A New Discussion: Searching for New Ways of Being Catholic.... (Main Forum)

Thanks, James. Increasingly I think you and I are on the same page. I envy you in having been "mugged by reality" a lot sooner than myself.

I suppose in some ways I am more intrigued than concerned with what might emerge in society in another hundred or two hundred years' time. Yes, in a sense I do have a concern for the future that my offspring might inherit but my increasing interest these days is simply one of curiosity and intrigue. As I've written I am an optimist on the big canvas. Looking at the big, big picture of the direction human civilisation and knowledge has taken I'm not longer inclined to sweat the small stuff. Intelligence, truth and justice will ultimately prevail. In the sort term though humankind might have to put up with quite a few more Mugabes, Hitlers, Fidels, Idi Amins, Caesar Augustuss, Tony Abbotts, John W Howards, George W Bushs, George Pells and Scott Morrisons before we collectively see the promised land.

This coming year is going to be fascinating to see if the moderate politicians can prevent the Cro Magnon elements in their ranks grab hold of the levers of power and plunge the world into another great depression or world war. I suspect it is is somewhere around a 50-50 or 60-40 bet at the moment. Stripping away all the fine detail, as I see it, the essential problem is that collectively we in the Western world have over-valued our collective worth by perhaps two or three times. The "game" that is being played at the moment is all those who essentially have been responsible for the over-valuation are attempting to shift the burden for the re-valuation that has to be forced onto society onto others — the naive and gullible who don't have the capacity to understand what is being done to them. One of the really comforting things at the moment is that there is now some serious discussion going on in the mainstream secular media. The likes of Rupert Murdoch, Alan Jones and all those dickwads Murdoch employs across the Fox network in the United States no longer have a monopoly on the control of public opinion.

Back to the more immediate discussion: I am honestly in two minds about the future of religion in the sense of it being one of the "governing estates" in society. I don't mean that in terms of the old pre-revolutionary France sense of "estate" but in the sense that religion is one of the major paradigmatic centres in society that in effect create that great canvas upon which Life and Civilization is acted out. Ironically I'm not much of a betting man on things like the gee-gees or who'll win some sporting contest but I love these punts on the really big questions facing humanity. I suspect it's around a 50-50 bet at the moment as to whether secular society itself takes over a lot of these roles previously undertaken by the religious establishment or whether religion carves some new niche and raison d'etre for its existence. There are good arguments on both sides as to which of the two scenarios might emerge as the one triumphant in another hundred or two hundred years' time. The one certitude I do have is that Benedict-Ratzinger is not going to be the architect for some re-emergent religious force in human society. The future he offers is a "smaller, purer" Church of nutters who are basically irrelevant to human society at large. If religion does find some fresh breath it is more likely to be found in all these nascent movements today many of which are searching across the traditional institutional boundaries and divisions.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

James wrote:

The reason I raise this is that there has developed in western societies, an insidious philosophy, as damaging, in my view, as the Communist one, that the State is bad, that it should get out of education, as well as everything else, and that private enterprise will let us march into a new Paradise as fanciful as Marx's Proletarian paradise. The programs that you mentioned about the unequal society are very worrying, because while Benedict is trying to turn the Church back to the Council of Trent, these people are trying to turn the economic world back to the times of dog eat dog capitalism, of pre-revolutionary Europe, where the rich have everything and the poor have the crumbs from the table, if they are lucky.

My gut reaction here is that many people even in Australia, where on average people are amongst the wealthiest in the world, the amount of whinging about ‘government’ is amazing.
I suggest that two main factors are perhaps responsible for this.
• The media can only survive profitably when it maximises a sense of insecurity and division within communities. They are succeeding massively.
• The governments, over the years, have developed policies and systems of welfare that provide people almost automatically with supportive benefits on a federal basis. What would happen if people had to put in applications for support to local councils instead? To me this immediately makes issues such as welfare much more personal and immediate. It would probably demand more personal effort and responsibility rather than the systematised federal process.

The religious motivation was a very powerful one in the development of the religious Orders overcoming the social problems of two hundred years ago. It may be that there might be some new religious Orders (or old ones that see the need), but by and large the trend is towards secular organizations that are not necessarily filled with atheists, but which do not want to limit the effectiveness of what they do by limiting themselves to people belonging to a specific creed.
Of course, apart from people of good will trying to do something about the problem, this difference between rich and poor, historically, has only had one outcome...revolution. We go down that path at our peril.

The phrase that leapt out for me is: ‘Apart from people of good will trying to do something about the problem.’
Many are very sceptical about this, but I continue to believe that we are part of that ‘good will’ group. Christians are community minded. They are willing to be a voice in the community, rather than being part of the silent majority.

.....but I want to assure you that you and Milly are not alone in your searching.

