Should we be worried? As members of the Church, should we feel ourselves to be increasingly under attack or should we feel quietly confident of a growing interest in and sympathy for what the Church is about. The latter view was put last week in an interview on the Today programme when the about-to-retire Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, spoke to James Naughtie. He rejected the suggestion that this was an increasingly secular age – quite the contrary – where people see faith in action they want to know more about it. He might also have pointed to the increasing number of writers getting involved in the God debate and the number of programmes on TV looking at serious aspects of faith and its history. The Age of the Enlightenment with its modernist successors is, he claims, coming to an end and a search for something like a renewed faith is taking its place though as yet people don’t know quite what their looking for and the Church is still hunting for ways to talk to them when they have begun to appreciate that faith in action can make a difference. The fact that the Church seems to be obsessed with sex is an impression the Bishop blamed on the media as virtually the only story the modern ‘Pharisees’ are interested in telling in our newspapers. Naughtie failed to ask why it is the press focuses on that issue and failed to challenge the Bishop on the fact that the Church provides not a little material in this area for journalists to seize on.
The same issue arose in a lengthy article written by the eminent Irish novelist Colm Toibin in the latest edition of London Review of Books. On the back of a rather insignificant book recently published in Italy, Toibin reflects in a rather random way on the Roman Catholic Church’s reaction to the press coverage of the issues of paedophilia and homosexuality. It is such a sensitive subject that it is virtually impossible to comment justly and objectively. Anglicans debate this subject openly and Anglican Bishops express a variety of views; the Catholic Church issues statements which may be discussed but not in public and especially not by Bishops. And yet both are attacked in various ways by the Press. Both Churches claim the right to contribute to national debates on various moral issues, and both churches display behaviour amongst their clergy and laity (though the Press are more interested in the former) at variance with their public teaching. This of course raises a question about what it is right to expect of the clergy; their role requires of them at some level to be models of church teaching and yet that should also include a modelling of repentance, humility and contrition. (Both churches have also always held that the efficacy of the sacraments is not inhibited or invalidated by the moral standing of the priest who celebrates those sacraments.) Repentance, humility and unaccustomed transparency has been required of the Catholic Church because of the examples of paedophilia amongst the clergy. Repentance has been necessary not only of the perpetrators but also the way in which their crimes have been inadequately investigated and dealt with. The question which remains unresolved, however, concerns the nature and origins of the culture which made dealing with this issue so problematic. Toibin’s article suggests that Catholicism finds these issues so hard to deal with because it finds sex hard to deal with in the modern world. He also suggests that the Catholic church is strongest when through liturgy and preaching it can be poetic, speculative, welcoming, mysterious, exalted and charismatic; in other words when it doesn’t talk about sin, sex, or Church rules. This though deeply attractive is also somewhat naive. Toibin sees the church as having a choice between the spiritual and the mysterious on the one hand and a desire for control on the other; but the church is not only a spiritual community it is also an institution and institutions are held together by tradition, rules, and set ways of doing and ordering things.
How to order the life of the church is an issue which Anglicans are tackling at the moment through the concept of a Communion wide covenant. Progressives are afraid such a covenant will be weighted unfairly towards the more conservative elements in the Communion and exclude or demote the position of the American church. The Archbishop of Canterbury sees the Covenant as a necessary means of preventing the fracturing of communion and maintaining open dialogue. It is not obvious that the ordering of the Church, the relative power of the Curia and conferences of Bishops, and the contribution of the laity is being centrally discussed by the Catholic church, for such debates if they take place usually go on behind closed doors. Somehow both churches need to move towards a structure and way of life where diversity does not threaten unity, where debate is genuine, open and patient, where the institution of the church is respected for its integrity, authority and reticence, and where the pastoral and spiritual needs of minorities are heard and responded to.
How is such an optimal position to be achieved, especially in circumstances where the church feels itself to be threatened by the secular media? Why is it that the Church merits so much attention from the media when sexual sin and suffering is widespread in all parts of our society? Perhaps the answer to that one is not to avoid talking about sex at all (as the Bishop of Durham claimed to do) but to find a better way of talking about it. The extent to which it preoccupies our society is clearly a sign that for all our talk we remain deeply troubled about it. Perhaps the media coverage emerges from a disappointment that Christians are unable to be wiser than they are, and unable to show a degree of humanity, understanding and maturity when it is so desperately needed.
Or again why is it that the Church is singled out for stereotyping, innuendo, and the inaccurate manipulation of data? At one level the Church shares in the general suspicion and mistrust directed towards all institutions in our society, notably Parliament and the Banks which is not to say that the behaviour of their members hasn’t earned serious criticism as in the Church. That anxiety about institutional structures results both in a wish for them to be dismantled in favour of smaller scale regional and local authorities, and also in a desire for a stronger centre and more charismatic and powerful leadership. Similarly in the Church you find Anglicans who want a looser sense of Communion with other churches and greater local independence and others who want clearer and more uniform and controlling structures. We may not be able to see a way through these oppositions but we should not grow used to them. They can be tolerated in a stable society but in times of great instability the two sides of the debate can resolve themselves into opposition between anarchy and dictatorship.
In the meantime writers like Toibin clearly have a need or nostalgia for a certain kind of Church, they clearly don’t think it is irrelevant and overdue for demolition. In the same way our secular culture in its attacks on the Church often implies a kind of disappointment that the church is not what they would like it to be. Or again the resilience of a belief in God and the desire for ‘spirituality’ in our society implies a need which the Church doesn’t yet know quite how to respond to, though one response is to hear only the criticisms and to despise the vagaries of the modern spiritual quest. When threatened it is easy to go on the attack. As George Carey has said, ‘It is clear that we must stand up against the marginalising of faith. We must constantly remind society of its Christian roots and heritage. As I wrote recently, if we behave like doormats, don’t be surprised if we are treated as though we are.” That implies perhaps that the church knows how to communicate an adequate defence but that society is just too deaf to hear. But does that mean we should just shout louder or seek for a way in which such deafness might be healed? Certainly in some parts of our political culture there is an aggression towards the church which must be resisted. It remains to be seen whether the concept of ‘the Big Society’ is going to create a more hospitable culture for the church. In the mean time Christian action and Christian apologetics need to go hand in hand whereas the latter is perhaps lagging behind. Should we be worried? I suspect we should be no more worried for the Church than we are for our society as a whole. We have in common our search for the meaning of the good life, for a contemporary language for our spiritual aspirations which is also open to the past, and for institutional structures which exist for the sake of all their members. We need not be worried but we should be vigilant, self aware, trusting and trustworthy for God is on our side when we are on our neighbour’s side.
With my love and prayers
Fr Stephen
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker