Another bishop, another search for a superhero. Nearly eight years after Mgr Paul Cremona was declared the successor of Mgr Joseph Mercieca, I am braced for another round of prescriptions from very serious people, both in and outside the Church, who, however, will end up missing what’s really at stake.
I hope I’m mistaken. I hope we won’t have to put up with another description of a super elastic Mr Fantastic: an archbishop with his ear to the ground, eye on the horizon, hand on the nation’s pulse... all while kneeling in prayer.
I don’t deny it would be helpful to have a leader with the vision of Steve Jobs, the organisational talent of Bill Gates, Barack Obama’s silver tongue and a snake-charming fakir’s way with the Curia. But all of that – even from a purely journalistic perspective, let alone a Christian one – is beside the most important point.
It is a peculiarity of the Church that it keeps being misdescribed, even by some of its well-meaning members. No soldier describes his army as a church, although many Christians describe the Church as an army. Few sports or social club members think of themselves as, thus, belonging to a church but the number of Church members who describe themselves as belonging to a club is, to coin a phrase, legion.
The Church does have a bureaucracy, however, one cannot treat its reform like that of a civil service. It does have a hierarchy but the chain of command is not that of a pyramid.
Any recommendation that begins with such assumptions is already misplaced. Even more so are recommendations aimed at making the Church ‘relevant’.
A firm needs to be relevant to demand to capture market share. An army needs to be relevant to the needs of the State it serves. And that’s how both a firm and an army think of themselves. The Church, rightly or wrongly, thinks of itself differently. It sees itself as offering the measure of all relevance: Jesus Christ.
It does not offer Christ as a means to acquire better sleep, self-esteem or career. It offers Christ as the measure of whether this or that career is meaningful at all and whether it’s worth getting any sleep. Far from offering self-esteem, its astounding claims – that Christ can be born within us and that He is to be found in the most wretched – dismiss the conventional understanding of who we are.
You may well think this is all mumbo jumbo. But it’s what you need to keep track of if you want to understand what’s happening within the institution.
No one should scoff at a bishop who’s a gifted administrator, or at one whose words can send his listeners away bubbling with new-found motivation. But those are secular gifts and, on their own, will be, to the attentive reporter, a sign of a secularising tendency from within.
Cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard, archbishop of Paris in the 1940s, was speaking from within the heart of Church tradition when he wrote: “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda nor even in stirring people up but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would make no sense if God did not exist.”
As the Dominican friar, Timothy Radcliffe (from whom I got that quote) explains: “There should be something about Christians that puzzles people and makes them wonder what is at the heart of our lives.”
Right now, in a society like Malta’s there is, increasingly among the younger generations, something about Christians that puzzles people all right – but it makes them wonder whether there is any heart at all to their lives.
The challenge identified some 70 years ago by Cardinal Suhard is the same as that being addressed unflinchingly by Pope Francis. Most reports, friendly or scathing, on the Extraordinary Synod that has just ended have misreported the thrust as about putting less emphasis on doctrine. Quite the reverse. Everything the Pope has said indicates he thinks of himself as bringing a more intense focus on the true doctrine.
The challenge before the Church is how to be free with one’s warmth without being free with one’s principles
In a religion that believes the Word of God to be a man, not a book, the idea and purpose of doctrine is bound to be unusual. It is not the man who points to the doctrine but the doctrine that points to the man. The doctrine is not ‘the message’ that the man delivers. The man himself is the message; the doctrine is the carefully phrased caption, so to speak, intended to elucidate what’s going on.
The Gospel writers attempted to convey both the meaning of this idea as well as the puzzlement that accompanied it. God is presented as being literally in touch with people, who seek to touch Him in turn. After the Resurrection, the fact that Christ can be touched and is present in such a humdrum way - saying things like: “Hello, let’s eat” – is presented as part of the disturbing mystery. One can sympathise with the disciples who hankered for a conventional apocalypse.
This would all be, perhaps, intolerably mysterious were it not for the example being set by Pope Francis himself. He has made the Church seem in touch because he is so touching himself. He is his own message. He has not changed one iota of doctrine but has tried to act in a way that clarifies its meaning.
He is acting in a very different world from that of one of the men he has just canonised: John Paul II. The latter had lived in a world that was truly under siege, first from fascism and then from communism. He did live in a world of black and white, of fundamental existential choice before forces that could come and carry you off in the middle of the night.
Francis, too, has seen death squads in his lifetime. As Pope, however, he faces a situation that cannot be described as a siege without alarming unintended consequences. It is not a black and white division between members of the Church and a hostile world.
As one Belgian bishop described it, it is a world that keeps throwing up situations of patches of grey: such as a family wedding, or a first communion, where an extended family riven by divorce, remarriage and residual anger manages – usually thanks to much diplomacy and effort – to make peace and gather together under one roof. In those circumstances, what is the action that best embodies doctrine? The exclusion from communion of those who are remarried, or, the communal celebration of their temporary peace?
The Synod document that has emerged has been clearly shaped by Francis. Contrary to what its aghast critics say, it neither waters down doctrine nor embraces relativism. It simply rejects the idea that the authentic way to act on one’s convictions is to behave without any regard to context at all. If goodness is multifaceted, then monomaniac simplistic behaviour betrays it.
At any rate, that seems to be the understanding of the man who will be choosing Malta’s next archbishop. Such an understanding of the challenge before the Church - of how to be free with one’s warmth without being free with one’s principles - makes it more not less difficult to find the right man.
Of course, the Church routinely makes do, and quite wel, with men who don’t have enough of the right qualities. But if we must have a yardstick to measure the Pope’s eventual choice of man against the Pope’s own sense of the challenge, then it will have to be this: the extent to which the new archbishop embodies both freedom and authority.
ranierfsadni@europe.com