Check the Economy blog for Catholic social teaching and the new encyclical

‘God and my right’

Barrister Neil Addison published an excellent piece in the UK’s Catholic Herald on 13 July under the title RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS UNDER ATTACK IN BRITAIN. In fact the headline is slightly misleading. Addison says, ‘I do not consider that we are in an era of anti-Christian persecution. Indeed, to suggest that we are demeans the word “persecution” and those many Christians who are suffering real persecution to the point of death.’  But, he continues,

‘What we are in is an era of increasing government interference and regulation of what used to be regarded as private life and an increasing intolerance of those who disagree. We are in an increasingly authoritarian society and the Church is always the first victim of authoritarianism because the Church exists as an organisation that is, or should be, independent of the state, and which has a basis for its motivation and thinking which is independent of the state.’

And he writes:

‘When we look at our current controversy over MPs’ expenses the constant refrain that is coming back from so many MPs is that what they did was “in accordance with the rules”. But what is missing in this response is that they never considered whether what they were doing was morally right or wrong and that, I suggest, epitomises a broader problem in our society. We are not showing respect for conscience and the desire not to do that which is morally wrong because we are no longer acknowledging the importance of morality itself and are instead fixated on mere legalism and rules.

‘As a lawyer I am constantly dealing with the efforts of government to legislate on everything and the consequence is that politicians are infantalising us as a society by removing our ability to think in moral terms. The result is that we have more criminal legislation than ever before and more crime, more financial regulation and more fraud, more interference by government officials in all aspects of life and more government failure and incompetence….

‘The new Equality Bill currently before Parliament epitomises this tendency. Nearly every form of discrimination is banned even for private associations and churches. Or, to put it another way, they are to lose the right to choose. Churches are to be banned from preferring Christians in their employment practices except in the employment of priests or religious teachers. They are not going to insist that employees live in accordance with the ideals or principles of the Church, and any employment or membership decision they take can be questioned and investigated by an unelected quango, the Equality and Human Rights Commission.’

Addison points out the inconsistency at the heart of this agenda:

‘The Labour Party would not employ a member of the BNP in any capacity; the Conservative Party would not employ a card-carrying Communist. Why, then, should the churches be obliged to employ people whose religion or lifestyle is incompatible with the beliefs or principles of that church ? I do not believe that political parties should be obliged to employ people whose political beliefs or activities are incompatible with their own. Political parties are entitled to preserve and defend their distinctive identity. I just make the point that religious organisations should be entitled to the same freedom to preserve their identity.

‘As the Government’s proposals stand I, as a Catholic, would be entitled to apply for the post of general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain and to sue if I was not appointed. And a member of the National Secular Society would be entitled to apply for the post of general secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. It is lunacy - and more than lunacy, it is dangerous to freedom and democracy, because democracy requires not just individual freedom but also freedom of association.

‘We need to defend the principle of civil society in which associations and organisations, as well as individuals, have rights and are allowed the freedom to preserve their distinctive nature and contribution to society as a whole. It is no coincidence that the first thing that any totalitarian state does is to regulate and control association, organisations and churches. We need to be alert to this danger and we need to defend the rights of churches and other organisations, not simply in order to defend religious freedom but in order preserve freedom itself.’

Our eyes can see only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum - that section we call “light”. Scientific instruments can see most of the rest. But even with every instrument known to man, 96% of the universe is missing, invisible, absent. Called “dark matter” by the scientists, its existence is known only by the process of deduction, and our inability to find it remains a mystery.

The Church Fathers also knew that most of the creation is invisible - that the tiny part we can see forms a miniscule percentage of the whole. The invisible creation includes the hierarchies of angels, creatures somewhat separated from the flow of space-time. The parable of the Good Shepherd - in which the man leaves his 99 good sheep in the field to go and find the missing 100th - was interpreted in accordance with this belief. The 99 sheep were the invisible angels, the 100th was the wayward human race. The Shepherd is the Son of God, who lifts the lost sheep on his shoulders by assuming human nature, and carries it back by ascending to heaven.

We seem to be trying to build a civilization on the assumption that only what is visible really matters - as though God and the angels did not exist, as though values and ethics belonged only to a secret, interior world that had nothing to do with time, space and matter… or politics. But reality has a way of catching up with us. The invisible scandal of child abuse suddenly becomes visible, the abuse of expenses is published for all to see, the lies on which our financial security had been founded are exposed. The invisible is made visible. That which by its nature cannot be seen is revealed by its effects. The sinking of the Titanic has archetypal resonance for us because our whole way of life is heading for a similar disaster. Civilization, punctured by the invisible, is heading into icy depths.

