Category Archives: Church Thought

No Historical Transparency in the Church?

July 12, 2024Abuse of Power, Articles, Bishops, Scripture, Secrecy, Sexual AbuseSean O'Conaill

While declaring transparency a requirement for a synodal church, the working document for the final session of the 2023-24 Vatican Synod on Synodality gives no promise of transparency around the historical origins of the standard procedure of concealing from Catholic parents the reality of clerical sexual abuse of children in the 20th century – a policy which spiritually traumatised countless Catholic children. How can the church become ‘missionary’ with such a background?

In Genesis we are told that for many years Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, did not know that his own most favoured son, Joseph, had not been killed by a wild animal but sold into slavery in Egypt by his other sons, out of jealousy. (Genesis 37-50)

In the Book of Kings we learn that Naboth of Jezreel did not know that when he refused the offer of an exchange of land with King Ahab of Israel, Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, would scheme to dispossess and kill him. (1 Kings 21)

Elsewhere we read that Esther, adoptive daughter of Mordecai and wife of Persian King Ahasuerus, was unaware initially that the powerful courtier Haman was plotting the extermination of her people, the Jews – because of Mordecai’s refusal to show due servility to Haman. (Esther)

Secure in her own garden, Susanna in Babylon was unaware that her beauty had enticed two elders among the Jews there to make a pact to threaten her with stoning to death for adultery if she did not give way to their lust. (Susanna and the Elders: Book of Daniel)

Uriah the Hittite did not know why the men beside him suddenly abandoned him in the thick of his final battle. He was oblivious to betrayal by his commander-in-chief, King David of Israel – who had seduced and impregnated his wife Bathsheba and then given orders that would doom him, despite his own loyalty to the cause of David’s kingdom. (2 Samuel)

Those women who gave birth to sons in Bethlehem around the time of Jesus’s birth had no reason to suspect that King Herod would plot their murder soon after hearing of the latter event. (Matt 2:16-18)

A Biblical Focus on Conspiratorial Injustice

Scripture scholars may doubt that all of these tales are historical, but the pattern of literary focus is clear. The authors had a common interest in narratives of high-level scheming, injustice, concealment and victimisation. The reason for the concealment may often be implicit but always these plotters can be understood as having a common interest in preserving their reputations in the gaze of others.

That is, they all had a deducible interest in ‘saving face’, to use a phrase more often associated with Oriental culture.

And this heuristic may also be applied to the Gospel accounts of the parts played by Caiaphas, Judas, another Herod and Pilate in the arrest, trials, crucifixion and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Innocence of the Victims

As the anthropologist René Girard has observed there is another common aspect of these narratives. Their victims, or intended victims, were essentially innocent. Taken as sacred texts they all reveal the God of Israel, the claimed source of all scriptural inspiration, to be on the side of the intended victim or victims.

Preservation of reputation on the part of plotters is far from being a dated and antiquated fixation – as proven by the outrageous murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, by agents of the Saudi government. That this is a western fixation also was most clearly revealed by the attempt of the Nixon administration to conceal the origins of the burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington DC in 1972. High level financial ‘scams’ such as the Enron affair of 2001 and the Madoff ‘ponzi’ scandal of 2008 are apparently inevitable in Western capitalism. Jealousies, plots and betrayals are at the core of western fictional drama, up to and including the current TV series Succession. The tension of these dramas hangs always upon what is known and intended by ambitious or lustful characters and yet concealed, agonisingly, from others who will suffer the consequences.

Unwitting Victims of Reputational Fear

Until 1994 in Ireland Catholic parents generally did not know that the ordained status of men to whom they often entrusted their children did not always make those men incapable of severely harming those children, sexually, psychologically and spiritually. By now those families who suffered this fate probably know that this phenomenon had been known to church authorities from the end of the first century CE (as recorded in The Didache).

On December 9^th 2009, following the publication of the Murphy report, the Irish Bishops Conference felt compelled to declare that:

“We are deeply shocked by the scale and depravity of abuse as described in the Report. We are shamed by the extent to which child sexual abuse was covered up in the Archdiocese of Dublin and recognise that this indicates a culture that was widespread in the Church. The avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children. This should never have happened and must never be allowed to happen again. We humbly ask for forgiveness.”¹

Since then the international scope of this ‘cover up’ has become more apparent, as has that motivation to ‘preserve the reputation of individuals and of the church’ – made even more poignant by the claim of Fr Gerhard Gruber in 2010 that as vicar general in the archdiocese of Munich he had been pressurised to take the blame for mistakes made decades earlier in the handling of a case of abuse – when Pope Benedict, then Joseph Ratzinger, had been archbishop of that diocese.²

An Unreasonable Comparison?

Is it unreasonable to compare this ‘cover up’ by churchmen with the plots and plottings of scriptural archetypes such as David, Ahab, Jezebel, Haman, Caiaphas and the Herods? Were those who practised concealment of clerical sex abuse of children ever truly aware of the scale of suffering they were visiting upon the innocent? Did they ever intend that suffering? May they not even have had worthy motives and been oblivious of serious injustice or harm?

All of these questions are plausible – and yet some may be asked also of some of the scriptural plotters, if mitigation is our intent. For example, given King David’s symbolic importance to Israel, might he not have been justified in sacrificing one man, Uriah, to avoid demoralisation of the nation in time of war? And mightn’t Caiaphas, Herod and Pilate truly have had similar thoughts in the case of Jesus the Galilean troublemaker?

Why So Little Learned in Two Millennia?

Was a span of almost two millennia not truly sufficient to educate churchmen in the consequences to victims of childhood or adolescent sexual abuse? When it came to ending the cover up, did the church truly need to depend upon secular lawyers, police, courts, media? When it came to their ‘learning curve’ on the impact of sexual abuse on children should churchmen truly have needed the advice of secular psychology and psychiatry, when they had Jesus’s own stern warning to guide them? If so, why on earth condemn secularism and the Enlightenment?

However plausible may be the attempts at mitigation of the cover up of clerical child abuse, it will always remain true that many children globally suffered totally unexpected and unimaginable horrors from these abuses. That much of this could have been prevented if the episcopal magisterium had shown corporate wisdom, courage and transparency ab initio, rather than corporate dedication to the protection of its own reputation, will also always be true – and the people of God truly deserve an historical accounting for this failure.

The Cover Up of the Past

So far, instead, even after almost four decades of revelation, the cover up still extends backwards into the distant past. For example, no one knows why or when it was decided, with apparent unanimity by the magisterium, that Jesus’s own emphatic condemnation of the betrayal of childhood innocence (Matt 18:6) was irrelevant when considering whether ordained abusers of children could be retained in ministry after a first provable offence. Why was this most emphatic teaching of Jesus ignored, when the context of his only recommendation of celibacy (Matt 19:12) suggests that it was probably intended merely for those who could not contemplate life-long marital fidelity? This obvious reluctance on the part of the current magisterium to consult and reveal the full Vatican and wider church record is a barrier to the ‘reckoning’ on clerical abuse called for by the Irish national synodal synthesis of August 2022.

Administrators’ Dilemmas

Inevitably we must guess that it is still the situational dilemmas of administrators that delay a final reckoning. They need to reflect on that scriptural record, recalling where the Trinity’s sympathies always lie – as well as the prophecy of Simeon that the life of the child Jesus would reveal the hidden thoughts of many. When Christian historians of the future tell this story, will they not also be stressing the innocence of the victims and the reputational fears of the powerful ordained?

Apart from this need to ‘clear the air’ on the handling of clerical abuse there is another reason for urgent closure. The teaching authority of Catholic bishops everywhere – especially in regard to sexuality – has been rendered null for many by this disaster. Irish bishops have still not revealed the reason for their failure to sponsor and publish reliable research on the widespread failure of Irish Catholic schools to develop a practised liturgical faith among their alumni in recent decades³. This too is an unnecessary mystery suggestive of fear of self-embarrassment via the likely results of any such research.

