The Splendour of Charity - Cardinal Cordes to the Bishops of England and Wales

I have just read (one month late!) the address that Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum gave to the meeting of the Bishops of England and Wales in Leeds in April. The full text can be found on the website of the Bishops Conference. The Pontifical Council Cor Unum is the Vatican office "entrusted by the Holy Father with giving concrete signs of love and charity". Cardinal Cordes showed himself to be very familiar with the situation in England and Wales, referring to legislative pressures on Catholic institutions in the areas of adoption and education, and making an indirect reference to Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's action with regard to the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth and to the challenge

At one point in his address, Cardinal Cordes gives the following account of how the encyclical Deus Caritas Est came into being:

"Since Cor Unum is directly concerned with the praxis of the Church’s love for our fellow human beings, Pope John Paul II had asked that I prepare for him a preliminary draft of a papal writing on charity. My intention was to begin with an inductive presentation: reflections on the general willingness of people to provide help today, followed by a description of Christian initiatives that exist, moving in the end to the rooting of love of neighbour in God. The former Cardinal Ratzinger was aware of my writings. When he was elected Pope, he decided to publish an Encyclical on charity, but he totally reversed my intended order. His starting point is Revelation’s central message: “God is love.” He initiates the Encyclical with a drumbeat, proclaiming the absolute precedence of Him “Who has first loved us” (1Jn 4:10), both in the order of time and in the scale of values."

With hindsight, this God-centredness of the encyclical appears very obvious; but Cardinal Cordes account of the background to the encyclical brings it into a new relief. Cardinal Cordes also draws attention to an idea that was completely new to me. This is the idea that Deus Caritas Est is an encyclical that needs to be implemented, that there is a course of action to be followed in response to the encyclical. Whilst this is something in which all members of the Church have a part to play, Cardinal Cordes believes a primary responsibility rests with the Bishops of the church:

"There is no doubt that Deus caritas est directs itself to various groups in the Church. Nevertheless, the main burden of responsibility for its implementation in dioceses and parishes is placed squarely on the shoulders of the Bishops. It is not only the pastoral realism of the Pope, but also theological reasons that make the ordained Pastors the principle target group for the Encyclical."

The theological reasons referred to are the threefold mission of the Church, particularly entrusted to a Bishop at the time of his episcopal consecration: of teaching the word (martyria, or witness), of celebrating the mystery of redemption (leitourgia) and of active charity (diakonia). The Bishop has an obligation of oversight in all three of these areas.

"Some Catholic aid agencies actively avoid acknowledging this fact and sometimes Bishops themselves fail to exercise their legitimate and necessary oversight, leading to approaches that are predominantly political or economic to the neglect of revealing through love of neighbour the love of the God of Jesus Christ."

In a section headed Christ: the Model of Charity, Cardinal Cordes says:

"The attentive reader of Sacred Scripture clearly sees that the charitable gestures of Jesus and the compassion of the first Christians were always intended to point to the loving-kindness of the heavenly Father."

And the implication of this is drawn in the next section, headed Protecting the Heritage:

"For this reason, it falls still today to Christians, and, in a special way the Church’s Pastors, to be attentive. In other words: Catholic charitable organisations should be careful not to forget the meaning of their activity, influenced perhaps by the present climate or excessive reliance on public funds. The question is one of fostering the Christian roots of the Church’s activity and so preserving the “splendour” of our identity as Catholic charitable institutions."

To express this in a language more familiar to those of us involved in Catholic education, this is to see charitable activity as a first step of evangelisation, that is, the stage of presence in charity to our neighbours. It certainly should not be explicitly prosletysing, but it nevertheless has a Christian identity.

Cardinal Cordes also highlights a Change of Paradigm that he sees in Deus Caritas Est:

"Until now, the Church’steaching on the struggle against misery – like the social encyclicals – dealt with public defects, goals and programs; they addressed factual problems and they insisted on concrete changes outside of oneself. Besides all this, Deus caritas est turns now decisively to committed persons: the Pope wishes to shape the life of the actors through a “formation of the heart” (n. 31a). So, for the first time, he formulates basic guidelines for a “spirituality” of those working in help-agencies.

"Clearly the first preoccupation of Caritas cannot intend to change society and
unjust structures. It is the human heart that makes the structures. Therefore, the essential requirement for action – as the Pope says – is to “be persons moved by Christ’s love, persons whose hearts Christ has conquered with his love, awakening them with a love ofneighbour” (n. 33)."

