity need to pray for above all – for the spirit of love and service – both unconditional.

This is especially true because all Irish people believe they already know the Gospel – and are rejecting our church because they see it as essentially dedicated to its own power and survival. That is the lesson they have taken from the scandals of the past twelve years.

We will only rise to this challenge if we have no hidden agenda to empower our church once more – no agenda other than the service of the needs of the neediest Irish people – especially of those who are today outside the magic circle of secular power and influence.

We will rise to this challenge, I am convinced, if we pray to Jesus the layperson, and ask him to give us the gifts we need to fulfil our own lay role.

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Consecrating the World?

Articles, Christendom, Church Renewal, Freedom, Leadership, Secrecy, Secularisation, Separation of Power, , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine and Life 2003

In resisting the ‘clericalisation’ of the laity, Pope John Paul II has insisted in Christifideles Laici upon the quite separate and unique lay role of ‘consecrating the world to God’. In so doing he reiterated a central theme of Lumen Gentium. Dismissed by many as a mere stratagem for maintaining the clerical monopoly of power in the church, this verbal reinforcement of Vatican II needs to be taken far more seriously as an opportunity for freeing the Holy Spirit to enlighten and encourage both clergy and laity at a critical time.

But ‘the consecration of the world to God’ is a formula that needs teasing out. If we understand it simply as a ‘churching’ of the world, a matter of ‘ outdoor worship’ – of ostentatious religiosity in the form of mass processions and other grand liturgical events designed for media coverage – we are attempting something else, the recreation of that public power the clerical Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere sought to express in the pre-Vatican II era. Christendom and Christianity were never the same thing – and the distinction is critical if we are to communicate to lay people their own crucial and indispensable role in worldly consecration.

Nor can the consecration of the world be achieved by subterfuge, by inducting laity into clerically inspired and controlled pseudo-lay movements that seek to ‘infiltrate’ secular space. Conspiratorial Catholicism is one of the most powerful de-Christianising forces in history, because it proposes to seize by stealth what Christ aimed to transform by nothing more, or less, than unconditional and universal love. By now every Catholic – from Pope to first communicant – should know the fundamental equation proved by recent events: secrecy is – in itself – scandalous.

The fundamental values of the Gospel are not specifically Catholic, or in need of secret stratagems or movements, or alien to the secularised world, or out of place in any human relationship. They are the inalienable sacredness of every human person, and therefore also the sacredness of every human space – and the right of all persons to know and cherish their own dignity and freedom as dearly beloved of God. They have to do, centrally, with unconditional respect for one another, and for ourselves.

It follows that instead of lamenting the half-emptiness of the glass of secularisation, Catholicism should be celebrating its half-fullness – the fact that it emphasises some rights that are implicit in the Gospels, and provides a peaceful neutral space in which all can freely discuss their own spiritual journeys and dilemmas. Victimisation and oppression are also anathema to ideological secularism – and this is a victory for the cross as well, even though we must point to the obvious anomaly of abortion and the drift towards a degrading separation of sexuality from binding relationships.

We Catholics cherish our sacraments as signs of divine love – but we have also forcibly baptised conquered peoples, and therefore made baptism also – for some – a contradictory sign of oppression. Religious freedom was a goal of secularism before it was a principle of our Church – so secularism is for many a more convincing sign of their own liberation, and therefore, to that extent, in that respect – and for those people – more sacramental than the church.

It follows inexorably that there are secular sacraments as well as Catholic ones – sacraments that point nevertheless to the same truths. It follows that they too are worthy of Catholic respect. This discovery was fundamental to the work of Fr John Courtney Murray whose respect for separation of church and state in his own country guided the Vatican II affirmation of the principle of religious liberty.

Which means in turn that we must believe that whenever the Church fails in its assigned role of mediating liberation and salvation to the world, God will find other means. We must therefore learn to recognise them – rather than to condemn them because they are not Catholic. Karl Rahner’s ‘anonymous Christians’ are no mere theoretical possibility: they exist wherever human beings idealise human equality and freedom – even if they mis-recognise Christ as a God of oppression through our fault.

This perspective is very different to the one currently taught in our schools. Although we have abandoned the formula ‘no salvation outside the Church’ we have nevertheless supposed and taught that somehow sometime our Church will be vindicated as the central vehicle of human salvation, and that divine grace must sometime be mediated to all through its sacraments. We are also taught to fear secularism, rather than to celebrate the freedoms it provides.

The lives of people such as Nelson Mandela, Andrey Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and George Mitchell prove that our God is always greater than we are, and has other strings to his bow. And that he does not wait for our Church to get its act together.

What the Gospels centrally reveal is the existence of a divine force for good, concerned for the fulfilment of every human person. That does not mean that we must suppose God wants everyone to be like us.