We cannot live without God, and civilization depends upon the sacred, whether we acknowledge the fact or not. Human rights, which we make so much of today as the basis for a secular morality, in fact do not exist without God. They belong to us insofar as we are made in the image of God and exist in relation to him. Our value derives from that likeness, and we have a destiny in him that is defined at our creation. Any other attempt to construct a set of rights for ourselves is built on sand; it is merely a list of what we wish for ourselves. The rights of the unborn, invisible in the womb, or the elderly and the slum dwellers, invisible at the margins of productive society, will always be trampled underfoot, if that is all they are. Seven million babies have been aborted in Britain alone in the last forty years. But the invisible exists, and the blood of the invisible cries to heaven.

The Centre for Faith & Culture and Second Spring join the rest of the Catholic community in welcoming the appointment of Archbishop Vincent Nichols as the new Archbishop of Westminster. In the wonderful homily he preached at his installation he says that belief in God “opens us to all that lies beyond. It’s a constant invitation to go beyond our immediate knowledge and awareness, and even our current commitments. Faith in God is not, as some would portray it today, a narrowing of the human mind or spirit. It is precisely the opposite. Faith in God is the gift that takes us beyond our limited self, with all its incessant demands. It opens us to a life that stretches us, enlightens us, and often springs surprises upon us. Such faith, like love, sees that which is invisible and lives by it.”

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Please note the various improvements that our webmaster Mark Armitage has recently made to the Second Spring website. You can explore the site by clicking on the buttons in the main menu, on the left of your screen. And don’t forget to keep up with our Economy blog.

May is one of the most beautiful times to see Oxford. The month begins with the Magdalen College choristers singing in the dawn from the top of the College tower over the River Cherwell. Anyone venturing through the city streets later that morning is likely to encounter Morris dancers and other people behaving even more strangely. This year a woman dressed as a sheep was wandering across the road on all fours. By now the two main arteries into the city - Woodstock and Banbury Road - are transformed into avenues of white and pink blossom. As the days of sunshine become more frequent, one begins to think of strawberries in the park and picnics on the river.

If the weather is not so hot, the museums offer an interesting refuge - the Pitt Rivers is open again after a major refurbishment, although the Ashmolean is closed until November. The Museum of the History of Science is much more fun than it sounds, and right at the architectural heart of the university, among the greatest concentration of colleges and libraries, next to Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre. There are also some very fine art exhibitions. ART JERICHO recently exhibited a rich selection of very fine etchings by Jane Peart, Heather Power and Morna Rhys, and is now featuring the 71st annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers, which is not to be missed.

Tourists with a religious bent might find information of interest on our ‘Oxford Centre’ page. May being Mary’s month, why not make a mini-pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Oxford, at the church of St Aloysius, where Gerard Manley Hopkins once preached, and which is now the home of the Oxford Oratory? In mediaeval Oxford there were many well-known images of Our Lady, including the one before which St Edmund of Abingdon made his vow of perpetual virginity at the age of twelve, placing a gold ring on the statue’s finger. Tragically, this and other signs of devotion to the Mother of God were destroyed by a later age and it was not until the nineteenth century, at the time of the ‘Second Spring’, that Our Lady of Oxford was to return.

Hartwell de la Garde Grissell was an Oxford convert who became a Private Chamberlain and personal friend of Pope Pius IX. The Pope granted him indulgences for a painting of Our Lady as “Mother of Mercy”. After Grissell’s death in June 1907, he left his his painting of Our Lady of Oxford to St Aloysius’ Church, on condition that a suitable chapel should be built. The relic chapel is where the image is venerated today, amid the bones of the martyrs who hid in the Roman catacombs and laid down their lives for Christ and His Church. On the Feast of Our Lady of Mercy in 2001, Cardinal Stafford, then President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, said Mass in the church and prayed at the shrine of Our Lady of Oxford.

That we can address Mary as Our Lady of Oxford reminds us that although the Virgin’s care and intercession is universal, she is also able to care for each one of us individually. To have her image set up in a particular place shows that she is not remote or unapproachable, but rather our Mother, whose love for each of us is intimate and personal.

All things rising, all things sizing

Mary sees, sympathizing

With that world of good,

Nature’s motherhood.

Apologies for delays to Second Spring issue 11, which is still in production. In the meantime, please note the new features on this site, including our redesigned CHRISTIANITY section, and CATHOLIC OXFORD, accessed from the menu on the left. In the run-up to the release of the eagerly-awaited papal encyclical please visit our new web pages on Catholic social teaching and the economic crisis.

