Catholic Social Teaching: Economic Justice and the Dignity of the Worker

“Never discuss religion and politics”, they say. So one would appear to be straying into dangerous territory in seeking to discuss economic justice and the dignity of the worker in the context of Catholic Social Teaching; for if ever there was an area in which the taboo two meet head on, it is surely this?

In any event I often used to find at dinner parties that politics would come up, perhaps with the other guests hoping, in vain, that if they let me talk about politics they would not have to hear me out on religion. Conversation would inevitably involve one half of the table railing against the plight of the poor and the need for greater welfare provision, whilst the other half would talk about the evils of state welfare dependence, and need to empower people and reduce government intervention in people’s lives. Unwittingly, both positions point to the two pillars of Catholic Social Teaching: solidarity and subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity, implied throughout the whole of Catholic social theory and given its clearest expression in Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, means that in the adjudication of matters political and economic, a preferential option should be given to the more local level of authority. The state should not interfere in matters in which people are competent to decide for themselves. Furthermore the state should not presume its citizens are incompetent to determine what is best for them just because they are poor as this undermines their intrinsic dignity.

However, subsidiarity must always be balanced by solidarity, which is to say, a keen sense of the common good, of the natural and supernatural connections that bind us to one another, of our responsibility for each other. The message of the parable of the Good Samaritan is not vitiated by subsidiarity. Nor, as many point out, should the state discourage the individual from helping others; the elimination of charity is not the aim of solidarity. Nevertheless, the concept of solidarity acknowledges that sometimes the government is the legitimate vehicle by which social solidarity is achieved. There are things that we cannot achieve as individuals at a small community level, but which we can achieve on a larger scale with combined efforts and resources. However, it must always be remembered that “solidarity is first and foremost a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone, and it cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State” (Caritas in Veritate).

“Thus the principle of subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa, since the former without the latter gives way to social privatism, while the latter without the former gives way to paternalist social assistance that is demeaning to those in need” (Caritas in Veritate) . . . the aforementioned dinner party tension!

Where though does economic justice fit into all this, and what might the Church usefully have to say about it? Is the Church even qualified to have an opinion on such matters? Well, almost no one predicted the global financial crisis which came to a head in 2008, including most economists, although in an interview back in 1996 when asked his opinion, on the Western economic system and its then trajectory, one churchman gave the following perceptive analysis, showing that we might just be worth listening to on such matters:

As a matter of fact, I understand too little of the world's economic system to say. But it is apparent that in the long run it can't continue as it is. First of all, there is the inner contradiction of the indebtedness of states, which live in a paradoxical situation; for, on the one hand, they issue money and, in general, guarantee the value of money but, on the other hand, are actually bankrupt, if we judge in terms of the debts. There is, of course, also the debt disparity between North and South. All of this shows that we live in a whole network of fictions and contradictions and that this process cannot continue on indefinitely. 

"We have just witnessed [Spring 1996] this curious situation in America. Suddenly the state can no longer pay its debts and must close shop, so to speak, and furlough its civil servants, which is a crying contradiction because the state has the responsibility for holding the whole together. The incident has shown in a drastic way that our system contains gross mistakes and that a considerable effort is required to find the corrective elements.

This critique of the prevailing system is characteristic of much Catholic Social Teaching on economic justice. It is not prescriptive, respecting their legitimate autonomy on such matters; it does not give detailed requirements of how states are to organise themselves, but rather with the benefit of critical distance identifies trends; what is potentially positive in them; what is less desirable; and also where excesses may lead.

Seeking to proclaim the truth in and out of season, inevitably finds the Church often teaching against the prevailing consensus; accusations have been levelled that its teaching on economic justice has been both in favour of Marxism and unbridled capitalism. The truth though is that when the Church looks at economic justice it never does so from a purely economic point of view. This point is key. The Church refuses to see the human person as purely an economic agent or utility maximiser. We are so much more than this and public policy must take this into account, as Pope St John Paul II sets out in Centesimus Annus:

The economy in fact is only one aspect and one dimension of the whole of human activity. [Where] economic life is absolutised, [and] the production and consumption of goods become the centre of social life and society's only value, not subject to any other value, the reason [for this] is to be found not so much in the economic system itself as in the fact that the entire socio-cultural system, by ignoring the ethical and religious dimension, has been weakened, and ends by limiting itself to the production of goods and services alone.

