Why (still) this blog?

A quick note to record that today, the 6th January 2020, this blog reaches its fifth birthday.  I’m very grateful for all who have read and commented in that time; I hope you have enjoyed the pieces I have written.  And happy feast of the Epiphany!

I must admit that my motivations in writing this blog remain much as I described them in my first post: mainly self-centred!  Really I think of it as a diary of my own thoughts and ideas, a record of people and books and places I find interesting, and an outlet for my obsessions: poetry, music, churches, landscapes and traditions.  I find it a good way of working out what I really think and feel about something, and also of honing my writing-craft.

Often, though, I also feel that I would like, in however small and hidden a way, to record and publish my celebration and defence of things dear to me.  There are things and people in this world, some of them in danger or decline, or dealt an unfair press, or simply deserving of a larger hearing, that I feel the urge to praise, or protect, or ponder.  The blog gives me a way to do this, allowing me, quietly and cautiously, to stand up and be counted, and to give encouragement to others who have similar interests and ideas.  This is why I make my writing public.  Whenever I have made the wonderful refreshing discovery of a like-minded and thoughtful writer, my first feeling is of gratitude, more than anything else, for their courage and generosity: it may be small recompense on my part to inflict this blog on the Internet in return, but, apart from spreading the word about the writers I encounter and mulling over their ideas or stories, it is all I have to give.  

I know, too, that my articles might be read by people who do not share my perspective on things — this is entirely welcome, and opens up an opportunity for dialogue.

Since 2015, various heartening developments have coincided with some of the ideas and interests that have featured here, and I have even made some new acquaintances; this turns out to be one of the joys of blog-writing.  For example, the recent revival of interest in the composer Ruth Gipps has brought me into conversation with other admirers of her music.  And even the blog’s title has taken on new meaning since last October, when the author of the prayer from which I took that mysterious, paradoxical phrase ‘Some Definite Service’ was canonised: he is now Saint John Henry Newman.  The year beforehand, the gist of that meditation had already received special attention in the Church, when the Synod on Youth asked how we can remind the world and our neighbours that we all have, every single one of us, however weak or inadequate we think ourselves, however uncertain the future seems, regardless of our past and irrespective of our station in life, a definite vocation, ‘some definite service’: we are not mere meaningless molecules, but have been created for a cosmic and glorious purpose.

I hope that this blog has been an encouragement to others, and offered the welcome of a virtual wayside sitting-room for netfarers.  If so, it has done its job and I mine.

England’s Newest Saint

This morning at Mass the parish Youth Choir sang ‘Praise to the Holiest’ in honour of Britain’s newest saint, St. John Henry Newman — as we may now call him! — who was canonised this morning.  I think we may fairly feel a surge of joyful pride, not because we can take any credit for his holiness, but because he feels close to us: he is ‘one of ours’.  He is the first canonised English saint to have lived since the Reformation; he wrote the words of some of our best-loved hymns; he grappled with the pain of the fissure between the Catholic and Anglican churches.  He knew the English countryside, and the cities of London and Oxford and Birmingham (also Dublin), not quite as they are today, but, importantly, as they were becoming what they are today.  Certainly he lived and worked in a time when the forces that we now call relativism and secular progressivism were stirring and gathering strength, and these did not daunt him in his long and unrelenting search for objective truth.  As no less a person than the Prince of Wales says in yesterday’s Times, he ‘stood for the life of the spirit against the forces that would debase human dignity and human destiny.’ And his way of responding to these things, lucidly and serenely, with conviction but not belligerently, happens to serve as a very helpful example for us in our own day.

Of course, he is a saint not for his relevance to our cultural situation, nor simply because of his intelligence or his writings and achievements, but because of his person; because of the way in which he lived his life.  More than pride, perhaps it is confidence that we should take: here is a man whose example we can trust with a new certainty.  And here is a man who lived not so very long ago, in circumstances not altogether dissimilar from ours, who proved that sainthood is not a quaint idealism of other times and other places, but something alarmingly plausible.  Can British people in the modern world still become saints?  Could it even be that saints are what we are meant to become?

This blog takes its name from a phrase of Newman’s.  As I wrote in my first post, I treasure the gentle paradox of the words: there is a steady slow-burning encouragement in the idea that there is ‘some definite service’ that we are all called to do.  Evidently England’s newest saint did his!  Here is the passage in full:

God has created me to do Him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.  I have my mission.  I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.  I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught.  I shall do good; I shall do His work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.  Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.  If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.  If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.  He does nothing in vain.  He knows what He is about.  He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.  Still, He knows what He is about.

Bl. John Henry Newman: Meditations on Christian Doctrine, Meditations and Devotions, March 7, 1848.

John Everett Millais’ portrait of John Henry Newman on display at Arundel Castle (W. Sussex), 13th September 2019.

Youth, the Faith and Vocation: seven thoughts

On the list of urgent matters to discuss in this world waist-deep in crisis, I can easily see that the lives of young adults do not come first.  More immediately pressing matters tend to push their hopes and anxieties into the background.  Still, these hopes and anxieties are there; they do not go away, and behind the louder elements, whose politicised protests are seldom representative of the whole, they accumulate into a silent mountain to which it is difficult to do justice.  

The world’s bishops, assisted by young lay representatives and others, has recently had a go at doing them justice, though, gathering in Rome for a Synod over the course of October to discuss ‘Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment’.  ‘What is life like for you?’, the Catholic Church has been asking its young members, those aged 16-29, this past year.  ‘How do you find your faith and work out your calling?  And what about young people who are not in the Church… or no longer in the Church?… What are your lives like; what meaning do you think the Church has?’  It is the Church’s business to help is in working out the meaning and purpose of our lives.

The Synod’s final report has just been released.  I have been meaning to write about it here long before now — ever since it was announced, in fact — not least because I fall squarely into the age bracket in question.  It is not a lack of interest that has silenced my keyboard.  I have been thinking and reading quite a lot about it all, and following the Synod’s progress.  I filled in the Church’s official online questionnaire earlier this year, and in the early summer attended three invigorating meetings of young adults with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, before he went off to the Synod.  So I feel that I have managed to repay the bishops’ frank appeal for views with some considered answers.  But I have not added much to the online conversation, having been left with too many thoughts to hammer out easily into a concise blog article.  Only now have I managed to boil them down to these seven, so that, for my own satisfaction at least, I can record my own point of view before I read the final document.  What do any readers think — do these sound true and fair?