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Calvary by Daniel Mitsui

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Many people have seen in Jesus’s cry from the Cross an indication that the Son of God was allowed to experience the whole of human suffering - including the pain of real despair and a sense of meaninglessness. As the sun itself seemed blotted out of the sky, the world seemed to lose its connection to God. And yet it was God who experienced this exile.

One human being can only experience so much. But each of us can find our own suffering in his. We know that he has accepted it for us, even as we fight against it in ourselves. He makes suffering a sacrament, a thing that connects us to him, and therefore a conduit through which grace can flow to us through him.

The relationship works both ways, of course. That is why traditional piety at Passiontide tells us that our own sins have nailed him to the Cross. My little acts of selfishness, pride, self-indulgence, dishonesty and betrayal find themselves in the treachery of Judas, the denials of Peter, the weakness of Pilate, just as my own sufferings have found their home in his. This is not ‘guilt tripping’ but realism. The life of Jesus in me cannot be disconnected from his life in Galilee, Calvary, Gethsemane - or heaven.

I have known people who, whether for a short time or longer, have lost their religion. Faith deserts them, as though it was never there. Sometimes this is because deep down they don’t want to believe. However it happens, they have lost their connection with Christ. He has become to them merely a figure in the distant past, or a person in a story that has been heard once too many times.

The best argument I have heard against faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was this. If it is true, and if Catholics receive God in communion every week, how do they remain such a miserable bunch? This applies not just to the ones who hypocritically receive communion without even trying to live the moral life that it signifies, but to those who are devout, good people. Shouldn’t something more extraordinary happen to them? Surely they should be transformed into something more impressive, if God is entering them every week?

It will happen. Just give it time. If we look at ourselves, instead of hastening to judge others, we will see how easily we have built a wall of habit and inattention around ourselves that prevents grace flowing into every part of our lives. Why am I not transformed? Even when my heart is spiritually alive, the blood of Christ somehow does not reach my hands and feet. The eucharist, though it keeps me alive, cannot do more than that without my help.

Mostly we simply continue to struggle - with the same habits, the same sins, the same thoughts, repeating ourselves day after day. ‘Baptism is the beginning of a struggle, more or less severe according to God’s providence, that ends only at the moment of death’ (Vivian Boland OP, Spiritual Warfare). By all accounts, the moment of death itself is the most intense part of the struggle. It is like the struggle of a woman giving birth, for we are giving birth to our eternal selves. The best way to prepare for that moment is by receiving the sacraments and trying to be faithful to them: they may not transform us, but they give us the strength to continue the struggle.

Or think of it like this. We are on a journey, but we are tempted to go in many directions. Going to Mass, being reconciled and receiving communion is a way of turning back towards God. We may not get far, but at least we are facing in the right direction.

The image is reproduced with permission from www.danielmitsui.com

Are we forgetting how to read?

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

“I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes….  For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded... But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles….” Read the whole article by Nicholas Carr here.

The Messenger

Éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended
Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / above the middle-earth sent unto men

These lines from Cynewulf’s poem Crist, which inspired Tolkien on the eve of the First World War, became the seed of the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. In those stories, Earendil (the father of Elros and Elrond) is a messenger to the angelic Valar from the races of Elves and Men, conjoined through his own ancestry. He jouneys into the Farthest West at the darkest moment of earth’s history, bearing the holy light of the Silmaril upon his brow, to beg for assistance against the Dark Lord. Having set foot in the Undying Lands, where his appeal is heard by the Valar, he is not permitted to return home but is given immortality, and his ship is given the power to journey among the stars. He becomes the world’s first space-traveller, and the flaming jewel he wears as a token of love appears to us as the Evening and the Morning Star. At the end of the First Age, in response to Earendil’s intercession, the armies of the Valar descend upon Middle-earth to overthrow the power of Morgoth. Descending from the heavens in his silver ship, Earendil slays the greatest of dragons, Ancalagon the Black, and Morgoth himself is thrust by the Valar beyond the Walls of the World into the Timeless Void.

The most effective prayer of intercession is made by one who can represent by his ancestry all the afflicted peoples of the earth, to plead for pardon and pity. And intercession is necessary, not because God is deaf to the cries of individual victims, but because we are part of something bigger than ourselves, and the history of our own woes is bound up in a larger story.  The events to which the myths of the Simarillion look forward have taken place in reality. Jesus Christ who is both God and Man has paid the full price of our redemption, pleading on our behalf at the throne of God for pardon and pity. “For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Hebrews 9:24).

See Ted Nasmith’s painting of Earendil’s voyage here.

