[0:05]Thank you, dear Michael, and I would agree with you, uh, Lent has gone very fast, as they say, time flies when you're enjoying yourself. So, um, I'd like to begin by thanking the Loyola Institute, um, for inviting me to come over the Irish Sea and address you all this evening. It's a great honor of which I'm very conscious. Um, I'm also conscious that I don't appear, oh, yes, I do appear now to have a, uh, mouse, which is a rather important bit of this talk. So, um, the last time I came here to give a lecture, uh, which some of you, I think, might have attended, it was about my research on the Jansenists. I think I then at that time electrified some of my audience by my claim that the Jansenists were an an instance, not of a false reform, but of a failed reform, which found its vindication and fruition finally in some of the key reforms of the Second Vatican Council, 300 years after similar attempts at reform were made in 17th century Paris. If you didn't hear me then and you want to know more about it, I can tell you where you will find it in writing. Now, not all that was advocated by the Jansenists had its roots in a correct or even a healthy understanding of the theology, of theology or of the Church. My principal thesis is that a more balanced version of what the Jansenists hoped for then, at least in terms of ecclesiology, liturgy and the return to biblical and patristic sources, finally came to its proper conclusion through the scholarship of the resourcement theologians, especially of Henri de Lubac. And the vital corrective to their biased and toxic interpretation of the uh, Augustinian tradition and his theology of grace, came principally in the work of Yves Congar, whose work we are considering this evening. I've been asked to contribute to your extended reflection on true and false reforms in the Church by looking at the relevance of Congar's work to attempts at reform today. Um, we are in the midst of a major push for reform led by Pope Francis himself through the global synod. Some of you know that I was one of four theologians and members of religious congregations called upon to collate and synthesize the initial response to the synod from the world's religious. It was, to put it mildly, a massive and very challenging task, but a huge privilege.
[3:07]It offered us a bird's eye view not only of religious life today, but of the life lived by those who are very often on the front line of the Church's delivery of its apostolic mission from one end of the globe to the other. The experience was rather like being put in a room with a thousand radios, all speaking at the same time, all in different languages, all at pitch of voice and at massive enthusiasm, and trying to work out what everybody was saying.
[3:49]I think that was the biggest surprise for all of us. Um, what was therefore most striking to us was precisely the united voice that came both from the global North and from the global South, from political, economic and social contexts that differ massively from one another, but in which so often one and the same reflective voice resonated. And I'm going to actually put Congar and his ideas of true and false reform into conversation with what we learned from the synod response from the religious. I'm conscious, very conscious, that I am not speaking to an audience that is exclusively made up of people who belong to religious orders. But our primordial vocation is our baptism. It derives from our common baptism to share in the threefold ministry of Christ as prophet, priest and king. And in that respect, when one part of the body, which is trying to exercise those threefold gifts, in a prophetic, priestly and kingdom manner, speaks, it actually speaks to the whole body. And therefore, I think there are very powerful resonances with the responses that have come from other parts of the Church, and indeed, from the peripheries of the Church itself. So, the material that resulted from the response to the synod from the world's religious underpins a lot of what I want to say tonight. So also does the work I've been engaged on since the beginning of the Covid pandemic and its consequent lockdown on hope and the need for hope in the Church, which I hope resonates with what you've been looking at in the last couple of lectures here. It feels, at least in my part of the world, as if hope has been in rather short supply within the Catholic Church of late. Part of the critique of the synod from those who perceive it as an extended exercise in disloyalty, is that it is destroying faith, hope and love for the Church. I would personally not be in agreement with such an analysis. My work on hope has centered largely on Pope Benedict's encyclical, Spe Salvi, a really magnificent document, which, through no fault of its own, but because of when it appeared, rather disappeared without trace and without comment from the wider Church. In one of its opening paragraphs, it says this: The Christian message is not only informative but performative. That means the gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known. It's one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time of the future has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently. Just give you a moment for those words to sink in. It's not informative, but performative. It makes things happen and is life-changing and is Church-changing.