1.  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Human nature never changes; one of many thunderbolts to strike me while at university was to read the Pensées of Pascal with their freshness of informal jottings.  But history does change, of course, and just now even seems to be actually accelerating into the ever-uncharted territory of the future, even as mankind’s joys and sorrows remain the same.  So the Church’s mission, to go out and bring mankind home to God’s house, is desperately urgent, especially where history is changing most quickly: among young people.

I am an ordinary rank-and-file pew-filling Mass-goer, living and working amid the pulsing tumult of London, belonging proudly to the ‘Benedict Generation’ who came of age in faith under Pope Benedict XVI’s gently determined steersmanship.  To me the Church is truth and home.  But for huge numbers of young people my age this is clearly not the case.  To most of my contemporaries, even those of good will, the Church means little or nothing: an unnecessary and obsolescent encumbrance, rather than a life-giving stronghold of joy and encouragement.   I think also of the members of my parish’s Youth Choir, aged between nine and sixteen, who will be young adults themselves sooner than we suppose, and the scale of our task weighs heavily on me.  I think of the forces ranged against them, all the other ideas and lifestyles that clamour for their allegiance, the dazzling superficiality of the secular universe, and of the gulf of distraction and misunderstanding that threatens to separate them, or already separates them from the hearth of the Church.

The Synod has come not a moment too soon.  I know, because I have grown up with them, how deeply relativism and individualism have sunk their teeth into the young men and women of my generation here in the West, and how far away and foreign the Church appears to them.  The name Jesus Christ means, to many, merely a harmless spiritual teacher who lived long ago and may have had some sensible things to say which have since been improved on anyway.  The shocking idea that He was God, and then that He took on our nature, body and soul, walked and breathed and worked as we do, and suffered as we do to the point of death, and then was resurrected, thereby giving us too real hope in resurrection after death, is not merely strange to them, but it has never really been articulated to them.  The same goes for the idea that He may be still be encountered and befriended.  It is gone: if this knowledge was understood in previous generations, it has not been passed on and is forgotten now.  In the Church I think we already know this… but have somehow been slow, or even afraid, to contemplate the reality unblinkingly for ourselves (though I know that some observers’ gaze has been very clear and unwavering).  The New Evangelisation is urgent; it was urgent twenty, thirty, seventy years ago.  The reality is that many good people have no religious sense at all.

But nature abhors a vacuum.  Into the new void other ways of thinking and believing — new creeds, though they would never describe themselves in that way — have come rushing, and they are increasingly making their presence felt.  They do not necessarily declare themselves overtly to be enemies of the Church.  They sound nice and reasonable, at least at first, and certainly seem to make life easier.  They may even contain a great deal of truth, but in comparison to the Christian faith they are short-sighted and half-hearted, proclaiming a truncated, stooped vision of man, because they lack the sure, crazy foundation of love.  These new religions encourage us to place the weight of our faith in scientific progress, or governments, or unfettered liberty, or in political action, or social engineering, or in Me, the Ego, to solve our problems and fill the chasm of longing within.  In placing the individual at the centre of our lives, they leave us with an alarmingly blank slate when it comes to morality: we can do just as we please, provided we do not prevent anybody else from doing the same.  The new creeds claim to be harmless heralds of peace and freedom for all, but a nastier side can be revealed when they encounter resistance in the form of the Church’s teaching.  This is the dictatorship of relativism, which has nothing to say to those who hunger for more than the ‘OK culture’, and hope to live life to the full, to work out what life is really all about and to pursue heroic holiness, nor to those conscious of having done wrong and who search for true forgiveness, not for mere excuses.  In twenty-first century Britain, people still prove themselves capable of breathtaking acts of goodness, but a willing myopia shies away from asking why.  What lies beneath our common urge towards kindness, and behind the mystery of our simultaneous aversion towards and tendency to surrender to evil?  Nobody asks; it is as if we would rather not know.  Most of the moral values and ideas that survive in the secular world have a Christian origin, but that origin is allowed to be obscured, and the ancient philosophical pillars of strength that underlie them, and the revelation that lightened them, are not spoken of.  And anyway, in modern life, there is simply no time to think too much about these things, nor to seek anything approaching transcendence.  There is always something else that needs doing. Ours is a tired, unhappy culture, atomised in its homogenaeity; we are a great crowd of lonely individuals, constantly in search of something new to place on the altar where God should be.

In such a world, reverence is revolutionary and orthodoxy is rebellion. Going to Mass, even, often has a deliciously conspiratorial feeling about it, as if the Church were an underground resistance movement.  (That is partly because it is).  If for our parents’ generation it already took courage to go to church and to assent to the Creed with a straight face, for ours it is now actually subversive.   It really is counter-cultural and there really are people who hate the Church.  To be Catholic in these circumstances is often bracing for young people with fire in the blood.  But often it is tiring and isolating, too.

2.  The Question of Trust
There are many reasons why I am Catholic, and also many different kinds of reasons.  Among those reasons are people whose example vindicates the faith in my mind.  I am not the first, having traced good things to their roots, to decide that if such roots are good enough for certain people I have known, they are good enough for me.  Having admired and been impressed by these people, I have come to have trust the moral foundation on which they have built their lives.  I have confidence in what Church says about life.

I hardly need reminding of the wrongdoing that goes on in the Church.  I know that trust is its first casualty.   I do not wish to dismiss it glibly, but am aware it needs its own article if it is to be dealt with properly.  For now I will say that the first hope is this: that the Church has always acknowledged unequivocally that such wrongdoing directly contradicts her own standards, which are totally set in stone.  No excuses can be made for it.  Mercy is always there, it is true, but on Heaven’s terms, not our own.

But meanwhile it is hard to overstate how urgently the Church needs to make herself trustworthy.  Young people are in particular need of something to trust, and there is no shortage of movements in search of their confidence who could easily win too much of it: advertisers, political movements, Twitterers in search of disciples, professional cliques, gangs, to say nothing of those currents of thought that directly oppose the Church in their view of the dignity of life, marriage, wisdom, the law, the poor and so on.  All of those movements, though, have ulterior motives.  Who will love and affirm young people in their own right, for their own sake?  Above all the Church, it seems to me.  Dear reader, the Church will always affirm the absolute and irreducible dignity of your life, even when nobody else will — even if you yourself deny it — and what is more, can tell you why.

Young people hunger to do good, but often need confidence first.  The Church can give them that confidence and encourage them in difficulty.  We cannot outdo the secular world in slickness, but it is we who have authenticity.  So we need to be radiantly authentic.  That means that we must become good examples and living proof that the Church’s message is as valid and as fresh as it has ever been… living proof of the unwavering presence of Christ in the world.

