50th Eucharistic Congress: Dublin 2012

I read with interest Pope Benedict's remarks to the recent meeting of the Pontifical Committee of International Eucharistic Congresses.

Of particular interest were Pope Benedict's remarks about the "statio orbis" Mass which concludes the celebration of each International Eucharistic Congress. Pope Benedict's account of his participation in the Congress in Munich which launched the idea of the "statio orbis" was interesting and brought to mind my little part in the most recent "statio orbis" at the end of the 2008 Eucharistic Congress in Quebec.

Moreover, the International Eucharistic Congresses have a long history in the Church. Through the characteristic form of "statio orbis," they highlight the universal dimension of the celebration: In fact, it is always a celebration of faith around the Eucharistic Christ, the Christ of the supreme sacrifice for humanity, to which the faithful participate not only those of a particular Church or nation, but, in so far as possible, from several places of the globe. It is the Church that recollects itself around its Lord and God. Important in this regard is the role of the national delegates. They are called to sensitize the respective Churches to the event of the congress, above all in the period of its preparation, so that from it will flow fruits of life and of communion.

Quakers and lesbian/gay "marriage"

Over the last few days, I have been giving some thought to the reports that the Quakers were to allow gay marriages. This is reported on the BBC News website here, though if you visit the Religion and Ethics area of the BBC website - here - you will find that the news report's account of Quaker beliefs in general is not very accurate. So far as I can tell, the account of Quaker beliefs at the Religion and Ethics site is accurate - I have no great expertise in Quaker beliefs, but everything at this site accords with the little that I do know about them. The Times report is here.

The Quaker system is very attractive at first glance, and its emphasis on the presence of God "within" each and every person sounds very similar to Catholic teaching on grace as the presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul.

And the flaws in Quaker belief start at exactly that point. Sustained to its logical conclusion, this emphasis will want to say that God is present "within" even as a person comits the most evil of acts. From the point of view of reasoning, it is difficult to recognise in Quaker belief any place for sin and evil - the presence of which in the world is apparent without the need for execptional study. If it is not pursued to this conclusion, it needs to admit that each person has something of God within them, and also something that is of evil (cf the second page on the BBC Ethics and Religon site); and, from the point of view of Quaker-ism as a system of faith, there arises a need for discerning what it is that is of God and what it is that is of evil. There seems to be no rational way of making this discernment, as it rests within the choice of the individual in responding to "the light within", and therefore remains profoundly subjective. Expressed in terms of Catholic teaching, Quaker-ism does not give a proper, objective place to the doctrine of original sin.

This consideration is closely linked to the next flaw which begins to appear at this point. The human person is of his and her nature a being endowed with reason, and a being who is of his and her nature, communal. Communication between persons is based on this rational and social nature of the person. Consequently, we should expect that God's revelation of himself to human persons will also take part in this rational and communal character of the human person. In other words, revelation will be external and public in its character, and it will be given to a community. This is, of course, what we see in Judaism - God reveals himself and dwells among his chosen people - and in Christianity - where the presence of Jesus in the world is continued in the visible body of his Church. Quaker belief is fundamentally irrational, and reduces God's revelation of himself to a personal subjectivism. The silence of the Quaker meeting is perhaps symbolic of the isolated individualism of the Quaker view of revelation.

The subjective nature of Quaker belief about how God speaks to men and women therefore gives rise to both its major strength and, at the same time, to its greatest weakness. It places a very high value on the human person, and expects an identical high regard to be given by every person to every other person. This is the basis for their stand for non-violence and pacifism, a rather wonderful symbol of which is the Friends Ambulance Unit. It also issues in their strong sense of conscience, which could be seen to be a parallel to John Henry Newman's teaching about conscience as the prompting of God in the soul (though Newman's teaching would have an objective content in relation to the teaching of the Church that would not be there in the Quaker understanding). It has a relevance to, for example, how we might regard the person who is seriously ill. The weakness arises because no one Quaker can really communicate to another Quaker, or to someone outside their religion, anything of objective validity about the revelation of God. One can talk about God as love, and about his presence "within" and about the value that must be given to each and every person, but none of this has any objective content, any external or public form that can be communicated to another so as to demand their obedience. A Quaker is not able to teach their belief to another, or to argue for it by reason. In the modern world, it is therefore quite unviable as a system of religous belief capable of synthesis with a modern, scientific understanding of the world. [Note to myself: I must read up about Michael Faraday's religious beliefs in relation to his science.]