[8:19]Many people ask with some trepidation, what is the future of the Church? And believe me, nobody is asking that Church that question with greater urgency than the religious, certainly in the global North, who are seeing their median age rise exponentially, and are not seeing much of a structural future ahead of them. But if hope is life-changing and if it makes things happen, then we are invited to believe both in the Church and within religious life that the dark door of time of the future has been thrown open and is thrown open by the impetus for reform within the Church.
[9:07]And we who have hope are precisely hoping to live differently as people, as the people of God, as religious, as the Church. So in asking the faith community which constitutes the Church to live differently, the synod contributors are, it seems to me, precisely expressing their hope that this is possible as well as necessary. If we've been calling for change, it's because we know that change is possible for us, and that it's possible for us to live the gospel message more authentically and more fruitfully. Where there is no hope of change, there is no call for it. So we must see the synod and all genuine calls for reform within the Church, primarily as exercises in hope. Now, writing about the urgency of reform in the Catholic Church of the 16th century, Yves Congar notes that a major problem in pushes for reform at that time was the failure of the hierarchy to develop a sense of urgency. He says, and I quote, the key difference, much to our advantage, and he's talking of his own generation, is that the Church today possesses a purity of spirit, resources and pastors, as well as a commitment to its apostolic mission, that the beginning of the 16th century lacked. Vatican II has clearly proven that. Well, I wonder. I wonder what we would now say decades after Vatican II. I would certainly wish to agree with him that in the person of its chief pastor, Pope Francis, we do indeed have someone who possesses a unique purity of spirit and who, driven by his commitment to apostolic mission, is willing and able to call upon resources that hitherto have largely been ignored by the Church, namely lay people, including women and those who are perceived, for whatever reason, to be on the peripheries of the community. Indeed, Pope Francis has been at pains, at times, to bring about a major shift in perspective, through which we come to see that those who are really on the peripheries of pastoral reality and the pastoral reality and context of the Church, are often those who think of themselves as at its center, namely the hierarchy, while those who are at the contextual center of the pastoral needs of the Church are precisely those who are so often treated as if they were peripheral to its real business. It's a kind of inside out movement that he's been engaged in. Congar had his critics both at the time and after his contribution to the Second Vatican Council. And he felt obliged to answer some of his critics in ways that ring very familiar to us today or at least to me. He claims that the self-critic of the Church does not lie in a lack of loyalty or coherent theological perspective, as was claimed in his time, and is being claimed today in ours. On the contrary, he counters that it lies precisely in a deep attachment to the Church. He says, it lies in a desire to be able to trust despite the disappointment of someone who loves and expects a great deal from the Church. If he continues, certain proposals for reform have given some people the impression of being revolutionary. It should be recognized that these revolutionaries act in a spirit of fidelity to the Church. The word revolutionary is an extremely loaded word to anyone who comes from Latin America. And it strikes me very powerfully as someone who has had experience of living and working in the Latin American Church, how often in his papacy, Pope Francis has called upon us to be revolutionaries of tenderness. And I wonder what we think he means by that. He is not being sentimental. It's worth us remembering that most Latin American revolutionaries die. Including St. Oscar Romero, one of the greatest conservatives turned revolutionary of the Church of the 20th century. So when he's asking us to be revolutionaries of tenderness, he's asking a very, very serious thing. I would concur with Congar that if there is a vehemence within calls for reform that we hear emanating today from the global synod, he says, there is neither revolt nor bitterness, rather there's a very deep attachment encouraged by the rediscovery of the Church. Congar points out that if there's a crisis or uneasiness, which lies at the root of present-day reform, it's not a crisis of loyalty. Certain critics, he says, have experienced a feeling of uneasiness, a malaise. They've felt that their pure, necessary, justified demands have been insufficiently taken into consideration or even treated with a prejudice of suspicion. They've felt that their leaders don't recognize the urgency of problems as seriously as they do, and that despite the exhausting effort they devote to their proposals, they're in danger of failing, either because their urgency is recognized too late, or because in the end, the principle is called into question. And I would go back to looking at those adjectives that Congar uses with regard to the demands for reform. That they must be pure, necessary and justified. I think when he's talking about pure, he means kind of purity of intention. That they don't come with a hidden agenda. They don't come with a personal or a political agenda in a way that actually is not consistent with the union of the body described by Paul.