Lack of Clarity on Sin

The clarity of the church’s teaching on sin is another serious issue. No one who pays any attention can be unaware that serious differences exist between the understanding of sin as prioritised by Pope Francis or, for example, Cardinal Robert McElroy – and sin as seen by the pope’s highest-level opponents, for whom the ‘no parvity’ principle in regard to all sexual rule-breaking is apparently as true and unshakeable as the Creed.

“… the sins of the flesh are not the most serious. The gravest sins are those that are more angelic: pride, hatred. These are graver.”⁴ So insisted Pope Francis in December 2021, when asked about the admission by a French archbishop of an affair with an adult woman. If the ‘angelic’ sin of pride is indeed graver than lust, what about ‘the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church’ identified by Irish bishops as a cause of the cover-up of sexual abuse? Wasn’t it David’s pride that prevented him from owning up to his own affair with Bathsheba – and then led to the far greater sin of murder-by-proxy?

The Catechism is seriously lacking an extended and culturally relevant treatment of both pride and covetousness – even while the problem of clericalism has been identified by Pope Francis as that desire for superiority, attention and honour⁵ that the Catechism does identify as a feature of pride⁶. Defining covetousness as ‘modelling your desires on what your neighbour has’ would also allow the magisterium to see and reject the desire for social superiority that fuels all social ambition, including the rampant desire for celebrity. Secularism sorely needs an explanation of inequality – and pride and covetousness are ready to hand.

Sin of Pride Embedded in Clericalism

Or at least they will be when the magisterium has clearly seen these sins as fundamental to the cover up of clerical sexual abuse, and confessed them frankly as embedded in clericalism and ecclesiastical ambition. Pope Francis’s courage in opening up this debate needs the support of all bishops in the pursuit of a ‘reckoning’ – a telling of the complete truth of the hierarchical church’s own sins.

When it happens this telling will involve a full exposure of the historical record, and the sooner the better. Scripture lauds the anointed King David while telling us the worst that he did. Jesus’s own mitigation of the offences of his persecutors – ‘they know not what they do’ – can be applied also to the cover up of clerical abuse but we need, urgently, the full story – whatever may still impend – if the church is to overcome this disaster in the time of any of the generations now living.

It took decades for Jacob to learn that his most favoured son was still alive, but at least he lived to see Joseph again, now greatly honoured, in Egypt. In knowing that Catholic churchmen at the highest level can visit the most appalling suffering upon innocent children, out of concern for the reputation of ‘the church’ – and can collaborate to hide this problem until exposed – don’t we Catholic people already know the worst?

As stated by the July 2024 Instrumentum Laboris for the final session of the Vatican Synod of Bishops on Synodality in October 2024:

“A synodal Church requires both a culture and practice of transparency and accountability, which are essential to fostering the mutual trust necessary for walking together and exercising co-responsibility for the sake of the common mission.”⁷

Despite this statement of principle there is no sign whatever in the document of a realisation that continuing secrecy about the recent past is an insuperable barrier to trust – and so also to communion, participation and mission. How are we to take the call to transparency seriously if secrecy is still to be maintained around the greatest scandal the church has ever suffered?

Never in the long history of human shepherding have so many sheep been lost by so many shepherds – but apparently we are never to know why.

Notes

Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9^th December 2009
‘Law firm to publish report on handling of abuse in Munich Archdiocese’, CRUX, Catholic News Service, Jan 4, 2022
See ‘Faith Formation and Fear of Shame’, O’Conaill, The Furrow, 2017
‘Full text: Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference from Greece’, Catholic News Agency, Dec 6^th 2021
‘5 Of the many times Pope Francis has warned against clericalism’, Kathleen N. Hattrup, Aleteia, 23^rd August 2018
CCC, Glossary, ‘Pride’
How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73

(Author’s note: An earlier version of this article appeared in the Oct 2023 edition of The Furrow, under the title A ‘Reckoning’ on Clerical Abuse? Challenge and Opportunity.)

The Prayer That Changed Everything for Me

June 24, 2024Articles, Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, Prayer, Secularism, Status AnxietySean O'Conaill

That was in 1994, at a time of deep crisis.

Aged fourteen then my youngest son had just told me:

“I don’t believe in all this Jesus stuff – and most of my class don’t either!”

As a vice principal and teacher of history and current affairs in that same school this hit me especially hard. I felt deeply that my son was making a huge mistake but could not even begin to explain why.

Our Irish Catholic church culture had mistakenly taught us lay people to leave all deep thinking about faith to clergy and teachers of religion – and that was not my school department. Effectively, I had not considered myself responsible for ‘passing on the faith’ to my own children. My older children had also already opted out of church-going so I realised at that moment that I was incapable of resisting this tide.

Simultaneously then I was suffering a crisis of confidence in the entire secular programme – the western project to use ‘reason’ alone to build a perfect world. In 1994 the early signs of Russia’s turn to extreme nationalism, and away from democracy, were beginning to show – and the likelihood of global environmental collapse from industrialisation was looming. What explained the failure to achieve true equality and social justice in the West – especially in the USA – and the growing indifference to the plight of children in the ‘undeveloped’ world?

Mere rationalism was certainly failing me, so I felt truly overwhelmed in the days that followed my youngest son’s revelation. So, at some point one evening I switched off my BBC ‘B’ PC and went to my room – and closed the door. Sitting on my bed I said:

“This is it for me, Father. I don’t understand the connection between the Gospel world and the history and current affairs I am teaching. Please help me to see!”

There was no voice from heaven in that moment, but in the days and weeks that followed I slowly became aware of the universe of honour and shame in which we humans have always lived – the dimension of fear of scorn that impels all of us to seek affirmation and respect from others – the need of the ego. Always bothered by this need we suffer from Status Anxiety – but not until 2004 did I describe it this way.

‘People climb!’ That was how I first summarised the pattern I was seeing – and this tendency had me too in its grip. Was I too not on a ladder of hopeful ascent within my own profession? Was that not the cause of the friction that always occurred in our school staff room whenever some post of promotion was on offer? Was that same thing – the need to be first – not at the root of decades of conflict in Northern Ireland, my own dear place?

People wanting to be first – even in the church – but there was someone in history who had done the opposite – the outstanding exception who highlighted and pinpointed exactly what is wrong with the world, always. It was He who most clearly explained the pyramids of power and injustice – the pyramids of esteem – that arise in all eras of history, including our own. The emerging icons of commercial power in my own time – the Titans of the digital economy – were merely the successors of the Caesars of the ancient world and the imperial adventurers and rulers who had led the West to global dominance after 1450.

It was this climbing – this need to be first – that lay at the root of all inequality and injustice – and now it was threatening even the climate that gave us the very air we breathe. This was what I now saw.

And Jesus of Nazareth was not just a figure from history, he was the only salvation for us all in our own time. Moreover, through the Holy Spirit, he was offering me guidance too – in everything I thought and wrote. My life was now on a different course – because I had said, at a moment of crisis, the prayer that described my own anguish.

But God will not forgive me if I do not speak the most important lesson of this experience. The Trinity can teach and lead every living person on the planet in the same way – especially at this time of world crisis. They are at everyone’s elbow – now and always – just waiting to be asked.

Apocalypse Soon – or New Pentecost?

May 22, 2024Articles, Environment, Greed, Holy Spirit, LiberalismSean O'Conaill

If the Catholic church is in crisis in 2024, so is the world.

When scientists tell us we are exhausting the key resources of our planet, and political leaders struggle to contain the violence that can erupt anywhere – and extremists invent conspiracies freely on the Internet to justify hatred and scapegoating – who can now share the 18th century optimism that Reason would create a perfect world, without Faith?

Instead, allied to science and technology, human covetousness has created an egregious overclass whose indifference to the suffering of a far larger underclass now threatens the world with dystopia, tyranny and cataclysm.

Not without optimism has every pope since Leo XIII predicted a New Pentecost. Pope Francis did that again in Dublin in 2018.

“Each new day in the life of our families, and each new generation, brings the promise of a new Pentecost, a domestic Pentecost, a fresh outpouring of the Spirit, the Paraclete, whom Jesus sends as our Advocate, our Consoler and indeed our Encourager.”