So, what are the issues for the implementation of Deus Caritas Est here in England and Wales? I suggest the following two, one at the level of an organisation the other at the level of individuals:

1. CAFOD's annual review for 2006-7 records £7.6m of income as coming from "Government and other grants"; £13.4m came through the Disasters Emergency Committee; £26.0m directly from CAFOD supporters; £3.7m from the Caritas Network; £1.4m from trading and interest earned. The questions for implementation here are about if there are any conditions attached to the income from Government and other grants. But there does seem to be a strong voluntary support base to reflect a Christian identity and so withstand any loss of Government income should that become necessary.

2. The Catholic Herald of 6th May reports that the Nottingham diocesan adoption agency will cut its ties with the diocese because it cannot follow Catholic teaching and comply with gay rights legislation: "From October it will merge with Family Care, the adoption agency of the Anglican Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, to form a new agency, but one which will not be formally linked to the Churches and will be able to place children in the care of gay couples." This does leave unanswered the question of how the staff of the agency will live up to the God-ward orientation of Christian charity, as presumably any Catholic staff will face the possibility of being expected to act against Catholic teaching.

I haven't forgotten, but ....

I haven't forgotten that I had said I would do a further post on Richard Feynman. I am (slowly) reading James Gleick's biography, and one or two other things. I promise I'll get round to it ...

Days of Eucharistic Adoration ("Forty Hours")

I have spent the last couple of days putting together the programme for our parish's Days of Eucharistic Adoration. As I went to look at the materials I used last year, I realised that this is now the fifth consecutive year that I have done this. There is now an established "routine", and I am, as I usually am, a bit bowled over by everyone's willingness to "join in" with getting it up and running. I took the photo below last year, at the end of the Adoration on the Friday evening. The Church is set up as it was for the Children's Adoration and Vigil. Last year's theme was the Our Father, hence the icon of God the Father and the words of the Our Father on the displays.

The theme for the days of Adoration - "The Eucharist: Gift of God for the Life of the World" - is taken from the theme of the International Eucharistic Congress, taking place in Quebec in June. The three "sub-themes" are based on three of the icons that decorate the "Ark of the New Covenant" that has been designed as a focus of devotion and adoration, particularly for the young people of Canada, during the time leading up to the Congress.

If you are within reach of Romford during these days, please do call in and visit Jesus, our Eucharist, Gift of God for the Life of the World.

New City Magazine - May 2008

The May 2008 issue of New City is the first since the death of Chiara Lubich, the founder of the Focolare Movement who publish the magazine. It is therefore dedicated to her, and to some of the key events in her life and the life of Focolare. Particular attention is given to Chiara's visits to England and Ireland.

One article is entitled "The Work of Mary". This is the official, canonical title of the movement - Focolare is a kind of nick-name. According to the article, it was Chiara's understanding of God's plan for the movement that it was to live "like Mary"; or, in fact, more than that to "relive Mary" in a certain sense. New City reproduces a meditation in which Chiara gives an account of how this intuition for the movement came into being. It has a striking resonance with a thought of Alina Reyes included in the post I did yesterday on the April-May issue of Lourdes Magazine. One might also want to suggest that apparitions of the Virgin Mary such as those at Lourdes do in some way make a presence of Mary in the Church.

I went into church one day, and with my heart full of trust, I asked: "Why did you wish to remain on earth, on every point of the earth, in the most sweet Eucharist, and you, you who are God, have not found a way to bring here and to leave here Mary, the mother of all of us who journey?"

In the silence he seemed to reply: "I have not left her because I want to see her again in you. Even if you are not immaculate, my love will virginize you, and you, all of you, will open your arms and hearts as mothers of humanity, which, as in times past, thirsts for God and for his mother. It is you who now must soothe pains, soothe wounds, dry tears. Sing her litanies and strive to mirror yourself in them".

[Chiara Lubich Mary the Transparency of God]

Lourdes Magazine - April/May 2008

The current issue of Lourdes Magazine arrived a few days ago. As usual it contains a mix of articles related to the life of the shrine. The main feature covers the 50th anniversary of the International Military Pilgrimage. I think it was participation in this pilgrimage, possibly in the late 1950's or early 1960's, that saw my father make his first visit to Lourdes. We saw from time to time some black and white film of this .... The ethos of this pilgrimage is that of military engagement as being at the service of peace. The pilgrimage can be an occasion of reconciliation between those who have fought on the opposite sides of conflicts. The Magazine also contains the homily preached by the Bishop of Lourdes and Tarbes on the 11th February this year, for the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.

