CathNews New Zealand

Like many people in the southern hemisphere of our planet, winter 2022 is the year of rain, floods and landslips.

We have all heard about global warming and seen graphs and projections of changing temperatures, but it takes a constant and sometimes torrential rain for the statistics to become a reality.

But has this anything to do with religion or should a theologian even use time in thinking about it?

Let me tell you a little story about last Sunday.

Taking his cue from the constant rain, a friend of mine preached about climate change.

His argument was a simple one.

• Look around you – we are all struggling in this rain.
• We hear every day on the news about weather records being broken with higher rainfall and, for some unfortunate people, floods that mean they need to leave their houses.
• The news headlines tell us:
  • “Insurance costs could increase as climate risk rises.”
  • “Sydney has officially received more than a full year’s worth of rain, and it’s only April.”
  • “Frightening, out of control: Nelson residents flee as river bursts.”
  • Eastern Australia faces wet weather and flooding with 70% chance of  third consecutive La Nina.”
  • “State of Emergency declared on NZ’s West Coast.”
• This concerns us as Christians because we will soon profess our faith in God as the creator of all. [When we say the Creed].
• We have to see this as part of the challenge of faith today.
• If you want to know what Pope Francis is saying about this, then read Laudato si’ on the web or buy a copy from the rack at the back of the church.
• It was a very short homily because attention spans contract in inverse proportion to noise of the rain pelting down on the church roof.

Surprise reaction

On Sunday evening, he rang me to tell me what happened next because it shocked and hurt him. Here’s the story.

As he said farewell to people in the porch when the Eucharist was ended, he was tackled by three or four people in a group.

They told him – in quite graphical language – what they thought of his homily, his advert for anything written by ‘that pope,’ and their future attitude to him!

Criticism of preachers is, of course, not new – as a revered Professor of Homiletics once warned: ‘If 50% of the congregation like the idea of you preaching, you can bet your bottom dollar that the other 50% dread it!’

The criticisms on Sunday evening can be summarised under three headings:

• They did not want to hear about science in a sermon; it belongs to the world and not to religion – and, anyway, how do you know it is true?
• They did not want ‘social commentary’ because they came to Mass to have a personal encounter with Jesus, and this annoyed them.
• If he did this again, they would withdraw their contributions; they were not going to pay someone to support ‘woke’ culture.

They were not as crisp as this, but I hope I have captured the kernel of what I was told they said. These are very revealing comments as they manifest in a nutshell some of the deepest spiritual problems among Christians today – and this makes them worth thinking about.

Faith and Reason

For several centuries it was a central plank of the opponents of religion that one should create a great chasm between faith [aka ‘superstition’] and reason [aka ‘science’] – one excluded the other!

It was left to Christians to argue that ‘all wisdom comes from God’ (Sir 1;1) and that no item of truth can contradict another – but it may only be from a fuller vantage point that we can understand this.

Thus, down the centuries, far from being enemies of science, Christians have seen the discovery of the complexity of the universe as an investigation of God’s handiwork. What is new today among some Christians it is the notion that they would rather believe than think!

But if one has to opt for a binary of either believing or thinking, one is moving on to very dangerous ground. Here lies the road to both to silliness and to being hoodwinked by every demagogue with a Twitter account.

Rational enquiry is not a substitute for faith, but rather faith in the Creator – who is beyond our imagining – goes hand-in-hand with rational study of that which is within our vision.

Without rationality, faith becomes credulity.

Without faith, life is reduced to a swamp.

This is such a basic element of the Christian tradition – though there have always been fundamentalists – that it was rarely mentioned.

We cannot take it for granted today: even when we examine the ‘things of faith’ – be it doctrine, ancient texts such as those collected in the Bible, or practices – we cannot ignore the light that comes from rational enquiry and discourse.

To abandon it would be to affirm a religion that is less than our human dignity – and so a rejection of one of our unique gifts as humans: God has given us logicality, and the Logos has become us.

To isolate ‘faith’ from rationality may make religion (apparently) simpler and far better at providing a ‘security blanket’ for those who crave absolute certainty.

But it also makes Christianity indistinguishable from superstition. In assuming it can relate to God without the universe and our interaction within it, it takes God out of his creation.

It might seem pious to believe something that is the very opposite of what rational and critical evaluation leads us to affirm, but this is not a faith that is grounded in our tradition but simply a whim that opens us to every kind of extremism.

Libraries have been written on this, but the advice of St Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) still holds: if it has to be a choice between a pious confessor and a learned one, get the learned one.

Truth in its fulness is beyond this life. Even the limited truth we can attain is only achieved with the greatest effort – and we need all our faculties, especially our reason, in this quest.

What are we doing when we celebrate the Eucharist?

One of the great limitations of the liturgy before the reforms of Vatican II was the need to provide simple explanations of what we were doing – or at least present at – which were accessible.

The outstanding example of this process – over-simplifying to the extent of confusion – was that “we go to Mass to meet Jesus.” It was to be a private encounter, perhaps highlighted by “receiving communion.”