So what is it that faces us – New Pentecost as prayed for by popes, or Disaster – the Apocalypse as understood by popular media – the end of everything? When environmental scientists hesitate to beget children we are truly faced by a nightmare rather than the Utopia prophesied by the most naive at the 18th century dawn of secular liberalism.

And yet the word Apocalypse means not disaster but revelation, the breaking in of insight – exactly what is needed to precipitate a global sharing of the truth that was glimpsed in the pandemic of 2019-22. To the basic needs of food, clean water, clean air and shelter we need to add the realisation that we are all both interconnected and in need of peace and climatic safety – above all else.

Superyachts and Helicopters?

Who can sensibly be dreaming of superyachts and helicopters in such a time, or survival bunkers somewhere in New Zealand? That we tend to want what others want – choosing our own desires from the preferred options of the mega-rich – is now as obvious as the futility of doing just that. Everyone everywhere is threatened by the self-indulgence of those who can currently choose what they want from the conveyer belts of the 2024 global economy.

Who cannot see this choice as a turning point of human history – with salvation on offer only if we opt for simplicity, the Gospel of just enough?

Reason to be reasonable must now see what Faith has always taught: that there is no wisdom alternative to the Great Commandments. This is a most dangerous time – but also a time for confidence that, despite its obvious faults, our church has not led us astray.

It’s not a choice of Apocalypse OR New Pentecost that now faces us. In an intensifying global crisis radical rethinking is unavoidable, as well as prayer. Revelation and New Pentecost will come to us together. The leaders of tomorrow will be the first to experience this – the first to absorb the whole truth.

Sean O’Conaill, May 2024

Why did Jesus of Nazareth accept Crucifixion?

April 30, 2024Articles, Atonement, Christology, Church Formation / Education, Evangelisation, Jesus, Kingdom of God, Redemption, SatanSean O'Conaill

To rescue us from fear of the judgement of others – what Jesus calls ‘the world’ (John 16:33) – by overthrowing, without violence, the judgement of the world of his time, and all time. This fear of judgement, which comes not from God but from the Adversary, is the root of all Status Anxiety (fear of ‘what people think’), status seeking, inequality and violence.
So that we might follow him out of love rather than fear.
To teach us to forgive as He did.
To reveal to us the origin of all violence in Status Anxiety – and the Satanic historical pattern of the accusation and scapegoating of the innocent that arises from the Status Anxiety of those seeking or wielding punitive power.
To give us a limitless horizon – beyond mere consumption, sexual fixation and death.
To offer freedom from fear to those challenged to speak the truth to abusive power, the whistle-blowers who are needed even in the church.
To allow us always to review the history of the church and to lament the Status Anxiety that misled it too often into too close an alliance with state power (c.313 CE to c.1918 CE) under Christendom, and the many victimisations, enslavements and compromises with violence that followed – including the abuse of children by ordained clergy.
To take away even those sins when we have seen them, and properly atoned.
To clarify our understanding of sin as stemming from doubt of our own value, leading to the coveting of status in the positive regard of others – and all other unloving and unjust actions.
To make way for the Holy Spirit, close counsellor of everyone.
To bring us back to the Father our maker – and sender of Jesus our Rescuer and the Holy Spirit our counsellor.
To save the world in an always New Creation – through our conversion and our witness to the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who accompany us always and forever.

If the earliest Christians were given new life by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and a vision of a new creation in a violent world now passing away, why should Christians of our time not always see this world of now as equally limited in judgement, and the Trinity as calling them always to a new and peaceful Kingdom of God, beyond all ambition and conflict? The medieval God seen by St Anselm of Canterbury as bent only on balancing the scales of an eternal justice is not the God of the apostles or of Irenaeus or the other early fathers, for whom it was God the Father who had burst their chains by sending them His Son.

Using the psychological and anthropological insights of Alain de Botton and René Girard it is time to return to the early church’s vision of Jesus of Nazareth as Christus Victor, who with the father’s help has overturned the verdict of the world, by exposing the real author of the lies that had condemned him. In the words of Gustav Aulén, interpreting Irenaeus:

“First, then, it must be emphasised that the work of atonement is regarded as carried through by God Himself; and this, not merely in the sense that God authorises, sanctions, and initiates the plan of salvation, but that He Himself is the effective agent in the redemptive work, from beginning to end. It is the Word of God incarnate who overcomes the tyrants which hold man in bondage; God Himself enters into the world of sin and death, that He may reconcile the world to Himself. Therefore Incarnation and Atonement stand in no sort of antithesis; rather, they belong inseparably together. It is God’s Love, the Divine agape, that removes the sentence that rested upon mankind, and creates a new relation between the human race and Himself, a relation which is altogether different from any sort of justification by legal righteousness. The whole dispensation is the work of grace.”
[Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor, 1931. S.P.C.K. edition 1965, p 34.]

Church Is Mission?

November 24, 2023Articles, Atonement, Evangelisation, Recent, TheologyRecentSean O'Conaill

Without official rejection of a mistaken medieval understanding of ‘redemption’ the call to mission is futile.

‘Rather than saying that the Church has a mission, we affirm that Church ‘is’ mission.‘

Those are just two of 110 occurrences of the word mission in the Synthesis Report of the October 2023 16th Synod of Bishops in Rome.

Nowhere is there a convincing manifesto for this mission. With the Irish national synodal synthesis of 2022 saying that ‘we are unsure about how to evangelise in the modern world‘ there is no help with that problem in the forty-one pages of the report.

So far also the two Irish bishop representatives at the synod – Brendan Leahy of Limerick and Alan McGuckian of Raphoe – are also unhelpful. All Catholic bishops are still imprisoned by a medieval theology of atonement and redemption that no missionary in Ireland today could offer as ‘Good News’?

Blaming the Father

Originating with St Anselm of Canterbury in the late 11th century this theology proposes that the crucifixion of Jesus was demanded by the Father who sent him – to give ‘satisfaction’ for the ‘dishonour’ caused to the Father by all of our sins – by dying an excruciating death in ‘substitution’ for ourselves. (CCC 615)

God the Father was Liberator for the early church.

This was not the theology of the early church. The very idea of ‘redemption’ derives from the ‘buying back’ of the freedom of a slave. It was to God the Father that the first Christians attributed their own liberation from fear of the condemnation of their own Roman world. The greatest power of that time had been proven powerless to overwhelm an ever-living truth – by Jesus’ Resurrection.

What exactly do Irish bishops believe: that the Father of the mission we are now to embark upon is bent upon our liberation from the source of all oppression and fear in our present world – or that he is still, as he was for St Anselm in 1098 CE – in the business of calling in debts?

This theology never even liberated any bishop. No Catholic bishop anywhere in the world is known to have warned his flock about the possibility of clerical sex abuse of children – before victims of that abuse or their families took secular legal action themselves. In December 2009 the Irish Conference of Catholic bishops named the fear that had paralysed them: of a loss of ‘reputation’ if the truth was known.

The Root of All Evil?

An overbearing concern for ‘reputation’ now has a name – Status Anxiety – given in 2004 by the philosopher Alain de Botton. If our bishops cannot see this same affliction in every aspect of the evils that surround us – from manic consumerism, absurd inequality and climate change to compulsive cosmetic plastic surgery, stalking and mass shootings – and even invasive imperialism in Ukraine and violence in the Holy Land – how are we to convince anyone that Jesus has anything to do with overthrowing the power of evil? If they cannot see it also in the problem of clericalism, how are we to overcome that?

Status Anxiety is essentially fear of scorn – of being ‘cast out’ – the fear that stalks our dreams. It also drives the pursuit of ‘likes’, admiration, influence, celebrity – and power. This explains the absorption of younger generations with digital media. A globalized personal ‘brand’ can now be created, via a handheld device, even by children.

Meanwhile our prisons and psychiatric hospitals and addiction centres struggle to cope with the depression, self-harm, trolling, addiction and criminality that results from the lack of status – even the shame – that the victims of the digital age must feel.