What caught my attention, though, was coverage of a "book fair" held in Lourdes 9th-11th February. This featured a number of books about Lourdes or St Bernadette, some published for the 150th anniversary year. One is a book La jeune fille et la Vierge by Alina Reyes. The surprising thing about this is that Alina Reyes previous writings are "controversial" (the word used by her interviewer in the Magazine - they are actually better described by the word "erotic"). I have not been able to find out much about Alina Reyes apart from the Lourdes Magazine interview. The fascinating possibility that I want to explore when I am able to obtain her book about St Bernadette and her novel Foret profonde (in which she writes about the healing influence of Lourdes in her life) is that her life expresses the purification of eros to become agape of which Pope Benedict XVI writes in Deus Caritas Est.

Meanwhile, some extracts from the interview:

I did not recieve a religious education; I was a natural mystic who was not aware of it. Above all, as far as I can remember, I knew with an unsustainable certainty (to the point that I often tried to rid myself of this feeling), that a superior, cosmic order, invisible and spiritual, which I could not name, carried me personally in His heart. I could never have talked about it, it was too overwhelming, and I still cannot say any more. At twenty four, whilst expecting my second son, I read and re-read the Gospels and spent months embraced by a marvellous grace. I continued to experience this state, but still declared myself an unbeliever. This is how I know of this process of emptying oneself to receive the invisible. Little by little, increasingly specific things occurred to me, more and more evident, notably a direct contact with God. I knew then I should no longer conceal the name of the One who inhabited me ...

My novels are only "controversial" for those who see evil where it is not. I have always denounced the culture of morbid sex, and sought to give my vision of the flesh; flesh which is happy is one of the means for human beings to access a fulfilled fusion with the world, in other words, the Creation. ... Then yes, I reconcile Eros and Agape, and I am a Christian because this religion is that of the flesh. When we enter a church we see the flesh of Christ, the flesh of the saints, we see the child Jesus at Mary's bosom ... God was incarnate, how can one believe He hates the flesh?...

I tried to show the literary dimension of this event [ie the apparitions at Lourdes], and what strikes me is its resemblance to the beginning of Genesis: "God said ... And there was light". The word of God is a light; this is what is happening in Lourdes. The word which Bernadette transmitted to the world testifies to this "light", as she says at the beginning, which appeared to her in the "darkness" of the grotto ...

Yes I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing Pascal and I do it again by saying: "It is necessary to find the virgin in oneself to discover the hidden Virgin". The Virgin Mary is a door to enter God, and this door is innocence, the spiritual possibility of regarding the world as immaculate in its conception. I think I have said that the Virgin in us is our true face, our face denuded of social masks ... Lourdes invites us to present ourselves before the Virgin Mary, as we are surrounded by the mountains which evoke naturally the purity of nature, a purity we lose so dramatically.

The introduction to the interview describes Alina Reyes book as "at the same time splendid and surprising"; according to the Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, it is "a book which will stand the test of time".

Some election statistics ....

In the recent local elections here in the UK, residents of London boroughs had no less than three different ballot papers to fill in. First: to elect a mayor for the whole of greater London (this being quite a different position than that of the "Lord Mayor of London" who is the mayor of one London borough, the City of London - a much more ancient position). Second: to elect a constituency member of the Greater London Assembly. Third: to elect London-wide members of the Greater London Assembly, on the basis of proportional representation.

Amongst the candidates in all three of these elections were candidates of the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party. These are candidates who, from a Catholic point of view, can be described as being "on the side of the angels" - pro-family, pro-life and supportive of Catholic social teaching in other regards too. How did they get on?

According to the 2008 diocesan directory, the Mass attendance at the Catholic parishes within the Havering and Redbridge GLA constituency is 17 403. Let's take this as some sort of rough measure of the level of Catholic activity in the constituency. The turnout in the constituency was 44.78%, so, assuming that these active Catholics voted in the same proportion as their non-Catholic neighbours, that gives 7 793 Catholics voting. I really do not know what scaling factor should be applied to take into account Christians of other denominations - shall we say a factor of 5, trying to take account of evangelical churches as well as the Church of England, Baptists, Salvation Army etc? That gives a rather rough guess at 38 965 Christians voting in the constituency.

In the Havering and Redbridge votes for the mayoral contest, 2 957 people (1.78% of total votes) voted for Alan Craig, the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party candidate; in the constituency election for the Assembly, 5 533 (3.29% of total votes) voted for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party candidate. So, very (very, very) roughly, 7.6% of Christians voted for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party candidate for Mayor of London and 14.2% of them voted for their constituency candidate for the Assembly.

