My first ‘View from the Pew’ column appeared in The
Catholic Voice in December 2013. My original idea was to write the column in
the form of a diary, with several subjects per column, each linked to my
personal experience. I moved away from this idea in later months.
December
2013
This year, I spent the
week of Thanksgiving in Richmond, Virginia. It was a relief to get away, if
only for a few days, from the Irish media’s non-stop campaign against the
Catholic Church, not to mention its incessant cheerleading for abortion,
euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. I have been in Richmond many times, but I had never
been in America for Thanksgiving before.
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| St. Benedict's Church in Richmond Virginia |
Richmond has a strong
Catholic presence. The parish of St. Benedict’s is a vibrant and traditionally-minded Catholic
community, a home to many young people who take their faith very seriously.
It’s a treat to go to Sunday Mass and to see many young parents with babies and
infants in the pews, to hear Latin being used so extensively in the liturgy,
and to feel the presence of a whole Catholic culture and way of life.
In Dublin, it seems to me,
Mass-going is mostly an individual activity. But in Richmond, whole families go
to Mass together.
One evening, a couple of
years ago, I attended a “Theology on Tap” event in Richmond. This was a
Catholic talk given in a local bar. The speaker was a young man who had
converted from Presbyterianism to Catholicism, after deep study and reflection.
The place was packed with young people, mostly in their twenties. When the
speaker asked for questions, there was no shortage of them—and they were
thoughtful, theologically literate questions, too. I couldn’t imagine such a
scene in Dublin—and bear in mind that Richmond is a fraction of Dublin’s size.
Of course, it’s easy to
idealize. Although America seems much more friendly to Christianity than the
Ireland of today, Stateside Christianity is often skin-deep at best.
To take an example, I was
pleased to come across a stand of Christian books in a supermarket in Richmond,
and couldn’t help remarking how unlikely such a sight would be in a supermarket
tin Ireland. But, flicking through some of the books, I quickly realised they
were little more than standard self-help books with a sprinkling of Scriptural
quotations. The motivational books of the “mega-church” pastor Joel Osteen (Every
Day a Friday, Become a Better You), crowd the bookshops, and seem to
be Christian only in the most nominal sense imaginable. And it’s clear that a
lot of church-going and church adherence in America is a matter of tribalism or
identity, as was the case in Ireland until recently—what might be termed
“bumper sticker Christianity”.
But the difference between
the Irish and the American attitude to religion is still a meaningful one, in
spite of all this. It can be seen in little things—like the way words like
“God” and “Jesus” roll effortlessly off the tongue of Americans, while they
seem to stick in the throat of Europeans, even religious Europeans. It can be
seen in the unselfconsciousness with which Americans will say grace in a
restaurant, or indeed in their own house. It can be seen in more significant
things, too—like the thirteen per cent increase in applications to US
seminaries in the last ten years, a stark contrast to our own dribble of new
seminarians.
I put all such broodings
aside, however, as I determined to enjoy my first American Thanksgiving.
When I was younger, I
actually thought Thanksgiving was the American equivalent of Christmas. And,
until I experienced it at first hand this year, I had a foggy idea of what it
actually involved. I knew it involved a big dinner, and lots of people
frenetically trying to traverse great distances to be with their families, as
in the wonderful movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles. But what
else was there to Thanksgiving?
Not a whole lot more, as
it turns out. Thanksgiving seems extraordinarily close to being a holiday for
the sake of a holiday.
We made an enormous turkey
dinner in the afternoon, and in the morning we watched (on television) the big
Macy’s parade from New York, followed by the final of the National Dog Show,
which is always televised on Thanksgiving.
(How delicious quaint is that particular tradition?) An American
foxhound called Jewel was the deserving winner this year.
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| Jewel, champion American foxhound |
Perhaps just as
interesting as Thanksgiving is the day that follows it—Black Friday, so called
from the fact that many shops don’t go “into the black” until that day of the
year. It is not only the biggest shopping day of the year in America, but a
scene of pandemonium in many stores as bargain-hunters rush to pick up the best
buys.
Unfortunately, Black
Friday is no joke, but a very disturbing spectacle of consumerism gone
mad. My wife wisely advised that we should stay inside that day, but we watched
internet videos of shoppers literally fighting and trampling each other for the
bargains, all over the nation. A few years ago, a Wal-Mart employee actually
lost his life in the Black Friday crush. And this year a man was stabbed, in
the very State I was visiting—over a space in a shop’s car park.
If you ever find yourself
wondering whether Christians make too much heavy weather over “consumerism”, or
whether claims that shopping is used to fill a spiritual vacuum are rather
far-fetched, just look at “Black Friday”.
This festival of greed is
also eating into the holiday the day before, as shops open earlier on the
Friday morning, or on Thanksgiving Thursday itself, denying their staff the
opportunity to spend the day with their families and friends.