Jesus the Whistle-Blower

Is not Status Anxiety also the source of the fear that attacks would-be whistle-blowers everywhere? Is that not what Jesus was – a whistle-blower against all injustice, who stood firm – without violence – against the merciless judgement of that ancient world? Did he not name his own mission, when he said, just before his own judgement, that he had ‘overcome the world’ – the fear of that judgement? Did he not by his crucifixion and resurrection dissolve the same fear in his earliest followers, who then took up their own crosses – and changed an empire?

We Catholic Christians urgently need official recognition that the first person of the Trinity, far from being himself trapped in medieval Status Anxiety, is still bent – with the Son and the Holy Spirit – on rescuing us from that affliction. Until that happens the mission ahead will be ‘mission on pause’.

First published on the website of the Association of Catholic Priests of Ireland – Nov 21st 2023.

René Girard: The Creed Overcomes the World

October 1, 2023Articles, Covetousness, Recent, René Girard, The Creeds, YouthRecentSean O'Conaill

First published in the Japan Mission Journal, Autumn 2023

As soon as I began exploring the Internet from the mid 1990s, I ran into arguments against Christian belief that were couched in the following terms: ‘To believe in an objective truth, to believe that history has a meaning and a destiny, is necessarily to wish to impose that understanding on others. All such “overarching stories”– otherwise known as “meta-narratives” or “master narratives”—are necessarily intolerant and violent—the Christian Creed included. The history of Christianity proves exactly that.’

This is the argument for relativism, for the impossibility—and the danger—of any Creed, any overarching ‘story of salvation.’ It is the Gospel according to postmodernism. Yet when Pope Benedict XVI launched an intellectual assault on what he called ‘the dictatorship of relativism’ in 2005, he found a firm supporter in the influential literary, anthropological, and philosophical thinker René Girard (1923-2015).

Girard upholds the objective truth of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement, but gives it an anthropological reading that renders it credible in a fresh way. He sets up the Creed against the World in a battle for the human soul. Here I shall meditate on two Girardian themes: the influence of mimetic rivalry in history, and the way in which the Gospel weans us from seeking glory from one another (showing the importance of this for young people dealing with social media today).

A native of Avignon, France, who spent the bulk of his career in the United States, Girard insisted that he was never a theologian. He was first (in chronological order) a historian, then a literary critic, then a cultural anthropologist, and then a philosopher of violence in his ground-breaking work La Violence et le Sacré.¹ He came from a French intellectual tradition that was, on his father’s side, secularist and anticlerical. Nevertheless in the 1970s he came to the firm conclusion that the Jewish and Christian scriptures, known to us as the Bible, had revealed, more clearly than any other texts, a fundamental inescapable truth about human nature – a truth that lies, he argues, at the root of all violence.

This is as follows: after we have satisfied our basic physical needs we humans literally do not know what we should want. Someone else who is apparently more important than ourselves must show us what to want or desire. We are therefore, necessarily, imitative beings. We learn by copying, subliminally, the behavior we see, as soon as we begin to see. We cannot help but adopt as our own at least some of the desires that we also see—especially the desires we observe in those who appear to have greater ‘being’ or status or fame. Girard calls this copied desire ‘mimetic desire.’ He identifies it with the tendency we are warned against in the 9th and 10th commandments—not to covet what belongs to a neighbour—not to want anything that belongs to a neighbour.

To covet is not a matter of simple greed or desire; it entails an element of rivalry and imitation. The repetition of the word ‘neighbor’ is, Girard argued, all-important. It is through that lens that he interpreted the tales of violence in Scripture and indeed the entire historical record. (He had previously uncovered the dynamics of mimetic desire in studies of the modern novel, including Cervantes, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Proust.)²

Mimetic Desire in History

Take, for example, the young 6th century Irish monk, Columba. His coveted object was the laboriously handwritten and unique copy of the Psalms owned and prized by his eminent neighbor St Finnian. According to one version of the story there followed from this clashing desire the collision of two Ulster Gaelic noble families in the battle of Cul Dreimne in 561—–and Columba’s penitential exile on Iona. The history of copyright law began at that point, according to Wikipedia.

Henry II of England coveted the lands of his nearest neighbors to the west, the Irish. There was a ready excuse for appropriating them: the allegedly lower moral and religious standards of us Irish back then. No eminent cleric in England, or Rome, demurred (as far as I know) when Henry performed his religious duty—by invading Ireland in 1171. Note both the ostensible religious motive for that invasion and the far more likely motive—simply wanting what your neighbor has that you do not. Those who want to see in religion the cause of all violence do not ever want to notice what almost always lies beneath.

How could Henry II of England so easily get away with that? Recall that since the fourth century Christianity had come to be allied with state actors in a contract that seemed to benefit both. Charles the Great (Charlemagne) crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, had built that empire, avowedly, in the cause of the one true faith. He did that, often, with immense cruelty.

And then, in 1095 came the famous speech attributed to Pope Urban II at Clermont—the oration that launched the first Crusade against the Islamic world. One historical source has Urban saying the following:

“Can anyone tolerate that we [Europeans] do not even share equally with the Moslems the inhabited earth? They have made Asia, which is a third of the world, their homeland…. They have also forcibly held Africa, the second portion of the world, for over 200 years. There remains Europe, the third continent. How small a portion of it is inhabited by us Christians.“³

Yes of course there were very good religious reasons for heading off to Jerusalem with an army, but was the occupation of the Holy Land by the Crusaders truly all about religious zeal? Exactly the same question applies to the global Christian imperialism that set in with the voyages of discovery in the 1400s, with Portugal and Spain in the lead. In the summer of 2022 Pope Francis was faced with the so called ‘doctrine of discovery’ that justified all that.

The New Digital Imperialism

In our own time, following the rise and fall of the prestige of Christian churches (over twenty centuries) a new global empire has arisen: the empire of global electronic media. Everywhere the teenagers of today can look for proof of their own significance on screens they need never darken. The screen itself, easily portable on a mobile smartphone, is a mimetic magnet. If a friend is absorbed in her phone that surely signifies the existence of a more important social universe via the phone than can exist without one, so the phone becomes a ‘must have’, a ‘portal’ to the irresistible possibility of ‘going viral’. And yet ‘virality’ too is a scarce resource, so fractious rivalries—this time in an arena that is potentially global—are the inevitable consequence of this online mimetic competition for attention.

The result? The verdict of many studies confirms the research of an Oxford University team: screen time correlates with poor mental health and ‘the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with technology use.’ Furthermore, the renowned US psychologist Dr Jean Twenge found in 2022 that the correlation between social media consumption and mental health challenges for young girls was even stronger.

‘The link between social media use and poor mental health for girls was 10 times as large as what the Oxford paper identified for “screen time.” A recent paper by two Spanish statisticians also examined the Oxford researchers’ techniques and also found a much stronger link. These findings fit with Facebook’s internal research, leaked by a whistleblower and published last fall, which concluded that Instagram led to depression and body image issues, particularly among teenage girls.’ (Washington Post, 16 February 2022)

The power of ‘social media’ lies in the simplest of mistaken assumptions —that our value and importance are determined by the judgment of others. Disappointment and elation, obscurity or recognition, honor and shame are in the gift of a handheld device that tells us at a glance where we stand. Anyone can therefore fall victim to an iron law of history—the very same law that governed the rivalries of the ancient world. Wherever there is a search for status there will also be the formation of alliances in the shaming of those who are in any way vulnerable.

That many of the young are now mentally distressed and disturbed as a consequence is well established. To believe in the Internet, or in media generally, as the arbiter of a person’s worth is to fall into spiritual poverty. It is also to be in danger of entrapment in cults or conspiracy theories, completely isolated from reality. Already there have been tragic instances of youthful suicide directly related to the power of social media to determine the mood and the behavior of its most vulnerable devotees. It is not far-fetched to describe social media fixation as algorithm enslavement, and the deployers of those algorithms—aiming as they do at ‘hooking’ and retaining the attention of all who enter—as digital imperialists and enslavers.

The Creed as Antidote to Digital Imperialism

The logic of crucifixion in the ancient Roman world was also squarely based upon the proposition that the value and significance of any human life is determined by social verdict. Why take the time to make a spectacle of crucifying anyone if the expected payoff was not the consolidation of the power and status of Rome, by convincing the beholders that there could be no greater power?