A glance at any of the Eucharistic Prayers would show that our action – as the People of God – is to gather as disciples and then, with, through and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, to offer praise and thanksgiving to the Father.

We celebrate with Christ, in Christ, and through Christ, and our prayer is to our heavenly Father. We do this in the power of the Spirit – and thus fulfil our baptismal calling.

Again, it is so basic that we miss it and do not spell it out.

Many Catholics look shocked when they hear this and wonder when this ‘latest theory’ was invented. So, just in case, here are the texts in the 2011 English translation.

Eucharistic Prayer 1 – The Roman Canon

It begins
To you, therefore, most merciful Father,
we make humble prayer and
petition through Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord.

It ends
Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
all glory and honour is yours,
for ever and ever.

Eucharistic Prayer 2

It begins
You are indeed holy, O Lord,
the fount of all holiness.
Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray,
by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall,
so that they may become for us
the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It ends
Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
all glory and honour is yours,
for ever and ever.

Eucharistic Prayer 3

It begins
You are indeed holy, O Lord,
and all you have created
rightly gives you praise,
for through your Son our Lord Jesus Christ,
by the power and working of the Holy Spirit,
you give life to all things and make them holy …

It ends
Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
all glory and honour is yours,
for ever and ever.

Eucharistic Prayer 4

It begins
We give you praise, Father most holy, for you are great
and you have fashioned all your works
in wisdom and in love.

It ends
Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
all glory and honour is yours,
forever and ever.

It is not a private encounter but something much greater. We move beyond our isolation into the community of faith, become the body of Christ, and then in him enter the court of heaven.

Who are we when we celebrate?

There was a nasty little barb in the criticism of my friend: do what we want or we will not pay you. Quite apart from the rampant atheism of the notion that even in faith, money is the bottom line, this threat shows a very defective ecclesiology.

They assume that the ministry of the Church exists to supply them with a service – in the same way the electricity company supplies me with the power for this computer. I get what I pay for and I pay for what I get!

But one is not availing of a service from another in liturgy: we are all providing a service to one another. We are a community in a common endeavour, not a clientele in an emporium.

Contributions are part of our support for the whole work of the community as a local church.

Anyone who thinks it is payment – or worse still, a cleric who thinks it is his wages – needs to ask some hard questions of themselves. We do have a paid, semi-professional ministry; maybe that is part of the problem.

In our first reference to a collection at the Eucharist – mid-second century – the money was for the poor: the presiders had not yet converted themselves into clergy.

Moreover, one of the reasons we have formally appointed teachers in the Church is that we sometimes need to be reminded of hard messages that ‘upset our apple cart.’

When a presider preaches, he is not simply mouthing off a few platitudes (though it happens all too often) but bearing witness to the truth. This is one of the reasons that St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) saw a similarity between the teacher and the martyr.

Sometime in the second century, a Christian teacher – who pretended his essay was a letter from St Paul – wrote this:

proclaim God’s message, be zealous in season and out of season; convince, rebuke, encourage, with the utmost patience as a teacher (2 Tim 4:2).

It is still the fundamental challenge: we must preach in season (what people like) and out of season (when it is not ‘the flavour of the month’). And we might add: we need to preach in both cold seasons and heatwave seasons!

Should we address climate change?

After finishing the call, my friend asked if he should simply drop any mention of climate change as it was so disturbing to these people.

He felt that he should not drop it because if everyone is hearing about it in the media, they should be alerted to linking that concern to the bigger picture that is our vision as believers.

I heartily agreed! But it would be naïve to ignore the fact that there are deep-seated interests in our societies who value Christianity as simply a religious prop to their ideology – such people will always try to bully people not to raise questions.

And Pope Francis seems to be their especial bogey man.

I then suggested that he might show how that concern can be linked into the liturgy:

1. We have special texts in the sacramentary for celebrations of the Eucharist ‘for productive land’ and, even more relevant in floods, “May the flood of water not overflow me, Nor the deep swallow me up, Nor the pit shut its mouth on me;” (Ps 69:15). We Christians have always been concerned about the environment – at least in theory.
2. He might use a real loaf of bread and break it and share it. The Eucharist is not an esoteric rite – it begins with that basic foodstuff. If that foodstuff is threatened by parched fields and ruined harvests, then it is not only a matter of human sympathetic concern, but of Christian loaf. A real loaf reminds us that faith is rooted in the heart of our humanity.
3. He might fill the community’s cup from a bottle of ordinary wine and demonstrate how it is through the earth, through the creation, that God shows us his love and care, and gives us joy. It is from within the creation that our song of praise must well up in our thanksgiving to the Father, through Christ our Lord.

We might recall that prayer of the first communities of disciples:

We give thanks to you, our Father, for the holy vine of David, your servant, which you have made known to us. Through Jesus, your servant, to you be glory forever (Didache 9,2).

– and if you have not yet read Laudato si’, then read it. You just click here!

• Thomas O’Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.

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