Into Catholic heartlands

I went last night to hear a popular (lay) speaker on the situation of the Roman Catholic Church today. The venue was the new Dominican parish in Leuven-la-Neuve, the country’s largest French-speaking university, of Christian (rather than free-thinking) tradition.

 Average age around 60. Socially very homogenous: largely university or free professions, almost entirely white. The Dominican leading it was dressed in civil clothing, no one else recognizable as a priest.

 This is a group where you feel a ‘silent tradition’, a shared set of references, a way of speaking. Very Belgian. This tradition recognizes itself as Christian, even I am not sure that the Christian faith is the primary momentum.  Like any bourgeoisie, they are people who are confident of their place in society, who know who they are and where they are going and defensive against anyone who challenges this. Which is perhaps why they are pretty critical of the Church hierarchy, which you feel for them to be very much 'out there'.  The more authoritarian parts of the Catholic Church, like Opus Dei, would have been very unwelcome yesterday evening.

Somehow I found the discourse curiously shallow and immature for people of their age, like fifty-year olds whose sex life has not got beyond that of their twenties. Many of them sensed it and are looking for something else. I almost wanted to say: stop your amateurish bible studies and prayer groups and plunge into a much deeper spirituality: do the Ignatian exercises, go on a serious pilgrimage, or learn the Jesus prayer.

 Despite this gap they do not know how to fill, Orthodoxy is not a reference here. Why? In part at least because connecting with, and feeding into, this group, this ‘silent tradition’, is very difficult for us Orthodox here in Belgium. We lack the language, the educational level, the social background, the ability to sense how traditions like this one operate. In many cases we simply cannot behave socially. We are not what the Germans call 'salonfähig', people you would invite to your salon.

Yes, they did mention one Orthodox to me: a Belgian priest who has wandered in and out of the various little groups on the fringe of Orthodoxy, and now runs a church in the 'western Orthodox' tradition. I am not enthusiastic about his church, but he has one enormous advantage on the rest of us who try as Orthodox to connect into the local Belgian scene: he is from their tradition, from a ‘better’ bourgeois family (including a bit of spare inherited family money with which to buy a church building). He is salonfähig.  

 

The only other way in is to attract by a quality of holiness (like what Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh did in England). None of us unfortunately are anywhere near this.

Rape in the Church

Last night’s speaker (see my yesterday’s post) said that ‘I do not think that society does not want to be Christian’.  

I have heard this many times in Catholic circles over the past years.  In simple language: I would be a Christian if the Church did not act in certain ways, which I find unacceptable.

Obviously this can be an excuse, to which the answer is: join the Protestants.

 But yes, though the Orthodox and the Catholic right will hate me for saying so, I am prepared to accept that certain outer aspects of the Church's life and practice are genuinely morally unacceptable to many people. And not simply because their own judgement or conscience have been distorted by sin…

Right now the single biggest accusation against the Church is rape. Not just in the narrow sense of priests misbehaving with young boys and girls and pretty seminarians, even though it is this that is hitting the headlines.

But there is another rape, in the broader sense of violation of a certain space in people's private lives - call it conscience, the intimate sphere or what you will – in particular demanding that they submit their conscience to outside diktat. Christ knocks at the door (Apocalypse 3.20) and courteously and respectfully and very patiently leaves it for me to open. Many in the Church either want to force it open, or to refuse me the right to hold the key to my own inner space.

 

Rape leaves pain which lasts a lifetime. It also leaves distrust, immaturity and under-performance.  All of which I see too much of. The Christian call is to full maturity (Ephesians 4.13), not this.