All of this can be summed up by repeating once more that economic freedom is only one element of human freedom. When it becomes autonomous, when man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a subject who produces and consumes in order to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relationship to the human person and ends up by alienating and oppressing him.

Thus any public policy which fails to take in account what it means to be human and to flourish fully as a human being, not just as an economic agent, is never going to benefit society truly. The idea that if we just get the economic system right everything else will take care of itself which seems relatively uncontested across all political parties at present is what Pope Francis rails against in Evangelii Gaudium. He asks the jolting question:

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?

neatly illustrating the warped mentality that has led us in many cases to believe that we are ruled by the financial systems in place rather than their being at our service, as if somehow we did not have the free will to act differently and economic events just happen to us. We need to change, not just the system in the abstract.

He then goes to on to criticise the idea that if one segment of society gets richer everyone else will automatically benefit:

“. . . some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralised workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”

Some cheap headline seekers have sought to suggest that is the Pope saying that capitalism is wrong and advocating Marxism, however, this is badly to miss his point. What he is saying is that we can never delegate our responsibilities of justice, fairness and a concern for the poor, to the system. We, at an individual and a societal level, always have moral responsibilities to those around us, which no system, no matter how fair, will ever abrogate. As EF Schumacher wrote: “The economic problem . . . is a problem which has been solved already; we know how to provide enough and do not require any violent, inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been. But there is a moral problem, and moral problems . . . are not capable of being solved so that future generations can live without effort.”

What particularly alarms me as we move beyond the economic crisis of 2008 is how wealth inequality is growing at an unprecedented rate once more, and there seems to be a presumption from some that if only the rich become even richer, the poor will eventually benefit. Eventually in and of itself is not good enough, irrespective of the absence of evidence that this will in fact eventually happen. Economic justice, not only demands that change occur to those structures of inequality that mean that those who were in large part responsible for the crash are the first to recover from it, but also that those currently reaping rewards do not ignore the plight of those less fortunate and assume that somehow they will be okay . . . eventually. We have a responsibility towards our fellow members of society that should compel us to do something now.

As the US Bishops have written on economic justice: “Our faith calls us to measure [the] economy not only by what it produces, but also by how it touches human life and whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person. Economic decisions have human consequences and moral content; they help or hurt people, strengthen or weaken family life, advance or diminish the quality of justice in our land.” We need as a society to become more keenly aware of all these aspects, and we need to do this quickly. At the same time as advocating for fairer systems, we must not lose sight of the fact that we can have an impact at an individual level too. We can think about where we shop and who benefits, if we have responsibility for setting somebody’s wages this also should give us pause for thought.

Today being the Feast of St Joseph the Worker, in this context, I want to reflect briefly on the dignity of the worker. The Church has always seen the dignity of work in and of itself. Work is not just viewed as a means to an end, but as something which has worth in and of itself. This is why we should never be content about having large numbers of people out of work, even if the benefits given to them were sufficient to support them and their dependents. There is a justifiable sense of self-worth to be derived from work and furthermore anybody who has ever watched The Jeremy Kyle Show will know that there is at least one good reason not to be idle at home during the day!

Mosaic of St Joseph the Worker, with Jesus and Mary

In Laborum Exercens, Pope St. John Paul II looks on work not just as a means of self-support but also as a contribution to society and one way in which Man is distinguished from the rest of Creation:

“Through work man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very natures, by virtue of humanity itself. Man is made to be in the visible universe and image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work.”

