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].

First Thursday of Advent: Faith in Action

Mont St. Michel

In today’s Gospel (Mt 7:21,24-27) Our Lord ends the great Sermon on the Mount with a call to arms, a call to action.  We are to do the will of our heavenly Father if we would enter the Kingdom of heaven. Simply hearing the words of God is not enough. Likewise, merely uttering praises to God is inadequate.  

But what sort of action is Jesus proposing? It may seem surprising that of all the possible analogies that Jesus might speak of, He refers to housebuilding: we are to emulate the “wise man who built his house upon the rock”, and not the “foolish man who built his house upon the sand”.  Why might Jesus use this example? Aside from powerfully illustrating His point, it may be that Our Lord was seeking to draw upon the dramatic rebuilding of the Temple, i.e. God’s House, which was being undertaken at that time in Jerusalem. More profoundly, St. Thomas Aquinas suggests that Jesus was referring to a different Temple which was about to be built: the Catholic Church. And if we are to take the Church as the Temple, the foundation is Christ Himself for as St. Paul says, “they drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (I Cor. 10:4).  So Jesus is calling us to action which is rooted in Him, who is love. We must not only hear Jesus’s words but we must act upon them for “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26).

What are we ‘building’ today? What actions, founded in our loving God, are we undertaking? In his recent Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis urges us to evangelise, “For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?” [para. 8]. Later, he reminds us of our obligations to the poor: “Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully a part of society. This demands that we be docile and attentive to the cry of the poor and to come to their aid.” [para. 187]. In these timely examples, Pope Francis challenges us to act on the message of the Gospel; our place in heaven may depend on it.

Our Holy Father, Pope Francis

'White Smoke'

In the spirit of Easter joy, we hope this video might lift your hearts. The Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, were fortunate to have cameras running while they recorded their upcoming album with De Montfort Music, as this coincided with the election of Pope Francis. The video below can bring us to relive the excitement of that moment.

On 13 March 2013, right after Vespers, most of the Oxford brethren were huddled round a little laptop in the JCR (student common room of Blackfriars Hall), straining to hear the quiet commentary. Rather uncharacteristically, we were even willing to delay our dinner! By the time Pope Francis appeared on the balcony of St Peter's, we had transferred to the Aula (lecture room) with its big screen, to watch, listen and pray with him and millions around the world.

Where were you...?

Saturday of the Fifth Week of Lent - To fear or not to fear?

Gospel: John 11:45-56.

It is easy to sense fear in Caiaphas’ voice as he berates his fellow members of the Sanhedrin: they “do not seem to have grasped the situation at all”. They fail to see how serious this is, that there is a choice to be made between getting rid of Jesus or the destruction of the Jewish nation. In a certain sense, Caiaphas is quite right. Jewish identity as he knows it is under threat, but only insofar as Jesus comes to purify it, to bring it to its consummation, and - as St Paul would later eloquently teach - to engraft the gentiles into the root of Abraham. Jesus comes not to destroy Jewish identity, but to make it more vital and complete, sanctifying it with the very presence of God made man.

Although fear is - on one level - a good thing, leading us to avoid dangers, modern psychology has done much to draw attention to the corrosive power that fear can exercise over our lives. In fact, we see fear being treated in two ways in the Scriptures: we read that “fear of the Lord is the first stage of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), and that “there is no fear in love, for perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). On the one hand there is a fear that emerges from communion, a reverential fear that respects the awesome power of God at play in our world, whilst on the other there is a fear that excludes communion, desiring instead autonomy and self-preservation, and which cuts ourselves off from the world around us. When Aquinas treats of this latter fear he describes it as a “contraction” of the soul akin to the physiological withdrawal and ‘going inwards’ of a dying person. This corrosive fear is inherently patterned by a tragic irony, since in its desire for the preservation of life it cuts us off from God, the source from whom all life flows.

Courtesy of CBCEW

In the weeks since Pope Benedict XVI announced his intention to renounce the Petrine ministry, it has been notable that many responses have - quite naturally - been marked by fear. The claims that the Papacy faced its greatest ever crisis always seemed implausible in the face of a study of Church history, but they were understandable: Benedict’s departure, and the change of style that Pope Francis has brought with him, touch upon many of the things that we hold dear as part of our Catholic identities. The challenge for us, as we unite around the Vicar of Christ in the task of the New Evangelisation, is that we do not so cling to the human things that are dear to us as to exclude the purification and revitalisation of our God-given identity, being worked by the Holy Spirit through the ministry of Pope Francis. If we do so cling, we may find ourselves committing the sin of Caiaphas, and - as Gamaliel cautions in the Acts of the Apostles - “we may even find ourselves fighting against God!” (Acts 5:39).

St Joseph - Well done, good and faithful servant

St Joseph is not a prominent figure in the Gospels – no words of his are recorded in them, and, apart from the narratives surrounding Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke (going up to the finding in the temple), there is no mention of him apart from a few references to Jesus as ‘son of Joseph’. And yet, from those few glimpses we get of him – his concern for the well-being of his fiancée when he hears she’s pregnant, his taking Mary and her baby Jesus to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod, his sharing of Mary’s concern as they hunted for Jesus in Jerusalem – we see a man who quietly but persistently does his duty. For St Joseph, of course, that duty was the extraordinary one of caring for the Incarnate Son of God and his blessed Mother as Jesus grew up, but in it, the Church has recognised the significance Our Lord’s having a human family has given to our ordinary human family life, the life of work and everyday concerns which was St Joseph’s, and in which we are called to live out our Christian faith.