In his new booklet for CTS, Edward Hadas tries to get to the roots of the present financial crisis, the full scale of which continues to unfold in the headlines every day. “Banks have failed, governments have debauched currencies and the rest of the economy has been thrown into recession. If only the business of banks worked anything like as smoothly as the aviation system. Then crises of the sort the world is now enduring would be almost as rare as plane crashes. Could that happen? No one can be sure in advance, but it is worth trying to create a sounder financial system. The current crisis provides an excellent opportunity. ”

Hadas concludes his analysis with a “moralist manifesto” that aims to integrate finance with morality. For in the words of the Church’s Compendium of Social Doctrine: “The moral dimension of the economy shows that economic efficiency and the promotion of human development in solidarity are not two separate or alternative aims but one indivisible goal.”

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Visit our Stations of the Cross during Lent.

Where did evil come from?

There is a gaping hole in the Christian explanation of the universe. Or that is how it appears to many young people. Where did evil come from? The standard answer, of course, is “free will”, but that isn’t enough. The question is why, if God knew that sin and therefore suffering would ensue, did he continue with the creation?

The Christian tradition replies (a) that any creation is better than none, and (b) that God made sure that it would end well, by dying on the Cross. But many believe that non-existence is better than suffering (witness the rise in suicide and the arguments for mercy-killing). And they ask, how can it be made to end well by yet more innocent suffering? Especially if an eternal hell lies in wait for those who don’t repent.

Lent seems a good time for Christians to reflect on all this, and to try to clarify what is going on. Two preliminary points come to mind. Point one. As Chesterton once said, you should not look a gift-universe in the mouth. How can we pretend to be able to judge whether the whole is worthwhile, or weigh the positives against the negatives and find it wanting? We are simply not in a position to be able to do so. Point two. Suffering is not cumulative. As the philosopher Wittgenstein pointed out, there is no suffering greater than the suffering of one man. I’ll come back to that next month, as we approach Easter.

Meanwhile, the origin of evil is still on the agenda. How could the highest Angel, Lucifer, reject God in full knowledge of what he was doing, and of the consequences, so completely that he will never repent of it? That is the question, surely, in its starkest form? The fall of humanity is merely an echo of the angelic fall that preceded it.

Satan in his original glory, William Blake

It is impossible to reject God completely, since our being comes from him. To reject him in that sense is beyond our power; it would be to un-make ourselves. But what is possible - for a creature that is like God but not God - is to reject “part” of God, or an aspect of God; specifically, its own loving relationship with God. In fact, the more like God, the more beautiful and glorious, a creature is made to be (and Lucifer was very great), the more intense must be the temptation to reject that relationship.

To be like God is to be self-sufficient in every way except the most important - we depend on God for our existence. But if our existence is already assured, we can reject God in every other sense. Lucifer has what he wanted: himself. He was faced with a choice between water and fire, between flowing and burning. In choosing to keep what God had given him, rather than give it back to God, he chose the fire.

But why did God, knowing that Lucifer would reject him, go ahead and create him anyway? We might turn the question around. Would Lucifer in fact have chosen non-existence, if that had been an option for him? It seems not, because he wanted his own being so much he was prepared to reject God in order to keep it for himself, even if it meant being wrapped in flames.

In Tolkien’s creation-myth, Ainulindale, God tells Melkor (Lucifer) that the divine plan for creation as a whole cannot be thwarted: “For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” In God’s design, even the rebellion of Satan, with all its dreadful consequences, can be accommodated. No comfort there, of course, to the mother whose children are being tortured to death before her eyes. But who said the truth must be immediately comforting?

We assume too readily, also, that Revelation (and therefore theology) must have an answer to all our questions. The Venerable John Henry Newman wrote: “Now why does God permit so much evil in His own world? This is a difficulty, I say, which we feel at once, before we open the Bible; and which we are quite unable to solve. We open the Bible; the fact is acknowledged there, but it is not explained at all. We are told that sin entered the world through the Devil, who tempted Adam to disobedience; so that God created the world good, though evil is in it. But why He thought fit to suffer [permit] this, we are not told. We know no more on the subject than we did before opening the Bible. It was a mystery before God gave His revelation, it is as great a mystery now; and doubtless for this reason, because knowledge about it would do us no good, it would merely satisfy curiosity. It is not practical knowledge.” Read the whole sermon.

If you are looking for more Lenten reading, I cannot recommend too highly Timothy Radcliffe OP’s Why Go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist, which is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book. It manages to be both funny and wise on every page.