[16:36]It's necessary, it's not peripheral. Dear friends, we are really not talking about what color pom-pom anybody wears on his hat in the sanctuary. And it needs to be justified. It needs to be justified by the call of the lived experience, the pastoral need of the people of God and the people in the world around us. Now, the Churches of the global North have been devastated, as you know, only too tragically well here, by the impact of abuses of power, of conscience, and of the person within the Church, and by justified accusations that leaders did not recognize the urgency of the problem until it was too late, or fatally, called into question the principle of dealing with such accusations in a way that was consistent with justice and with the gravity of the crimes committed.
[17:42]My experience, and my experience from the synod, is that the Churches of the global South have barely begun to deal with these issues. And the response when they do will be a tsunami. And that is the voice of the religious speaking, who have witnessed it among themselves and in their own bodies. A remarkably courageous document was published recently on the Internet, you can find it if you look, by the Conference of Religious of India entitled, It's High Time. This document makes clear that the women religious of India are no longer prepared to tolerate the abuse of power to which they have been subjected with impunity for far too long. There was a team of only two female and two male religious dealing with a mountain of data in a multiplicity of languages in the collating and synthesizing of the religious synod response. Given the pressure of time under which we were working, we were unable each time to identify the provenance of the data. But occasionally something emerged that was so strong and so clear that we would stop and look up, whose voice we were hearing on the list of identification codes given to each congregation. Interestingly, the same calls, as I've said, for reform of the Church came from North and South, from female and male religious, and they came in ways that were not always expected, given the dominant secular and ecclesial cultures in which these religious lived. I will speak further about this as I go along. Again, I'm going to refer to Congar and his response to his critics, many of whom spoke in the name of what they um, blithely assumed to be tradition. Though, speaking as someone who lived through the times to which sometimes our present-day critics speak of tradition, I often personally failed to recognize the times as they are described. Um, it seems to me that when people, uh, of a younger generation than mine, critique me in the name of tradition, it's a tradition I don't necessarily recognize. And I'm reminded of a saying, I'll probably garble it, but anyway, if I can remember, by Pablo Picasso. Tradition is having a baby, not wearing your grandfather's hat. It's a slightly kind of gnomic saying, but I'm sure you get what he means by that, you know.
[20:47]And Congar says of this, they think that too often considerations of tradition, meaning official support for received ways of acting or speaking, practically smother considerations about the most authentic sorts of improvements or the most urgent pastoral adaptations. Congar and his companions within the resourcement movement often had to contend with these opposing views of what tradition is. My work both within the synod and among the religious of the world with whom I've worked over the past 15 years and more, is that when it comes to religious life and indeed to the more general life of the Church, the dominant culture of the part of the world where the Church is trying to live its life, nearly always trumps the apostolic teaching itself. As I said to a delightful, sincere and passionate group of younger students in this university last night, we've only to think of what became of the Pauline teaching on the radical unity and rebirth of all human beings and all categories of human society in the crucified and risen Christ. The Letter to the Galatians assures us that, in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
[22:42]Stirring words. And we know that Paul castigated the Galatian Church in the most furious and violent of terms for its attempt to impose the law of Moses, the Jewish law, on new Christians converted from a gentile background. Paul would not tolerate for a moment opposition to his teaching that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, but only one body in Christ Jesus.
[23:20]He appears in the letter to Philemon, at least implicitly to carry out his teaching on there being neither slave nor free, and to enjoin it on the owner of the runaway slave, Onesimus. Even though we look in vain in that letter and elsewhere in the Pauline corpus for an explicit rejection of the institution of slavery as such, and this would have terrible consequences in the Church in its subsequent support of and condoning of the slave trade in later centuries. There is room, I would argue, to find a similarly implicit assumption of Paul's teaching on there being neither male nor female in Christ, with his own collaboration with and respect for those independent women of business like Lydia and Prisca, on whose support he relied for his ministry. So far, so good, dear Paul. Yet, in teaching that appears to derive from Paul, and there are questions as how, as to how genuinely Pauline it is, there's also a severe restriction of the role of women within the faith community that appears totally to undermine and contradict what he teaches in the letter to Galatians. From the letter to the Corinthians, a man ought not to cover his head since he's the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man, neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. Oh, Paul, what happened to Galatians, my friend?
