Do you believe in miracles? (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Thursday, July 26, 2012, 23:58 (301 days ago) @ Ynot

Tony, There used to be a theological caution which I'm sure you'd be familiar with. It went along the lines of never to test God. I haven't seen it mentioned much in recent times but am ever conscious of it in that I sometimes wonder in what I've been doing with my life for the past 20 years is "testing God" — pushing things to an extreme limit in a lot of this stuff that I was brought up to believe actually has substance and how much is institutional propaganda, superstitions for the naive and gullible, snake oil salesmanship, etc.. Religion is such a profound mix of hugely deep human insights about so many things and, at the other extreme, it is literally a snake oil sales' endeavour. How do we sort the wheat from the chaff in this realm of our lives?

I've already mentioned the testing of the hypothesis of Fr Peyton that "the family that prays together stays together". It's a catchy slogan but I genuinely question today how much substance is contained in that slogan. (By the way I didn't set out to "test" it. I literally did believe that my rosaries would "protect" my family.) The big one that has intrigued me is these "birds of the air" sayings of Jesus and how much they spend their time in anxiety and worry. Watching the birds outside my window, which I've been doing now for about six years, the conclusion is that the little blighters seem to be very anxious a lot of the time, greedy also, and like human society populated by bullies and the meek and unassertive. In about 1991 or 1992 I made a personal commitment to live simply and try and live without all the usual security props in modern society like substantial capital, life insurance, superannuation and all those sort of things. A decade later, when I was working in the Catholic Education system a spate of books was published that roughly coincided with the centenaries, sesqui-centenaries or bi-centenaries of some of the major teaching and nursing orders that came to Australia. A common theme in some of those works was this idea of reliance on Providence and I have mentioned before the particular story of the Dominican nuns who came to the Geraldton diocese early in the 20th Century. To this day I don't know how much of it was "corporate or institutional mythology" and how real it was. Your story of the Little Sisters of the Poor has counterparts in the stories of almost all of the religious orders.

I've been intrigued not only at the personal level though. Back in the 1980s I took on this big endeavour called "The 1984 Project" — roughly set around the "coming of age" of George Orwell's book "1984" but it was also an examination of the question why Western Civilisation had become so dominant and successful globally in its spread to all corners of the world. As I've previously related, in the end I didn't get my program into production but the BBC did get a series to air, "The Triumph of the West" written and presented by Professor John Roberts which examined some of the things we were trying to put under the microscope in our endeavour. Sadly John Roberts' program had about one airing and then sank like a stone unlike Sir Kenneth Clarke's "Civilization" series and Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" series which had many, many replays. Western Civilization it can be argued was a child of Christian Civilization — the Holy Roman Empire and all that. One of the things that has long intrigued me is what relationship there was between the economic and financial success of Western Civilization and some of the foundational philosophies and "life outlooks" in Christianity and in particular Catholicism. It was interesting that in the recently produced and screened series by Niall Ferguson on what he called the "six killer apps" that gave Western Civilization its economic success he identified "Calvinism and the Protestant Work Ethic" as playing a huge part. He nominated that as one of the "six killer apps" [See Ted Talks video at the end of this post]. I have long been intrigued how much this belief in Providence also played a part that is ultimately sourced back to those sayings of Jesus to "Be Not Afraid", to "Put Out into the Deep — Duc in Altum", and the sort of sayings that we heard in the Sunday readings a couple of weeks ago — which mythologically or otherwise have supposedly played an important part in the ethos of many religious congregations and endeavours (and not just Catholic ones).

If the the star of Western Civilisation is today on the wane and the emergent economic superpowers in human Civilization turn out to be the Chinese or the Indians all of my speculation — and that of the likes of John Roberts and Niall Ferguson — might be worthless. It was neither Providence nor Protestant Work Ethics that were a determinant at all but purely the acumen of snake oil salesman and those who are good marketplace hagglers.

Guys like Edmund Rice have long intrigued me. Unlike Mary Mackillop for example, but similar to Emilie de Vialar (founder of the nuns who taught me, a French-based order, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition — in Australia they only had foundations in Melbourne and Western Australia) he came from a relatively prosperous background. The propaganda is that they "gave it all away" and went off to "serve God". The irony is that they ended up building these massive enterprises around the world, long before most global corporations, that required massive capital infrastructure (just think of all the real estate and school buildings they owned around the globe). In Rice's case, had he continued on as a Ship's Provisioner – his business before he gave it all away to found the Christian Brothers and the Presentation Brothers – there is no way on God's green earth you could conceive of him building a commercial Ship's Provisioner business as large as the Edmund Rice Education enterprise became. How did they do it? Was it truly "built on Providence" or did they attract into their enterprises a good quota of "main chancers" and women (in the case of the female religious endeavours) and blokes with exceptional business, financial, organizational and management skills? In other words how much can it be truly claimed these enterprises were "a work of Providence" or "a work of God" and how much were they simply ordinary graft and corruption and the sort of rat commercial cunning that is to be found in any other walk of life, or down at any Saturday morning market in any city of the world? The current stories that are surfacing of what's been going on in the Vatican Bank are cause for concern in that they challenge an important element of the myth of Catholicism's reliance on Providence. Looking at the story of Edmund Rice one might be tempted to offer the advice to anyone who wanted to know how to become a successful "capitalist": go form a Catholic religious order!

In many ways the founders of the women's religious orders intrigue me even more. Many of them were operating long before the suffragettes and women's lib and the modern talk about glass ceilings. The enterprises some of these women built were the equal of anything that men were building and they didn't seem to be constrained by any "glass ceilings" at least at the level of the practical good they did in the world or in the capital size of the enterprises they constructed.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]