3. Boldness
Our situation is now that the Church has to work hard to earn the trust that is placed in it, whether from within or without.  The Church should also repay this trust.  And I feel that one of the best ways to repay it is to be proclaim its own message boldly and confidently.  The Church needs to speak with authority, which does not mean with aggression or arrogance, but it does imply the courage to lock horns with the world if necessary.  I cannot be the only young Catholic whose experience of modern British culture is generally that of a head-wind.  It is so easy to sense our courage sapping without the Church at full steam beside us, trusting in God, reassuring us that the counter-cultural course we have set is worth the risk.

And the Church can do this because this authority comes from above.  This is at least one advantage we have over the secular world: we assert things not only because they sound good and we want them to be true, but because they are true, whether we like it or not.

4. The Vanguard of Anti-Cynicism
At one of the meetings of young adults at Archbishop’s House, Cardinal Vincent made some striking remarks about cynicism.  Answering a question on another topic, he suddenly spoke with some feeling of cynicism’s ‘corrosive effects’ on society and on individuals.  I wanted to burst into applause: he had articulated something I realise I have felt for a long time.  After the meeting I managed to thank him for his words, and again he lamented the prevalence of this cynical atmosphere; it was "everywhere in the papers", he said.  It is a kind of hardening of heart, and there are places in which it is so pervasive as to be more or less compulsory.  For example, it held absolute sway over my schoolmates between the ages of twelve and eighteen, so that it was seldom possible to have a serious conversation with anyone, and hardly anything anyone said was actually meant.  No high ideals, no hero-worships, no debates with any sincerity.  I know that this attitude is often adopted simply for the sake of self-preservation, but this does not make it any less caustic.  Even now that my generation has reached adulthood I often hear it lurking just beneath the surface, curdling laughter into sniggering, riddling the meanings of words with holes like wood-worm, corroding the sword of justice with sardonic resignation or bitter indifference, and hardening people against each other.  Some of my peers seem unable to turn it off.  It also gnaws away at beauty.  Look at what it has done to our art, music and poetry; look at the lovers of beauty it has beleagured.

But the Church is a stronghold against this caustic cynicism and irony.   I believe that we  lovers and defenders of good and gentle things  have no better fortress than the  Church from which to launch gleeful raids against cynicism, armed with the words and artistry to speak of beauty, delight, diamond innocence, and the pathos of the human condition.

This is not to overlook the cynicism that many feel about the Church.  For this reason, too, the battle for trust must be fought piece by piece: see part two, above.

5. We must be ‘Smart and Beautiful’

‘Smart and beautiful’ is how Bishop Robert Barron describes the Christian faith, and in doing so captures two things that draw young people to it: its intelligence and its poetic beauty.  

Catholicism is a serious, grown-up, intelligent faith that affirms and sanctifies everything I was right to love as a child.  It has more than enough intellectual fuel for any restless, curious mind; it is inexhaustible.  It is remarkable how deep it is possible to go and never reach the bottom, and others have descended far deeper than I have.   When I was a student, I was fortunate enough to have a chaplaincy where the chaplains gave homilies as fulfilling and stretching as lectures, and weekly talks with unforgettable thoughts: ‘If, when thinking about God, you do not experience intellectual vertigo, you are not thinking about God’, or that the news of the sack of Rome in 410 A.D.  ‘would have been as if we heard that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Paris’.  University chaplaincies can give tremendously stimulating moral, historical formation, and the Church must give them as much support as she can afford.  In general, I think the Church could make much more of her intelligence and brilliance.  Young people can all respond willingly to Pope Benedict’s exhortation to ‘know your faith with that same precision with which an IT specialist knows the inner workings of a computer’.  ‘You need to know what you believe’, is his invigorating challenge.

Yet this intelligence is not pretentious or supercilious.  At the same time, the Church could also afford to emphasise her down-to-earthness.  This is a religion of incarnation: of oil, of water, of wheat, of salt, of dust, of blood, of a baby in a cattle-shed, of carpenters and fishermen.  There is nothing airy-fairy about it.  And notwithstanding her intelligence, the Church is for us all, whatever our minds’ wattage.  The ranks of the Doctors of the Church include such a person as Thérèse of Lisieux as well as St. Thomas Aquinas. 

And as for beauty, the Church lies at the ideal strategic position from which to launch a new evangelisation in art.  We live in a culture that is remarkable for its inhuman ugliness, yet people, being human, still hunger for beauty, and indeed are often to be found seeking it in church buildings.  New movements of Catholic artists, composers, novelists, architects or poets, in single-minded search of beauty and generous with their findings, could answer our culture’s unuttered cry to God for consolation.  Not browbeating the culture around us but enlightening it, we could could have quiet but deep influence in the coming years, and be of great consolation to people of good will.

6. Togetherness
And in an age of division we will thrive if we remind ourselves, often, of our togetherness in the Church all over the world, present, past and future.  Great occasions such as World Youth Day, pilgrimages and outdoor gatherings, as well as renewed attention to the words of the liturgy (‘so that from east to west a perfect sacrifice will be offered to your name…’) resound long in the memory.  Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain in 2010 fired me up tremendously, and not just because, I confess, the media’s considerable hostility to Church in the preceding weeks and months only served to goad me into greater pro-Benedict enthusiasm and vigour.  I simply enjoyed, and will never forget, the uplifting yet unfamiliar feeling of kneeling with eighty thousand others with Pope Benedict in Hyde Park for Eucharistic Adoration (at the vigil of John Henry Newman’s beatification).  We need the confidence and resources to mount more such events, if we can, because their effects last well into the lean times of isolation.

Togetherness in the Church also means vigilance in ordinary life, however, so that legitimate disagreements do not sour into division, whether at the scale of parishes, of dioceses or of the Church on earth as a whole.  We all have different charisms — some, perhaps, are more inclined to social justice, say; others to liturgy, and most of us are somewhere in between.  Provided we all sign up to the Catechism and the Creed, and sincerely found our lives on Christ’s companionship, we are more or less all right.  Another point: if people struggle honestly to accept the Church’s teaching, and are not being deliberately belligerent about their difficulties, I think we should be as patient and kindly as we are resolute in affirming the truth.  Faith is a gift, and Christ never promised to make our lives easy.  It is often uncomfortable to be counter-cultural; a lot of people struggle with it.  We must be capable of working out disagreement between ourselves without giving anybody cause to feel undermined by their own side.