[25:20]And from the Letter to Timothy, again, allegedly from Paul, though pretty much certainly not. Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man, she is to keep silent.
[25:40]For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness with modesty. I return to Congar's definition of tradition as official support for received ways of acting or speaking. Just think about that for a minute. Tradition, says Congar, when it is interpreted as official support for received ways of acting or speaking, that, says Congar, is false tradition, just as there can be false reform.
[26:33]The problem with that type of tradition is that it rapidly becomes the norm, and we easily normalize what suits us. At the very outset of the global pandemic, I received a card from one of our sisters in Germany. It depicted the globe wearing a COVID mask, and the logo read, don't let try to get back to normal. Normal was the problem in the first place.
[27:06]200 years ago, no one in Britain could see anything wrong with the national prosperity being based on a trade in human flesh. The movement for the abolition of slavery was begun by William Wilberforce and his colleague, the convert, former slave trader, John Newton, who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. Both were considered mad, bad and dangerous by their contemporaries, and only very slowly did these come to see the full horror of what they had accepted without question. I frequently ask myself, what those who come after us will think 200 years hence of what we now consider normal and acceptable within society and within the Church?
[28:01]There would be an interesting topic of debate, huh? It's one of those oft-repeated moments when I wish God would give me the gift of time travel, just so that I could look back and see. And yet that might mean, I would have to change from ways that make me feel both comfortable and justified. So perhaps I wouldn't like that gift so much after all. So if normal is the problem in the first place, what is problematic in what we have found to be normal within the Church? In what way does the way we are living Church actually base itself on official support for received ways of acting and speaking?
[28:53]The General Synod responses have tended to call for a church that takes more seriously the need for true obedience. And Pope Francis is asking us, as a good Jesuit should, to engage in true obedience.
[29:10]This obedience does not consist in blind compliance with every word that emanates from diocesan headquarters or indeed from the Vatican. It's an obedience consistent with the Latin root of the word, ob audire, which means to listen attentively. To what are we being asked by the Holy Spirit to listen attentively, and why? We're frequently reminded that the Church is not a democracy or a trade union. And it's certainly not the case that we are divinely bound to listen to the voices which shout most loudly. My own country has been doing that in recent years in the political sphere with devastating consequences. But from the earliest times, the spirit's presence has been discerned within the reflection of the people of God on their lived experience. When we do not listen to this lived experience or take it seriously, whether it's our own or that of others, we miss the voice of the spirit. As the poet Elliot said, we had the experience but missed the meaning. When the Church is unwilling or unable to listen to the voice of experience, of those both willingly within, and those who find themselves, for whatever reason, beyond its borders, then it will clearly miss the meaning that the spirit is trying to speak through them.
[30:52]In the synod response, religious speak of the need to listen to the lived experience of those who find themselves at odds with the Church's teaching, whether that's about the role of women within the Church, or the acceptance within the Eucharistic community of those who are divorced or separated, or those who identify themselves as LGBTQ. We specifically and deliberately checked the origin of these responses. And we were surprised to find that they did not exclusively come from the sophisticated global north, but also from countries within the global South, where such identification carries severe social and political penalties, including imprisonment and death. There was a powerful and fearless critique within the response of clericalism from all parts of the globe. Our methodology was in the first instance to ask religious to invoke stories and accounts of synodality as lived and experienced within their institute. Using the paradigm of the parable of the sower, we then asked them to describe the seeds of synodality that already exist in their experience, and then to describe the weeds that threaten those seeds. Bless you.
