REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE NORTH-WEST EUROPEAN REDEMPTORIST CONFERENCE ON COLLABORATION
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE NORTH-WEST EUROPEAN REDEMPTORIST CONFERENCE ON COLLABORATION IN MINISTRY
I am delighted to have this opportunity to join you here this afternoon and I would like to warmly thank Father Seamus Enright for inviting me. My thanks also to Father Brendan Callanan for his kind words of welcome.
It is strange the way the human mind works. They say that when people are first introduced, they sum each other up in a matter of seconds. Almost subconsciously, they form impressions on the basis of eye-contact, appearance, tone of voice, accent – even on the basis of who the other person reminds them of. That first impression is extraordinarily persistent, often surviving and colouring what they subsequently learn about the other individual. They may ignore changes, even transformations in that other person, because they still stubbornly cling to their initial preconceptions.
No doubt you are all familiar with those preconceptions, because for many people – at least in Ireland – the Redemptorists will forever be the Stormtroopers of the Catholic Church. They remember the fire and brimstone of their youth, that zeal, those voices of certainty. Even if they never experienced it, their imagination makes up for any deficit.
It may therefore come as something of a shock to many people to know that change is at the very core of the Redemptorist mission. Indeed it is embedded in your Constitution that you must be ‘attentive to the signs of the times’. This may seem, for some people, like an abandonment of old certainties, that the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater. Yet as Cardinal Newman once remarked ‘to be human is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often’.
The question, of course, is what direction that change should take? How can our mission as Christians be renewed and invigorated without losing focus and meaning?
The starting point is that it must be ‘our’ mission, that of laity and clergy alike. For too long in Ireland, we looked unquestioningly to the clergy for all the answers, and all too often, they were only too happy to supply them. Simplistic, narrow answers to what were often the wrong questions. It was an unhealthy relationship for both, breeding an unquestioning, intellectually lazy dependency on one side, and often an authoritarian intellectually lazy, arrogance on the other.
That attitude has started to change. This Conference, and indeed your wider emphasis on collaboration with the laity as part of an equal partnership is a sound example of that. I admire your honesty in acknowledging, within your guidelines on collaboration, that this change owed as much to the unavoidable reality of declining numbers of priests and other religious, as to a Damascus like conversion. It takes courage to change, to seek help in your ministry. But change can also be an extraordinary liberation. Seamus Heaney, in his poem, ‘From the Canton of Expectation’, has spoken in another context of the amazing vitality and creativity that can be released when new sources of energy are harnessed. The opening up of educational and employment opportunities to women, to disadvantaged communities, to the marginalised and forgotten, have underpinned the economic and social transformation of this country. Heaney described them as ‘intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars’. His generation, the first to benefit from free education transformed the thinking landscape of this part of Ireland – his own class giving us no less than two Nobel Laureates - each recognized not just in Derry but in Delhi, Beijing, Washington and the world.
I have no doubt that you, also, have experienced that sense of reinvigoration, of sharing the burdens and responsibilities you have shouldered so long, a difficult and often thankless task. To change is not to bury the past, to forget the hard work and commitment of those who ploughed a lonely furrow in years gone by. Their contribution must continue to be acknowledged. You can remain justifiably proud of all you have achieved, including the process of revelation and change. That past legacy need not become a straitjacket, inhibiting growth in the name of past attitudes and sacred cows. As Aldous Huxley once wrote ‘Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only consistent people are the dead’. We can take pride in the healthiness, and the hope at the heart of any organization prepared to declog the veins and get its institutional cholesterol level down several vanity points.
The thing about change, of course, it that like democracy, it is difficult to have just a little of it. The broadening of participation releases new energies, but also generates new expectations. Expectations by the laity of having a real say in how the future of the Church is shaped. Expectations by women that their gifts and talents will be fully valued and fully utilised. Expectations that equal participation means just that.
The question then arises: if it is possible to bring about such a renewal, such a broadening of participation and a release of new energies, towards what end should we direct this? Have the Churches in Ireland and abroad resisted change for too long and now given too little too late? Is it the case that, in the words of the poet John Hewitt, we have all ‘coasted along’ for too many years?
There are many in our society today who see the Churches as irrelevant, whatever changes they might put in place. Yet there is a real spiritual hunger in the world, some of it reached by the churches, more of it elusively outside their reach. These years of cynicism have produced a wretched sense of foreboding that churches drained of confidence have drained Christ of his credibility. Sometimes, however, it is when things are at their bleakest and most despairing that the miracle of the fresh green shoots opens up the prospect of rebirth. Patrick Kavanagh, in his poem ‘From Failure Up’ wrote of the hope that can spring from apparent failure:
‘Under the flat, flat grief of defeat, maybe
Hope is a seed.
Maybe this’s what he was born for,
this hour of hopelessness.
Maybe it is here he must search
In this hell of unfaith
Where no-one has a purpose
Where the web of meaning is broken on threads
And one man looks at another in fear’
The last line of that poem says
‘O God give us purpose.’
Which is of course what Christ came to give and not just that, but the tools to effect it - the grace, the support to break through all those barriers from self-doubt to hatred of the other and to plant seeds of love in barren places. If a profound breakthrough is to occur, however, the Churches must look outwards with generosity and humility to each other and be prepared to build the kind of bridges which we will need to sustain our society spiritually in the next millennium.
Nowhere is that openness, that spirit of reconciliation and humility more necessary than in Northern Ireland. If love, unconditional and generous is the hallmark of the Christian, we have to humbly acknowledge that this island has too often allowed the corrosive power of hatred, vanity and contemptuous rivalry to get in the way of Christ’s wish for love and unity among all God’s children. Despite the valiant efforts of many courageous men and women of faith to heal these rifts, we are about to enter the millennium with that toxin still eating away at hearts and minds and souls.
That poison will not be eliminated by silence, by the fear that to speak out is to risk rejection from the other side and calls of betrayal on our own. True reconciliation requires us to speak out and, more importantly, to listen to others when they speak and to acknowledge their hurt. We have seen from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that listening to the truth can be painful. Yet through this pain comes the possibility of the boil being lanced, the poison being released, and the commencement of genuine healing.
This spirit of listening to others and recognising that we have much to learn from each other, is the foundation on which a true ecumenism can be built. An ecumenism that does not seek to gloss over difference or attempt to make the other side think like us, act like us, speak like us, pray like us. Reconciliation is about recognising and respecting diversity, not seeking to annihilate it. These very differences provide us with the profoundest evidence of the scale of God’s embrace of diversity. For He is the source of all diversity, the creator of each human being in his own image and likeness and yet completely unique. How does He want us to approach that diversity? Fearful and contemptuous? Offering embrace or respect only on our terms? Or full of joyful curiosity, interested in each other’s perspective and history because of the new light it sheds on our own and our understanding of each other and God. It was St Paul who told us: ‘Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed’.
The challenge for the Churches now, is to catch the wind of that empowerment, so that together, religious and laity, we can transform the face of our own Church and build bridges of hope and reconciliation with all God’s people. Only then can the dream of true peace, in our world and in our hearts, become a reality.
Sooner or later every institution conduces to its own institutional vanity and is for a time so seduced by it, that it fails to see the spores of cancerous cells which that vanity scatters. The evidence of this damage is now in, but the evidence is also there that with the right kind of partnership, the right kind of relationships, these sick cells can be excised – we can make faith healthy – healthier than it has ever been.
As the Irish proverb says:
‘Ní neart go chur le chéile!’