Such naked exploitation
was one of Pope Francis’s targets in The Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii
Gaudium), the apostolic
exhortation on the New Evangelisation, whose release was the week’s big
Catholic news.
Knowing what a travesty
the media would make of the Pope’s carefully-considered words, I decided to
ignore the coverage, download the document to my smart-phone, and read it for
myself on the plane back to Ireland.
I wonder if people who
don’t read Papal documents realize what they are missing? Or whether
non-Catholics ever suspect what intellectual pleasures there are to be found in
the study of the Faith? Some recent Papal encyclicals—like Blessed John Paul
II’s Faith and Reason and The Splendour of Truth, or Pope
Benedict’s In Hope We Are Saved, are deliciously meaty extended
essays worth reading again and again, as much for enjoyment as instruction.
Apart from a few
hours of sleep, I spent the entire flight home mulling over The Joy of the
Gospel. I don’t mind admitting that a few passages moved me to tears.
When Pope Benedict
retired, I was distressed and anxious. I suspect the gentle Bavarian will
always be my favourite Pope. But who could fail to see an initiative of the
Holy Spirit in the arrival of Pope Francis, and the astonishing outpouring of
enthusiasm and energy he has sent through the Church, and through the whole
world? It’s extraordinary how many churches already have his image hanging over
their main entrance.
The Joy of the
Gospel is the strongest expression yet of a theme that the previous two
Popes often raised—that is, that mission and evangelisation should be the
central goal of the Church, that (to quote the document) her “customs, ways of
doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably
channelled for the evangelisation of today’s world rather than for her
self-preservation.” And it is brimful of this Pope’s oft-repeated theme that it
is better for the Church to take risks, and to find new ways to take the Gospel
to the world, than to sit tight on the laurels of tradition and triumphalism.
It resounds with
this Pope’s trademark pithy phrases. “There are Christians whose lives seem
like Lent without Easter…an evangeliser must never look like someone who has
just come back from a funeral.” “Evangelisers…take on ‘the smell of the
sheep’.”God asks everything of us, yet at the same time he offers everything to
us.” “Nor is it fitting [for a homilist] to talk about the latest news in order
to awaken people’s interest; we have television programmes for that.” “The
Church urgently needs the deep breath of prayer”.
The document is over two
hundred pages long and covers an impressive range of subjects, all connected to
the central theme of evangelisation. It is freely available on the internet and
I encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself, even if it takes a few
sittings. It is simply impossible to write a brief overview of a document so
deep and many-sided.
One thing, however, that I
will mention about The Joy of the Gospel
is its civil, even genial tone. All too often, traditionally-minded Catholics
(like myself) fall into the trap of taking the term “the Church Militant” to
mean that we should be abrasive in our presentation of the Gospel, that we
should pull no punches and mince no words, that we should almost exult in
offending modern sensibilities at every opportunity. This is not Pope Francis’s
attitude, any more than it was the attitude of his two illustrious
predecessors.
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| Michael Voris of Church Militant TV. Well-intentioned, often right, but.... |
In this document, the Pope
has warm words for other religions (especially Islam), for lapsed Catholics,
and for the non-religious. He calls for evangelisation to be a dialogue rather
than a full-frontal assault.
And there is no mistaking
his attitude towards those who put all their hope in a fervent return to
tradition. He criticizes “those who
ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because
they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular
Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline
leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of
evangelising, one analyses and classifies others, and instead of opening the
door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying”.
Above all, the message of the document is a call to
evangelisation by all Catholics, both lay and clerical, learned and unlearned.
“I invite everyone to be bold and creative in this task of rethinking the
goals, structures, style and methods of evangelisation in their respective communities.”
This puts me in mind of an idea of my own. It bothers
me that a walk through Dublin city centre on a Saturday afternoon is likely to
pass Muslim street preachers, Evangelical Christian street preachers, Mormon
street preachers, and every sort of street preacher except Catholic. Surely
there is room for a Catholic stand outside the G.P.O….but perhaps, instead of
hectoring and embarrassing passers-by, a rotating raft of speakers could simply
read aloud from the four Gospels,
while having Catholic pamphlets and books available for those who enquire
further. I submit this suggestion to the proper ecclesiastical authorities, who
would need to give it the necessary sanction and supervision.
I arrived in Dublin in time to attend the eleven
o’clock Mass in Our Lady Queen of Heaven, the airport Church. Watching the
priest bless the Advent wreath beforehand, I felt a deep sense of comfort. How
could the frenzy of consumerist society, or the spin cycle of the Irish liberal
media, ever prevail over the gentle and ancient rhythms of the liturgical year?
The white and pink and purple candles, so simple and gracious, seemed like a
symbol of something infinitely more enduring than all the furious forces that
seek to snuff out the light of faith in Ireland, America, and everywhere else
that it shines.
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