I am also convinced of the necessity of a determinedly ecumenical attitude.  The divisions between the churches, though much healed in the past century, still represent a great wound.  However distant unity seems, we must work very hard to maintain close friendship with our brothers and sisters in other churches.  The old disagreements cannot be brushed aside and should not be trivialised, and the pain of riven communion remains unhealed, but any survey of the terrain today will makes it plain that everyone who is signed up to the Creed is more or less on the same side now.  So, unless there is unequivocal evidence to the contrary, I think we must consider any serious churchgoer these days to be an ally.

7. ‘Young People Want Great Things’

Finally, I am very glad that this Synod has given such prominence to the idea of vocation.  It is tremendously important.  The sense of being called, rather than merely having floated or emerged into being, transfigures us.  It gives the longed-for direction to life that many others seek vainly in wealth, political action or Progress.  It gives meaning to days and years, to mere instants and whole epochs alike.  It can so convincingly capture the imagination for the side of light — within the soul, in the Church as a whole and throughout the world — that I think it should be made a mainstay of the New Evangelisation.  (This blog takes its name from Cardinal Newman’s prayer-meditation on vocation, incidentally).  Certainly in the West, where the dictatorship of relativism, the tyranny of mediocrity, reigns supreme, the idea that we might be called to a mission greater than ourselves, beyond our own desires, appetites and knowledge, is invigoratingly counter-cultural.  Also, as people tire of the dictatorship of relativism’s constant, off-hand instruction to make up a meaning for our lives, not caring a jot what we come up with, and as people detect the indifference that underlies this instruction (existentialism’s nasty backhand), they will look, in increasing numbers and with increasing determination, for something else — which they will know they have found when they encounter the idea of vocation compellingly expressed, and realise that they have one.  This is the Church’s secret weapon in our time.  

✛

‘Young People Want Great Things’, said Pope Benedict early in his pontificate, and the words leave very little else to say.  Young people are full of fire; we brim with energy.  But we need to know what to do with it, so that we can set to confidently, with God-given gumption.  We have the energy to purify first the Church, then the world.  In this age of destruction we yearn to build.  

Dear Bishops — Thank you for asking us your questions.  This is what we would like in the Church, please.  We want a challenge, but not without the Church beside us.  We want companionship so that we have the strength to face the isolating world.  We want more than the insipid, malnutritious menu presented to us by the world, in which anything goes and nothing really matters, but we also want to be able to speak with compassion to people who think that this fare is satisfactory.  We want to know how to have the courage, in a world which mistakes lesser evils for positive good, to announce what is really good all the way through — the Gospel, the electrifying news of hope — in a straightforward, calm, sane, unhectoring way, with our example as much as our words.  We want the miraculous triumph of the friendship of men and women that we call marriage; we want motherhood and fatherhood, defiantly raising families to the glory of God, or simply to be motherly and fatherly to those around us.  We want to be saints and artists and philosophers, holy and humble priests and nuns, teachers and scientists and gardeners and nurses; we want to be good companions.  We want to help people and to console them.  We want interesting things to read, homely places in which to discuss them, and like-minded people to discuss them with.  We want beautiful, beloved churches and energetic movements and associations. And our friends outside the Church want these things too, whether they know it or not.

Belonging to the Church is both a great joy and a lot of hard work.  But it could be more joyful still. We know that we need help, and instruction, and often forgiveness.  We need the gold standard of justice and, being every one of us broken, the medicine of mercy.  And, above all, youth wants truth.  And the Church’s strange and loving founder can give us all of this.  Long may the Church make a nuisance of itself by calling us all to greatness.

Some revisions made (to improve phrasing) in March 2019.

‘Excelsam Pauli gloria’ — Westminster Cathedral Choir.

Vows and Vocations

At three o’clock — or sometimes shortly thereafter, now that live broadcasts can be rewound — we allow the television to interrupt our merry-making on Christmas Day.  The Christmas pudding having been doused in brandy and set fire to and sung over and most assiduously devoured, we are usually just in time for one of the more unfrenetic and comforting broadcasts left on the main channels: the Queen’s Christmas message.  I find it invigoratingly traditional in spirit, and there is a rare feeling of national togetherness as the Queen invites us to look back on the year.  Gloriously heedless of the BBC’s dull secularist ethos, H.M. always makes unforceful but unambiguous (and therefore courageous) mention of her Christian faith. This year’s message was the fiftieth the Queen has made by television, so it is a well-established tradition in its own right.

But even fifty years of Christmas broadcasts struggle to shine against the seven decades of the Queen’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh.  There beside the Queen as she delivered her message, next to the portraits of her great-grandchildren George and Charlotte, are two photographs of Elizabeth and Prince Philip.  One was taken on their wedding day in 1947, and the other in November this year to mark their Platinum Anniversary.  Seventy years separate the pictures, but one reciprocal vow is common to both.

A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily) on Nov 19, 2017 at 2:49pm PST

This is marriage, the real thing, and this particular marriage is special because it belongs to us in much the same way as the Queen herself belongs to us.  It is one of the last lit beacons in bleak Britain, whose marital statistics show that a third of all marriages are sooner or later put asunder, and that more and more couples move in under the same roof without entering into marriage at all.  More than three million families have been begun without the security of wedlock.  It is some decades since the State showed any understanding of its proper responsibility in this field, which is to create all the right conditions for stable family life, especially for the sake of its oldest and youngest citizens, without meddling in it.  What has happened instead is that marriage has been undermined so that, from a simply practical point of view, people can hardly be blamed for choosing to set up home in co-habitation.  The social and financial benefits that marriage once brought do not now make economic sense, and to many people the law appears to set a trap, being still just tenacious enough to protract and sour any parting, yet not firm enough to banish the very idea from people’s minds, encouraging building rather than dismantling.  By Britain’s national anticulture, by spectres of the imagination and by the reality of people’s own experiences, many have come to fear the unsunderable vows.  Yet couples who are ready to found a household should surely wish for just such a bond.  Marriage helps couples, before they ever enter into it, by serving as a test or proof: if they do not feel they trust each other enough to marry, then they cannot know whether they trust each other to start and sustain a family.  On the other hand, if their mutual trust does indeed go far enough that children seem a real possibility, then why delay in giving form to the natural truth?  Marriage is for life because children join their parents for life.  The great vow is there to protect first husband and wife, and then their children, against human weakness and the evils of the world outside.