Darwin in 1840

This month being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, most of us are already tired of the theory of evolution. Yet it goes to the heart of the modern world, and as such this web-site cannot let the moment pass without adding to the festivities. I recommend the articles you will find in the “Darwin” issue of Philosophy Now magazine (Jan/Feb 2009). Among them is an enlightening piece by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci. In it he writes:

“Just as the Standard Model in physics is undergoing challenges and revisions (think of string theory, for one), so is the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology being challenged. An increasing number of scientists – including yours truly – have grown dissatisfied with the fact that the current version of the theory does not adequately address many important questions. These include the role of developmental processes in evolution, the origin of completely novel traits (such as the turtle’s shell, for instance), the increasingly-plausible possibility of so-called ‘soft’ inheritance (ie, mechanisms of heredity that do not depend on DNA), and even whether and how the propensity to evolve – the so-called ‘evolvability’ of a lineage – can change during the course of evolution.

“Moreover, some evolutionary biologists think evolution is a much richer phenomenon than the Modern Synthesis allows, and includes the ability of natural selection to act not only on individual organisms, but at both lower (gene) and higher (species) levels. Perhaps more speculatively, but also most interestingly, some of us are pursuing research that for the first time since Darwin looks seriously at the possibility that natural selection may not be the only natural mechanism generating complexity. Intriguing mathematical models borrowed from complexity theory suggest that intricate forms and behaviors may be generated ‘for free’ as an emergent property of certain types of non-linear systems, of which living organisms are but one example (other examples include meteorological phenomena such as hurricanes, and computer-based algorithms, such as the appropriately named game ‘life’).”

The scientific status of the theory of evolution is therefore more complicated than we are often led to believe. We should beware of those who seek to turn it into a monolithic dogma to oppose Christian or other religious beliefs. My own summary article on the question can be found here. As Richard Dawkins retires as Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and is replaced by the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, with any luck we will find ourselves moving into a “post-Dawkins” phase of the debate about religion and science. Du Sautoy is an atheist but a much less militant one than Dawkins. In a calmer atmosphere we may perhaps reflect on the debate less in terms of the intellectual arguments but more in terms of what it reveals about our religious imagination.

Our God is Too Small

For the whole debate may be less about ideas than about images. We are persuaded by the sheer size and complexity of the world revealed by modern science to abandon our image of a God who is personally concerned with one small corner of the universe and our insignificant species. Religious believers have often cultivated an image of God that seems inadequate to cope with the cosmos as a whole, including all the innocent suffering it entails. There seems little connection between the loving Jesus of private devotion, the warlike Jehovah of the Old Testament, and the implacable Law that determines the extermination of millions of lives in natural disasters. But we need to respond to the increased scale of the universe not by abandoning but by expanding our idea of God.

God stops making sense when our image of him is both too little and too big. Too little: - we think of him as just a BIT bigger than us, or than the universe as a whole, whereas in reality he is INFINITELY bigger. As the great theologians have always said, we know that God is, and we know what God is not, but we are fooling ourselves if we think we know what God is. (In that sense theology is an exercise in controlled folly.) But at the same time, our image of God is too big. By that I mean he is not just small enough to fit in our heads, he is INFINITELY small. He is within the within.

The God Within

Perhaps what is missing in much religious formation is the vital instruction to look for God within ourselves. That is to be distinguished from identifying ourselves with God, or thinking that God is Myself. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.”

No, what I mean is that we need to discover God at the root of ourselves if we are discover him anywhere at all. Within ourselves, but beyond the self, is the living presence of the God who creates all things from the inside out. That is the God who is closest to us, whose reality is most evident. When we are tormented by the problem of evil, or uncertain about the meaning or value of Scripture, there are voices in our head that say, “You know it doesn’t really make any sense!” But there is a much quieter voice we need to learn to hear that whispers, “Just be patient and trust, and I will lead you to what you need to know.” That quieter voice is harder to hear because it comes from a deeper level - not from the self but from beyond the self.

The Two Halves of God

The secret of religious faith is when we manage to put the two halves of God together - to see and feel the connection between the inner God and the outer God. The outer God is so much bigger than anything that exists that even the word “exists” can only be applied to it with inverted commas. This is the God whose watermark runs all through the world in the form of a beautiful order - the same order that science has partially explored, the order that determines the rain to fall on the good and the bad alike, the order by which a man may give thanks for his bread, but the parasite may also give thanks for the warm body on which it feeds in the dark. How can we relate to that God, unless we know that it is also the God that creates us from within, that we find within ourselves, at the origin of our own minds, the source of all our consciousness and love? THAT God, who is the same God because ultimately there can only be one, is a God we can communicate with.

The Christian faith pus the two halves of God together in a particular way. The inner God and the outer God meet in Christ, who is outside ourselves yet inside the universe. More on that another time.