This is a very different conception of work and the worker from the mindset, all too prevalent, which sees the worker as a merely another production cost. Employers need to realise that their workers are human being with lives and aspirations outside of their work. Wages should never be viewed as just another necessary expenditure to be cut as far as possible for the sake of the profit margins. The argument that says paying higher wages, where people would work for less, is a dereliction of the duty to act in the interest of the shareholders rests on a selfish conception of the shareholder as one who is only interested in his own profits. If , though, we are to flourish fully as human beings this cannot be the dominant mindset. Nor is this pure pipedreaming, there are companies out there that treat staff equitably and continue to flourish in a difficult trading environment, John Lewis springs to mind.

The shrewd analyst who predicted the economic crash back in 1996 (Joseph Ratzinger) had something further to say on remedying the prevailing economic system:

“But I would like to add that we will not find [the corrective elements for our economic system] if there is no common capacity for sacrifice. For these correctives cannot simply be created by government prescription.

"This is the great test of strength for societies. We must learn that we cannot have everything we would like, that we must also go a notch below the standard that we have reached. We must once again find our way beyond what we currently possess, beyond the defence of our rights and claims. And this transformation of hearts is needed in order to make sacrifices for the future and for others. This, I think, will be the real acid test of our system.”

Christ crucified - the ultimate sacrifice

For the ultimate example of sacrifice, we need look no further that the inspiration behind all Catholic Social Teaching, Jesus.

Gospel Joy: Protecting Unborn Children

It might seem surprising to have a post about protecting the unborn child in a series about Gospel Joy.  It is true that abortion isn’t mentioned in the Gospel and, whatever one’s view, it’s axiomatic that the killing of unborn children is not a subject of joy.  Yet Pope Francis addresses the matter in his Apostolic Exhortation (paragraphs 213 and 214).  The reason he does so is that the Gospel is all about love: “Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children” whom he describes as  “the most defenceless and innocent among us”.

It is because we Catholics love our neighbour, made “imago Dei” - i.e. with the profound dignity of being made in the image of God, that we believe abortion is fundamentally wrong.  It is not a position which is somehow anti-women or “ideological, obscurantist and conservative” but a stance that reflects our love for our shared human life. If we stop loving the very gift of life, what remains?  How could one profess to love God the creator, and destroy His creation?

It is inconceivable that the Church’s position with respect to the unborn child will change, however expedient it might seem to some.  This is because recognition of the fundamental human dignity and inviolability of every life is not so much a teaching of the Church as a reality.  As the Holy Father says himself: it’s a reality which can be understood by “reason alone”.  And you don’t have to be a theologian, philosopher, scientist, doctor, or women’s rights campaigner to engage with this reality.

Yet it’s a reality which is often unrecognised or ignored.  Across the world, 42 million abortions take place annually; 115,000 every day.  Closer to home, in the UK, over 6 million abortions have taken place since 1967; the present rate is about 600 per day.  These statistics are truly shocking.  It’s enough to make one weep.

Where does one begin?  Let’s come back to love. If we really love God’s children and abhor abortion, we will work hard to stop it; if we want to stop abortion, we will love, support and provide real alternatives for vulnerable women and build a culture of life; and, if we want to build a culture of life, we will love and forgive those who have had abortions and are in need of healing (even if they don’t know it).

So the most important way of protecting unborn children, it seems to me, is to love their mothers. In that regard, the Gospel has much to teach us.

There are many excellent organisations working in this field - one I can recommend, from personal experience, is Life.

Gospel Joy: Following the example of Our Lady

From the very beginning of the pontificate of Pope Francis, he has placed great emphasis on Mary, the Mother of God. At the end of his apostolic exhortation "Evangelii Gaudium" he refers to her as the Mother of Evangelization, showing her role not only in the earthly life of Jesus, but also her presence and role over the centuries in the mission of Church. Jesus dying on the cross entrusted her to his disciple John, through whom he entrusted his Mother to the whole Church and all believers. Through this act Mary, the Mother of God, became also our Mother.