But we have also forgotten not only the practicality and common sense of marriage, but its transcendent, spiritual dimension.  This is another casualty of the dictatorship of relativism — Benedict XVI’s phrase — the tyranny of indifference that surrounds us, unctuously bidding us do as we please but offering no railings of guidance, and certainly no healing, if our desires lead us into wrongdoing and suffering.  The idea of marriage as a calling to high friendship, as a sacrificial mission that elevates the dignity of man and woman, has vanished, and along with it a sense of motherhood and fatherhood as vocations, to be honoured far above mere career or material prosperity or political engagement.  So people no longer know what to hope for, nor what to build, are therefore afraid of commitment, and so settle for too little from themselves and others.

Yet the Church insists not only on its spiritual dimension but on recognising it as a sacrament, that is, an encounter with the explicit presence of God.  Marriage is, indeed, a minor miracle.  I don’t mean this in a facetious way.  It is one of the great paradoxes of life, this unexpected, triumphant treaty of accord by which men and women, in their rival camps with their baffling, amusing, mysterious, undefinable differences, can find not merely reconciliation, nor even simply fleeting pleasure, but actually their highest earthly adventure by pairing up with a member of the other team (the rival team!), and sealing with them an all-transfiguring, world-creating pact, each a match for the other, and each the other’s match.

The impossible union is not only a wonder, but a plausible reality.  A bride will cost a man his life, but, mirabile dictu, it can come to pass that even such a wayward creature as a man will vow to pay, and keep his vow.  The hard-won reward is generous: he finds himself the beneficiary of a vow of equal magnitude, and he finds himself in a unique position to give the gift of self.  Moreover, the happiness and security this brings him overflows into any children the marriage produces, children who encounter no pit of dread in asking two of the most important questions in growing up: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Whom can I trust?’, though many young people do encounter such a chasm.  And the Queen, who in her life has had to make some fearsome vows before God, to her bridegroom and to her realm, is one of our greatest living examples in this regard.  Her own family has not been untouched by the turmoil of marriage in late twentieth-century Britain, but she and her husband have kept their faith and their vows, and quietly encouraged the rest of us to do the same.

In marriage is found, and from marriage comes, the ‘home’ of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas message.  I think it would be a good challenge for the Church and all people of good will to make this a year of promoting marriage, simply the idea, in our tired culture.  The Coalition for Marriage is already doing an excellent job in keeping an eye on the state of things, informing public opinion and encouraging the Government to do the right thing.  But marriage ought to be an urgent topic of conversation.  It needs to be allowed to set alight the imaginations of young people (I write as one) who are hungry for a mission, and the message needs to be proclaimed that marriage is a good thing from alpha to omega and at every scale: national, local and in the innermostnesses of the soul.  It ought to be given a place near the heart of the New Evangelisation; to solve the marriage crisis would be to ease many of the other social, moral and spiritual problems that afflict us.  Along with the other sacraments of mission (Holy Orders and Confirmation), it is the antidote to the dictatorship of relativism’s shrugs of indifference, and the soundest, least wasteful vessel into which to pour, with generosity and joy, the fruit of one’s sacrifices.

Meanwhile… Merry Christmas!  Keep feasting!

(Malcolm Archer’s setting of the Linden Tree Carol)

The New Evangelisation: ten thoughts

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  The question asks itself now not in ancient Babylon but in our own country and our own day, and with growing urgency.  The Church’s answer is the New Evangelisation —  a great call to re-evangelise Christian cultures that have forgotten the faith — but it can be hard to see how we are to fit into it, or where to begin.  I am not a convert, still less an expert, but I thought it might be worth putting up this list of reflections, even if most of them might seem obvious.