So, is it fair to say that the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party in London did not tap in to what might be thought of as their voting base? A number of thoughts occur:

1. It is for lay people to use their expertise and experience to decide whether or not it is appropriate to stand for electoral office on a Christian platform. In the same way, it is for lay people to decide how they should use their vote. It would be quite wrong for church leaders to take an approach of saying that their members should vote for one candidate or party rather than another, even where that party has a Christian platform. There is an appropriate secularity of the political process that church leaders need to respect.

2. This is not the same as saying that church leaders should say nothing about politics! They could, for example, be expected to speak out if a particular policy being proposed was clearly contrary to their church's teaching (something that might be easier for the Catholic Church than for other denominations). They could also promote Christian social teaching.

3. But there is a way in which points 1 and 2 merge together. In this election, how far have Christians voted according to conscience - and by that I mean by using their Christian faith to make a judgement of the appropriate way to vote? Or, how far have they voted on the basis of Conservative vs Labour (or perhaps with Liberal Democrats in there as well), in a kind of allegience to the major party system, and then simply trying to choose what they judge to be best of the top three, believing that any other vote is a wasted vote? I do not want to say that the only judgement of a Christian conscience would be to vote for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party - depending on your individual constituency candidates, for example, a Conservative or Labour vote might well be appropriate - but I do feel that there would have been a noticeably higher vote for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party if the idea of a vote based on conscience were more widespread amongst Christians. And this is something to which Church leaders can legitimately make a contribution.

On a more optimistic note: so far as I can make out from the voting figures, the Christian Peoples Alliance have made progress in the 2008 London elections when compared to their showing in 2004. Their share of the vote for the constituency election votes in Havering and Redbridge, for example, progressed from 2.14% in 2004 to 3.29% in 2008, and this with an increased overall turnout in 2008.

Go here for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party comment on the election results and here for my post on William Hague's recent lecture on "Practical Politics, Principled Faith", which is relevant.

A funeral

On Tuesday/Wednesday I undertook a round trip to the North West (civilisation!) for a family funeral. My mother was one of eight sisters, and the lady whose funeral I was attending was the last of the eight. She died at the ripe old age of 91, after many years of severe visual impairment and, more recently, a lengthy period suffering from dementia.

One of the interesting things I learnt about my aunty on Wednesday was the strength of her Catholic faith, and how much this was part of her ordinary culture. I heard anecdotally of wedding dresses being converted into vestments before the couple had returned from their honeymoon. The aside comment added to this, however, was that she would have probably accepted them being made into cricket whites if the materials had been suitable - in their younger days, theirs was very much a cricketing family. Another whimsical comment was about St Peter having to make sure the kettle was on when my aunty arrived at the pearly gates - she being a great tea drinker. Champagne and pasties were order of the day at the get together afterwards - this being all but a family "tradition".

My aunty had four children (my cousins), two daughters who lived nearby and two sons who were further away. They have cared for their mother over many years, first when she was living at home and then, more recently, when she was being cared for in a nursing home. During the last few years, I think they arranged for their mother to have a visit from at least one of them almost every day. This visiting was not easy, given their mother's illness.

Listening to the homily at the funeral Mass, which briefly referred to my aunty's death as being in some way a relief, my mind went on to a completely different track. I thought first of an idea of Cardinal Barragan, of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral of Health Care. He observed a year or two ago that the person who is mentally ill is a faithful image of Christ, and not in some way a damaged image of Christ. This is because their suffering and helplessness images that of Christ in his agony in the Cross. Seen in this way, the life of someone who is mentally ill should be seen as being precisely that - a life that has a positive value.

The second thought I had was that my cousins probably did not think that they were doing anything special in the way that they visited and supported their mother over a very long period of time. It appeared to be taken for granted that that was what they would do. The only implict reference to it during the homily was in describing the death as a kind of relief, though that was not an explicit reference. Perhaps this caring within a family is something that we should not take for granted, and should celebrate more than we do. In a practical way, it is a recognition of the life of the one who is visited as being precisely that - life, and a life that, though it is "lived" in an imperfect way, is nevertheless life that has a positive value.

In the context of the funeral Mass, this double recognition of life amidst the mortality of earthly existence is fulfilled in the belief that the body of the one who has died will rise again to eternal life in heaven. It is this belief in the resurrection of the body that gives meaning, not only to the dying of the person, but to the caring given during the days, months and even years leading up to the death. Whilst there is certainly a very human sadness to be recognised, perhaps priests preaching at funerals could present more positively the continuity of the recognition of life through illness and death to eternal life.

Eternal rest grant to her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace and rise again in glory. Amen.