Te see the attitude of Mary in the reception of Jesus and the Gospel  we can consider certain passages from the Scripture that show both contemplative and active side of her life. Mary agreed to be the Mother of God - "let it happen to me as you have said" (Lk 1:38) and she "stored up all these things in her heart" (Lk 2:52). But she also "went as quickly as she could into the hill country" (Lk 1:39); and "near the cross of Jesus stood his mother" (Jn 19:25). She was also praying with the disciples before Pentecost.

These fragments can teach us Christians that our proclamation should be a result of our contemplation that is its source. We can't preach the Gospel without our personal meeting with Christ. Christianity is not a system or an ideology, we don't preach anything like that. We preach a Person. Therefore we won't be able to speak about somebody without our meeting with this person. Otherwise it will be our words, but not testimony that we will be able to give even in difficult situations. Mary was the closest to Jesus from his Incarnation and birth till his death on the cross and she is still in the heaven. Following her example we can learn how to be close to Jesus in our life. Nobody can teach us this better than his Mother. It is an interesting fact also that these two aspects of preaching are very important in our Dominican tradition and spirituality. The motto Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere emphasizes both the contemplative and the active sides of our preaching.

Mary, Virgin and Mother

you who, moved by the Holy Spirit,

welcomed the word of life

in the depths of your humble faith:

as you gave yourself completely to the Eternal One,

help us to say our own "yes"

to the urgent call, as pressing as ever,

to proclaim the good news of Jesus.

Mother of the living Gospel, pray for us.

Gospel Joy: Loving one another

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-5)

These simple words of Jesus are the great charter of Christianity. The heart of the Gospel is love. Love of God and love of neighbour are the two hinges on which hang 'all the Law and the Prophets' (Mt 22:36-40). Moral rules are still important for human flourishing, but only insofar as they find their perfection in love. And love is ultimately defined as seeking the good of the other.

We cannot speak of the joy of the Gospel, then, without locating that joy within a loving heart. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis keeps returning to this touchstone of love. The word 'love' permeates the whole document. To set the tone, the Holy Father connects love and joy right at the beginning, when he speaks of 'the quiet joy of [God's] love' (§2). 

We are often tempted to think of joy and love as fleeting emotions, but we are being invited here to consider them as more permanent dispositions. Both joy and love must be understood as human activities that endure through time. Indeed, the permanence of joy and love in our hearts is only achievable when we draw on the eternal joy and love found in God. 'God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy' (§3). The Pope reiterates that joy endures; it is no fleeting feeling of a hollow happiness. Rather, real joy comes from 'our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved' (§6).

As a result, joy leads to an 'enriching friendship' with God (§8). This, in fact, brings us back to love. For St Thomas Aquinas, friendship with God is just another description for self-giving love (caritas in Latin, agape in Greek). This caritas is a superhuman love. Indeed, one of the striking points made by Pope Francis is this: 'We become fully human when we become more than human' (§8). That is, we realise our full humanity when we allow ourselves to be drawn up into the divine love, that love which seeks not selfish gain but constantly gives itself freely for the benefit of others. The self-emptying love of God is most fully revealed on the Cross, for here is 'love in its most radical form' (§12).

Pope Francis embraces Vinicio Riva

Is there not, however, a problem of priorities: does love within our community not conflict sometimes with showing love to those outside? Our Lord is obviously speaking to his disciples, and refers to the love they must show within the Christian community. Doesn't this run contrary to the strong themes in Pope Francis's preaching about the Christian priority to go and preach outside our community? The Pope says that we must firstly evangelise those who do not know Christ. Certainly, a superficial reader might imagine that he is opting for evangelisation over and above building up the Church. He quotes the now-famous Aparecida document of the Latin American bishops in 2007, saying we 'cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings' (§15). Elsewhere he has said: 'I prefer a thousand times more a Church that is damaged [by external encounters] than a Church that is sick from closing in on itself. Go out, go out!'

On the other hand, we can't forget about our own community. The cliché that 'charity begins at home' echoes St Paul's insistence that Christians mustn't abandon the needs of their families (cf. 1 Tim 5:8). Tertullian noted in AD 197 that the pagans were disgusted at the evident love shown between Christians, specifically their charitable concern for the most needy (Apologeticum, 39, 7; cf. Matt. 25). But should we be surprised at this? We Christians must love our brothers and sisters in need; 'for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen' (1 Jn 4:20).