1. Apathetic agnosticism is a greater, a subtler and a more widespread challenge than aggressive secularism.  Our country is awash with spiritual apathy (or acedia): a number of people are openly opposed to Christianity, but far more in modern Britain seem almost to sleepwalk through life, hurled by busy lives from distraction to distraction, not seeing what weighs them down.  There is a lot of unwise, stupid and wrong behaviour as well, but we should never confuse this, the result of sin to which believers are hardly immune, with the actual intelligence and goodness of non-churchgoers.   Easy though it might be to forget in a culture opposed to the Church in so many ways, people really do examine the human heart carefully without any particular grudge against Christianity.  We should remember that our faith does not make us, in ourselves, superior to them — see Galatians 6:14.  Another point is that people have different reasons for not going to church, and these cannot necessarily be bashed aside with a copy of the Catechism.  For instance, many young people, having been brought up without regular church attendance, might feel that to start practising would be a slight to their parents and their values; it would be wrong for us to ride rough-shod over that loyalty.  Many people stay away from church without resenting churchgoers; many pray without practising; many believe in God but lack faith in the visible institution of the Church; many people are of good will but spiritually unadventurous. There are also more people with misgivings about modern values than the media suggest: I know a number of (young!) people who reverence marriage, dislike bad language, seek beauty in poetry, and so on.  To be evangelised is to discover something that is not completely unfamiliar.
2. We should announce the Gospel by asking people questions.  This is an age, in thrall as it is to the doctrines of self-determination and relativism, in which people dislike being lectured to, and in any case, it is better to invite people to discover the faith for themselves and in their own time.   Proclamations, however resonant, can be taken as slogans and brushed off quite easily.  Even quietly-posed questions are less easy to ignore.  They are more likely to percolate unobtrusively through the mind, reappearing every so often, never really going away, gently nudging and pestering for an answer.  We could learn from our Evangelical brethren here:  the talks and discussions they organise often have a question as the title, such as ‘Is there more to life than this?’, ‘What if the Resurrection really happened?’, and so on.  Even rhetorical questions demand unspoken answers.  Do you believe that you have an absolute and irreducible dignity as a human being?  Would you prefer to be excused for your wrongs, or to be forgiven?  Do you remember that we believed because it is true?
3. We must evangelise the arts and culture.  We must have the courage to answer the cults of sarcasm and ugliness with works of art, literature and music that uphold human dignity and strive for beauty.  The right artistic intention is, I think, to be prized even more than accomplishment or execution.  A  sincere true utterance with some rough edges is better than a thousand polished works calculated to trample goodness and truth gratuitously (I think works of art or literature can be evil, as well as simply bad).  The ideals by which all art was once made have been so neglected that they now represent a niche in the market, and it is up to us to fill it.  We need writers, composers and architects whose subjects are not necessarily explicitly religious but whose faith can be seen to leaven their work.  We need audibly beautiful, even musical poetry.  Popular music must be prized out of the hands of the industry that has dragged it down into sordidness, and the airwaves filled with simple, unaffected, authentic and uplifting tunes.  Films, too, could explore the world and the soul far more deeply, and without sermonising (Inside Out, which I have already praised, is a case in point).  These things matter because art is not inanimate: it always acts upon us for better or worse.  If beauty is a reflection of God, and God is love and truth, beautiful art will lead us towards deeper understanding and purer love of each other and of God.  Such love is several orders of magnitude above a love of music or poetry, but both have the same essence and the same divine origin.
4. Our position should not be a merely anti-modern or reactionary one, even though we are right to mourn to much of what the past has taken with it.  Although we should cherish tradition, resist our culture’s chronological snobbery with energy and revive certain aspects of the old world, our aim is not simply to return to the past.  Likewise, given that much of what we say and believe might be called ‘conservative’, we should remember that we are so confident in its truth because it is Christian orthodoxy, not because it is conservative.  We should look for opportunities in the modern world; we should embrace new technology.  This is, for instance, the age of the image, and ours is the religion of the image: the modern ‘explosion of imagery’, Fr. Robert Barron has said, even makes this a ‘Catholic moment’.  Why should the Church not encourage the building of beautiful websites or beautiful graphic design?  I am probably guiltier than most of yearning for the past and raging against the present, but we should make the effort to receive the ‘sacrament of the present moment’ gratefully.
5. We must never tire of striving and praying for Christian unity.  Christians have inherited a difficult and a painful tangle and our divisions, though less raw than they once were, remain scandals and obstacles to faith.  We should make a greater effort to collaborate with Evangelical Christians who, like us, hold to Christian faith in the teeth of fashion, their concern for what is ‘Biblical’ corresponding to ours for what is ‘orthodox’.  We should make an effort to understand the Eastern Orthodox faith: last February’s meeting between Pope Francis and the Russian Patriarch Kirill, and good relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople, are valuable and significant.  (I have heard a priest say that fifty years might suffice for full communion to be restored between East and West.)  Even within the Catholic Church, we should overcome our differences by trying to keep them in perspective, avoiding airing them in public if possible, and also by keeping our minds and hearts fixed on Jesus Christ (see point 10). 
6. Marriage, the family and childhood matter.  It is on this front that the modern world has declared war most explicitly on the Church.  We need courage to defend it.  A preoccupation with the welfare of adults, though not unjustified, has contributed to the social and cultural neglect of children and the elderly, who in their own ways have become almost second-class citizens.  Children in particular are segregated from the world of adults: because the adult world believes itself entitled to violent and sordid entertainment, children must be given their own isolated culture.  This, among other things, means that the passage from childhood to adulthood is no longer a steady growth or slow mellowing but a series of disillusioning shocks and blows, the worst of which fall between the ages of eleven and fourteen.  Surely most of us have seen this happen: the descent of the grey veil of cynicism; the deliberate self-vandalism of the soul; the hideously thorough revolt against childhood.  The New Evangelisation reminds us of the importance of the family, in which all people have their place and by which all understand their own lives.  Somewhere (I wish I could remember where!) I have heard and heartily agreed with the statement that ‘all men are called to be fatherly and all women to be motherly’.  I think it would also be good rule to behave at all times as if children might overhear.  Unfashionably, I also believe that men can and should cultivate chivalry towards women and that women should demand excellent manners of men.  Both men and women, if they are called to do so, should steel themselves joyfully for the mission of marriage and parenthood.
7. There is a good deal of health in the Church’s youth.  I can report this from belonging to it!  In university chaplaincies, in diocesan ministries, in parishes, however small in number, there is plenty of energy, intelligence and good humour to be harnessed.  The Church has great strength in its youth, as World Youth Day has proved again and again, and will surely do again this coming July. 
8. A sense of vocation is the antidote to the myth of self-determination.  There is more strength to be gained from the feeling of being called to do something than from simply wanting to do something.  The current idea that we may do as we please as long as we think it harms nobody else will, I think, pall, since it leaves nobody but oneself to blame for plans going wrong or indeed for suffering.  As people tire of endless fruitless avenues, the Church should be there to propose a robuster way of life, something requiring service and devotion and even vows, which nevertheless brings far greater happiness than the path of self-absorption and quick gratification.  I never tire of quoting Cardinal Newman’s meditation about service and vocation, from which this blog’s name is taken: ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission — I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next […] I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.  Therefore I will trust Him’. One way of telling whether something is a real vocation, it has occurred to me, is to feel a strong desire to do something good, to be terrified of doing it, and to be determined, almost in spite of oneself, to do it all the same.
9. We are sharing a revealed faith, not advocating a philosophy or policy.  Our faith is not an idea that we came up with one afternoon in the pub and are rather pleased with.  It is not a theory to be evaluated, nor a strategy to be risk-assessed.  It is not our idea but God’s.  If we invite people to understand the Church, we do so because we believe they will be happier for knowing it, and we want happiness for them out of love: it is something that we can hardly help telling other people about, like the urge to share music or discuss favourite books. 
10. Who do we say that He is?  Our first task is to evangelise ourselves.  In a lecture that is well worth listening to, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth says (here to be precise) that in the modern world we are to concentrate above all on the person of Jesus Christ.  Where, before the Council, the emphasis might have been too often on ‘The Church of the Lord’, we are invited now to found our lives more clearly upon ‘The Lord of the Church’.  The New Evangelisation may be a great task, but it begins here, and is a futile exercise without it.  It may also be a great task, but it is to be gone about in small, even unseen ways.  Whatever happens, we should not worry: we have already been told that it will all come right in the end.

Do readers have thoughts about these?  I would be interested to read any comments.

Reading ‘Pope Francis: Untying the Knots’ by Paul Vallely

Some time ago a friend kindly lent me ‘Pope Francis: Untying the Knots’, a biography of the Holy Father by Paul Vallely.  It is an absorbing and pacy book: I remember its being published remarkably soon after the election, and read it bearing in mind that speed had been of the essence when was being researched and written.

From www.paulvallely.com

Vallely works through the run of Jorge Bergoglio’s life with methodical detail and also sprinkles it with some wonderful vignettes.  For instance, he discovered his vocation in a confessional which he had only entered on second thoughts on his way to make a proposal of marriage.  His mother used to gather the children around radio to hear broadcasts of whole operas.  Then there is the nickname of El Chabon that he is given in villa 31, a slum of Buenos Aires, which apparently translates as ‘The Dude’.