I hope you both will continue to do what you have been doing and........please don't knock yourselves about in the doing. You are both far too valuable to so many people, dare I write.

Of course, your political road to Damascus has heartened me!, but I do not expect you, want you, to go any further.
You and I must have something on which we differ and converse about!

James, thanks for putting in a word for the value of the State.

Where is our tether?

Good question, Tony. One "tether" we all share in common is our financial security and resources. That's ultimately the "tether" that circumscibes the circle we are allowed to play in as in the sense of the physical circle that a puppy might be given to play in constained by a physical leash.

There are many non-physical "tethers" that constrain our freedom, or our circle of influence in society. I think religion was once one of the most powerful of these "non-physical tethers" — more so when it literally could hold the power of life or death over the lives of individuals. For many that has largely broken down today and I think that is reflected in this relatively new phenomenon of increasing numbers of people going to the trouble of not simply "dropping out" but taking positive steps to become de-baptized or "struck from the registers of membership". Self-evidently the vast majority of people today are no longer afraid of "the everlasting fires of hell" promised by the bishops and the temple police who tried, and still try, to control human society.

That "tether" might have lost much of its potency but there are plenty of other societal, familial and personal taboos that either limit our freedom or constrain our minds and emotions. For a long time I think my view of the religio-spiritual quest might have been likened to a journey to meet a friend we held in the highest respect. The religious quest was a journey "to meet God". That's the picture presented by all this talk of "eternal salvation", "being saved", "heaven", "the paschal banquet", the "beatific vision", etc., etc., etc.

My view of the Divine or the Godhead is changing. It's not some "dude" we're going to meet, some "chief judge" who is going to hand out glitter stars and elephant stamps for how well we have navigated the journey of life. Increasingly I see these concepts we try and express in terms like God, the Divine, the Godhead, the Trinity, or Heaven as the Ideal of what we all aspire to be, or the state we all aspire to end up in. The old concept is "tether territory" but this new territory is not constrained in that way. There are still constraints on our behaviour but, it seems, they are not so much constraints from some sense of "being caught and being punished". Rather it is a self-imposed (rather than a God- or Bishop-imposed) tether that dumb behaviour, or dumb thinking, slows our progress is reaching the end destination.

Ultimately what is the religious quest all about? Is it about building up brownie points trying to demonstrate to some concept of God modelled on the Kindy teacher model we met at around the age of 4 or 5 who'll be nice to us and promote us into "big school" if we are successful brown-nosers throughout our lives? Or is the spiritual quest ultimately about learning to make intelligent (emotional and intellectual intelligence) decisions that might be close to the decision we can imagine this "ideal being" we try to condense into the word "God" as making if they were faced with the same set of parameters as ourselves?

Both concepts involve "tethers". Many great spiritual writers seem to see the ultimate spiritual quest as a process of breaking through the "tethers" or "constraints" placed on us not by bishops, popes and God, but by our own egos, insecurities, and past experiences of pain (anxieties). I think there is one "tether" that ultimately does bind all of us. It is called conscience but we remain actually free to even disobey our own consciences — that IS one of the great miracles of existence (i.e. that "ultimate freedom" to even disobey our own consciences). We disobey our own consciences though at a peril that exceeds any pubishments that any external God might hand out to us at some "Last Judgment".

We both continue to admire your patience in trying to take on the heathen. I honestly don't know how people like yourself and Pere continue to do it. That's one of my "tethers". I simply do not have the patience.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

Tony, thank you for this very inspiring comment.
I feel that your eucharistically inspired engagement of imagination, senses and connection with a community of people also struggling with their 'tethers' is a great description of Eucharist celebrations.
Everything becomes personal.
If it is to be it is up to me!

It is very scary Peter, that the changes in the ‘power structure’ over the last 50 years all seem to be in the direction of authoritarianism rather than being based on Catholic Social Teaching’s fundamental requirements of subsidiarity and solidarity.

I find it very disheartening to keep working at it under those circumstances.

Thanks for your post Sue.
V2 did teach us that the church is not just the Roman one and for me at least it, was hard to take initially. Now that I'm still in it and need to be "comfortable", it's a constant discerning/praying, as I find some stumbling blocks, of which there are many, as pointed out here on Catholica as well?!
Of course a lot of the times I myself can become and is that stumbling block?!
So The Roman church is part of the Body of Christ but only part, as I understand and have been taught!?
It can help and also be helped by the other parts of the body?!
So the hope remains, as much as ever, that the Spirit is guiding,using all parts of the Body, I feel?!
Just some thoughts.
georgeh

...thank you to all of you for your responses. Each of them pick up some small element of what was contained in what I was trying to write and has led me off in a series of valuable new directions that need deeper exploration. Thanks in particular, Sue, for the link to Maureen Flood's story. I do highly recommend readers of Catholica, if they are not already familiar with her story, to read the obituary that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on January 13, 2006:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/the-spiritual-journey-of-an-incisive-mind/2006/01...