[32:26]Their fourth task was to describe how they saw God's dream of synodality for the Church and the consecrated life of the third millennium, and then to think about the consequences of that dream. We invited them finally to reflect on the implication of this dream and its enactment for the life and mission of the Church. In the synod response, which is available, by the way, it's available online and I can certainly uh, make sure that you get a link to that if you want to read the document more fully. And we try to keep the document as short as we could, because we know that there's nothing worse than long wordy documents. The religious speak with openness and courage about situations that must change if religious life itself and the wider Church are to survive and flourish. They offer a vigorous self-critic as well as a critique of oppressive attitudes and practices within the wider Church, which they see as preventing the general life of the Church from achieving its full potential. They speak out of their zeal and energy for the signs of hope in the synodal process that they find in every human context and corner of the world. It's worth remembering, for instance, that the Catholic Church is actually offering 25% of the global response to HIV and AIDS. It's huge. And most of that is being offered by religious. So they are the ones who are seeing on the ground the people dying of HIV and AIDS. That raises its own questions about Church teaching on safe sex and the like. Nevertheless, the experience of the religious caring for those who are most profoundly impacted by the AIDS pandemic, which is continuing unreported and unannounced across the world, is a very powerful one. And they stress the urgency of action towards greater synodality, while knowing that the onus for change falls upon themselves. In that respect, true reform comes when we take upon ourselves the responsibility for living and being the change that we wish to see. We cannot, any of us, sit passively waiting for daddy to fix it. He's not going to. He can't. We have to do it for ourselves. And in that respect, we actually did get a number of, um, comments or even letters, um, we actually got two sets of synod responses posted to us from the United States. And there was a there was a handwritten note saying, we don't suppose that anyone's going to bother to read this, but anyway, here it is. And we took a photograph of ourselves reading it. You know, and sent it back to the sisters saying, we read it. We heard it. We took it seriously. We promised it's going into the report. And I have heard, I don't know about you, but many people saying, what's the point? Is this a genuine reform? I mean, what's it going to lead to? And my slightly, probably very irritating and glib, but it really isn't glib. Soundbite response is, the process is the product. Huh? Once we have engaged with this process, we have become different people. We can never disengage. We can never not have heard the discussions that we're part of. We can never not have heard the witnesses that we've been part of, and that will change us. And in that respect, the reform, the change starts when we open ourselves to being changed by what we hear when we listen to one another, and when we have the courage to tell one another the truth. Of course, any authentic reform must come in dialogue with those whose vocation it is, mandated by the Church, both to teach and to lead. But let's remember that bishops and clergy teach and lead with the consent of the taught and the led. That's why in any ordination, the worthiness of the candidate is proclaimed to the congregation and the congregation's ascent is sought. This is not a mere liturgical flourish. It's a really important enactment of the vital principle of the dynamic relationship between all the baptized, whatever their God-given vocation may be. Since the foundation of synodality and of authority within the Church, is baptism and not ordination. So all the baptized have to be engaged in the ascent to the person who is leading them. I've very recently myself attended the ordination of our new bishop. And, um, you know, there's a moment, it's a bit like weddings, you know, when they say that bit about, is there any reason, just cause why, you know, this man should not, and you're all thinking, oh my God, what happens if somebody says anything, you know? And I'd love to know one day if somebody stood up at an ordination and said, hang on a second, you know, I'm not sure I agree with this. Well, they'd probably be ushered out of the Church, but it'd kind of be interesting, though dreadful. So we won't wish for it, huh? So, true reform, as it emanates from the synod report of the religious, has its roots in personal and corporate processes of conversion. And the responsibility that each of us carries to allow ourselves to be converted. The principles of subsidiarity, collegiality and solidarity, in life and mission, are gaining ground both within religious life, and within some parts of the Church itself, though by no means enough of them. There's little call for shifts in doctrine or teaching as such, but a loud call for a broader and more genuine understanding of what lies within the Church's teaching. There's a call for a profound shift in structures and methods of leadership from problem-solving to appreciative inquiry, from leadership as power to servant and transformational leadership, which changes the understanding of obedience from one of silent compliance to one of mutual discernment, shared decision-making and communal discernment as such. We are told in the overall synod document that religious are called to be missionari dell'ascolto, missionaries of listening.
[40:17]And I think that that is not the exclusive task of the religious. I think all of us in true reform are being called to be missionaries of listening, whose key verbs are listening, participating, praying, and seeking. So to end, because I've been talking a lot about the ways in which uh reform is seen. What kinds of seeds of synodality were seen within the Church? When we present the inclusive and non-exclusive face of the Church, and renounce any kind of exclusive and excluding attitudes, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like, through consultation, through dialogue, through joint reflection, and above all, through self-examination. There are seeds of solid, uh, synodality, when we break new ground in solidarity, opening new avenues of presence in diverse movements and in alliance with like-minded groups to address key social issues such as climate change, the migrant issue across the world, homelessness, etcetera.