Paul Vallely’s contention throughout the book is that Pope Francis’ characteristic humility, simplicity, authenticity and concern for the downtrodden pour forth now so startlingly only because of difficult trials he underwent in the past.  For instance, Vallely paints a picture of his time as superior of the Jesuit province in Argentina, soon after the Second Vatican Council, in which he apparently reacted fiercely against new movements and ideas (such as Liberation Theology or modern ecclesiastical architecture) and thus divided Argentinian Jesuits into supporters and adversaries.  Then there were the difficulties of the Argentinian ‘Dirty War’ of 1976—1983 in which a military regime, trying to stamp out any hint of Communism, included in its long list of political enemies priests who seemed too attached to the cause of workers or slum-dwellers.  Moreover, Vallely describes various examples of collusion between representatives of the Church and the regime; even within the Church, it was difficult for Jorge Bergoglio to know where and with whom he stood.  Vallely also dwells at length upon an incident involving two priests from whom, because they had expressly disobeyed his request to stop working in the slums for their safety, Jorge Bergoglio removed the licence to say Mass and therefore, in the military’s eyes, the Church’s protection.  These priests were kidnapped shortly afterwards and, it seems, were fortunate to avoid death, let alone to be released. 

It was against this background, Vallely tells us, that Jorge Bergoglio was sent to Bavaria in 1986 to research a Ph.D.  Here, in the church of St. Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, he encountered a painting of Our Lady entitled ‘Mary, Untier of Knots’.  This image resonated with him precisely because of the troubles he had faced in Argentina, and he took back copies of the painting on his return.  Vallely’s belief is that this picture played no small part in a conversion, or something like it, that the future Pope underwent.  After this change of heart and mind, we read that he came to believe that poverty could not be eradicated without a conversion of society; he became less opposed to Liberation Theology and he set himself the challenge of adopting humility as a ‘religious decision’.  It was the experience of division and disunity in the Church, of murkiness with regard to the 1976-1983 regime and the unassuaged plight of the Argentinian poor that forged the Pope Francis who now unsettles us and challenges us with his humility and directness.

It is a tale compellingly told.  I have misgivings about one aspect of its telling, however.  This portrait of Pope Francis often reads as if meant to be considered in contrast to, even in rupture with the recent history of the Church and indeed Pope Benedict in particular.  Vallely’s use of the word ‘conservative’ (a word which I think ought particularly to be avoided in Church affairs) might justly be described as liberal, and he does not mean it as a compliment.  How thinly Vallely has veiled his disapproval of the Church’s administration can be told by his use of phrases like ‘Vatican crackdown’ or ‘conservative hierarchy’; see also his description of Benedict XVI’s liturgical formality as a ‘predilection for lace and Latin’.  It seems fair enough for Vallely to pit Francis against the Curia, since the Curia has certainly been in need of reform, but the assumption is made that the Curia’s problems come from attachment to tradition, or antipathy towards modernity, rather than from nepotism, insularity or, come to that, from sin.  There is even the implication that, before his ‘conversion’, in his antipathy towards revolution, readiness to assert authority and decision to decorate a bare modernist chapel interior, Jorge Bergoglio had resembled Joseph Ratzinger, and that the new version is an improvement precisely because he apparently no longer does so.

In the first instance I find this unfair to Benedict, whose character and mission might have been different from Francis’, but was far from deficient (I have sung B16’s praises here).  It is certainly true that Benedict was a man of words and thoughts where Francis is more obviously a man of action and gesture, but a contemplative approach does not necessarily lead to a ‘Church turned in on its inner spirituality’.  As I see it, Benedict knew his strengths and their limits — a deep understanding of Europe, along with the intelligence to grapple with it.  So, in his seven years, although he never forgot that he was Pope for all the world’s Catholics, he laid down the intellectual and spiritual foundations of the New Evangelisation in Europe in particular.  He confronted the dictatorship of relativism on the very fronts on which it had declared war on the Church, and did not waver when the Western media retaliated.  He provided European Christians with the intellectual equipment to engage with the New Atheism, gender theory, the dictatorship of relativism and consumerism, and fought sin’s particular footholds in Western society.  Simply by insisting that we can speak of such a thing as absolute truth, truth that comes from God, he did a great service for hope.

If he revived Papal fashions and invited the European faithful to a careful consideration of the liturgy, it was not to flee from the plight of the world’s poor.  Rather, it dealt with one of the greatest threats to Western Christianity, namely the wholesale abolition of an awareness of its past.  How tempting it is to believe that this is the greatest of ages simply by virtue of our living in it, and consequently that our ancestors’ way of life is entirely obsolete (how often do we hear this or that idea hastened along ‘because it’s the twenty-first century’?).  By reviving traditions in the Church, Benedict reminded us that wisdom is gained not by rejecting the past solely on the grounds of its mistakes, but by sifting carefully through the ages, avoiding its errors and, better still, embracing its triumphs.  It was a way of asking the New Evangelisation’s great question to Europe: ‘Do you remember that we believed because it is true?’.  

Benedict was aware that Europe carries ever less weight in the Christian world.  I think it is reasonable to suppose that one reason for his resignation was to open the way for someone more knowledgeable about the non-European Church.  So in the end, he allowed himself seven years to lay the foundations of the New Evangelisation in the West (foundations that we are to build upon with his legacy), which in turn allowed Pope Francis to concentrate on his own strengths.

This does not mean that we can afford to pay less attention to Pope Francis (who himself has said that ‘every age has but a meagre awareness of its own limitations’).  I simply think that Pope Benedict had a particular mission, as Pope Francis has his.  Modern Europe is not like the rest of the world: the challenge of building the Church is very different, even to the extent of needing two different kinds of Pope at different times.  This is illustrated by Vallely’s own description of Argentinean popular piety and the informal, exuberant mood at Mass in the slums of Buenos Aires.  Coming from a place where the Christian faith has life like that, Pope Francis could be excused if he were baffled by European cynicism and sulky reticence towards any discussion of faith, though Laudato Si shows that he understands it very well indeed.  I see these two Popes in continuity with each other; they may have different characters and gifts, but both put these at the service of the servants of God.