Here's just the last part of it to whet the appetite:

Dyslexia hampered her at school but she became a nurse at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney before joining the Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Melbourne, a very strict, enclosed, contemplative order who adored the Eucharist for an hour every day and night.

If the young, kneeling women felt themselves dozing off during adoration, they would stand. The nuns made all the altar breads for Victoria, requiring hard, manual work. And the order's leaders taught that dancing was a mortal sin.

"It was organised in such a way that you got a full night's sleep once a week," Flood said. "I thought that if you were going to give your life to God, you had to do the hardest thing."

She became the order's regional superior in Australia before travelling to Rome in 1981, as deputy superior general of the Blessed Sacrament Order. She had overcome her dyslexia and was to prepare programs for Vatican Radio, including a series on human sexuality, and for the ABC, write several books and earn a Sydney University master's degree for a thesis on spirituality in Judith Wright's poetry.

Rome opened her eyes; she began to lose her faith in the church and take a keen interest in feminism. Recognising the limitations of her order, she was to describe herself as "the best possible nun of the worst possible kind". The order is left now with only 10 members in Australia and about 330 around the world.

Back in Australia in 1987, she gravitated to Father Ted Kennedy's community in Redfern. "I knew that the Eucharist is broken bread for broken people but in my whole life I'd had very little, if any, direct contact with poor, broken, dispossessed and unjustly outcast people," she said.

"I knew I needed to go somewhere beyond the walls that insulated our lives and limited our vision and understanding."

She found the celebration of the Eucharist at Redfern to be prayerful, joyful and open to the unexpected. She said: "The air we breathe, the land on which we stand, is laden with the suffering of generations of the dispossessed original peoples of Australia. The overwhelming spirit of the community is of longing for justice and reconciliation … Surprising as it may seem, running beneath and through every layer of this situation is a constant overflowing river of laughter."

Sister Vianney Hatton said at Flood's funeral: "The Redfern years challenged and exhilarated her and she found her true spiritual home among the oppressed and needy, especially the Aboriginal people … She was never other than a daughter of the church, but she came to eschew mediocrity and the institutional structures that bound rather than freed people. She was equally intolerant of hypocrisy and patriarchal oppression."

Hatton said that, in the last years of her life, Flood let go of rigid belief systems and discovered "the original depth hidden within our own Catholic tradition". She could blend a free spirit, a decisive nature, a deep respect for life, a love for adventure and an uncompromising sense of integrity.

She was saintly, but perfection was not her goal. She had her shadow side. Particularly in later years, her friend said, Flood "battled her demons and faced her terrors and fears with great courage and honesty. We all know how difficult we found it to see the deterioration of her incisive and mystical mind."

She had also found spirituality in poetry. Her thesis on Wright, finished in 1997, ends with a personal reflection in which she wrote: "The death of God came as a great shock to me." She was talking of a transcendent God. Hatton believes her sense of the presence of a personal God had died. Her certainty had been stripped away; her faith had become a belief without knowing.

Flood wrote in her last essay: "I believe that Jesus was an amazing prophet, a messenger from God." She thought his life and teaching "simple and profound".

She had long lost her youthful piousity but found inner peace. She wanted "quiet time, to talk to the angels, look at the sky, look at the trees. And getting rid of stuff. I adore getting rid of stuff."

Women such as Maureen Flood entered convents in a different era. Years later, many found themselves in unpaid community work, which they embraced with enthusiasm and grace. Their spirit of self-sacrifice is not always common today.

Yet a sense of fun sprinkled her spirituality and self-sacrifice. "I'm a little deranged," she would say in later years. And, at a St Vincent's storytelling session after her death, a friend told how Flood had said: "If I believed in reincarnation, I'd like to come back and have lots of sex."

The meaning of love...

It might be observed that in some ways Maureen Flood's story is some kind of metaphor for the crisis that religious orders (and so many of us individually) are going through in the search for a raison d'etre.

Somewhere buried in all the reading that I did yesterday there is this recurring exploration on the theme of "the meaning of love". These guys — I was mainly reading the stories of males yesterday but after spending a bit of time with Maureen Flood today I'd now also use the term "guys" to include the women as well — these guys often expressed why they joined and this particular focus on the eucharist and adoration as connected with a search for love and the particular love that Jesus was identified as having shown to humanity by the sacrifice of his life.