Growing Intolerance of Christianity in Britain

The newspapers in Britain have recently drawn attention to the case of a Christian nurse suspended for offering to pray for an elderly patient (or, in Newspeak, ‘failing to demonstrate a personal and professional committment to equality and diversity’!) - and then reinstated after the absurdity of it was pointed out in the House of Commons. It was then revealed that the National Health Service has also issued guidelines that define all attempts to ‘preach and to try to convert other people’ in the workplace as a form of harrassment. Similar stories continue to emerge which appear to indicate increasing intolerance towards those who speak of Christianity in public. Put this together with the following comment (Telegraph, 8 Feb 09), and we may have further reason for concern:

“The evidence is growing by the week that the Government is creating a surveillance state. It was confirmed yesterday that a database containing the international travel records of all citizens is being compiled; and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is drawing up plans to keep similar details of every phone call and email that is sent. In addition, the records of all children are to be held on a system called ContactPoint, a national ID database is currently being developed, all health records currently held by GPs will be centrally available and a database of DNA profiles, ostensibly for criminals, is being built by stealth. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous CCTV cameras in every public space make personal privacy increasingly hard to maintain.”

Proselytism vs Evangelization

It is of course true that some forms of proselytism are objectionable and do amount to harrassment. But there is also a danger that such rulings may be used as an excuse to suppress any religious talk at all. That would be a shame, because nothing is more interesting to most people than the meaning of life. And if you believe something is true, good and beautiful, the natural reaction is to want to share it - to help others to see it too. This certainly applies to Christians, who are in any case obliged by their faith to evangelize. The point is always to do it tactfully and prudently, in a way that does not offend and alienate others.

The NHS document (’Religion or Belief’) can be downloaded from here. It includes some interesting statistics on religious belief in Britain - between 1996 and 2006, the proportion who claimed no religious allegiance rose from 42.6 to 45.8%. As one might expect, the biggest rises were among Muslims (from 1.8% to 3.3%) and non-denominational Christians (from 4.7% to 9.6%). The number of those who identified themselves as Roman Catholics rose very slightly from 8.9% to 9%, while other Christian denominations declined.

S.C.

PS. I was recently appointed Senior Editor at Sophia Institute Press. My task is, while preserving the traditional Sophia strengths – its popular reprints, spiritual classics and self-help and transformational titles, as well as the successful new imprint for Catholic fiction, Imagio – to broaden the range to include more scholarly, though still accessible titles in keeping with Sophia’s developing role as a College Press. Read more…

When I see the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars which you arranged, what are we that you should keep us in mind, men and women that you care for us?

A question often asked (rhetorically) by modern sceptics is how the Maker of such a vast universe could be as concerned as the Bible claims with one tiny planet and one tiny species among so many. The question was answered by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion, when he writes in his Elvish creation myth the Ainulindale (bearing in mind the Ainur are the Angelic spirits and Arda is the Earth):

“Now the Chidren of Iluvatar are Elves and Men, the Firstborn and the Followers. And amid all the splendours of the World, its vast halls and spaces, and its wheeling fires, Iluvatar chose a place for their habitation in the Deeps of Time and in the midst of the innumerable stars. And this habitation might seem a little thing to those who consider only the majesty of the Ainur, and not their terrible sharpness; as who should take the whole field of Arda for the foundation of a pillar and so raise it until the cone of its summit were more bitter than a needle; or who consider only the immeasurable vastness of the World, which still the Ainur are shaping, and not the minute precision to which they shape all things therein.”

If you go to the magazine section and click on ‘current issue‘ you will see a draft of the cover and list of contents based around the theme of divine praise. The printing of the issue has been delayed, but to make up for that, I am paying some attention to the renovation of various sections of this web-site. We continue to place important new papers in the Articles section, including links to articles in other journals that you may find of interest. The Apologetics section (’Christianity Q&A‘) and the one on Catholic social teaching (’Sane Economy‘) will receive special attention and be extensively revised during the year. In the Spirituality section (’Mystagogy‘) I have recently added a series of meditations on the Rosary. The Books section will gradually be expanded as new publications come along, and readers can already find there additional materials, background reading, and further research that could not be included in the printed books themselves, as well as copies of reviews and helpful links. Other sections will continue to be updated - including, of course, the main Links section.

Our ONLINE COMMUNITY serves as a space for discussion of current events as well as publications and conferences. This online facility can be really useful for maintaining contact with people of similar interests and for sharing ideas and scholarship. There is a brand-new section called Questioning Faith where you can ask difficult questions.