Happily, that false dichotomy between proclamation and service is easily resolved. Pope Francis on joy should be read in the light of his predecessor on love. Benedict XVI dedicated his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, to Christian love. In it, he argued that there is no dichotomy between kerygma (proclamation, one of Francis' favourite terms), leitourgia (the sacraments), and diakonia (the service of charity), and that universal love goes hand-in-hand with our special solicitude for the neediest among our own ecclesial community (DCE, §25; cf Gal 6:10). After all, we proclaim the Gospel in and through our love. As St Paul says, we need 'faith working through love' (Gal. 5:6).

Now, in Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis has enthusiastically taken up this great theme of love. Love is the fulness of the Law (§161). Our loving is a response to God, who first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10). From God's love, we receive 'a call to grow in faith' (§160), and we should respond by seeking baptism or (if we are already Christians) to renew our baptismal commitment to Christ. We cannot do this on our own steam, but receive the free gift of God's healing waters, if only we ask him.

L.O.V.E.

And this love is not a special preserve of the 'holy' or the 'saints'. Since we are all called to be 'missionary disciples' (§120), we are all called to share in, and share out, this divine love. As St John puts it so succinctly:

'He who does not love, does not know God; for God is love' (1 Jn 4:8).

And again, in case you missed it:

'God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him' (1 Jn 4:16).

Gospel Joy: Communicating the Joy of the Gospel today

“I have said these things to you, so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (Jn 15:11).

In a bar the other day, I was with somebody who had never met a friar before. At one point they said something along the lines of “he’s pretty funny, how come he’s a monk?” Now there’s a few of my brethren who might dispute the truth of the first half of statement, particularly after another bad pun. However, it’s the implicit sentiment that ought to be cause for concern. Why would somebody presume that laughing a lot and being funny were unsuitable qualities for somebody who has chosen religious life? How must the message be perceived, if the messengers are expected to be glum?

Clearly we’re doing something wrong. Perhaps the media portrays us as gloomy, perhaps they make out that our “good news” is nothing more than a restrictive set of morals? Pope Francis notes that some Christian lives “seem like Lent without Easter” (EG6). But this need not be the dominant narrative. Each one of us can change this and there are enough of us to make a real impact.

Joyful Dominicans with Pere Pierre of the Nobertines at the Monastery of
Our Lady of Sarrance, France

My favourite of the dismissals in the Revised Translation of the Mass is “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life”. It strikes me that this command is at the heart of the solution. If we radiate the joy proper to people who have just participated in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, if we allow the Gospel to sculpt our hearts, and if we do not hide our faith away, other people will surely start to ask, “How can these people restrained by this ‘rigid morality’ be so joyful? Might there be more to it?” Then we can be ready to give an account for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15), we can explain –in the words of Benedict XVI, which Pope Francis says he never tires of repeating (for they are the very heart of the Gospel) –, that: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” (EG 7).

Pope Francis is an example to us all in this. He has quickly gained a reputation for being a warm and joyful presence. Yet when asked, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?", his response was: "I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner."

His joy stems neither from deluding himself that he is not a sinner, nor from deluding himself that there is no such thing as sin, but rather from a trust in the infinite mercy of the Lord. The joy of knowing that Christ came to save us from our sins. As the Holy Father says, "God's mercy has no limits if he who asks for mercy does so in contrition and with a sincere heart."  We have good news for people and Jesus commands us not to keep it to ourselves. Pope Francis tells us that we “cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings”; we need to move “from a pastoral ministry of mere conservation to a decidedly missionary pastoral ministry”. This task continues to be a source of immense joy for the Church: “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Lk 15:7)(cf. EG 15).

Obviously for Dominicans, as members of the Order of Preachers, we ought to be out there preaching the message of joy that God loves each one of us. However, that command at the end of Mass is to all of us, and where the clergy are commanded to go, the laity already live and work. The New Evangelisation is the responsibility of us all and we must work together to achieve it.

