... another papal document is announced! Since I'm blogging from a new tablet and have not yet cracked all its intricacies, I cannot provide the link that is circulating online to the announcement by the Vatican press office. You'll find it. If you want to, that is. My betting is that by Friday we will not be able to avoid it very much. Or will we? Prepare for a two-paragraph tangent on my favoured hobby horse...
See, that's the problem with the information age. It always assumes you are ready to hear the news and that you will want to know the news. Indeed, it always assumes you need to know the news and that any news out there is good for you.
One of the major problems with all those assumptions is that the information age is absolutely indifferent to whether news is true or not. Notice the language used about false news: it is not called false but 'fake' news. Could it be that this is no misnomer? If they called it false news, then the news consumer could rightly demand true news. But the opposite of fake is not true; the opposite of fake is authentic/original. And the problem with that Greek looking word is that it is full of German subjectivist guff about the supremacy of sincerity (not meaning to knock sincerity obviously). No, the information age does not offer true news! It offers authentic news, sincerely meant, honestly fabricated from sources verified by no lesser moral authorities than journalists, many of whom are even honest souls. But none of this produces true news; only authentic news, quality sourced and - ooh err, feel the love! - responsibly reported. But I digress...
Assuming this announcement about a new papal encyclical is both true and authentic, my simple question is: why read the story? Why get drawn into the whole sorry storm of fawning idolisation and incoherent rage that will no doubt attend the letter's publication? We all know what will happen. Spadaro et al. will gather around to talk about a new parallel theology or a quantum interpretation of the moral law or perhaps a bio-evolutionary rereading of theandric hermeneutics or some such. They will hold the largest levers of the information pump. Meanwhile, the Christians,
...a declining band
Will point with monitory hand,
and say what we are now accustomed to saying repeatedly, desperately, fruitlessly about Pope Francis's utterances (I here abstract from all carefully made distinctions about magisterial authority about which I profess my incompetence). Need I go on?
I'm not advocating incidentally that the best response is one of blythe indifference - the response that no doubt 97% of the world's population will have - or a well-studied yawn. Heaven forfend.
I'm not quite sure what to label my strategy, if I can stick to it (which I doubt). But I'm minded to call it the "post-coenam" strategy. Don't panic. This is the kind of moment lived by the disciples while Christ was in prison overnight. We sometimes think - I know I'm tempted to think - that the wheels have finally come off the Catholic Church and that this papacy is proof that whatever is true, it's not what we thought. That is not a wholly unfaithful thought but it is a dangerous one without tethering it to the gospel.
In which case, in my view our patrons now are the disciples after the arrest of Jesus. Jesus is in prison; Peter has betrayed him; everything is in disarray; the glory of Palm Sunday is long gone and the sense of power from Jesus' miracles is a thing of the past, a mere dream. We've never been in such a sorry mess, you say? Well, we haven't but the disciples have. Those special friends of Jesus with hardly two acts of courage to rub together in the early hours of Good Friday. Is that over dramatising things? Maybe. But I've known people give up on the Church seemingly for less.
So, friends, that's my advice (not that you were asking). Walk this mile with the disciples. Perhaps it's better to call it the post-Gethsemane hour. The only question now is whether you are going to stick with him.
We keep looking for light in the wrong places; that's human. But if you want to face the probable debacle of this Thursday with some peace, don't follow the news trails. Read the gospel. The age of innocence is long gone.
Tuesday, 27 February 2018
Sunday, 25 February 2018
Prayer request
Please pray for the 9 month old nephew of a friend of mine who must have an emergency heart operation on Wednesday morning. His name is Gioele.
Sawing off the branch on which I'm sitting
Anyone who has read this blog before will know I have a downer on digital culture. I am of course thereby thrust unwillingly, albeit not unconsciously, into the classic position of the man who is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting. So be it, say I. If it is so, it will not be the least absurd of all the contradictions that circulate the globe in a digital format.
Better that than other vices which existed prior to the internet and will always attend those who try to communicate in any way imaginable (which is all the human race!): the vices I refer to are a failure to be conscious of one's tools of communication; a failure to be aware that they shape what we say and even what we think; and the failure to admit that humans always have an ambiguous relationship with their tools. Errors or vices, say you? The former very often lead to the latter.
I know what you're thinking, so stop it! A bad workman always blames his tools. That may be true but its truth is not nearly so close to home as that of the lesser used adage: we make our tools and our tools make us. What kind of man does the internet make? That is the question. That is all the more the question if, as today, we spend so much of our time thinking, feeling and operating through its channels.
None of this would matter perhaps until we get to the question of whether the man made by the internet conforms to the man planned in the mind of God. Here the question is not whether the internet can be a good source of information or even a weapon of leverage in the information age. The question is whether immersion in it is compatible with our call to wisdom, the greatest of the gifts of the Holy Ghost and the one that makes us most like God.
Saw-saw-saw. I know. Some questions are best left to simmer on their own.
Better that than other vices which existed prior to the internet and will always attend those who try to communicate in any way imaginable (which is all the human race!): the vices I refer to are a failure to be conscious of one's tools of communication; a failure to be aware that they shape what we say and even what we think; and the failure to admit that humans always have an ambiguous relationship with their tools. Errors or vices, say you? The former very often lead to the latter.
