When we quarrel about the church…

Sun23A 10.9.23

[Matthew 18:15-20]

The Catholic church today is deeply divided. To sketch the division rather crudely, we can say that many Catholics see the church as an unchanging, monolithic institution governed by a hierarchy of ordained men, who alone have the power to put us in touch with God through the Eucharist and other sacraments. This view strongly emphasises Catholic identity as expressed in traditions and rules, such as the strict obligation to attend Mass on Sundays, to abstain from meat on Fridays, and for priests to celebrate every Mass in identical words and actions.

These “traditionalists” rightly treasure Catholic culture in music and art, but it is to be hoped that they have abandoned the old belief that no one – even babies – can “get to heaven” unless they are baptised; and the tradition – in some places – that forbade Catholics from reading the bible, for only clerics could interpret it safely.

The other group, a majority of Catholics in “the West”, see that many beliefs and practices have evolved through the centuries, and are not essential. Although many of these people no longer attend church services, they also love God and follow Christ. While the other group might disparagingly call them “cafeteria Catholics”, their position is based on a sound interpretation of history and of scripture. They embrace the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council, which restored the liturgy to the languages spoken by worshippers because it was not originally in Latin. This group accepts that all people are called to be holy no less than clerics or vowed religious; that every person’s conscience must be respected, particularly as they seek and worship God. No more Inquisition!

The first-mentioned group sees the church as more exclusive. Their rigid emphasis on ritual and rules gives it the appearance of a cult. The second group sees the church as more inclusive. They see the Incarnation as showing God come among us as Jesus, who has passed through death and is present in all people and all creation. Because Jesus showed that God is infinitely loving and merciful, they can accept Pope Francis’ description of the church as a field-hospital for the wounded, rather than an assembly of the holy. Because Jesus identified with people who are poor, needy or in prison (Matthew 25:35 etc) these Catholics see that following him includes working to make society more just and to preserve our endangered environment, local and planet-wide.

This is merely a sketchy description of two common views of the church, but it represents the main disagreements among contemporary Catholics. Are these differences insoluble? In today’s reading from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus shows us how to resolve divisions in the Christian assembly.

When someone “does something wrong” against us, Jesus advised that we approach them gently, without anger. If they do not listen, we may bring in other witnesses. If this fails, it becomes a matter for the whole assembly. This suggests that our divided church needs to proceed by the ancient synodal approach that Pope Francis is re-introducing. We must listen to everyone, and respect everyone’s dignity. We must avoid any bullying; there is no place for Inquisition!

When it seems impossible to reach agreement, and the other side offends us by continuing to claim that they alone are right, Jesus advises us to treat them “like a pagan or tax collector”. This does not mean that we shun or reject those persons. Jesus always befriended pagans and tax-collectors, sharing meals with them, including Matthew, who recorded Jesus’ advice for us.

The future of our church solution depends on our recalling Jesus’ promise that “Where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them.” Perhaps Rumi, the Persian poet and mystic, was expressing this in another way:

“An ant hurries along a threshing floor

with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks

of wheat, not knowing the abundance

all around. It thinks its one grain

is all there is to love”. – (Rumi, 1207 – 1273)

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The Eucharist: do we “get it”?

Feast of The Body of Christ                       11th June 2023

[1 Corinthians 10:16-17, John 6:51-58]

[Sieger Köder]

If we don’t see the whole picture, we can make terrible mistakes. Twenty years ago, a judge sentenced Kathleen Folbigg to forty years in jail, because a jury had concluded that she had murdered her four babies. There was no physical evidence that she was guilty: just her intensely emotional diaries, which her husband had handed over to police. But good friends had kept fighting to question her conviction, and last week Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned and released.

New DNA evidence showed that her children had each carried a gene predisposing them to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and experts who re-examined Kathleen’s diaries pointed out that they were not admissions of guilt, but the fantasies of a deeply grieving woman who carried wounds from her own childhood. When the fuller truth was heard, this woman whom raucous media had condemned as an evil murderer was seen instead to be a victim of tragic errors.

