Pope
Benedict XVI
A MAMMOTH TASK
Faith
without Formality
A snapshot of the world that our new
Holy Father, Benedict XVI, will want to evangelise reveals an increasing number
of people with a deep hunger for God but without any need of a Church to belong
to. “Believing without belonging.” Clearly a big challenge to Christianity is
how to remain in contact with the millions of people who look for God but do
not come to church. Most people in the world respect Jesus as a great teacher,
but they cannot see their way to a church. This is no doubt partly because
priests and religious have been found guilty of sexual abuse; or it could well
be that the Church’s moral teaching sounds like telling people what they must
do or, more often, what they must not do. “Individualism” is perhaps the key
characteristic of the modern man, who cherishes his freedom of deciding on his
moral values (the “original” sin), thereby implying the rejection of
“excessive” interference by institutions, church or state. The young do indeed
look to the Church for moral guidance, but by and large deny the Church any
right to personal intervention in people’s private lives. They are looking for
people (priests included) who will walk hand in hand with them on the journey,
not just people who “get our young people back to Mass” – as is so often
expected of a priest.
There is much faith, but without formality.
Jesus once said, “When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth?” There
definitely is faith among the peoples of the world. However, faith without
education and structuring is amorphous and possibly quite dangerous. East and
West are home to all the faiths on earth. The crucial question is whether these
faiths will live together in peace or whether they will tear the world apart.
Dialogue
without Dilution
Christianity is driven by the desire
to remind people that all men and women are called to seek the truth. But
people become understandably jittery the moment religious leaders want to talk
about the truth. The reason is that violence is associated with different
faiths quarrelling about the truth. Christians make claims for Jesus, Muslims
for the Koran, and Hindus for Krishna, and so on. Truth claims have been
associated with intolerance, with arrogance and indoctrination. And if we do
not strive for the truth, we shall all be stuck in our differences. In a recent
interview, Cardinal Karl Lehmann said, “Of course we have to preserve tolerance
and religious freedom to today’s civilised society. We have to remain open to
dialogue. (But) I think that most Churches have come to share that tolerant
approach. There’s a danger that the differences between religions will begin to
disappear; dialogue and tolerance may lead to a kind of levelling. So we have
to take a new direction. Once religious freedom and tolerance are guaranteed
and put into practice, we have to state and define our own position with
greater clarity.” So the key issue is how to engage with other faiths and a
secular world in a way that is not dogmatic but also true to oneself.
Our
common hunger
There is no point in dialogue if
there is no truth to aim at. The only basis on which we may build communion
with believers of other faiths and, indeed, with non-believers is a shared
search for truth. We can only draw close to people who think differently if we
believe that we can reason together and learn from each other. Claiming that
you have the truth all wrapped up only flashes the signal for intolerance and
violence. Believing that together we may arrive at the truth can heal
differences.
Confidence in the human intellect
and the process of reasoning can go beyond the lunacy of war and the absurdity
of genocide. We continue to believe that human beings are rational and are made
to seek the true, the good and the beautiful. No one should be in a hurry to
give up on thinking, throw up his hands and say, “It’s no use!” Our mission as
Christians includes going on thinking, posing the difficult questions and
searching for the better answer at every stage. We shall do this convincingly
if we believe that we are pilgrims ourselves, not knowing all the answers in
advance, and ever ready to learn from other people. We have no more idea than
anyone else what will happen in a hundred years, leave alone a thousand. Yet we
surely can offer a glimpse of the goal, namely, community in God forever,
through Jesus Christ, the world’s Saviour, the fulfilment of the true, good and
the beautiful. The universal hunger for the true, good and the beautiful is a
sort of hard-wiring of human nature. Human nature wouldn’t be what it is
without this hunger. Our Christian mission is to ensure that this desire is not
extinct in the hubbub of the marketplace and the rush of material progress.
We look forward to the leading of
our dear Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.
(-
to be continued)
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