The bishops on faith clubs

One day, historians will study the process of secularisation in Malta. Secularisation, that is, in the sense of the various developments that led many Catholics to find the religion they were brought up in to lose its intellectual forcefulness and emotional plausibility, to seem less a source of universal human wisdom, more a set of hand-wringing platitudes or sectarian doctrines. The historians, as usual, will have to decide whether the Church leaders themselves contributed to the process in unintended ways.

I suspect the historians will pay close attention to this Advent's pastoral letter. Not because the congregations to whom it was read in the churches on Sunday were ascertainably more alive to the pulpit than usual. But the bishops' letter may well represent a crystallisation of their cultural diagnosis, which will predispose their future actions.

What the bishops wanted to establish was what adult Christian commitment consisted of. They underlined the importance of a style of life and Church involvement that was coherent with belief. They paid their respects to those who chose to opt out of Church membership and, in a way, insisted that those who wanted to call themselves Christian had to show a similar clear-minded consistency. Otherwise, they could not be said truly to belong to Christ.

However, the way the bishops went about saying this was, shall we say, interesting.

They could have said, although they did not, that being a Christian involved having what used to be called "a sense of the Church". There is nothing very mystical about this. It is said that, when in a quandary, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would ask herself: What would Mrs Thatcher do? Her sense of her political identity was strong enough that it served as a kind of inner voice.

What "a sense of the Church" requires is sufficient involvement in Church activities to develop that kind of voice. A "sense", of course, is not a programme of action or a set of numbered rules. It is intuitive, variable and subject to dispute. But it is in such disputes that the "sense" itself is clarified.

Instead, the bishops did two things. First, they likened Church membership to that of an environmental group or a sports association - in other words, to a club, with a philosophy and goals.

Now, many Maltese, whether believers or not, liken the Church to a club. But this was always, at best, a highly misleading analogy. A club is exclusive. The Church has traditionally seen itself as open to all, which is why bishops traditionally address all people of good will, not just their members.

Club membership is partial. One can be a member of several clubs at once. The philosophy of one does not impinge necessarily on the other or, indeed, on one's whole sense of self. But the argument the bishops were making was precisely the opposite: Christian commitment cannot be compartmentalised.

To go along with the club analogy is to go along with the picture of the Church as just one "system" of belief and practice, alongside others. It is a widespread picture in the modern, multicultural world - precisely because it secularises belief as one option among others on the religion and spirituality supermarket shelves. One chooses one's religion as a consumer, as one does between this or that club.

Second, the bishops used the term "collective consciousness" to describe the nature of subscribing to the Church's philosophy and goals. They put quotation marks around the term, presumably to indicate they were getting it from somewhere else. And they were.

They were almost certainly alluding to the early 20th century celebrated sociologist, Emile Durkheim's description of religious belonging. But why the bishops chose to rely on Durkheim for what they wanted to say is, to say the least, puzzling.

Durkheim, an atheist, famously described religion as "society worshipping itself"; that is, society worships gods in its own image. The bishops hardly wanted to say that. On the contrary, they spoke of religion in cultural terms and as opposing the dominant culture.

Put to one side that a society is not a culture. In Durkheim's sense, the conscience collective (the term is rarely translated) was a term that covered imagination, feeling and thought but, above all, it was meant to indicate a kind of ideologically closed mode of perception and persuasion.

A religion like Christianity, with several sub-cultures, its roots partly in, partly outside any particular society, has always been difficult to fit within the Durkheimian paradigm. To do so as a religious leader is essentially to begin to manage a world wide movement as though it were a sect.

That is not what the bishops had in mind. But it remains to be seen whether, with their disconnection from contemporary intellectual life and their potted sociology and anthropology, that is what they are helping to bring about.

ranierfsadni@europe.com