A Candle in the Darkness

(The Furrow, September 1993, pp.507-510; written from Mangango, Zambia)
When did you last meet a Catholic who was enthusiastic or joyful about the faith? For myself, it’s been so long I don’t remember. And others I’ve asked feel the same.

Why is this so? If Jesus Christ is our saviour, and the gospel is good news, haven’t we a lot to be joyful about? Instead there is a sense of aimless drift; the gospel seems stale; the Church appears as a hindrance rather than a help on the way to God. The Pope [John Paul II] seems to be calling the Church back to the past, while the Church is calling him forward to the future. The result is a stalemate.

The spirit of Vatican II seems to have come to an end. Where there was hope, there is now anxiety; where there was trust, there is now the fear of losing control; where there was freedom, there is now the re-imposition of centralized control and censorship. These negative elements feed on themselves so that what began as a mistake risks becoming a disaster.

Ecumenism is stagnating, principally, it seems, because of Rome’s insistence that the concept of papal primacy which has been uppermost in the Catholic Church for the last 150 years be accepted as normative by all Christians.

The bridges built to the rest of the world by the Church in the years after Vatican II (1962-65) and which moved the world to listen to the Church as it had not done before, have now fallen into decay. To much of the world the Church seems so hopelessly reactionary that its voice scarcely wins a hearing.

I can think of two reasons for this. The first is that, in the years which followed Vatican II, attention focussed less on renewal than on adaptation. By that I mean that time and effort went into re-organizing structures and institutions than into personal renewal and conversion. We took the former road because it was easier: to change someone or something else is always easier than changing yourself. A wise old pagan called Petronius Arbiter, who lived about 200 years before Christ, wrote a comment which might have been written with this situation in mind, ‘I was to learn late in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.’ Bull’s eye, Petronius!

The only people I can think of who really took to heart the challenge of spiritual renewal were the charismatics, or Catholic pentecostalists, if you prefer the term. What a breath of fresh air they were, even in their eccentricity. There was joy, and there was a radiant hope. Their groups were real powerhouses of prayer and active Christian service; they were groups in which ecumenism was alive and flourishing.

What happened to them? Their decline and demise are an illustration of the problem. A combination of official hostility and neglect marginalized them. They received a lot more discouragement than encouragement. I know a bishop who wrote to his priests that ‘nothing but evil’ would come from the charismatic movement, while, in a large city with many Catholics, the charismatics had to meet in a Quaker hall because no Catholic parish would allow them to use its church for their meetings.

The net result for the Church is that lack of imagination, narrowness of vision, and, above all, the fear of losing control, have led to a great opportunity for renewal and growth in the Church being squandered.

A second reason why the flame of renewal has gradually sputtered out is that it was seen by many, perhaps most, as a process working from the top down rather than from the bottom up. The years following the Council were followed by a stream of documents from the Vatican. The Roman bureaucracy grew fat, as bureaucracies everywhere do, on the time, the effort, the initiative, the creativity and the money of those they were supposed to serve. The underlying current in its effort was the fear that, if the Church bureaucracy didn’t keep a tight hold on the reins, the laity would get out of hand and finish up God knows where.

So where do we go from here? Is there any hope? To that question a Christian can only answer ‘Yes.’ Our hope is in Christ. No matter how gloomy the present picture is, and for me it is a gloomy one indeed, miracles can happen. Who, a few years ago, would have predicted the end of the Soviet Union? That is a source of hope.

A first step is to learn from our mistakes and try to rectify them. That suggests that we start with renewal at the grass roots. A key element of this must be the fostering of a strong sense of the individual and of individual conscience. A strong community is built on strong individuals, not on weak ones. We need to become more aware that the individual is responsible for himself or herself before God. We are not saved simply by being members of the Church. The faith or the activities of the group do not make it unnecessary for the individual to act responsibly using God’s gift of intelligence.

If this has a ‘Protestant’ or ‘Lutheran’ ring to it, well and good. It is past time for Catholics to recover what we lost by merely reacting against Luther and all he stood for. His strong emphasis on the individual and on conscience is an element of Christian tradition which needs to be rehabilitated in the Catholic Church. It is an important safeguard against the danger of mere anarchy or self-seeking.

A second step would be to give a central place to the value of Christian marriage and family life. The family, in the words of Vatican II, is ‘the domestic Church’; it is the cornerstone of civil and religious society. Yet, despite all the lip-service paid to it in the Church, its place in pastoral priorities is low indeed. The laity are still something of an afterthought in the Church.

One change that is very necessary if pastoral work among married people is to have credibility is that they must be pastors to themselves. This demands an awakening of responsibility on the part of married people to each other, especially at a time when divorce and promiscuity threaten the foundations of marriage. It also means that celibates should stop trying to teach married people about the morality of sexual life. Celibates don’t understand it. The tragedy of Humanae Vitae (and it is a tragedy for all sorts of people) resulted from clerics over-reaching themselves and going beyond their area of competence. If married people had been given a voice – not merely some nominal consultation at the level of providing information – but rather a voice in the moral evaluation of matters affecting family planning, that tragedy might have been avoided.

A third proposal is that small Christian communities in various forms supplement and support parish life. These are communities formed where people are at, either in terms of where they live, or the spiritual or psychological situation in which they find themselves. In a world which is growing more urbanized and impersonal these can provide a human home, a place where people can feel free to be themselves. Small communities can take as many forms as members wish, but they grow strongest where they seek to combine elements of prayer, gospel sharing, and exchange of spiritual experience and mutual support. They provide an opening for grass-roots ecumenism and grass-roots evangelism, and for the development of lay spirituality and lay leadership. If that sounds like too ambitious an agenda, it must be said in reply that there are places in the world where it is happening. In these small groups of ten or twelve people there is an opportunity for spiritual growth through self-help and mutual encouragement.

It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and it is also better to start oneself than to wait for others to lead.