The view from Fanjeaux - Mission territory for St Dominic
and the early Dominicans

Let us not wait, though, until we are perfect to start telling people about the Good News: the need for the Joy of Gospel to be taken outside the Church means we don’t have time for that! Let us strive to become more perfect along the way. We will be called hypocrites when we fail to live up to the standards we strive for, and we must be humble and ask for forgiveness when this happens. As Julia says in Brideshead Revisited:  “the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy.” We must not, though, dismayed by our frequent short-comings, succumb to the temptation to believe that the difficult parts of the Faith ought to be dropped or given up on. Those who do this harm themselves and the unity of the Church in its Mission; they sell themselves short and undermine those striving to uphold the fullness of the Church’s teachings. Perfection gained at the cost of lowering our aim is a shallow victory indeed. Perhaps it is in holding to our values, but with a renewed humility at our failures, a joyful admission of our faults, knowing that as we do so we come closer to Christ, that we will be the visible signs of a contradictory joy that the world needs? Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP speaks of how we need “to labour make the Church a place of evident freedom, courage, joy and hope. Truth matters. But our words will be useless unless they are embedded in communities which show how they are pointed beyond us, to the one who has sought out and given us his Word.” That’s a challenge to all of us, but the challenge to be more joyful, more free, sounds like one worth taking on.

Gospel Joy: The Homily

There’s an old joke that there’s no such thing as a bad sermon: sometimes, it’s the preacher’s words that are most enriching; at other times, it’s the silence between the words that are the morsels to be savoured. If we’re honest, I suspect we’d have to admit that listening to sermons isn’t always our paradigm case of Christian joy. Shouldn’t it be a sin to bore for Christ? 

St Paul describes preaching as “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:14). In our own times, these two poles of preaching can often be misunderstood. Far from being a matter of liberation, truth-telling can easily be seen as the shouting of truths at people who don’t want to hear, the type of confrontational revelations worthy of the stage of Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle’s lie detector; ‘love’ can be reduced to a general permissiveness, an 'anything goes' mentality that denies the truth in the name of a false freedom (‘all you need is love’!). What keeps truth and love together in Christian preaching is joy: the Christian preacher does not just proclaim a theory of life or a set of doctrines, but rather heralds the source of their hope, a joy tasted and offered for inexhaustible sharing. 

The preacher invites others into the joy of their friendship with Christ. What is proclaimed is neither abstract truth nor general love, but the relentlessly particular friendship that Christ offers to each and every one of us. The source and font of this joy is Trinitarian—the one God who dwells in three persons. The preacher participates in this joyful communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and invites others to be caught up in this eternal love story. This is the story of a two-fold economy of desire: God’s desire to enjoy us, which constitutes our desire to enjoy God. But the fact that this love story culminates in the bloody execution of Christ should caution us against simplistic accounts of joy as a panacea for all troubles, the promise of a quiet life that brackets out the fullness of human experience. 

The preacher’s task is a formidable one. The homily is the moment when the Gospel of Christ is drawn into contact with the experience of a particular Christian community, with all their joys and hopes, their fears and anxieties. For this reason, preaching is an essential task of the priest. Ordained to represent the people to God, and God to the people, it is human sorrow and human hope that the priest touches when he anoints the sick, when he consoles the bereaved, when he baptises or witnesses matrimony, and when he hears what only the Almighty should hear in confession. We can teach rhetoric and public speaking, we can make sure that the theology is in the right place, but the greatest preachers will always be those whose friendship with Christ overflows into their friendship with Christ’s people, the shepherds who (as Pope Francis reminds us) have both the ‘smell of the sheep’ and the ‘smell of the Good Shepherd’. 

