Palm Sunday liturgies

Amy Welborn has posted an account of her experience of Palm Sunday this year. This, and the comments in which others describe their experience, make an interesting read. Look out particularly for the comment that describes attendance at a celebration in a Ukrainian parish.

"I am a Christian"

I take this from Independent Catholic News.

The National Secular Society has encouraged 100,000 people to sign a certificate to "debaptise" themselves as part of a campaign to allow people to revoke their baptisms.

Premier Radio (London's Christian Radio station) are asking Christians to publicly affirm their faith by signing a declaration for Christianity. The plan is to find 100,000 people who are prepared to publicly stand up and declare that they are Christians to show the British public that Christianity is still relevant and alive.

Please sign the declaration at: www.IamaChristian.co.uk and pass this on to friends and family.

The sign up format includes a drop-down menu that allows you to declare your Christian denomination. It would be very good to see Roman Catholics well represented in signing up to this declaration. The option to declare your Roman Catholic denomination is helpful, as I would otherwise have been hesitant to sign an essentially evangelical statement of faith that lacks the ecclesial dimension essential to Catholicism.

Little Venice to Camden - but not quite back again

Zero and I went out for the day yesterday, starting with Mass at St James Spanish Place, adjourning round the corner (with a few others who had been to Mass!) for tea and toast, and then heading for Warwick Avenue to start this walk. [The http://www.waterscape.com/things-to-do/walking/london-walks site has some other walks that can be downloaded].

The walk from Spanish Place to Warwick Avenue took in:

And Marylebone Station (to get on the Bakerloo line to Warwick Avenue). Not somewhere I had ever been before, and rather more pleasant an enviroment than some of the much larger London stations. Raided Marks and Spencers for sandwiches for lunch.

The walk along the Regent canal has some very pleasant spots, though one or two bits were a bit "untidy concrete". You do get a real sense of entering a "different world", seeing the narrow boats moored along the sides of the canal. It was a bit difficult to tell how many, but some of them are people's homes.

Arriving at Camden Lock saw an increase in the number of people ... and a decrease in the average age. As you get older, it does get more and more difficult trying to be trendy. The M&S sandwiches sitting beside the locks probably marked us out from those partaking of (less healthy?) fast food from the nearby market stalls.

I could not live in Primrose Hill, as there were no Italian restaurants and life without Spaghetti Carbonara is not life at all. The view from the top of the hill, though, is very worthwhile, and I kicked myself for not having a pair of binoculars with me. Recession or not, one of the features of the skyline looking south across the centre of London was the number of construction cranes.

As we headed back towards St John's Wood, someone had had enough (I still have to really understand females and shoes ... ).

Some more training is needed, I think, before we take on Santiago de Compostella .....

1st April

I received this as a "comment" on Wednesday. Unfortunately, I had to actually go to school on Wednesday morning and teach some lessons, so by the time I saw the comment it was too late for me to do anything about it.

Zero says
As this is April 1st will you be up to some mischief on your blog? Perhaps you could treat us to several paragraphs of the "latest" book by Pope Benedict-so new that no-one even knew he was writing it!

I suppose I could have leaked the name of the next Archbishop of Westminster ....

Eucharistic Adoration April 2009

This afternoon and evening has seen our regular "first Friday" Eucharistic Adoration in the parish. It really is quite a privilege to get the glimpses into other people's spiritual lives that organising these events gives.

St Edward's Church is a town centre Church, literally a stone's throw from a bus stand. This stand acts as a terminus for some routes, and so the buses park up there while their drivers have breaks between runs. Today I met a driver who had dropped into the Church and spent some ten minutes of one of his meal breaks in Eucharistic Adoration. He has just started driving from the nearby bus garage, having previously lived and worked in south London ... where he used to regularly pop in to the Catholic Church in Lewisham. He spoke of such visits being very much part of his life.

And a young lady who I had not met before read one of the readings for our Stations of the Cross. Talking to her afterwards, she is a music student. One day she had gone along to hear a performance of a Hadyn Mass - not realising until she got there that she was not going to a concert performance, but to an actual celebration of Mass with the Haydn music. And that is what has led her to be receiving instruction ready for becoming a Catholic. It was, literally, the first time she had ever been to Stations of the Cross.

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?

Asking questions and writing letters

Asking questions and writing letters - these are two accepted tools of the apostolate. But there is an interesting art to them both.

One can ask a question for three reasons: to elicit information (in which case you will often ask a question that does not reveal to your interlocutor the information you are really seeking, but the answer to which will reveal it); to make a point to your interlocutor and to others in the audience (in which case the question will clearly indicate where you stand on the issue at stake, and invite agreement or disagreement in response); or to attempt to influence the actions of your interlocutor and audience, especially if he or she happens to be a politician (in which case the question will probably probe the reasons or evidence supporting a point of view).

It all depends what you are trying to achieve. The second type of question almost certainly will not influence the actions or views of the person of whom it is asked; but, in a political environment, it can make the person who asks it look good, strong and effective. Though, in practice, the questioner has in all probability achieved very little. The third type of question is much more likely to influence someone, particularly if it is well argued. The effectiveness of questioning does depend on something unstated, though, and that is whether or not any degree of trust is built between the questioner and the questioned. Trust is not the same as agreement. But if you do not have a basic level of trust in the person asking you the question, you are not going to give a proper answer - you do not know what the questioner will do with your answer so you will make sure that you do not give them anything that they can do anything with. The third type of question, I would suggest is the one that implies most trust and will therefore bring out the most useful answer.

Letter writing is the same. You can write to score a point (and so, in political terms, gain status yourself, perhaps an "open letter") or you can write with the purpose of influencing. But the successful influencing - which does not always mean agreement - depends on a basic level of trust from the person you are writing to. If your correspondent does not trust what you will do with their reply, and thinks that you might release it to the press or publish it on your blog, you should not expect to receive anything more than "thank you for your letter, which is receiving attention" in response. And that is down to you as the writer of the letter, and not to any disregard on the part of the person to whom you have written. On the other hand, if your correspondent trusts you to treat their reply with discretion and fairness (in any public use of it), then you are much more likely to be able to engage in a proper dialogue and so influence. But you should not write the one type of letter and expect to achieve the outcome appropriate to the other type of letter.

I do have experience of both questions and letters! Something like two years ago now, I was a resident member of the Board of an Arms Length Management Organisation in my local authority. This is a company, wholly owned by the local authority, with responsibility for managing the local authority's housing stock. If I say that, as I left the Board, the officer responsible for developing the Organisation's work on equalities and diversity commented favourably on the way I asked questions at meetings ("not putting people down" was part of the way she expressed it) you can perhaps work out what was happening there.

I have had exchanges of letters with the General Secretary of my trade union on two matters over the years. The General Secretary's responses have been honest - we do not agree over the issues concerned - but they would not have been so without the element of trust that existed between us in the correspondence. When we see each other at meetings, I think we both know where each of us stands on the issues concerned but there is no personal antagonism. The potential for influence is there, whereas it would not be if I had just written to score a point.

Now, where is my pen ...