Although I was busy enough seeing six people every day during the retreat last week in Oxford, I still had more free time than usual and found myself, among other things, attending the inaugural John Henry/Cardinal Newman Memorial Lecture in St John’s College. One of the sisters in the community I was living with tutors at the university and was able to get me a ticket, or more accurately in such a posh establishment, an invitation. The lecture was sponsored by the Jesuit, Dominican, Benedictine, and Oratorian communties in Oxford and the speaker was Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for the Promotion of Christian Unity and a member of the International Theological Commission, an advisory body to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith whose job it is to keep people in the Church in line when it comes to matters of dogma. Cardinal Kasper himself is a very emminent theologian who was considered by some as a possible candidate for the papacy when his friend and countryman, Joseph Ratzinger, was elected Pope in 2005.
The title of the Cardinal’s lecture was, The Timeliness of Speaking about God, his central point, as I understood him, being that, instead of discussing what he would see as less central issues, by which I took him to mean things like women priests, celibacy and so on, theologians, and through them the whole Church, should be addressing themselves today, first and foremost, to speaking to the modern world about God. That, after all, is ultimately what we are about and the Church can only have relevance in the modern world, he argued, if it speaks about what it knows and about which the world has a right to expect that we have something meaningful and helpful to say.
But what did he want us to say about God? Well, essentially, he wanted us to speak about the real God. He didn’t exactly use words like superstition and religious mumbo-jumbo – the whole thing was too polite and academic for that – but I am sure that is what he had in mind when he said at one point, “In the piety of the Church God has often been tamed and made innocuous; the living God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush” and whom we met this morning in the first reading, “is barely recognizable in the ‘dear God’ of pious parlance.” words which made me wish you were all there to hear them so that you would know that I am not the only one who says these things. But before he spoke about this real God, he had a few words to say on the subject of atheism.
To be honest, I was slightly disappointed that he mentioned Richard Dawkins and his book, The God Delusion, at this point. But I suppose he did so because of the Oxford connection. Dawkins lives in Oxford. I don’t believe, however, that he deserves to be taken so seriously given that what he says and what he makes a great deal of money out of saying is so intellecually shallow. And Cardinal Kasper acknowledged this. He describes the kind of stuff Dawkins pedals as atheistic fundamentalism which, to quote his exact words, ‘reiterates in a heavy-handed and distorted manner 19th century positions which have long been considered a thing of the past.’ He also quotes a critic of Dawkins, himself a scientist, who speaks of the atheism delusion. But what I found most helpful in this part of the lecture was what the Cardinal had to say about what seems to me to be one of the great signs of times in which we are living. The actual quote contains some big words – you have to speak like that in Oxford – but basically what he was saying was that the two great promises of salvation the 19th and early 20th centuries had to offer the world – the idea of inevitable progress and the Marxist notion of utopia on earth - had failed to deliver, leading in our own day to the kind of defeatism, scepticism and agnosticism which many feel in the face of the great problems facing humanity and which seem to me to lie at the root of problems like drugs and violence in our society. And it is in the face of all this, the Cardinal argued, that the Church has to speak to the world again about God. But what God are we talking about and what exactly is it we have to say to people about him….or even her?
Well, essentially he is speaking of the God we hear about today. There are long difficult passages in the lecture about the Trinity, but what it boils down to is that we must speak to the world about a God who is close, a God who cares about the world and its people, a God who heals and forgives, the God, in effect, whom Moses, in the first reading, referred to as, ‘A God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness.’ There is no place in the Church today for the harsh God whom many of us met as children. He was always a projection of our own deepest fears, never did exist and does not exist now. The real God is the one Jesus speaks of today, the God who ‘loved the world so much that he gave us his only Son’ who came into the world,’not to condemn the world but so that, through him, the world might be saved.’ This is the deeply positive, hopeful, encouraging message we are called to proclaim at this time and so there can be no place in it for anything that event hints of condemnation of the world, young people or anyone else. As Cardinal Kasper said towards the end of his lecture; ‘If theology speaks in a new and fresh way of the living liberating God who is love then it will render a service to life, freedom, justice and love…and open up perspectives of hope.’
At this point I found my mind turning to, of all places, Kilmarnock prison. I was aware of what many would consider the rather strange pride I often feel in the fact that there are so many Catholics in our jails. And then, the next day, in a review of a book about a nun who belongs to the same congregation as the ones I was with, I found a lovely explanation of it. Speaking of why, born a Jew, she had become a Catholic while a student at Cambridge, she said that she felt there was room for her in this Church because it was ‘so studded with human failure and sinfulness…not a club for nice people.’ Well, all I can say to that is, ‘long may it continue.’
BIDDING PRAYERS
On this feast of the Holy Trinity we pray that the world of our time will come to know the only God who exists; The God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness whom we heard about in today’s first reading. We pray that, as the world makes its way through this new millennium, the human race will finally leave behind false gods who are no more than projections of our own deepest fears and come to know the God who loves us………....Lord hear us
There are very good historical reasons why atheism has become the religion of our time, but atheism itself is a deeply flawed way of thinking rooted in false understandings of what faith in God means. Largely it is a result of years when religion had more to do with superstition and magic than the real God and we pray for the grace to leave these harmful aberrations behind and learn to speak again to the world about the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and who loves the world more than it could ever know……………………………………………Lord hear us
The failure of the great ideologies of modern times, such as Marxism, capitalism, socialism, atheism, consumerism and others, to satisfy the deepest needs of humanity has left a huge void in our modern culture. Into this void have come the pessimsim, despair and hopelessness which lie at the root of so many of the problems we face today. And so we pray for the grace to understand the world we live in so that we can begin to speak words of hope and encouragement to it………Lord hear us
If we are to speak words of hope and encouragement to the modern world then there must be no hint of condemnation in the way we think about it. Jesus, we heard today, came, not to condemn the world, but that it might have eternal life, and any follower of his must have that same attitude. And so we ask God once again to heal us of the many negative, critical and pessimsitic ways of thinking about the world which are so often to be found in church-going people………………….Lord hear us
Many young people today have simply heard of so many things that we just take for granted. They know nothing about God or Jesus. Many have never heard simple things like the parable of the Good Samaritan or the story of the Prodigal son. What churches are about and what goes on in them is a complete mystery to them. And so we pray that, before they reject God and write off the things of faith, they will come to a deeper understanding of what they mean…..……………..Lord hear us
We have been hearing today about Cardinal Kasper, a senior figure in the Vatican and a man who has influence with the Pope himself. And so we pray for all who hold such positions of power and influence in the Church that, open to the movement of God’s Holy Spirit, they will do everything they can to make the Church at this time a more and more effective and credible instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the modern world………………Lord hear us
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