In every sermon there is an implicit, often subliminal, prayer that begs God to further reveal the meaning of our lives. Preaching is a human activity, but cannot be reduced to a human activity alone. The Protestant theologian Heinrich Bullinger even went so far as to claim that “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God”. Obviously the preacher’s words remain human words and never become divine; the preacher’s words carry authority only insofar as they conform to God’s Word. But preaching is much more than a didactic or catechetical moment when the scriptures are exposited. In the mystery of salvation, human words come to do divine things: the ever-creative word of God speaks afresh through the words of his preachers, calling into being new realities and strengthening the Christian community. For that reason, every sermon truly is worth listening to.

Gospel Joy: Being a missionary Church

Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation represents a summons of all Christians to mission and so in one way or another every section of this somewhat lengthy document is directed towards preaching the Gospel. Yet if I were to pick out one strand of thought that seemed to me to be particularly relevant, it would be Pope Francis’s warning that a crippling inferiority complex has emerged among Catholics in the scandal-hit West that threatens to suffocate the proclamation of the Gospel. In short, the Pope warns, we are in danger of being shamed into silence. 

Few people would deny, I suspect, that a perception has emerged among many Catholics and non-Catholics alike in parts of Western Europe and the United States that the Church has lost both its authority to speak and the right to be heard. In the face of such public disapproval, there can be and often are prudential reasons to remain silent for a time, there can also be good reasons for choosing our words with tact and care. But there is a vast difference between, on the one hand, a heart that responds to our own sin or the sin of our fellow Christians with humility and contrition, and on the other a heart that responds fearfully when confronted with the same issues and attempts to hide. 

The first letter of St. John tells us that ‘there is no fear in love, but love casts out fear’ (1 John 4: 18). There is a warning here and it is a warning that Pope Francis is asking us to take to heart. A fearful response to our present trials casts out the love that is necessary for true repentance and reform. A true and lasting turn away from evil and towards the Good that is God can only be driven by a deep love of God and a recognition that the faith we have been given, the life with God that we share, is something so valuable and precious that it is worth devoting our entire lives to and in the end something worth dying for.

The key to overcoming an inferiority complex and shame, then, the key to overcoming our fear, is to learn again the value of what God has already given us. If we can grasp even a glimmer of how much we are loved by God, then this will be a love that we want to share. This does not change the reality that our society may still not be ready to listen. There is much hard work to be done ahead proving our faith, proving our love, and proving our hope by deeds: by Christ-like service of our neighbour. But if we recommit to a new thirst for holiness, then this labour will not be a burden but something that we choose because we want to share the gift we have received. In this generosity and self-giving, God’s power will be manifested in our weakness.

Gospel Joy: Evangelii Gaudium (New Series!)

“The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew. In this Exhortation I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelization marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church’s journey in years to come” [EG 1].

With these stirring words, Pope Francis begins his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Guadium, The Joy of the Gospel, and so we likewise begin our new series exploring the themes and challenges which the Holy Father presents to the Church on the “proclamation of the Gospel in today’s world”. We will consider how we, as a Church, communicate the most powerful, inspiring two thousand year old story of Jesus Christ, in the modern age.  How do we preach God’s love to a world that appears so unreceptive, to an audience seemingly deaf to our words? These are fundamental questions for us Dominican Students, belonging to an order whose principal task is to preach, but they are also of the utmost importance for all Christians.

Well, Pope Francis is leading by example! Many people - who, hitherto, have had little interest or regard for the Church - have expressed new-found enthusiasm, admiration and an openness to what the Church is saying as a result of what one friend has called Pope Francis’s “leading with love”. What a dynamic, joyful witness we have in St. Peter’s successor!

Lest this Evangelii Gaudium be misunderstood as an exercise in Public Relations or some sort of political manifesto, let us be clear at the outset of this series that at the heart of the Pope’s message is an invitation to us, to “all Christians, everywhere”, to “a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ” [EG 3].  Miss this, and frankly, you miss the point.  Everything that the Holy Father addresses is rooted in Jesus Christ and His inestimable love for us.

We invite you to join us over the course of the next month as we reflect upon the concerns which the Pope exhorts us to consider, take to heart, and act upon; "For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?" [EG 8].