In fact, to be truly Catholic, we must be ready to acknowledge that many are Godly who are very unlike us – and celebrate that difference. As Richard Rohr and Ronald Rohlheiser have emphasised, Jesus never told us to be right, to be sure of our own religious and intellectual superiority. Becoming wise is a matter of letting go the need to be right – and it is far more important for the Church to be wise than dominant.

If this seems to be a capitulation to ‘ relativism’, the mistake is in supposing that our God is confined to revealing himself through us. We write and speak of a hierarchy of truth, and so oblige ourselves to identify what lies at the summit of that hierarchy. We need to be very sure that we do not place ourselves there, by deifying our Church.

For me the summit of that hierarchy is the inalienable dignity of every person – including those who differ from me. Their right to differ is therefore in itself sacred – so that I cannot claim the last word. This seems to me to be at the centre of the Word I worship.

And that is very close to the Enlightenment principle of intellectual freedom – one of the keystones of secular modernism.

It follows inexorably that Catholicism needs to re-evaluate its performance vis-a-vis the Enlightenment and Christendom – and this amounts to a revolution in Catholic thought. To consecrate the world to God we are called to co-operate with – rather than to convert – all who centre themselves upon principles of equality, freedom, community and inclusion.

Just as the domination of the secular world today cannot be considered the manifest destiny of any secular superpower, neither can the spiritual domination of the world be considered the manifest destiny of Catholicism. To be truly a great sacrament of human spiritual liberation it must let go of the need to be recognised by all as right, while maintaining its own right to adhere to its own faith. If its mandate is to liberate the world – the central meaning of salvation – it must unequivocally affirm that its own core values include the right of others to remain forever outside.

It follows from all of this that the role of laity in consecrating the world to God must not be seen as one of simply following the instructions of the clerical church, or of reversing secularisation. Clerical paternalism has already placed faithful Catholic laity in the obnoxious position of appearing to be simply forelock-tugging ‘yes’ people with no intellectual autonomy, a kind of ‘Catholic Mafia’ still wedded to the cause of re-clericalising secular space.

We Catholics must all become far more aware of the degree to which fundamental Christian and Catholic values are already out there in the world, informing the best of secular culture. Previous articles on the Harry Potter and Star Wars phenomena have pointed to the central Christian ideas of self-sacrifice for the good of others, and there are many more examples of the same. The very real example that now dominates the imagination of the west was that of the policemen and firemen who raced into terrifying danger, with no violent intent, on September 11th 2001.

What made the priesthood of Christ quite unique was that it had both a secular and a religious significance. Traditional priestly animal sacrifice was essentially the deflection onto a non-human creature of violence that must otherwise fall upon the sacrificing community, or upon at least one of its members. There was, on the part of the priest, an inevitable element of substitution and evasion. Sacred violence in the ancient world was therefore inevitably morally compromised – the fundamental reason for the obsession with ritual cleanliness. Furthermore, the spheres of the sacred and the profane were inevitably divorced and almost antagonistic to one another, as the priest had to be apart from the rest of men.

This evasion and separation was obliterated by the cross. Jesus sacrificed himself alone for the cause of a forgiving and peaceful world. As Paul noted in Ephesians, every Christian can emulate this sacrifice of Christ in his own body, to some degree, for the benefit of others. This real self-sacrifice incarnates the mercy of God, and the sacrifice of Christ, in a manner that is in no way inferior to the liturgical sacrifice of the Mass. Indeed, to the degree that sacrifice remains a merely liturgical phenomenon, Catholicism has failed.

Which means in turn that there should not be any difference in dignity between the lay Catholic and the Catholic priest in the church’s own internal structures. I have remarked here before on the fact that lay Catholics recently wronged by their clergy have found in secular structures a personal dignity and a vindication they could not discover in their Church. This is a scandal that must be righted urgently if the Church superstructure is to recover any of the prestige it once had in secular Ireland, and among its own laity.

Autonomy is an essential sign of dignity, and the lack of autonomy that lay people suffer in the church is the essential cause of the spiritual diffidence, resentment and intellectual immaturity that characterise so many of us. The ‘consecration of the world to God’ requires therefore the creation of autonomous lay structures within which lay men and women can develop their own special and irreplaceable vocations.

These structures are needed not for radical theological innovation, but for the empowering of laity to incarnate the values of the gospel that belong especially to lay people – the values of sacrifice and service that presently lie largely dormant because the Church remains an essentially clerical apparatus. For centuries that apparatus has called laity to worship without freeing laity to serve – for fear of losing clerical control. It still hangs fearfully unready to free the Holy Spirit that now calls so many lay people. It is that fear above all that now retards the development of the whole church as an instrument of worldly consecration.

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