And yet the crucifixion of Jesus had the opposite effect on those who firmly believed that, somehow, Jesus had not been obliterated by it. Hence the conviction of the converted Paul of Tarsus that a ‘New Creation’ was now in process, and that the power of Rome was ‘passing away.’ With its trinitarian and resurrectionist core already expressed in the Gospel of Matthew by the end of the first century, the Creedal narrative was clearly in its origins a rebuttal not only of the Lordship of the Caesars, but a portable indestructible passport through any tyranny—to be recited in time of trial as a reminder of where the greater power always lay. The survival and growth of the church in the first three centuries, despite three separate waves of persecution, is testament to a core of belief that warded off all contrary social verdicts. The Creed is the densest expression of that core, even if, under Christendom, it was later misapplied as a catalogue of dogmas serving as an instrument of clerical control.

Now, with clerical control receding into history, the essence of the Creed—the proclamation that Jesus has been resurrected and vindicated by the Father, and raised to the status of supreme judge of the living and the dead—is ready for rediscovery as a rebuttal of the fallacy that anyone but Jesus is valid final judge of any one of us, and therefore as rejection of the orgy of judgmentalism—and of ‘viral’ global ambition—that plagues the Internet. No one should ever consider the verdicts of YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or any other online arena to be definitive of the value of anyone, least of all of oneself.

What has the Experience of Media Shaming taught Irish clergy?

An Irish Catholic Church that has fallen from high social prestige to social disgrace in little over a generation has so far adjusted poorly to this situation. Clergy whose vocations began before ‘the fall’ were themselves teenagers when their own corporation was a power-broker of both honor and shame in Ireland. Resentment and even anger (much of it justified) can be their default reaction to the reversal of fortunes they have experienced.

There is another option: to look again at that human tendency to see ‘honor’ as truly at the mercy of other humans, and to identify this as the driving force of all ascent to social superiority, in all eras, and as the ‘worldliness’ that Jesus came to conquer. The Gospel story exposes that mistake, and the fallibility of human judgment even when all are in agreement. So perhaps we may see the disgracing of the Irish church, at the hands of a secularizing media, as deliverance in disguise. It was to protect its social eminence, its ‘reputation,’ that the clerical institution failed to be truly Christian in its protection of Catholic children. Now their own ‘humiliation by media’ may free them to celebrate and re-affirm the Creed—the shortest summary of the story of Jesus, and of Catholic belief—in the face of a secularism that direly needs it.

Certainly there must be many Irish (and Japanese) teenagers ready for saving from the mistake of believing their dignity is decided by the Internet, so intensely controlled merely by ‘the market.’ Our Creed, rightly understood, can be an instrument of that rescue. It is a calling for all of us to take up that instrument and use it to overcome this new form of enslavement.

Notes

René Girard, 1972. La Violence et le Sacré. (Paris: Grasset, 1972); Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
See René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961); Desire, Deceit, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Quoted in P Johnson, A History of Christianity, (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 244.

The Gospel as a Takedown of Celebrity

December 3, 2022Articles, Desire, Gifts of the Holy Spirit, History, Holy Spirit, Media, Personality Cults, Recent, Scapegoating, Spiritual Worldliness, Vanity, ViolenceRecentSean O'Conaill

‘Mind you tell no one anything!‘ said Jesus to the man he had just cured of leprosy in the very first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. (Mark 1: 44)

Repeated many times in this Gospel, this warning by Jesus has puzzled commentators for centuries. As Jesus had already begun his public ministry at the river Jordan, and already signed up the earliest apostles for his mission of declaring the Kingdom of God, why did he then repeatedly warn against what our world calls ‘publicity’?

Almost always the explanation given by scripture commentators is that it wasn’t yet time for him to be ‘raised up’ on the cross in Jerusalem, to become celebrated by the sensation of his Resurrection within three days.

It follows that the glorious culmination of the Christian story is almost always misunderstood as a return of the visible individual person, Jesus Christ. Until then, despite the power of the Holy Spirit, it seems we must think there is something profoundly lacking on earth – because the King of Kings is not here, visibly, to take charge.

Many Christians even seem to believe that in the interim the power of evil must be stronger than the power of grace and that the world is headed for some kind of cataclysm in which God the Father finally loses patience and empowers some Christian leader to do what Jesus refused to do: knock all other human heads together to create a single global Christian kingdom, with Jesus then enthroned in Jerusalem as global monarch.

That Jesus must always have wanted to be celebrated in the twenty-first century sense – i.e. to be sometime a single visible personality and a focus of endless fascination for a global TV audience – is a key component of this typical misunderstanding of the Second Coming of the Lord – because of course then, it is supposed, he will indeed reign from some earthly place as King of the World, and even of the Universe.

The Failure of Christian Monarchy

That Jesus might have seen celebrity itself – the making of any living individual human an object of fascination and ‘crowd sensation’ – as hugely problematic and even disastrous – and might have come to warn against it, is not considered. In my own church the arrival of Pope John Paul II in 1978 to media stardom was seen for decades as beneficial for the cause of the Gospel. That too has become problematic – in light of the known internal abuses of power by Catholic clergy that John Paul II knew of from at least as early as 1984 – and did too little to resolve¹. Thankfully a successor pope has set out from the start of his term of office in 2013 to demystify himself, and to point to the need for ‘walking together’ as equals to renew the church.

To continue to misunderstand the Gospel in this way is to fail to notice what history itself – and especially recent history – reveals about the problem of celebrity and the impossibility of a single global centre of government, or living individual, ever bringing about the kingdom of God. It is also to ignore the power of the Holy Spirit of God to move multiple human beings simultaneously in service to one another – directed not by some living super-person but simply by the needs of their neighbours and the wisdom gifts of the Trinity.

In the coronavirus pandemic of 2019-22 what purpose was served by the cult of celebrity when the direst need of so many was the compassion of their nearest neighbours, and no single global master plan could have made a difference in time? In multiple locations celebrated political individuals failed dismally to lead effectively, and more often became serious obstacles to the resolving of the surrounding crisis. Everywhere the elderly found themselves dependent upon the persons nearest to them – often people they had underestimated, at the very base of the social and economic pyramid.

Celebrity is essentially a mistaken fixation with individuals who become the focus of media attention for as long as it takes disappointment to set in. No wonder we hear so much now of ‘imposter syndrome’ – the latest celebrity’s inevitable fear of being shamed by some very different revelation, in tomorrow’s press.

This ‘take’ on where human history is heading – based upon the assumption that God could have no objection to celebrity as such – ignores everything that has been learned about the dangers of celebrity, and the cult of celebrity, in the global TV era. It also ignores the warning that the Gospel story itself gives us in its dramatic essence: we humans raise people up in expectation of endless sensation, and then, if they disappoint us, to exult in tearing them down. A celebrity is always a person from whom far more is expected than can be delivered – and therefore also a scapegoat in waiting, the person whom everyone will all too often agree to shame and vilify.

The Caesars Were Celebrities

The Caesars – the emperors of Rome – were the greatest celebrities of the ancient world, their power attained and maintained by the most ruthless use of force. Beginning with their founding ‘God’ – Julius Caesar (who envied Alexander the Great) – they were expanding the Roman empire to its greatest extent in the reign of Augustus Caesar (27 BCE – 14 CE) and the first century of the Christian era. It was during the reign of Augustus that Jesus was born, but from 312 CE until our own time Christians have tended also to look to Christian ‘strong men’ to protect the faith and the church – despite endless disappointment.

However, no Christian king in history has come close to realising the kingdom that Jesus spoke of – the Kingdom of God. Just as the story of Julius Caesar reveals the huge danger of murderous jealousy that arises out of the successful ambition of one man, the Gospel reveals the problem of rivalry that arises when any one living individual is identified as ‘it’ by their followers – the jostling for preference and promotion. Commonly called ‘palace rivalry and intrigue’ it happens even in the Vatican, where, above all, we should expect to see strict observance of the Petrine and Catholic principle that ‘God has no favourites’ (Acts 10: 34-48).