[41:41]Because what is seen as important is for the Christian Church to be seen as a credible subject and reliable partner in paths of social dialogue, when it creates a welcoming atmosphere which helps people to be free and willing to talk, to share their ideas, their hopes and experiences. There was a clear call within the response to include lay, uh, people and religious women and men in the formation of seminarians, so that the ordained ministry is seen not as a clerical cast, but as a branch of the baptized, a formed, a refined form of the baptismal vocation, in line with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. So that it might influence the emergence of a church that is more participative and welcoming.
[42:41]Very briefly, what are the specific weeds that were seen as choking all these seeds? The climate of division and polarization, which manifests itself in dogmatism, pride, hypocrisy, envy, jealousy and petty slander. Some religious express skepticism that critical voices would be heard without being censored in their diocese or their parish. They saw us stifling the seeds of synodality and therefore as a a counter-reform, as it were, theological, moral, social and liturgical fundamentalisms. And when such fundamentalist movements are supported by political, economic and media groups who are trying to regain patriarchal power and establish a pre-Vatican II model of seminary formation, it was seen as a profoundly pernicious cultural influence. Those from the global South also named things like the caste system, tribalism, regionalism, nationalism, as movements which in and of themselves are deeply contrary to the spirit of baptism described by Paul.
[44:11]And they flagged up over and over again the problem of sexism, both within decision-making structures and even within the language of the Church. So that women are excluded from meaningful roles in the life of the Church and discriminated against, um, certainly within Church structures, for instance, by not receiving as religious a fair wage for their ministries and services, and being used and regarded as a cheap labor force. Uh, there was a great critique of the patriarchal and hierarchical model of, as I've said, which favors clericalism and disregards the fundamental dignity of every baptized person. Because within this is a historical, social and cultural supremacy of the masculine, which considers the clergy as a race apart, and motivates an arrogant and disrespectful treatment of the laity, preventing forms of collaboration and mutual relationship. And this was seen as being toxic for the priests as well as toxic for the laity, and placing intolerable burdens on many good men who go forward in a desire for service to the priesthood. So failures in leadership were certainly raised as a major issue, but also failures among the people of God themselves, in that they will collude very often with oppressive structures of leadership because it's easier just to go along with what daddy says, rather than to be to stand up and be counted as having a counter-voice.
[46:38]So where does this leave us, and where does this leave us in regard to what Congar speaks about true and false reform? Everything that I have done in recent years in the kind of research that I have done has highlighted for me the major, major impact all across the world that dominant cultural models have on our understanding of and interpretation of the gospel. The trouble with dominant cultural models is, it's like a big group of people shut up in a small room with no fresh air. We all carry on breathing the stale air, and after a while, we no longer notice that it's stale. It's only when someone walks into the room from outside and says, gosh, it stinks in here, that we realize there's a problem. We've got so used to breathing the toxic air. And this is frequently what happens with dominant cultural models. We're so used to it, we have normalized it. It is what's normal. And we failed to realize that normal is the problem in the first place. And normal is the problem and has been the problem down the centuries when the teaching, the radical teaching of the gospel loses its edge, because the Church adopts, whether it's the feudal system, or whether it's the class system, or racialism or whatever it may be, it adopts it easily without asking whether this is consistent with the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. So if we are to have true reform, it seems to me that one of the things we need to do is actually take off, if we possibly can, our unconscious cultural spectacles. And try as best we can in the light of the gospel, to see the world with the eyes of Christ himself. We will only do that if we talk to one another. We will only do that as Congar and his resourcement theologian companions told us if we return to the sources. The source of the Scriptures themselves, the source of the life of the Church. It's a difficult task, it's not an easy task, and it gets more and more difficult, it seems to me, as um, popular culture becomes more and more embedded in the life of those who imbibe what they understand by culture from the Internet. It's a great task, but it's an exciting task, and above all, it's a task that should give us energy and hope. The one who has hope lives differently. Thank you very much.
