Catholic and Loving it!

Bishop Conry's recent pastoral letter is a textbook example of everything that is wrong with the Catholic Church in Britain today.

To begin with, I would like you to consider two visions of the cross.

The first is to begin with a very small cross, nothing more than the intersection of two short lines. The core of our Christian faith is suprisingly contained, the love of God. There is little more to Christianity than God who loved us enough to become one of us and go to his death on the cross. Yet the arms of the cross reach out, they grow and grow unstoppably if we will let them, stretching out in all directions until they reach in to every corner of our lives, until they cover the whole world.

The second is to begin with a cross which is rather larger than we would like and then to realise that we can saw off a part of the arms of the cross and still remain a cross. A cross made smaller is still a cross and so we can remove the cross from certain corners of our lives making it smaller and smaller until it is restricted to an hour or so on a Sunday morning. Except, perhaps we can still be Christians without the hour on a Sunday morning. The shape of the cross remains but it is getting smaller.

A small cross is still a cross, which is what makes it difficult to argue. Nobody can deny that the heart of the gospel is the heart of the gospel and that other things are secondary.

What we can argue though is that it matters, it matters tremendously, whether we are allowing the cross to grow in to every corner of our lives (yes, even the bedroom) or shrinking the cross down until it fits neatly in our lives the way we like them.

Unfortunately, I think that Bishop Conry's pastoral letter betrays an attitude to Christianity which is very much concerned with making the cross smaller. With keeping Christianity out of those areas of or lives where we would rather it didn't interfere.

Step 1: If Jesus doesn't make an explicit statement on the matter, then I can believe whatever I like...

One way of restricting the reach of the gospel in our lives is to restrict it to "What did Jesus say".

Bishop Conry writes...

The question, "What does the gospel say about this?" cannot always be answered, because there are questions that Jesus simply did not address.

This is a terribly narrow understanding of the gospel.

The gospel is not restricted to "what did Jesus say" but is rather the good news of God's love for humanity. The gospel has something to say about all aspects of our life because all aspects of our life are affected by this tremendous love and our response to it. The question "What does the gospel say about this?" can always be answered.

It is true that the answer to the question is not always easy to find, it is true that there are certain beliefs which we as Catholics are completely free to make our own jugements on. Issues such as "how much time should I spend playing computer games" have not been defined by the majesterium of the Church but that doesn't mean the Gospel has nothing to say about it.

So I can say "Jesus didn't forbid computer games" which means that clearly I can play them for as long as I like. If my wife asks me to stop and spend time with the children she is clearly being unreasonable because Jesus didn't say anything about computer games.

But Jesus clearly does say something about love and love touches every area of our lives. Even computer games.

Step 2: Don't get caught up on single issues...

Another way to restrict the impact of Christianity is a bit of the old "don't get caught up with single issues" trick.

Bishop Conry writes...

It is all too easy to get caught up and even fixated with single issues, whether this is in religion or politics. So many people tend to focus on liturgy – even the language of the Mass – as if this somehow expresses the core of our beliefs. Others campaign on the moral issues of the day

...

These are all undoubtedly important issues, but they will never get anywhere near expressing our faith in its entirety, and we can ask if some of these questions are actually fundamental to faith at all.

Like all the best lies there is a grain of truth, it would be wrong to focus on individual issues at the expense of the gospel.

But what is also wrong is to look at those looong reaching arms of the cross and to say "is this actually fundamental to faith at all?" Can I remove this and still retain the basic shape of the gospel.

So the liturgy, humanae vitae and the moral issues of the day are all relegated to "single issues", pieces of the cross which can be cut off and cast aside. Is it okay to use contraception? Well, as long as I am leading a good life... why get caught up on single issues. We don't want to become fundamentalists...

To focus on single issues at the expense of love would be wrong, but the focus on them because of love is the very definition of the Christian life. Christianity is precisely about focusing on single issues. Not loving in some abstract sense, but loving this person in these circumstances on this day. Christianity is all about the little things.

Bishop Conry goes on to say...

We will not be judged on the particular and the minute, the single issue. We will be judged on how well we loved, and this applies even if we know God or not.

But when do we love except at some particular moment, who do we love but some particular person, how do we express our love except in some particular way. It would be truer to say that we will only be judged on the particular, how we loved our wife, our family, our enemies. It is precisely for these particular things that we will be judged. It is precisely in every particular thing that we must change the way we live.

Step 3: Everybody is going to heaven anyway...

The final reason not to worry about letting the cross in to every aspect of your life is this.

There is a beautiful picture in an exhibition at the National Gallery in London at the moment: I have asked your priest to mention it to you. It is a picture of Our Lady holding a cloak wide. In the foreground within the cloak are some Carthusian monks, but behind Our Lady the cloak is dark and endless. The commentary suggests that this means that there is room for us all. God’s vision of the Church is broad and generous. Let us embrace that generosity.

It is not generous to make the gospel small and to keep it contained. It is not generous to say "I will not dedicate myself to the particular", to say "if Jesus didn't spell it out, I don't have to believe it". It is not generous to say "as long as I love in general, it is not important for me to accept this particular non-core part of Catholicism".

God's vision of the Church is generous because it reaches out and grows, because it is restricted only by our own willingness to make space in our lives.

Real generosity means allowing Jesus in to every part of our lives and sharing the fullness of his love with others. It means not holding back on life issues and certain encyclicals. It means allowing the gospel to speak to us in ways that go beyond merely doing the bare minimum of going to Mass and believing that Jesus rose from the dead.

Fundamentally, it means sharing the gospel in it's entirity so that instead of making the cross small enough to slip in unnoticed, we actually invite others to be generous with the gospel. Yes, in particular ways. Yes, on those specific issues.

Yes. Even that one.

Until Kieran Conry and the rest of the Bishops conference stop making the cross smaller, it is very difficult to imagine how the Church in Britain is going to get bigger.

But it isn't hard to imagine it getting smaller...