I know what you're thinking, so stop it! A bad workman always blames his tools. That may be true but its truth is not nearly so close to home as that of the lesser used adage: we make our tools and our tools make us. What kind of man does the internet make? That is the question. That is all the more the question if, as today, we spend so much of our time thinking, feeling and operating through its channels.
None of this would matter perhaps until we get to the question of whether the man made by the internet conforms to the man planned in the mind of God. Here the question is not whether the internet can be a good source of information or even a weapon of leverage in the information age. The question is whether immersion in it is compatible with our call to wisdom, the greatest of the gifts of the Holy Ghost and the one that makes us most like God.
Saw-saw-saw. I know. Some questions are best left to simmer on their own.
Saturday, 24 February 2018
And another thing...
My wife tells me I often pause during conversation, even during sentences, for an unnervingly long period. Perhaps never so long as eleven months, however! I did promise at the end of my last post (16 April 2017) that I might not be blogging very much but nearly a whole year is perhaps an exaggeration. Is there anybody there? said the blogger, knocking at the moonlight screen.
Several years ago I published a long extract from Georges Bernanos on the topic of the differences between Martin Luther and St Francis. The burden of the extract was all about how one reacts to corruption in the Church and how one kind of reaction - the obvious kind - threatens to lead us down the same path as Luther. Luther had a point about Church corruption; not that that was his only preoccupation. But his answer to it was a damaging as St Francis's was beneficial. St Francis's response was not to go around the place scourging the evil doers. It was, to paraphrase Bernanos, to return to the fountains of sanctity.
Bernanos could afford to be wild in his rhetoric. He didn't have a Church to run. The Franciscans were split in the early years - not to say more recently - by the competing interpretations of just how far one can take the demands of evangelical poverty: fountains of sanctity then or sources of dispute? I suppose what Bernanos might have said to those arguing for the utter necessity of competent administration is that it can only ever be one small element in what is the wider, deeper and more challenging vocation of being called to follow the Lord.
But I digress. I only wanted to say that I decided out of the blue this morning to start blogging again. Anyone who has read me over the years will know what I think of the Church's current administration. Indeed, my strap line beneath the blog's title refers to it. But if I come back here now, it is only in the spirit of Bernanos's St Francis. I said some time ago we are living in a post-dubia Church. Indeed, we still are. But why should it also belong to the dubia-refusers?
One of the many insights of French cultural anthropologist René Girard - among some silly things - is that if we allow our actions to be shaped by reaction to our aggressors, we unconsciously risk imitating them. Much better, therefore, to adopt the St Francis's agenda. Dip into the sources of sanctity and share them with others. As I come back to blogging, I would much rather adopt that strategy than any other.
The waves crashing around us have sunk many a small ship in the last couple of years. The going has been hard. The questions many and complex. Not a few people have taken as their gospel point of reference the story of Jesus asleep in the boat in a storm while the apostles, hardened fishermen though some of them are, get increasingly desperate. It is the Lord himself who tells us not to be afraid, although I have to say my feeling is less fear and more like nausea.
Still, the solutions are now what they have always been. Love, duty, joy .. and no panicking. Easier said than done.
Still, for what it's worth, 'Ahoy there, shipmates.' I'm back, at least for a while.
Several years ago I published a long extract from Georges Bernanos on the topic of the differences between Martin Luther and St Francis. The burden of the extract was all about how one reacts to corruption in the Church and how one kind of reaction - the obvious kind - threatens to lead us down the same path as Luther. Luther had a point about Church corruption; not that that was his only preoccupation. But his answer to it was a damaging as St Francis's was beneficial. St Francis's response was not to go around the place scourging the evil doers. It was, to paraphrase Bernanos, to return to the fountains of sanctity.
Bernanos could afford to be wild in his rhetoric. He didn't have a Church to run. The Franciscans were split in the early years - not to say more recently - by the competing interpretations of just how far one can take the demands of evangelical poverty: fountains of sanctity then or sources of dispute? I suppose what Bernanos might have said to those arguing for the utter necessity of competent administration is that it can only ever be one small element in what is the wider, deeper and more challenging vocation of being called to follow the Lord.
But I digress. I only wanted to say that I decided out of the blue this morning to start blogging again. Anyone who has read me over the years will know what I think of the Church's current administration. Indeed, my strap line beneath the blog's title refers to it. But if I come back here now, it is only in the spirit of Bernanos's St Francis. I said some time ago we are living in a post-dubia Church. Indeed, we still are. But why should it also belong to the dubia-refusers?
One of the many insights of French cultural anthropologist René Girard - among some silly things - is that if we allow our actions to be shaped by reaction to our aggressors, we unconsciously risk imitating them. Much better, therefore, to adopt the St Francis's agenda. Dip into the sources of sanctity and share them with others. As I come back to blogging, I would much rather adopt that strategy than any other.
The waves crashing around us have sunk many a small ship in the last couple of years. The going has been hard. The questions many and complex. Not a few people have taken as their gospel point of reference the story of Jesus asleep in the boat in a storm while the apostles, hardened fishermen though some of them are, get increasingly desperate. It is the Lord himself who tells us not to be afraid, although I have to say my feeling is less fear and more like nausea.
Still, the solutions are now what they have always been. Love, duty, joy .. and no panicking. Easier said than done.
Still, for what it's worth, 'Ahoy there, shipmates.' I'm back, at least for a while.
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