Though the financial recession and tensions in the Middle East will dominate headlines for a while, this also promises to be a year in which there is a lot of talk about science. February marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and November the 150th of ‘The Origin of Species’. It is also the 400th year since Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens. The summer may see the Large Hadron Collider turned on at last - colliding particles together at close to the speed of light just to see what will happen. We are looking out for good popular science links and articles to add to the site, to help our readers follow these events and reflect on the relationship between their faith and the discoveries of science.

The “Atheist Bus”. The newspapers have been reporting on the placing by atheists (including Richard Dawkins of Oxford) of a message on the sides of buses around Britain: There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. It was the advertising standards authority that insisted on the “probably”, thus at a stroke converting the atheist bus into an agnostic bus, and planting the seeds of worry in the minds of many who had not given God’s existence a second thought for many years. How can you relax and enjoy life if it is conveying you inexorably to a possible confrontation with the God you have been denying?

The astute Catholic commentator Sandro Magister has rightly picked up on a recent address by Benedict XVI on the intelligent structure of the universe - mathematics not as a proof but as a pointer to the existence of God. “The great Galileo said that God wrote the book of nature in the form of the language of mathematics… It seems to me almost incredible that an invention of the human mind and the structure of the universe coincide… In this sense it really seems to me that mathematics – in which as such God cannot appear – shows us the intelligent structure of the universe… Only because our mathematics is reliable is technology reliable. Our knowledge, which is at last making it possible to work with the energies of nature, supposes the reliable and intelligent structure of matter.” You can read the full article here.

Of course, very few people read the Pope. A more direct approach would be to send round an alternative message on the buses. Something like this, perhaps: There might be a God. Why does that worry you?

ANNOUNCEMENT. The recession is causing a delay in the production of the Fall 2008 issue of Second Spring (issue 11). It will be printed and mailed as soon as possible in the new year. We apologise to our readers. Subscriptions will, of course, be carried forward, and we hope to resume production early in 2009. Watch for further announcements. — S.C./Thomas More College

THOUGHTS ON CHRISTMAS

First and foremost, the Nativity is simply a birth, which is the bringing forth of the secret that Mary has cherished within her for nine months – the face that God has fashioned for himself in the womb of the world. This is nothing less than a re-making of the world, for the world as it existed before was perishing, falling into nothingness, whereas now it is united through this tiny child with the divine life of the Trinity.

Into relation with this child all people and things are being drawn, and in this relationship they will pass through death into a new existence. The seed of this life began to grow in the earth’s soil at the Annunciation, but now it shows itself above ground, at Epiphany it will be acknowledged by the Wise, and on the Cross it will spread its branches over the earth. In the image of Madonna and Child is represented the drama of the human personality, coming to birth in the meeting of two gazes and of two smiles, the mother’s smile kindling the child’s, the child’s spontaneous smile evoking this sign of love from the enfolding cosmos. The Mother here is the purely human, the Child is God. It is Joseph’s mission to protect and raise this Child, which means first of all to shelter the Mother who is the Child’s first home. Icons of the Nativity show him weary, perhaps doubting his fitness for the task, puzzling over God’s plan. He is appointed to represent the heavenly Father and become an Icon of the Invisible.

[Extract from the meditations on the Rosary in the Mystagogy section. The illustration by Daniel Mitsui is from http://danielmitsui.tripod.com/artwork/religious.html]

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I want to thank all those made our 1 November conference in Oxford on “Scripture and Liturgy in the Theology of Benedict XVI”, cosponsored by the St Paul Center for Biblical Theology, such a great success. The Zenit news report can be read here.  We estimate around 300 people attended, many of them coming from a considerable distance. Follow-up will be announced on this site in the weeks and months to come. Conference participants may be interested in our web pages devoted to Mystagogy and Liturgy.

As I said in the programme for the event, back in 1996 our Centre for Faith & Culture organised an international conference on Liturgy at Westminster College under the title “Beyond the Prosaic”. (The conference proceedings were published by T&T Clark.) Thanks to the timing of the event, and the extraordinary range of brilliant speakers who came together for it, the conference marked the coming of age of the new liturgical movement or “reform of the reform”. The conference issued the Oxford Declaration on Liturgy which received a great deal of publicity, and we subsequently heard that Cardinal Ratzinger himself had referred to this as a “sign of hope”. Some time later, in 2001, I was also privileged to be able to stand in for Aidan Nichols OP at a conference at the Abbey of Fontgombault with Cardinal Ratzinger as the chief speaker. This may have been the occasion where the policy of reviving the Tridentine Mass alongside the Novus Ordo was first formulated and justified – a policy which later resulted in the recent Motu Proprio. At that conference Cardinal Ratzinger told us, “it would be fatal if the old liturgy found itself in a refrigerator, rather like a national park, protected for a certain species of persons, to whom one would leave these relics of the past. The classical liturgy should also be a liturgy of the Church, and under the authority of the Church. And only in this ecclesiology, in this fundamental link with the authority of the Church, can it offer all it has to offer.” The future Pope Benedict also spoke at that time of enriching the missal of 1962 by introducing new saints – such as Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, the Spanish Martyrs, and the Ukrainian Martyrs – and by adding some of the ancient prefaces for Advent from the Church Fathers. Dr Alcuin Reid edited the book of the conference proceedings (Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger), which apart from its specific recommendations explores the nature of Catholic liturgy and the principles that guide its organic development from a range of orthodox viewpoints.