Jesus reveals, by his death as well as his verbal teachings, that it was never the intent of the Trinity to reign over us. Instead their kingdom can be realised only within and among us – when we turn to the ever-present source of all truth, wisdom and love.

This kingdom is always both close to us and distant from us – close because the gifts of the Holy Spirit are equally accessible by everyone through mindful prayer; distant because mindful prayer is almost always postponed until every other means of satisfying our needs and desires is exhausted. Too often these desires are unwise, causing greater suffering – and this endless delaying of wisdom is the cause of the sufferings of the least powerful people on the planet.

These futile desires are also, now, the root of a planetary crisis. Utter disaster looms unless we all soon ‘wise up’. The Gospel warns us not to look to celebrity, or to celebrities, to save ourselves. By far the greatest figure in all human history, Jesus of Nazareth is waiting always for our attention to turn to the Good News of the Gospel: the kingdom of God is still on offer, to everyone. We simply need to ‘think again’ about where we are going, and why equality is always a mirage.

From the time of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) the prideful search for celebrity, for the admiration of ‘the world’, has lain at the root of all inequality and violence – including the violation of the Earth itself. That is why Jesus overcame the world by allowing it to crucify him: we are here to love and to serve, not to be objects of envy and fascination. There never was any other way of saving us humans from ourselves – and of saving our world as well.

Only when we have realised the promise of the first Pentecost, that there is to be a second Pentecost – a complete realisation of the power of the Holy Spirit to make us wise – could there be a second visible coming of the Lord. Only then will we be ready, realising that it is the same Lord who has been with us, through the same Holy Spirit, all along.

Notes

See, e.g., https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/shame-john-paul-ii-how-sex-abuse-scandal-stained-his-papacy/

What do we mean by the Kingdom of God?

September 3, 2022Abuse of Power, Articles, Covetousness, Kingdom of God, Mimetic Desire, Recent, ViolenceCharlemagne, David, Recent, Samuel, Solomonseanoconaill

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine and Life April 2002

Christian orthodoxy has always seen Christ as king as well as prophet and priest – a king who will personally and visibly reign some day, following the second coming. In the meantime there is ‘the kingdom of God’ which Vatican 2 identifies with the church, understood as ‘the people of God’.

When Jesus said ‘the kingdom of God is within’ and ‘at hand’ and that we should ‘seek’ it we can link this idea to the second birth that comes with baptism by the Holy Spirit. That is to say, a Christian spirituality can build a kingdom within us where Christ reigns as Lord, one that can gradually change also our outward cultural and social reality, moving the church and human society gradually towards a second visible coming of Christ.

But how do we envisage Christ reigning then? ‘Kingdom’ now seems a very archaic concept – especially in a context where the mystique of royalty has been totally destroyed by media intrusion into the all-too human frailties of the Windsors. No advanced country in the world is now ruled by a hereditary monarchy with real executive power – and this seems sensible. And so the ‘kingdom’ language of the Bible is one of those aspects of Christianity that make it seem fusty and culturally antiquated – the doomed intellectual property of a backward looking patriarchy. Must we Christians believe that God is stuck in an ancient and medieval mindset that will insist upon returning us some day to something like the kingdom of David or Solomon or Charlemagne, only more magnificent and triumphant, with Christ holding court in some fixed, earthly location and directing a centralised governmental system?

I believe not. I believe that if we read and ponder holistically the Biblical accounts of the kingdom of Israel, as well as the Gospel references to the kingdom of God, we find a dynamic that is actually predictive of a modern global egalitarian society – but one that lacks the imperfections of the most advanced we now have.

First, God did not impose an earthly kingdom upon Israel – but granted it reluctantly and apparently with the intention of letting Israel learn from the experience. The first book of Samuel tells us:

So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.” 1 Sam 8:4,5

Notice ‘such as all the other nations have’. This tells us something of crucial importance – that the earthly kingdom of Israel arose out of mimetic desire, or covetousness – the desire to possess that which is possessed by others – because they possess it. The perceived greater power of the surrounding monarchical systems – especially that of the Philistines – led Israel to envy them, to suppose that it was these systems that gave them this greater power, and to undervalue the system they already had – one in which prophets and judges ruled in a relationship of equality and familiarity rather than hierarchy and splendour.

The text goes on to tell us that Samuel was displeased by that request, but that the Lord told him:

“Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.”

So, according to the text, the kingdom of Israel essentially involved the rejection of an earlier ‘kingdom of God’ over which the Lord ‘reigned’ through the prophet Samuel, but without placing Samuel on some sacred plane above other men – a ‘kingdom’ that God preferred, and one without a palace or court. The word ‘kingdom’ in that context obviously has the widest possible connotation: that over which there is some kind of rule or dominion. We ought not, therefore, when attempting to conceptualise the kingdom of God, begin with, say, the military kingdom of David or Solomon – for these were inferior to the original kingdom of God.

The essence of that inferiority was their origin in an inferior spirituality – mimetic desire – and this is confirmed by the accounts of the central flaws of the three great kings – Saul, David and Solomon. David’s victory over Goliath made him the hero of the women of Israel, who accorded less glory to Saul – and he became murderously jealous. In other words he entered into mimetic rivalry with David for esteem – as did Absalom later, with equally tragic consequences. But David disgraced himself also by committing murder in order to possess Bathsheba – the wife of a subject. The fact that she was already married meant that David’s essential weakness also was associated with mimetic desire.

As for Solomon, he became renowned for his wisdom and, according to the text, ultimately preferred this renown to fidelity to the God who had given him this gift. Renown is simply wider esteem. The need of the man of eminence to be esteemed by other humans had again become his undoing. And this same weakness was the root source of the brutality of the Herods in Jesus’s time.

Sacred kingship essentially turned a mere human being into a mystical being upon whom an exaggerated dignity and military expectation was then conferred – with the consequence that the individual so honoured usually became virtually obsessed with his own reputation or ‘glory’. Another consequence was the inevitable withdrawal of dignity from those subjects who could never expect to come close to this semi-sacred being. Here again the book of Samuel is highly specific:

“This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plough his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the Lord will not answer you in that day.” 1 Sam 8:11-18

What is being described here is subjection: a loss of dignity and freedom. The sons who ran in front of the chariot would be the first to die in battle – for the glory of the person they served. Samuel’s critique of ancient kingship could have served perfectly the antimonarchist causes of revolutionary America and republican France nearly three millennia later.

If an inability to overcome the compulsion of mimetic desire was always associated with the visible kingdoms of Israel, then the original invisible kingdom had never been surpassed. It is against this background that we need to observe Jesus’ dealings with kingship – especially his rejection of the option of building such a visible kingdom in the only way that was feasible in the ancient world: by conquest.

This decision began with the second temptation in the desert, and was finally decisively rejected at Gethsemane. Jesus’ reply to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” can thus be interpreted as “That over which I rule is not one of those earthly kingdoms which arise out of mimetic desire and conflict”. And this means it cannot be like the kingdom of David either. It is the same ‘kingdom’ that Israel had abandoned in the time of Samuel, with Jesus in the Samuel, i.e. the prophetic, role. That is to say, it is really an anti-kingdom – one that contradicted the pattern whereby the subject would die for the glory of the king.

We must not make the mistake of supposing that an earthly kingdom ruled by a visible Jesus must necessarily be free of mimetic desire and envy – i.e. of imperfection – for the Gospel tells us otherwise. “Which of us is the greatest?” the apostles repeatedly ask of him, with the sons of Zebedee aiming at a heavenly elevation also. If the kingdom of God is to be free of mimetic desire, there simply cannot be a human pyramid of esteem with Jesus at its summit – for no matter how perfect the king, people would then jealously compete for closeness to him, supposing their own dignity rested upon that, as humans have throughout history. Earthly kingship creates inevitably a pyramid of dignity, in which a ‘wannabe’ fixation deprives everyone else of a sense of her/his own dignity (the source of all those English dreams of tea with the Queen).

