For a Church that reflects the Gospel

[anglomedved]

I have just finished Monique Hébrard’s new book ‘Pour une Eglise au visage de l’Evangile’ (For a Church that reflects the Gospel). Hébrard is France’s leading French religious journalists. 35 years ago, an early book of hers ‘Les nouveaux disciples’ on the (then) new religious communities, was one of the books that led to my own monastic experience (1982-84). While the context is very French Roman Catholicism, and this is journalism more than theology, the new book has some good ideas.

 

Throughout MH insists on the need to (quoting the head of the French Bishops’ Conference): “prove that the meeting with God can make people happy and free, and cause our humanity to blossom, [as] society cannot support anything that does not make for freedom and plenitude.“ Amen, Amen I say.

She speaks tellingly of the ‘generational break’, between the ‘generation of 68’, which is her generation, and mine (just, I was 18 at the time), saying that when we felt the need to ‘free’ ourselves in May 68, this was in a still very structured world. Two generations on, today’s student/young adult generation is stranded in structural void, where just about everything is permitted, and with no reference points against which to structure themselves in today’s fast-changing society, other than in a rather doctrinaire type of Catholicism (deeply antipathetic to both MH and myself). I remain with the question: what alternative can we of the 68 generation offer our grandchildren?

She quotes no less an authority than Cardinal Danneels (the former head of the RC Church in Belgium, a mild, thinking man now in his eighties, who comes across better on paper than in the pulpit) as saying that ‘In the last few years in particular, Christianity has been reduced to a moral system’ and that many are tired of this. Somewhere else MH has the telling phrase of a lay person to a bishop: ‘Stop talking about sexuality and start talking of spirituality’.

In my language: I suspect there is a very large number of people on the edge of Christianity, who basically feel the need for spirituality; but a) are not going to be fobbed off by the miserable low quality of much of what comes from the pulpit and confessional and b) want to go leave questions of sexuality in abeyance until other more basic questions are answered (and then some of the sexual ones may answer themselves in the process).

I am increasingly coming round to the opinion that (most) people are deep down spiritual, and this is something the Church should encourage fundamentally and make space for. We who have managed to ‘stumble towards God’ within the structures of the Church (often thanks to people who were more open to human failings than others – I owe my very Christian survival to one such man) should perhaps be more tolerant those who stumble outside the Church. We need to accept that perhaps a large proportion of what we think as specifically Christian spirituality is in fact shared by people of other faiths (Islam, Buddhism). At times it may be appropriate to teach the rules of this ‘general spirituality’, such as the danger of spiritual pride and the real existence of a force of evil, the use of disciplines of fasting, spiritual reading and silence, before moving into the specifics of Christianity.

In particular we need to take people where they are in their intimate and family lives, including having the courage to say that the ‘happy family’ (mother, father, permanently married, with at least two and preferably more kids) which remains a standard in the Roman Catholic church and (more or less) in Orthodoxy is probably at this present time in western Europe unreachable for a majority of the population, in the present socio-economic-moral environment. There will of course be heroes, but most of us are not.

I, this context I increasingly rile against the strictures placed by both Roman Catholic and Orthodox on taking communion in ‘non-standard’ situations. Basically in many areas (including also fasting rules during Lent and before communion) I believe that this should be a matter of individual freedom (and only when you take responsibility for your own actions in front of God can you be mature), though a priest has the duty to warn of taking communion ‘unworthily’. To refuse communion to a person whose marriage has fallen apart and who is hurting from this is for me straight wrong. Whether priests should systematically refuse communion to people in gay relationships (which according to the book they should) I am less than certain. Whether one should follow the Church’s fasting rules to the letter, my answer is, outside of a monastery, no.