I've been getting very tired of this crock called "atonement theology" as an explanation for the meaning of Jesus for quite a long time. I was surprised a few weeks ago to find that one of the earliest commentaries I wrote for Catholica in November 2006 came in at the third most read commentary on Catholica in 2011 [LINK].

We're searching, I submit, for a better understanding of love. Ironically part of what led me to this SSS exploration yesterday is that collectively they are dealing with this in a challenging way at the moment and it's gotten them into a spot of bother that is presently having to be sorted in some kind of judicial process. They (the order and the individuals concerned) are not alone in this. My sense through looking at the larger quest all my own and Milly's children seem to be engaged in essentially boils down to an exploration of the meaning of relationship and "what is love?" I know it has been part of my own exploration. Institutional Catholicism is up itself if it believes it has any understanding of the challenge any longer. I see so many priests, even bishops, desperately searching for something but getting themselves into various kinds of trouble (even if it is just being throught of as "a bit wierd" in the relationships they get involved in). I think the search ultimately that we're all after is intimacy not carnality. As I've written before, marriage, ultimately, is not about getting undressed in front of another person physically, it is an "undressing of the soul" in front of another person. It is about being able to trust one other person in the whole of humanity where we have "no secrets". We share our deepest vulnerabilities with another — far more deeply than the honesty we are supposed to bring even before a spiritual director or confessor.

This is turning into a book, rather than a discussion board post, so I'll leave it there for the moment but this is a theme I think we might all collectively explore much more deeply.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

In other words, we surrender to the idea that the Church is as it is, and drop wanting it to be different.

Yes, as long as this means that we give up the preoccupations with 'the church' that we seem to get preoccupied with here (popes, cardinals, bishops, Rome), and start to talk to one another unencumbered by institutional paraphanalia.

Because, as long as we feel bound to spend endless hours critically analysing it and expressing our wish that things were different, we are still being dominated by it.

I can understand what you are saying about surrendering to the idea that the church is as it is and to stop wanting it to be different, Sue.
But I can’t surrender to the idea of tolerating without protest some things in the church that are so badly wrong. It is not acceptable. And I feel I have to fight it or be part of the evil by doing nothing.

Like you I feel that I have to retreat to my local church community where I can be involved without being demoralised by the dictatorship that is so far removed from our reality.

I am desperately waiting for some of our bishops to actually say something meaningful and honest about the Morris Affair.

I honestly think you'll be waiting a long time, Jerome. This entire exercise is as old as the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno: "Execute One and Educate a Thousand!" They don't literally execute people these days, or burn them at the stake, but Bill Morris was the sacrificial lamb that sent a massive lesson to every bishop in Australia and every priest to "zip your tongue". None of the bishops in this country have the strength of character to stand up to the likes of George Pell. He plays the lot of them for a pack of suckers and amateurs witnessed by the way at the last plenary they sat there for a couple of days working themselves up into a lather trying to compose some letter of explanation to the Australian people at their behaviour in the entire +Morris affair. Pell sat back probably as smug as could be, probably interjecting every now and then to increase the sweat levels as they tried to compose their explanation, but he knew as soon as the plenary was all over he'd issue his own "pastoral" of explanation. They were all outsmarted like a bunch of school prefects. There are simply no leaders amongst any of them with the Machiavellian political streak and skills that Pell has in him. They all now know indelibly which side of the theological and political divide Rome supports. It would take a very brave individual to raise their voice today and these are basically not "brave individuals" or martyrs for any matters of justice or principle.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

Thanks for the link, Peter.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

Helen thanks for this article which as you would expect has plenty of churchspeak and in the end says nothing.

Danger of schism –

openly disobey –

theories bordering on heresy –

separatist movement –

possible apostacy –

a slogan now ‘in fashion’ (appealing to conscience that is) –

canonical action –

dissident priests –

rebellion –

ringleaders –

lack of obedience –

theological heresy –

taking canonical action -

All these words are about as meaningful to me as saying that this or that statement or this or that behaviour is unCatholic or unAustralian or even unAustrian.

Then there is this fear of Schullers success in the media.

And the bishops should ask them to choose between the decree they have drafted (their conscience) and the Church’s doctine and regulations. This sounds just like the ultimatum put to Giordano Bruno and that poor bugger was burnt to death for his choice of conscience rather than the latter.

The writer (Guido Horst) gives himself away as a toady to the pope by suggesting that disciplinary action of the Bishops against a schismatic, or in other words heretical priest would not be understood by most believers.

Alia verba the simple Christian needs to be protected from the power of the intellectuals.

Benikira

All the women I know were wise from their youth.
Wisdom is forced upon me as I grow old.

Helen, thanks for posting this. The spread of the Austrian priests' rebellion to other countries, including Australia, is such a sign of hope. The Church will have to begin reforming itself from within and can no longer put it's head in the sand.

Sue