What has this to do with the Eucharist, the centre of the Christian church? For more than a thousand years, Catholics have been taught to honour, as a precious object, the wafer of unleavened bread that a priest has consecrated during Mass. It is a “real presence” of Jesus, to be received only when we are cleansed from our sins, and – until recently – had fasted from all food and water from the previous midnight. Kept in gold vessels, veiled in silk in a locked tabernacle, the “sacred host” is sometimes displayed in a glass monstrance and given special honour on the feast of Corpus Christi or at massive Eucharistic Congresses.

Could new information radically change our understanding of this focal point of our Christian faith? The gospels can help us re-discover its deeper meaning. St Paul and the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke tell how on the night before Jesus died he shared one loaf and one cup of wine with his friends, stating: “this is my body… my blood”. Christians believe he is truly present when we do this in his memory.

But sharing a meal is an activity, not an object. At that final meal, Jesus said “do this”, not: “keep this safe to look at and worship”. As he was about to suffer a terrible death in solidarity with the world’s most deprived, he challenged us to give our lives for each other. When we do this, we are keeping his basic commandment, which is to love (John 15:12), and we become like him: become his Body.

At our family meals we do not greedily satisfy our individual selves: we see that all get enough food, and we grow in friendship as we share it. At a wedding banquet, individuals do not eat alone, but the bride’s and groom’s families try to become more strongly joined. The Eucharist too is not meant only to “make me holy” as an individual. Although generations of Catholics were taught this, they were not shown the whole truth. We cannot “meet Christ” unless we love each other! To love as Jesus loved, and commands us, we need to forgive every “enemy”. So the Eucharist, far from being a private “devotion”, is the way to change the world, to bring about God’s reign by abolishing all hatred and war. Rather than worshipping the Eucharist as a holy object, are we prepared to practice it?

Have church leaders, in trying to preserve Jesus sacred gift, actually distorted it by encouraging pious, but selfish, individualism? Even worse – have they allowed it to promote inequality, by inventing a tradition that only special men are able to lead the simple Eucharistic ritual because they have been made “ontologically different” by ordination? Worldwide, the church is now reeling from the countless crimes committed by privileged, ordained men who because of the prestige their position gave them, could more easily abuse children and adults. Abuse is the destructive fruit of inequality and privilege. Eucharist brings us together in holy communion.

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Shaping many into one

Pentecost Sunday 28^th May 2023

[Acts 2:1-11]

When deciduous trees stand naked in winter, we can see their marvellous structure of strong branches supporting a filigree of tiny twigs. Curiously, these trees can look very like branching stream patterns seen from a plane or in satellite photos.

Both structures are formed by water. In trees it reaches up against gravity, to build a structure that spreads its leaves to the sunlight. In the stream-pattern, gravity draws together millions of water-drops into trickles, brooks, then a mighty river.

In both patterns, many small things work together as one. They call to mind the mysterious Source of the life-force that keeps seven billion of us humans moving around on the planet’s surface.

In today’s story of Pentecost this Source, the Holy One, came as a powerful wind and as fire, which separated, branched out, to touch each person present. Those people waiting in Jerusalem were each different, just as we are. They each had a unique face, voice and finger-prints, and diverse abilities. Yet they each breathed the same air, drank from the same water supply, and shared the belief that Jesus, who had passed through death, was now filling them with his Spirit.

That Spirit gave them power. The biggest jetliners can move 500 people at high speed through the air. They get that power by burning about four litres of fuel every second. The sun burns a million tonnes in that same time. How powerful must be the force, the Consciousness, that sustains the whole universe… what the poet Dante called “the love that moves the stars”?

We imagine – deceiving ourselves – that we do and make things by our own independent power. Yes, our will-power can stand against death itself, but we delude ourselves if we think that we have this power in isolation from others. We exist because of the love and care of other people, and on a wider scale, because of the mind and love of the one Creator. Like those gathered at the first Pentecost, we are continually sustained by the breath of its one Spirit.