Today, of course, we think also of our new Pope Francis, whose ministry as the Bishop of Rome is officially inaugurated today; and indeed, the humble, ever faithful example of St Joseph, caring for the boy Jesus, is a very fitting one with which to assume the role of servus servorum Dei, of service to the universal Church which is the Body of Christ. By the intercession of St Joseph, may the Lord bless Pope Francis for the great responsibilities of his office, and preserve in him the faithful humility which he granted to the man who was assumed to be the father of Jesus.

Undiminished Vigour

A week ago, I heard the philosopher and 'new atheist', Daniel Dennett, speak at the Oxford Union. His topic – the impact of the internet on religion – caught my attention, not least because Godzdogz aims to harness the internet for religious purposes.

Earth's proud empires pass away...

One of Dennett's suggestions was that religious institutions are not as permanent as they might seem on the surface; and he singled out the Catholic Church as a good example. The Church is old, venerable, and very large, but also in constant 'crisis' – as the headlines never cease to remind us. Dennett made the explicit comparison to the Soviet Union, which collapsed almost overnight, peacefully and without warning. Empires and tyrannies do pass away suddenly. So we can hold out hope that the same might happen to the corrupt regimes of our own day – and Dennett would include the Catholic Church in this pejorative category.

This was, in fact, the subject of an excellent talk I heard back in 2010, to the ex-patriate Burmese Catholic community in the Philippines. The speaker, a Dominican, was particularly qualified to analyse large empires and institutions, having successively been a diplomat in Moscow and an ambassador to the Holy See. Like Dennett, he spoke encouragingly about how apparently impregnable regimes can collapse with almost no warning, applying the historical lesson to the present situation of the military junta in Myanmar. But would this Dominican have agreed that the Catholic Church is in the same precarious situation?

I think not. Dennett's tacit assumption, of course, is that the Catholic religion is false. His implicit argument runs something like this. Since the truth will win in a fair fight – 'who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?' (as Milton put it) – and the internet increases the potential for communicating the truth and exposing falsehood, then (Dennett hopes to conclude) the Catholic religion will suffer as the internet grows.

But what if the Catholic faith is true? That is what we Catholics believe. Without truth, our religion is hollow and our 'faith is vain', as St Paul pointed out. But, on the contrary, Jesus endowed his Church with his Spirit of truth, promising that he would 'lead [us] into all truth'. This divine dimension of the Church is entirely missing from Dennett's analysis.

Now Dennett's position reminded me of the Protestant historian, Lord Macaulay, and the famous passage from his 1840 essay on Ranke's History of the Popes. It is so beautifully written and expresses so vividly the permanence of the Church, that it is worth quoting at length:

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. 

The New Zealander, by Gustave Doré

The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions [now 1.2 thousand millions]; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Now a few comments are in order. Those final lines can bring a chill to those of us who imagine our own precious civilisation to be invincible. In the days of the British Empire, they would have had an even greater effect. Next, remember that Macaulay, as a Protestant, is not naturally sympathetic to the Catholic Church, so his words can be taken in a fairly objective light. But he, like Dennett, mistakenly assumes that the Church is merely 'a work of human policy'.

Of course, the Church is a human institution in one sense, and is composed of sinful human beings (ourselves); but its more fundamental identity is its divine constitution as the Body of Christ. The Church, after all, does not only exist on earth, but also encompasses all those who have died before us in Christ – those in heavenly glory and those being purified – and in God's eternity includes even now the blessed of future generations.

In today's Gospel, people doubt that the Christ, the Saviour of his people, could come from remote Galilee. Yet, Jesus of Nazareth has triumphed. We believe he has conquered even sin and death, by his cross and resurrection. But even the non-Christian observer can plainly see the results of his mission. For instance, Algernon Charles Swinburne's diatribe against immortality, entitled Hymn to Proserpine (1866), contains this evocative couplet:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Or will goodness prevail?

The sentiment is often attributed to the dying Emperor Julian 'the Apostate', who had lamented the rise of Christianity and sought a return to pagan ways. In the days of Swinburne and Macaulay, the spread of Christianity was even more obvious – and therefore all the more to be celebrated, or lamented.

But Swinburne's bleak view makes the same mistake as Dennett (and Macaulay), seeing no divine operation at work in the Church. His colourless world is very far from the manifest joy and abundance of life that is the daily experience of Catholics around the world. For us, this joy, this life, this faith, hope and love – all these are witnesses to the divine origin of our religion. 'For God so loved the world that he sent his Son into the world; not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.'

The same Almighty God who loves and sustains all things in their very being, is the same Lord who preserves and inspires his holy Church on earth. That Church, which subsists in the Catholic Church now led by Pope Francis, may not always exist with all the same structures or the same exterior appearances – some of which are indeed 'works of human policy' – and yet she has received a divine guarantee:

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18)

May the Church ever grow and flourish 'in undiminished vigour', while avoiding prideful triumphalism, to become the refuge and hope of all humanity, especially of the poorest and most downtrodden among our brothers and sisters.

Pope Francis, as Cardinal Bergoglio, washing feet