Vallely’s (and others’) frame of thought, in which two apparently distinct halves vie for supremacy — liturgically and morally doctrinaire ‘conservatives’ versus energetic upholders of social justice —  is not only over-simplistic, but also produces a thoroughly disillusioning vision of the Church, which at any moment might be lost to the wrong side.  Of course there exist within the Church divisions, disagreements and (fundamentally) sin, but I do not think that these align themselves along battle-lines in the way that Vallely describes.  Vallely says, for instance: ‘For all his growing sense of the need for social justice, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was doctrinally orthodox and mainstream’, as if the two were incompatible.  Yet concern for social justice is a pillar of Catholic doctrine, set out clearly in Catholic Social Teaching, and social justice is achieved precisely by a universal, willing adherence to the Church’s teachings.  It may be that some of the faithful are overly concerned by liturgy and rubrics, and that others have an excessively political and secular conception of social injustice, but the ideal is a combination of both spirituality and action, two things which do not contradict each other but go together in the same direction, just as Benedict’s and Francis’ papacies do.  All are called to the harvest (which, we are told, is rich, and the labourers few); each must bring what he can.

Lord, do you wash my feet?

Having one’s feet washed by one’s parish priest is a cold and ticklish experience.  At the appointed moment the twelve men, having been sought out quietly before Mass, make their way into the Sacristy in a dignified fashion.  There they lurch and stumble around in a very undignified fashion, stifling cries of woe, tugging helplessly at their shoes and socks.  Nevertheless, great care is taken to dissimulate any reaction to the freezing wooden floor.  A reminder is given that both shoes and socks should be removed, since “this is the Washing of the Feet, not the Washing of the Foot’.  Then the signal is made to go back into church and find a place on the chairs arranged before the altar.  The floor of the sanctuary is marble, and this really is freezing.  Again, none must falter: the disciples might as well be walking around in their bedroom-slippers.  Then the priests (my parish has three) get slowly down on their knees and, assisted by a pair of altar-servers each, pour surprisingly warm water over their parishioners’ feet, and dry them with a white stole.  The ticklish set their jaws against giggles.

It all seems rather comical.  To Simon Peter, too, it seemed rather comical.  I think there is a laugh of disbelief in the words “Lord, do you wash my feet?”.  Likewise, when Our Lord, insisting on washing Peter’s feet, tells him that “If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in common with me,” the answer (“Then, Lord, not only my feet but my hands and my head as well!”) reveals both Peter’s characteristically impulsive missing of the point (which is always heartening for us), and also his strong suspicion that, as his feet are being washed, his leg is being pulled.

It is true that the comic often relies on ordinary things being turned upside-down, but if the supposed comedian’s face is straight as he turns to his disciples and asks them: 

Do you understand what I have done to you?  You call me Master and Lord, and rightly: so I am.  If I, then, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet.  I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you.

John 13:12–15

then here is a funny kind of comedian indeed, particularly if He is also God.  Well might the twenty-first century parishioner think it ridiculous for his priest to kneel down and wash his feet.   Two thousand years later the joke is not old yet: it is both indeed very ridiculous and also a serious duty, and so yet another resounding Christian paradox.

There is also something to be said about the aiming of this lesson squarely at men in particular.  I cannot quite grasp it, still less articulate it, but two thoughts occur to me.  The first is that it is more of an effort than might be imagined for men, who have always stridden around priding themselves on their strength, to let someone else serve them in this way.  The second is the particular manner of this small vocation, to have one’s feet washed on Maundy Thursday.  It may be for men only, but is not so in a jealous or triumphant way, but in the same mysterious, and mysteriously correct way that some things are for women only.  The twelve men have been taught a lesson this evening about manhood: not merely about manly forbearance of chilly tiles, but about the heeding of callings.

Pope Benedict, and our duty to him

Pope Benedict announces his resignation (from the B.B.C. Website).

Two years ago today, Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation.  What a shock and a blow that felt.  I don’t think I was alone in wondering why this steadiest of shepherds would uproot history with only a fortnight’s warning.  Was something wrong?  Was the Successor of St Peter’s task so urgent that only a younger and fitter man could perform it?  Was the Church so threatened that not only holiness but also haleness were demanded of a Pope?  What were we to see in the juxtaposed examples of St John Paul II on the one hand (staying at his post in spite of grave suffering, unyielding to the bitter end), and Benedict on the other (acknowledging his age, understanding the limit of his gifts, aware of the Church’s mission in history)?  All there was for us was to trust that he and the Holy Spirit knew what they were doing.

Well, I don’t regret that approach, because now we are on a remarkable journey with Pope Francis.  Christ is looking after His Church.  Certainly, the urgency in Pope Francis’ approach suggests that he, like Benedict, believes that time is short and labourers few for a rich harvest.  Pope Francis is a safe pair of hands, however, and even if he is a taker of risks, his recklessness is to be trusted.  

And there are still many riches to be mined from Benedict’s pontificate.  I have been wondering whether he decided, actually from the beginning, to concentrate his powers in certain areas rather than to stretch them too widely, and thereby to sow seed for the future even in a relatively short pontificate.  The Pope Emeritus is an expert on Europe and the Church in Europe, where the New Evangelisation is most sorely needed.  So he decided, without abandoning the world-wide Church, to build up an intellectual, articulate and clear defence of the faith, fit to withstand raucous Western modernity in particular.  Hence, then, the rebuttals of the dictatorship of relativism, the pulling at the plug of secularism, the watertight encyclicals, and the homilies to savour. And hence the name ‘Benedict’, after the patron of Europe.  

We — the ‘Benedict generation’ and other church-goers in this off-hand and secular land — have been given a responsibility and a mission; indeed, a ‘definite service’.   We need to be New Evangelists.  The New Evangelisation needs to be new because our culture, already having heard the Gospel, has nevertheless forgotten it.  Pope Benedict’s efforts were directed at us who already believe and practise for precisely this reason.  He equipped us with the tools of the New Evangelisation, and we have a duty to use them.

This does not mean that we don’t jolly well listen to Pope Francis.  It means that we rummage through the riches of the Church’s tradition too, and share all we find abroad.  All the same, it is worth observing that Pope Francis, because of his predecessor’s work, is free to concentrate on his own strengths.  For instance, he can seek those on Church’s peripheries and summon them with, as I see it, his great unspoken message ‘You’d better come in for now’.  Then he can leave us, to some extent, to make them properly at home, with catechesis and example.  Our duty, then becomes twofold: to Pope Francis’s current pontificate as well as to Pope Benedict’s legacy, and ultimately, of course to Christ.

Here’s to the Pope Emeritus.  ‘Prost!’ as they say in Bavaria!

From St Peter’s List.com