In his letter Laudato Si, Pope Francis emphasised how all living things, and the mineral world too, are connected and depend on each other. Some philosophers even ask whether deep down, the observer/ subject and the observed/ object are distinct or separate at all. It sounds crazy, but physicists who peer deepest into sub-atomic physics say similar things. We do have to struggle, through childhood and adolescence, to form our individual personality, our character, but it is foolish to think that our ego is independent from – much less superior to – other peoples’.

Why are we envious when others are praised? Their success is ours too. Why gloat over others’ failures? In them, we too are diminished. Why get unreasonably angry when others cause harm? It is our common task to repair the damage.

We Christians cherish the sacred ritual of the Eucharist, the Mass, whose main purpose is not our personal holiness, but to unite us more deeply with others in holy communion. Loving other people is the same thing as coming closer to God. (1 John 4:7-8*) In sacrament, in love, we draw on the Spirit to help unite the human Family.

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* everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love.

By this love … everyone will know that you are my disciples

Easter 5C 15^th May 2022 [John 13:31-35]

We wonder why people walk away from the Catholic church. The sad statistics in Australia tell us that fewer than twelve percent, at most, now come to Sunday Mass. Attendance was much higher a few decades ago. In Europe the figures are much the same. In Germany, they are down to six percent. And it’s much the same in the USA, where attendance was once higher than in most countries. It is significant that large crowds still come to Mass at Christmas and Easter, for most people still have a deep conviction that our Christian faith contains an infinite treasure, a link with the Transcendent Mystery, the Holy One, something too precious to lose.

Clerics who run parishes and dioceses are inclined to respond to this important question by pointing out changes in the disappearing congregation. Yes, people’s lives are significantly different now from what they were in the 1950’s or even the ‘80s. People are busier now. Because of unjust social structures, many are forced to work on weekends. There is now an enormous range of entertainment and sport on Sundays, which was not there before. And children often need to be driven to their sporting events. People now know a lot more about the variety of religious faiths, and this may confuse their former understanding, which we were once so emphatically taught, that there is only one true way to find God.

Some clergy accuse “lay people” of having “lost their faith”. But there is plenty of evidence that people are searching for meaning in their lives; that they believe in life after death and the existence of “something beyond all this”. They just don’t want to come to church.

When we think of the declining numbers in our pews on Sundays, could a more sound approach be to look more critically at what we clerics offer, who stand here in front you? Why have we lost our “share of the market”? (I say “we” because I have been ordained for fifty-six years.) Do we have the courage to ask whether the clerics of the church operate, always and everywhere, on Jesus’ command, which is the title of this homily? By this love … everyone will know that you are my disciples. It is the last line of today’s gospel.

The following incident suggests that clerics do not always follow Jesus in this, but put law before love, seemingly to maintain the clerics’ own control and power. However I hope – with not much confidence – that this incident does represent the majority of clerics.

I was called to a hospital room to visit a woman who had terminal cancer, and was told that she was soon going home to die. I was pleased for her, for dying at home among family is preferable to dying in a vast modern hospital. But when I arrived at the woman’s bedside and met two of her adult children, I began to realise that she had chosen, in two days’ time, to die by taking some lethal mixture. I talked with her, and heard why she had made her choice, and that all her five children were content with it.After praying with her and anointing her, I left her, peaceful, even joyful.

The next day, during a conversation with other clergy, one man said that a ruling from the archdiocese commands priests not to administer sacraments to a person who has chosen to end their own life. The reason he gave was that the priest might be giving a sacrament to someone in a state of mortal sin. My mind went back to that hospital room. That dying woman had asked for a priest to visit her. One of her adult children in the room had shared with me that he “never goes near a church” because of “things that were happening” at his Catholic school long ago. Should I have obeyed a clerical rule and refused to anoint his mother, using our ancient sacrament, the symbol which declares that God – and the Christian community – loves her and is with her in her weakness? I sincerely believe that if I had refused her, no matter how politely I did so, it would be like slapping her across the face, then doing the same to her son, and walking away.

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