The only ‘kingdom’ that can be free of mimetic desire is one in which all accept their own equal dignity. It will therefore be unlike any earthly kingdom of the past, and superior – in terms of egalitarianism – to the most advanced democratic societies today. It is a future society in which dignity is equally distributed – far superior to the ‘meritocracy’ aimed at by our current political elites, for mimetic desire is rampant there also. It follows that power also will be distributed rather than concentrated as in all absolute monarchies.

This is part of the meaning of the passion and death of Christ: he is bringing down the pyramid of esteem, establishing a relationship between humans that is based upon equal mutual respect – the meaning of the washing of the feet. The continual eucharistic division of the body of Christ means that wherever the ‘subject’ is, there is Jesus also. Each of us is equally close, so none lacks dignity.

With globalisation our perception of human space is shifting. In the ancient world people supposed they lived upon a planar disc with real physical boundaries. There had to be a boundary out there, an ‘edge’, encircling human space. This is why Alexander set out to travel to that boundary – the end of the earth – conquering as he went. The human idea of kingship was therefore linked to the notion of a bounded planar surface, over which human heroes fought for arch dominion. The notion that Jerusalem lay at the centre of that surface persisted into the late Middle Ages in Europe.

The idea of earthly kingship was also linked to that of a vertical hierarchy of heavenly dignity, in which the earthly king’s elevation ‘above’ his subjects reflected the even greater dignity of God in the perfection of heaven.

If we interpret the Genesis story of ‘the fall’ as related to human mimetic envy of God in Heaven (‘you shall be as Gods’), we can then interpret the story of Jesus as a revelation whose central teaching is that God is not to be envied – because he is prepared to accept the humiliation of the world. And this in turn means that our conception of Christ as King must be one that rejects the typical earthly kingly pyramid. Somehow he will always be equidistant from us all, so that all are equally honoured.

The Eucharist achieves this, of course, by allowing within sacred space a perfect equality of contact with the king. The Ascension we can see then not so much as a departure, but as a necessary step towards a sacramental banquet in which all Christians are equally admitted to the divine presence, which can also, through the Eucharist and the Spirit, reign within. In this way God raises all into his being equally – undermining the power of mimetic desire.

Now conscious human space has no fixed boundaries, for we know the surface upon which we live is spherical, always returning to meet itself. Thus, the surface of the earth can have no centre, so that no location upon it is more privileged and prestigious than any other.

Furthermore we now look out upon an enfolding heavenly space so vast that the notion of human dominion there is ludicrous. And so we can envisage also a global – and even extra-terrestrial – human society in which, with the continual breaking of bread and body, there is a perfect equality of dignity, and therefore no need for conflict or concentrations of military power.

It is profoundly mysterious that there should be in texts that were written in the ancient planar world a clear revelation of a divine preference for a ‘kingdom’ that would look beyond any existing in that world, to provide what the global human family now needs, and will always need. That is, a Lordship that claims authority first and last in the human heart, that excludes no-one, and that promises freedom and equal dignity to all.

In an earthly community of this kind, people would not notice someone who came by, gently, seeking their company rather than their obeisance, their freedom rather than their subjection. He would not be challenged – for all people would be in the habit of accepting strangers this way.

Here is an early Irish poem that dreams of the future kingdom of Heaven:

CREATION OF HEAVEN

King, you created heaven according to your delight,
a place that is safe and pure, its air filled with the songs of angels.
It is like a strong mighty city, which no enemy can invade,
with walls as high as mountains.
It is like an open window, in which all can move freely,
with people arriving from earth but never leaving.
It is huge, ten times the size of earth,
so that every creature ever born can find a place.
It is small, no bigger than a village,
where all are friends, and none is a stranger.
In the centre is a palace, its walls made of emerald
and its gates of amethyst; and on each gate is hung a golden cross.
The roof is ruby, and at each pinnacle stands an eagle
covered in gold, its eyes of sapphire.
Inside the palace it is always daylight, and the air cool, neither hot nor cold; and there is a perfect green lawn, with a blue stream running across it.
At the edge of this lawn are trees and shrubs, always in blossom,
white, pink and purple, spreading a sweet fragrance everywhere.
Round the lawn walks a King, not dressed in fine robes,
but in a simple white tunic, smiling, and embracing those he meets.
And people from outside are constantly entering the palace,
mingling one with another, and then leaving.
Everyone in heaven is free to come to the palace,
and then to take with them its perfect peaceful joy;
and in this way the whole of heaven is infused with the joy of the palace.

(Celtic Prayers, R Van de Weyer, Abingdon Press)

It’s clear that the unknown author of this poem was someone within whom the Lord reigned already spiritually, and who understood that a perfect equality and lack of rivalry would eventually characterise his people. The word ‘subjects’ is out of place to describe these, for there is no subjection, only liberation. With such a ‘kingdom’ the most radical egalitarian and democrat could find no fault.

Did God want Jesus Dead?

August 1, 2022Articles, Atonement, Evangelisation, Recent, TheologyRecentSean O'Conaill

Now committed to a synodal programme, Irish Catholics will struggle to make missionary sense of a medieval theology that implies a divine need for a divine victim – the crucifixion of Jesus on Calvary to repay a human debt of honour to the Father God of Creation.

Satisfaction and substitution, keywords of the medieval and early modern theology of the cross, are both used in the Catholic Catechism of 1994¹ – to explain why Jesus submitted to crucifixion on Calvary. Human sinfulness is so great, according to this theology, that the voluntary suffering and death of God’s only son was needed to atone, reconciling the Father to ourselves.

In this understanding Jesus ‘satisfied’ a cosmic debt, substituting himself as sufferer of the divine punishment that must otherwise fall upon ourselves. This is the essence of the redemption theology of the Catechism.

Paradoxically, however, this leaves the same Father God obviously open to a suspicion of unforgiveness, making Jesus’s own forgiveness of his accusers a startling contradiction. Any ‘new evangelisation’ in Ireland must contend with this theological Gordian knot. Has any of us have ever heard, in church, a convincing attempt to untie it?

How many are aware that this medieval emphasis on divine debt recovery was not the understanding of the early Christian church? For over a thousand years, until the time of St Anselm of Canterbury in the late 11th century, it was taught that Jesus’s self-sacrifice had ransomed humankind from the powers of darkness – from ‘Satan’.

In this understanding, God the Father – in raising Jesus from the dead – was co-liberator of humankind. To ‘redeem’ was to buy the freedom of a slave, and, in the early church’s understanding, humans had been in captivity to evil until the time of Jesus. For those earliest Christian believers, the God of Abraham had done for themselves – through Jesus – what he had earlier done for the Israelites enslaved by Pharaonic Egypt.

In Cur Deus Homo (‘Why God Became a Man’ – 1098 CE) Anselm argued that the life of the Son of God was worth far more than any debt that could have been owed to Satan. To undo this mistake he essentially attributed the captivity from which Jesus liberated humankind to God himself.

To understand this shift we need to remember that for Anselm and his contemporaries the monarchical political order of the time was God-ordained. From the fourth century adoption of Christianity by the failing Roman empire, Christian clergy had supported the authority of the political order that protected them, an authority that rested on military power. It did not make sense to Anselm that God the Father would not rescue Jesus by the same forceful means, unless the crucifixion had been necessary to restore the perfect creation described in Genesis.

Anselm’s explanation of the Crucifixion became the bedrock of the fundamentalist evangelical Christianity of our own time – a Christian extremism that can favour the Old Testament principle of ‘an eye for an eye’ and scorn any reference to the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

There Jesus insists that enemies be loved instead. Never does Christian fundamentalism attend to Jesus’s repetition of the warning of the prophet Hosea – that what pleases God is ‘mercy not sacrifice‘ (Matt 9:13).

With the church no longer beholden to any political elite in the West, St Anselm’s perspective is a missionary millstone. Who cannot see that a state power that rests upon force – rather than consent – is unjust and sinful? Who cannot see in political ambition the covetousness of the 9th and 10th commandments of Moses?

And who cannot now see that it was in his rejection of ambition – political or religious – that Jesus overcame the temptation of ‘the world’? Oblivious of this danger even Christian religious elites can be corrupted, the problem described as ’spiritual worldliness’ by Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium (2013).

