Faith Matters Lecture 4: Catholicism and Public Life

The last lecture in the Faith Matters series was given by John Battle MP, who represents Leeds West in the House of Commons. Mr Battle's constituency website can be found here, a more personal website is here, and the text of his lecture is on the Westminster Diocese website. In the event, the lecture gave an account of how Mr Battle has worked as an MP, particularly in relation to his constituency, and offered an understanding of this in terms of a "social spirituality"; the lecture title might have perhaps led attendees to expect a lecture addressing issues such as gay rights, adoption agencies etc where a Catholic point of view faces challenges in public life today.

One aspect of attending a lecture such as this is that, in addition to hearing what one might term the "content" one also gains something of a "feel" for the person who is giving the lecture. Mr Battle communicated a real passion for the people of his constituency, and demonstrated a knowledge of their lives gained over many years representing the constituency. As he pointed out in answering a question at the end of the lecture, constituency surgeries and casework is an aspect of the work of MP's that is not often recognised in the media but nevertheless takes up a lot of their time when they are not at Westminster. The second thing that interested me was to see this being the subject of a reflection that related this aspect of Mr Battle's life as an MP to the content of faith. Whilst one might want to ask some questions about the theological perspective underlying this reflection, and therefore about the effectiveness of the resulting synthesis, it would be wrong to see Mr Battle as doing anything other than trying to genuinely integrate his politcal life with his religious faith.

Mr Battle made a kind of introductory observation about the nature of community. In the age of globalisation, we increasingly talk about the "tennis community" or "the hedge fund" community, to give Mr Battle's examples, and we also talk about "virtual communities" that exist exclusively by means of electronic communication. Mr Battle argues instead for a recovery of the original sense of the word community, as people who live and work in the same, shared physical environment. This might be termed a "neighbourhood community". An interesting thought for bloggers!

In answering a question at the end of the lecture, Mr Battle made explicit something that was implicit in the way he went about addressing the title of his lecture (publicised as "Catholicism and Public Life", but in Mr Battle's transcript given as "Building caring communities. Whose task?"). There are some controversial issues where the Catholic politician will find he or she cannot follow or go along with the direction of public policy. One approach is to enter into combat over these issues. Another approach is to, instead, look for those areas of activity in which the Catholic can still engage and work on behalf of others, and to get stuck into those. This latter is the approach that Mr Battle has, if I understood his lecture and response to questions correctly, adopted in his political career and which he was presenting during his lecture.

From a theological and philosophical point of view, the most interesting part of Mr Battle's lecture is the second half, from about page 6 of the transcript onwards. This presents an account of a "social spirituality" which would underpin a political and communitarian practice.

1. Reading Mr Battle's text, one is presented with a synthetic and cohering vision of a "social spirituality", supported by citation of a range of authorities. However, if you look at the cited authors, I am not sure that they are in fact all arguing for the same thing. Karl Rahner's reference to basic communities, for example, on pp.7-8, refers to a particular socio-political context internal to the life of the Church and, with the benefit of hindsight, would now reflect the situation of the new movements in the life of the Church. Similarly, Cardinal Murphy O-Connor's anxiety about renewing the community life of parishes (p.8) refers to the internal life of the Church. There is a blurring in the use of these citations of the idea of building ecclesial community and the idea building (secular) community.

2. A thread running through this section of Mr Battle's text is that of the social nature of the human person, his or her being made for life and activity along with other persons rather than in isolation. This is a very useful theme, that could be developed within the two spheres of (secular) community and ecclesial or religious community. The life of the Christian in the world is a life in a (secular) community; and the life of the Christian precisely as Christian is also a life in a community, but now a community that is directly ordered towards the Divine. Distinguishing the two spheres of community allows one to understand properly their relation to each other, and avoids the danger of an all too ready assumption that the one community is co-terminous with the other. One can see this danger, for example, in the picture of Jesus that is expressed in the quotation from Fr Albert Nolan on pp. 12-13 of the text, and in the way in which Karl Rahner is cited.

3. I would contend that, while not a canonical area, a parish community needs to move out from the Sunday Eucharist into the neighbourhood as the community builders.. It is difficult to disagree with this statement. It does, for example, echo one of the themes of the International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec last year, the theme of the relationship between the Eucharist and the mission of the Church in and to the world at large. However, it leaves unasked another question, that is of at least equal importance to a parish community. How can the parish community draw more of its neighbours to itself, and so itself increase (this not just intended in a simply numerical sense)? The two directions of movement are complementary, but if the distinction between neighbourhood community and ecclesial community is blurred, the two-fold nature of this movement is lost in an excessively optimistic turning of the Church towards the world. To mention a topic raised during the questions at the end of the lecture, one can work to support and grow relationships between, for example, unmarried couples - the parish moving out to the neighbourhood - but there is also a point at which you cannot leave marriage out of it - an invitation to the neighbourhood to move towards the parish.

And this last observation really brings us back to the underlying thesis of Mr Battle's lecture, and a key question. If one is to keep an integrity of Catholic faith, how viable is the approach of just concentrating on the areas where positive engagement is possible and leaving to one side the points of potential conflict with public policy? Recognising that any political involvement is "messy" and will demand co-operation with others of differing points of view, nevertheless, does Mr Battle's approach really work in the end?