RITE AND REASON:Having been hung out to dry by the Vatican, the Irish Catholic Church now has an opportunity to be a global sign of hope, writes PÁDRAIC CONWAY
WAS THERE ever a time when we needed Easter so badly?
The theologian Karl Barth said the effective preacher needed the Bible under one arm and the newspaper under the other. Even to read the headlines of any newspaper over the past year would be enough to send one fleeing to the Bible or other sources of spiritual comfort, such has been the unremitting bad news.
For most of us, the bad economic news is something that bamboozles even as it hurts us in our pockets, and shatters many of our most dearly held plans and expectations. Bad news of abuse of the most personal kind vies with the economic downturn for dominance of our headlines.
Many are rightly angry with both perpetrators and enablers, particularly with those from whom we felt we had a right to expect more. Many of these behaved for a long time as if they felt themselves to be superior.
Painful as the harvest being reaped may be, they should scarcely be surprised if a different standard is now being applied to their sins of omission and commission, however unfair this might prove in individual cases.
Behind the overt rage, in every case, is our silent scream at the thousand shocks we find ourselves inheriting: abuse suffered by those we know and love; illness and death inexplicable in human terms; a sense, bound up with all the foregoing, that the “what’s it all about?” question may have no answer – none that makes sense for us, at any rate.
At the heart of the Easter message is a duality that speaks to our unhappy situation. Put simply, there is no resurrection without a crucifixion and, we dare to hope, no cross without a resurrection. Our individual and communal griefs bring us to the point where, in the words of the poet, “self knows that self is not enough”.
For many of us who have been ill or suffered in other ways, what has got us out of ourselves and beyond the rage has not been the stuff of lavish spectacle but, to cite more poets, the little nameless acts of kindness and of love that we encounter in the bits and pieces of the everyday.
In these acts, we truly are such stuff as hope is made of.
And what then of our churches, whose very raison d’être is to be bearers of hope but towards whom, it would seem, fewer and fewer are turning?
The least that can be said is that church leaders may need to consider how the Easter symbolism of death-resurrection applies to the church in its visible manifestations. They must believe and be seen to believe that there is no cross without a resurrection and that, consequently, something has to die for something better to be born.
Church leaders too may find that the path beyond their travails lies not in extraordinary external interventions, but in the bits and pieces of their own everyday experiences. For this to happen they must show new levels of courage in bringing people in. The Irish Catholic Church, historically, was at its strongest when it was, in a real sense, the people’s church. If it is ever to retrieve that mantle and not retreat into a defeatist ghetto, so many of its structures must be seen and named as old wineskins.
To redefine the Irish church in a bold and imaginative way as the People of God in Ireland would be an honest reading of the signs of the times and the beginning of an authentic “new springtime” such as the one prayed for by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent pastoral letter.
Having been hung out to dry by a Vatican unaware of the storm about to break over itself, the Irish church has the opportunity to be a global sign of hope.
The alternative – to continue doing the same thing and hope for a different outcome – is the very definition of folly.
Dr Pádraic Conway is director of the UCD International Centre for Newman Studies, and a vice-president of the university