The crucifixion is explained simply by the refusal of the Trinity to force us to follow them. How could the Father be freely loved if he was less loving than the Son?

Violence – and victimisation – arise easily from human ambition. Jesus stands unique in the ancient world, as an historical figure who refused power on those terms, at staggering personal cost. That sacrifice bears witness to a source of moral strength that lies beyond any of us. It was in this non-violent self-giving that Jesus reached the summit of human achievement – bearing witness to a heavenly father who thinks the same way. His forgiving self-sacrifice finally abolished the contradiction between mercy and sacrifice. He died as he had lived, in solidarity with the most vulnerable – those many millions who have died to save the faces of the Caesars of history.

The sacred purpose of the Trinity is to free humankind from selfish ambition (the root of all imperialism), from elitism and from violence. We need to reconsider a theological perspective that falls scandalously short – by imputing self-absorption and a need for violent sacrifice to the Father.

Notes

CCC615 ‘”For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5: 19) By his obedience unto death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who “makes himself an offering for sin”, when “he bore the sin of many”, and who “shall make many to be accounted righteous”, for “he shall bear their iniquities”. (Isaiah 53 10-12) Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.‘

Salvation and Social Media

March 1, 2022Articles, Atonement, Media, Recent, RedemptionRecentSean O'Conaill

Jesus died on the cross …

… to free us from fear of what other people think…

… and from the danger of being misled by their flattery or adulation.

What is it like to be occupied by a foreign power … to be told that your culture is inferior and your God is powerless … to have every attempt at resistance beaten down and your leaders tortured and executed in the most brutal and degrading way?

Are you then in danger of believing what you are told, and even of blaming yourself for your foolishness?

That was the condition of the poorest in spirit in the Palestine of Jesus’s time.

And that was why they understood the Resurrection of Jesus as freedom now – from the mistake of believing that they had been forsaken by the God of their ancestors, the God of Moses who had freed the Israelites from the Egyptian Pharaoh.

It is time to recall what belief in the Resurrection originally meant, and still means:

We need not fear the judgment of other human beings, whoever they are – and will be foolish if we spend our lives in search of their approval.

How did we lose the original meaning of salvation?

How did it happen that Christian teachers today have so often forgotten the original meaning of ‘Salvation’ – and cannot explain the relevance of prayer to the epidemic of self-harm now ongoing via Internet social media?

For the earliest Christians the story of Jesus was ‘salvation’ right now – not just a promise of life after death. Occupied by an often brutal foreign power the Jews of Israel were in real danger of of internalising Rome’s judgement of them as an inferior people whose God had failed. It followed that a belief in Jesus’s resurrection was also a belief that Rome’s power lay at the mercy of the God of Israel and was ‘passing away’.

History was to prove them right. An empire that ruled by fear and the most cruel shaming had been overthrown where it most mattered – in the minds of a minority who were quick to pass on this electrifying news.

The same story of Jesus, amplified in the Gospels, also overturned the myths that wealth, health and social status were signs of God’s approval, while illness or misfortune or extreme poverty must be proof of God’s condemnation. The assumptions that sustained the social pyramids of the ancient world had all been thrown into question.

So, in their own lifetime many of ‘the poorest in spirit’ had become convinced that they had never been deserted by a transcendent power that knew them individually – and the world’s greatest empire had been proven a hopeless judge.

However, through the centuries this original understanding became dimmed, especially by a theology of atonement that implied that God was still dissatisfied by our sinfulness – identified mainly with our sexuality. St Anselm of Canterbury convinced many in Cur Deus Homo (1098) that God the Father sent Jesus to collect a debt on which we had defaulted, and that Jesus accepted crucifixion to repay this debt.

And then, in the 1500s, Protestant leaders such as Martin Luther and John Calvin developed the idea of Jesus as penal substitute, the one who accepted the extra punishment that must otherwise fall on ourselves – because the suffering that sin itself brings is not enough.

In this way the liberator God of the early Christians had become instead the Great Medieval Debt Collector who will send us to Hell for defaulting. No wonder this doesn’t make sense to so many of today’s young people.

Social Media – an Empire Built on Our Search for Recognition and Approval

In our own time, following the rise and fall of the prestige of Christian churches (over twenty centuries) a new global empire has arisen: the empire of global electronic media. Its favourites are no longer the military heroes of the ancient world but the ‘silicon’ hardware and software icons of the Internet, and anyone else who can ‘influence’ its markets. Everywhere the teenagers of today can look for proof of their own significance on screens they need never darken.

The result? The verdict of many studies confirms the research of an Oxford University team: screen time correlates with poor mental health and “the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with technology use”.

Furthermore, the renowned US psychologist Dr Jean Twenge has found that the correlation between social media consumption and mental health challenges for young girls is even stronger.

“…The link between social media use and poor mental health for girls was 10 times as large as what the Oxford paper identified for “screen time.” A recent paper by two Spanish statisticians also examined the Oxford researchers’ techniques and also found a much stronger link. These findings fit with Facebook’s internal research, leaked by a whistleblower and published last fall, which concluded that Instagram led to depression and body image issues, particularly among teenage girls.” (Washington Post, 16th Feb 2022)

Why the Phone Fixation?

The power of ‘social media’ lies in the simplest of mistaken assumptions – that our value and importance can be determined by the judgement of others. Disappointment and elation – obscurity or recognition – honour and shame – are in the power of a handheld device that will tell us at a glance where we stand.

Anyone can therefore fall victim to an iron law of history. Wherever there is a search for status there will also be the formation of alliances in the shaming of those who are anyway vulnerable.

That many of the young are now mentally distressed and disturbed as a consequence is now well established. To believe in the Internet – or in media generally – as the arbiter of a person’s worth – is, for millions, to become poor in spirit all over again. It is also to be in danger of entrapment in cults or conspiracy theories, completely isolated from reality and the real world.

And that is why we need to remind ourselves, constantly, through prayer, that we should never make ourselves the prisoners of the judgement of others.

What has the experience of media shaming taught Irish clergy?

An Irish Catholic Church that has fallen from high social prestige to social disgrace in little over a generation has so far adjusted poorly to this situation. Clergy whose vocations began before ‘the fall’ were themselves teenagers when their own corporation was a power broker of both honour and shame in Ireland. Resentment and even anger (much of it justified) can be their default reaction to the reversal of fortunes they have experienced.

There is another option – to look again at that human tendency to see ‘honour’ as truly in the gift of other humans – and to identify that as the driving force of all ascent to social superiority, in all eras – and as the ‘worldliness’ that Jesus came to conquer. If the Gospel story was not a revelation of that mistake – and of the fallibility of human judgement – even when all are in agreement – what was it?

Is not that mistake – the seeking of honour in the adulation of others – the root of all tyranny in all eras? Was not that the mistake of the sons of Zebedee also, and the root of all conflict?

**Can homilies address the threat to young people of online bullying?**

Why should we not see the disgracing of the Irish church – at the hands of a secularising media – as deliverance in disguise – especially from the mistake of supposing that when the church was itself the great social arbiter of honour and shame it was where Our Father wanted us to be? Was it not to protect its social eminence, its ‘reputation’, that the clerical institution failed to be truly Christian in its protection of Catholic children?

Has not their own ‘humiliation by media’ been in truth a later stage of the formation of Catholic clergy for the world of now? Is not the Creed – the shortest summary of the story of Jesus, and of Catholic belief – to be celebrated and re-affirmed now, in the face of a secularism that direly needs it?

Certainly there must be many Irish teenagers ready for saving from the mistake of believing their dignity is decided by the Internet – so intensely controlled merely by ‘the market’. Who is now ready for the rescuing? Is that not a calling for all of us?

Sean O’Conaill

[This article was revised on January 14th 2023, in light of reinforcing research data on the negative influence of social media on the mental health of young people.]

Lumen Gentium 37

The right of all Catholics to speak and to be heard!

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Salvation and Social Media

How did we lose the original meaning of salvation?

Social Media – an Empire Built on Our Search for Recognition and Approval

Why the Phone Fixation?

What has the experience of media shaming taught Irish clergy?