Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week and its celebration is cause for reflection. Historically, Christ was given a triumphal welcome to Jerusalem, yet only a five days later, people in the same city cried out for his brutal execution.
Here in Malta, these religious celebrations will be celebrated with pomp and pageantry, and crowds of people will turn out to fulfil their external religious duties. Such popular piety should not be scoffed at.
In his recent encyclical ‘The Joy of the Gospel’, Pope Francis stresses the immense importance of a culture marked by Faith, and says: “An evangelised popular culture has many more resources than the mere sum total of believers and contains values of Faith and solidarity capable of the development of a more just and believing society.”
Yet, one is also justified in being cynical when one questions whether this popular piety is being translated into the way we live. Sadly, widespread corruption is only too evident and the impact of our professed Christian beliefs are too often conspicuous by their absence.
No doubt, we are acutely aware of the failings of others and relish pontificating on those of the clergy, the politicians and any group in authority or public office. This is often a convenient and soothing exercise to justify our own shortcomings which we very capably belittle and even justify. It is a question of two weights and two measures.
Lent should be an opportunity for self-awareness. All the disciplines of prayer, fasting and charitable commitment have the purpose of drawing us to God and our fellow men. When, in 1910, The Times newspaper asked a number of authors to write on the topic: ‘What’s wrong with the world?’, G.K. Chesterton’s simply wrote back: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G.K. Chesterton.”
A society that loses its soul loses its freedom too
Such a reaction is a sharp and salutary lesson to us all, driving home the reality that the first subject for reform and improvement is ourselves. This is the transforming message of our Faith.
Life is a journey of opportunity where we must try to constantly challenge ourselves to embrace the Gospel’s message of love of God and our neighbour. We have to work hard at cultivating humility, integrity, forgiveness and altruism.
In 1930, when reacting to criticism at his embracing the Catholic Faith, the novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote: “The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards has become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanised state… It is no longer possible… to accept the benefits of civilisation and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests.”
The challenges of the 1930s are similar to those of today. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, modern society believes we can live and build an ethical society without God, that there is no morality beyond personal choice so long as you do no harm to others. This, in turn, promotes a culture of individualism, consumerism and relativism.
Even in Malta, we see the results of such a mindset portrayed by the dismal statistics of a fractured society crippled by the increasing incidence of broken relationships and marriage breakdown and the concomitant collapse of trust as one scandal after another knocks down our faith in institutions and people in positions of responsibility.
Committed Christians, by trying to live their Faith, are an asset to their community. Civil society should realise that isolating religious expression from the secular sphere and undermining our religion is not in the interest of the common good.
Sacks has no doubt what is at stake when he quotes the historian Will Durant: “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.” He concludes that a society that loses its soul loses its freedom too.
For believers, Holy Week should be a time of deep reflection and spiritual renewal, and above all, hope that our efforts to live up to the ideals of our Faith have also a positive and much wider social dimension.
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