Ratzinger enunciated one principle we particularly need to remember: the liturgy, including the classical liturgy, is “not something of the past to be protected, but a living reality of the Church, much respected in its identity and in its historical greatness. All the liturgy of the Church is always a living thing, a reality which is above us, not subject to our wills or arbitrary wishes.” It is a failure to understand and remember this principle that lies behind the tragic mistakes that have been made in the course of liturgical reform in the last forty years.

The privileged place for reading and listening to the word of God is in the liturgy. By celebrating the word and rendering the Body of Christ present in the sacrament, we bring the word into our life and make it alive and present among us.

– Pope Benedict XVI

And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and were wanton with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning; they will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, “Alas! alas! thou great city, thou mighty city, Babylon! In one hour has thy judgment come.” - Apoc. 18:9-10.

It probably isn’t the end of the world just yet, but who am I to say?  It is in any case becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that Chesterton arrived at:  “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”  Perhaps it is time to correct some of the mistakes.  A Distributist perspective can be found here.

In the meantime, we pray.  And maybe we read the Book of Revelation, not to find out what will happen next, but to remind us of what history is all about.  In fact Revelation is less about predicting the future than about Liturgy, according to Dr Scott Hahn, who expresses a growing consensus among theologians that the last book in the Bible was intended to be read as a kind of commentary on the Mass.  For the Eucharist on earth is a participation in the Heavenly Liturgy that St John glimpsed in his visions on Patmos.  As Scott writes, “The new Jerusalem came to earth, then as now, in the place where Christians celebrated the supper of the Lamb.”  We will be exploring this vision of the Cosmic Liturgy in our Oxford conference on 1 November with Scott Hahn, Aidan Nichols, Adrian Walker and Michael Waldstein, Scripture and Liturgy in the Theology of Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict is our inspiration. The following is an extract from an online article by Sandro Magister:

‘Benedict XVI … has identified his mission as successor of the Apostles precisely in being the celebrant of a “cosmic liturgy.” Because “when the world in all its parts has become a liturgy of God, when, in its reality, it has become adoration, then it will have reached its goal and will be safe and sound.”

‘It is a dizzying vision. But Pope Ratzinger has this unshakable certainty: when he celebrates the Mass, he knows that the entire action of God is contained in it, woven together with the ultimate destiny of man and of the world. For him, the Mass is not a mere rite officiated by the Church. It is the Church itself, with the triune God dwelling within it. It is the image and reality of the entirety of the Christian adventure. …

‘Easter, or the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, is an action that took place once in time, accomplished once and for all, but it is also an act carried out “forever,” as the Letter to the Hebrews highlights well. And this contemporaneousness is realized in the liturgical action, where “the historical Passover of Jesus enters into our present, and from there its goal is to touch and embrace the lives of those who celebrate it, and, therefore, all historical reality.” As cardinal, in the book “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” Ratzinger wrote evocative pages about “Church time,” a form of time in which “past, present, and future penetrate one another and touch eternity.”

‘… But the structure of the Mass also demonstrates this in a striking way, as Pope Benedict recalled in a commentary on the supper of the risen Jesus with the disciples in Emmaus, at the Angelus on Sunday, April 6, 2008. In the first part of the Mass, there is the listening to the Holy Scriptures, and in the second there are “the Eucharistic liturgy and communion with Christ present in the Sacrament of his Body and his Blood.” The two tables, of the Word and of the Bread, are inseparably connected.

‘The homily is the bridge between the two. The model is Jesus in the synagogue of Capernaum, in Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Luke. When he rolled up the scroll of the Scriptures, “the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them: ‘Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing’.” In his homilies, Pope Benedict does the same thing. He comments on the Scriptures, and says that “today” they have been fulfilled in the liturgical act that is being celebrated. With the repercussions that follow from this for the lives of all, because – as he has written – “the celebration is not only a ritual, it is not only a liturgical game, but is intended to be ‘logiké latreia’, a transformation of my existence in the direction of the Logos, an interior contemporaneousness between me and Christ.”‘