Faith without good deeds is a non-runner

Michael Commane

By chance I tuned in to the Ray D'Arcy Show on RTÉ Radio 1 last Friday.

It was one of those moments when, half listening to the radio, I suddenly sat up and paid attention to what was going on. It was great radio.

Ray was interviewing Fr Brendan McBride. I had never heard of the man before but suddenly I was listening to every word he said. He was so engaging; there was something about him that it was impossible not to listen to him.

Brendan is a Catholic chaplain in San Francisco. And for many Irish living in the city the chaplaincy in Geary Street in Richmond is a place they call home.

The 72-year-old Donegal man came to attention in Ireland in the aftermath of the tragedy in Berkeley where five Irish J-1 students and an Irish American were killed, and seven others were seriously injured.

Fr McBride spoke to Ray how events unfolded immediately after the balcony collapsed. He got to the site at 6am and then went to the different hospitals. As he was visiting the hospitals it struck him how the students’ parents would react back in Ireland as they heard of the disaster on radio and television.

And then within hours parents began to arrive in Berkeley and Brendan was on hand to meet them.

“These were the most fantastic group of parents. Everything is good with Ireland because these parents were phenomenal. I was so impressed. The love and care they had. You could see it was something built up over years,” Fr McBride said. He added that how often we hear that things are not like they used to be. “People are like they used to be,” he insisted.

In the interview Brendan spoke slowly, maybe even hesitatingly but every word he said had profound meaning and was uttered with palpable sensitivity. He spoke of the hospital staff as being absolutely amazing.

In the second reading at Mass tomorrow, St James in his letter writes: “If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, ‘I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty’, without giving them these bare necessities of life, then what good is that? Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead.” (James 2: 15-16)

During the entire interview with Ray D’Arcy, Brendan McBride never once mentioned the words faith, God or religion. And yet it was as clear as day that this man from Donegal was a man of deep faith in God.

It’s obvious that Fr McBride has taken to himself the words of St James. Faith without good deeds is a non-runner, it doesn’t work. Might it be that our Christian churches in their current dispensation have concentrated too much on the “theoretical side of things” and have placed too little emphasis on “doing Christianity”?

Ask any young person about which is more important – to have a strong belief in the idea that there are three persons in God or whether or not we should help our neighbour? Of course it’s not a matter of either or. Faith and good works go hand in hand but as St James is clearly telling us today that faith without good works is “quite dead”, to use James’s exact words.

Surely every time we do good we are behaving in a God-like way. After all, the word goodness has a touch of God about it. And that goodness was all over the Ray D’Arcy interview with Fr Brendan McBride.