All of which is about my wanting to suggest that, slick and easy as the decision of Quakers to allow gay people to marry may appear, it has no rational basis that other religious denominations can want to follow. It is nothing more than a kind of "collective subjectivity", lacking any really objective attempt to study male-female difference. It reflects the weakness of a purely subjective view of revelation - that, when it does emerge into the public domain without objective structures of belief, it is just as likely to approve what is of evil as it is to approve what is of "the light". In a certain, and very real sense, it can't tell the difference.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

A little while since I did a physics post, so here is one. Travelling to and from Leeds by train gave me the chance to do some reading. The month's edition of Physics World went with me for that purpose. It came along with an issue of Interactions which fulfils the role of a kind of newspaper for the Institute of Physics, highlighting its own work, where the magazine itself addresses news and ideas from across the whole world of physics itself.

It contains a full page profile of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who is the president of the Institute of Physics for the coming two years. She is the first female president of the Institute. Her career in physics had an unusual start in that her "big discovery" did not come after years of research and as part of a well developed research career. It came during her first venture into research, her PhD work. She was part of the team that discovered pulsars (a type of astronomical object whose emission of radiation varies in a regular cycle - they pulse), and this put her into the public eye. Her supervisor won a Nobel prize for this.

Jocelyn's career was not routine after that. She was married, and moved to follow her husband's job. So getting post-doctoral positions depended on (her own phrase) writing begging letters to universities. With her fame as a discoverer of pulsars, though, this meant "they were at least likely to read it and not bin it instantly, so I wouldn't be here if that hadn't happened to me..".

Asked if her Quaker beliefs have affected her management style (she is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends) she agrees: "One of the Quaker ethics is that there is 'that of God in everyone', which to me means that within everyone there is something really good and positive, and my management style fits with that. I have a very collegiate style, trying to draw out from each member of the team what they can best contribute.

"The Quaker ethic also fits very well with being a research scientist, because in Quakerism there's no dogma or creed but you are meant to sit light to your beliefs and revise them if need be. And when you're being a research scientist you're working with a model or hypothesis that you're meant to sit light to and revise if need be. That's the British style of Quakerism and research science sits very comfortably with that."

I found this interesting as representing a dialogue, lived out in practical life, between a scientist's religious belief and their scientific work. There is much in it that a Catholic scientist could share, with the difference that the Catholic would have an underlying dogmatic/creedal foundation that the Quaker would not have. Seeing that there is something "of God" in everyone would be recognised by a Catholic as growing out of a belief in God as the creator of each individual person in the image and likeness of God, which might be injured by sin, but is not completely destroyed by sin. And it is interesting to see that then developed into the adoption of a management style.

Similarly, the idea of being "light to" your particular scientific theory (model or hypothesis) as you set out on research would be seen as an openness to the ever emerging possibilities of the creative wisdom of God in creation, a recognition and faith in the ultimately rational nature of creation and of our ability to discover that rationality. Indeed, I have posted in the past on St Robert Bellarmine's account of precisely this sort of outlook, in the context of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the Galileo affair. Robert Bellarmine's argument that science still had not at that time produced the definitive evidence to support a change of perspective on a particular Biblical text explicitly included a recognition that, when such evidence was forthcoming, a "re-think" of both the scientific model/hypothesis and of the understanding of the Biblical text would be in order. I think it is fair to say that he would have us also sit "light to" specific interpretations of Biblical texts that touch on matters of science in exactly the way that we do for the science itself.

The non-dogmatic Quaker approach does contain a couple of hidden hazards, in my humble opinion. There must be a certain, loosely defined as it may be, range of underpinning belief - eg in the existence of God - which is not averted to. And the non-dogmatic approach can be open to a practical agnosticism or indifference to truth. But, that having been said, there is certainly ground to be shared in dialogue, as exemplified by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

On the current controversies over religion and science, [Jocelyn Bell Burnell] observes wryly:"I think there's a lot of dogmatism around in the debate, which is probably why it gets so heated".