Category Archives: Hypocrisy

‘Holiness’ in the Wake of Catastrophe

June 13, 2025Articles, Atonement, Courage, Holiness, Hypocrisy, Integrity, Scandal, TheologySean O'Conaill

The Vatican II document Lumen Gentium (1964) calls all Catholics to holiness – and idealises Jesus’ celibacy, poverty and obedience as ‘manifesting’ true holiness. Yet Lumen Gentium never refers to integrity – an even more vital attribute of Jesus’ ministry – or warns about the ‘wearing of masks’ – called out by Jesus as hypocrisy – so prevalent in the hiding by church leadership of clerical sexual abuse of children.

This shortfall in the church’s formal teaching on holiness needs fixing – to honour Jesus’ prophetic risk-taking in calling out the hypocrisies of the religious culture of his own time.

This also has implications for the understanding of Christian obedience, for Canon Law, for the structure of the church, for the Theology of the Cross and for our understanding of the Atonement.

This article was first published in The Furrow in May 2025.

“… all the faithful, whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord, each in his own way, to that perfect holiness whereby the Father Himself is perfect.”
(Vatican II, Lumen Gentium 11)

That all in the church are called to personal holiness by Vatican II (1962-65) was clear enough to those who took any interest in the council, even if, in Ireland, there was then a dearth of discussion of what that might mean.

Far less known is that the final wording and structure of the document that announced this call – Lumen Gentium – was arrived at only after a contentious debate between different interest groups of bishops at the council. It will probably be news to most that the document overall may therefore be less than limpid – and even potentially confusing and discouraging – on the precise nature of the holiness to which all are called. This is the argument presented by a monumental study of the history of that holiness debate, published by an Irish theologian in 2021: ‘The Charismatic Structure of the Church’¹

To summarise, the work – by Michael McGuckian SJ – provides copious historical evidence that there has never been complete unanimity among Christians as to how best to answer Jesus’ call to ‘follow me’. St Paul’s strong recommendation of the unmarried state – probably because ‘end times’ were then thought likely to be imminent – makes that point straight away. That advice was obviously not followed by everyone – including, thankfully, the mother of St Augustine of Hippo, St Monica, in the fourth century – and the church has owed its continuity to the celibate and non-celibate alike ever since.

The ‘Evangelical Counsels’

In the third century the preference of some for a ‘coenobitic’ or monastic life, and, later still, the emergence of the mendicant and preaching orders, added further layers of complexity. The elevation of the ‘evangelical counsels’ of poverty, celibacy and obedience by St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1256) raised immediately a question that was to dog Vatican II many centuries later: could those who did not follow this way – including secular bishops and clergy as well as lay people – truly hope to rise to the same perfection of life – the ‘holiness’ – that was claimed for the following of those counsels?

McGuckian’s study establishes that those who debated this at the council could not agree. The body of bishops that called for the universal possibility of, and calling to, holiness achieved, in Chapter 5, the statement at the head of this article – that everyone is called to ‘perfect holiness’. They failed, however, to persuade the opposing body of bishops (those aligned with the religious orders) to abandon the claim for the superiority of the evangelical counsels as a mode of life.

And so, in Chapter 6 of Lumen Gentium we find the statements that the evangelical counsels of poverty, celibacy and obedience ‘are based upon the words and examples of the Lord‘ and that this ‘religious state, whose purpose is to free its members from earthly cares, more fully manifests to all believers the presence of heavenly goods already possessed here below‘ (LG 44).

The author argues that these assertions make it far from clear that the holiness to which all are called in Chapter Five of Lumen Gentium is the same holiness achievable by those who follow the evangelical counsels – and therefore that perfection of life is truly considered equally possible for those who do not follow those. The lobby for Chapter Six could not agree to the inclusion of that phrase ‘same holiness’ in the document – and subsequent papal statements do not clarify the matter, in the author’s view.

A Layman’s ‘Take’

For a lay person faced with the challenge of the church scandals that have happened since Vatican II – and especially the challenge to understand the creedal affirmation of the holiness of the church – this book is a welcome contribution to Pope Francis’ bid to make the church energetically synodal at all levels. To me it is uncanny that the disagreement among the apostles as to which of them was the greatest (e.g. Luke 9:46-48) could in its essence be echoed and re-echoed down the centuries – and could become especially vigorous between those who have received the sacrament of ordination. Furthermore, given Pope Francis’ insistence upon the importance of the ‘domestic church’ there is an obvious need for clarity on how that Vatican II ‘universal’ call to holiness is to be answered now – and can be? – by those with family and civic responsibility.

Seeking clarity, is it naïve to suggest that the word ‘holy’ is applied regularly – even in Lumen Gentium – to very different phenomena, with very different shades of meaning, and therefore that the distinguishing of these could be a necessary preliminary to a reading of Lumen Gentium aimed at resolving any perceived contradiction?

For example, sacraments are ‘holy’ but the church has been clear since the early fifth century that the sacrament of ordination does not make those who receive it personally virtuous. Again, the office of bishop is a sacred or holy office, but the very fact that bishops can be, and are, dismissed by the pope for serious moral failure makes clear that the ordination of a bishop does not confer personal holiness either.

Must not a similar distinction be made for a chosen way of life, whatever degree of asceticism it may arguably ‘manifest’? Richard Rohr, the Franciscan teacher of the contemplative ‘way’, insists that in his experience of his own order ‘the young ego is often left unformed and unchallenged, and there have been many human and spiritual casualties as a result’² That one might choose the ‘manifestation’ of poverty, celibacy and obedience to prove one’s own superiority – without fully grasping the higher calling to humility and unselfish love – is surely a danger that spiritual directors in the religious orders will warn against – recalling especially Jesus’ warning about the wearing of masks.

A further consideration is that the poverty and obedience required of someone within a religious institution are substantially different from the poverty and obedience of Jesus – who was never a member of such an institution and answered to God directly. His poverty was a feature of a three-year mission, which was also, in its level of risk, in its brevity and in its tragic conclusion a sufficient explanation of his unmarried state. Is a professed commitment to a whole lifetime of celibacy therefore necessarily a decisive ‘manifestation’ of the ‘following’ that Jesus called for – especially in the wake of revelations that widespread non-observance of the celibacy rule has been tolerated by the clerical church?

And more than half-a-century after Lumen Gentium can we now be convinced that the discipline required of members of any religious institution necessarily ‘manifests’ in one central aspect the very particular, and solitary, poverty and obedience of Jesus?

Holiness and Integrity – and ‘Whistle Blowing’

“I accept that, from the time I became an auxiliary bishop, I should have challenged the prevailing culture.” This was a key sentence in the resignation statement of Bishop Jim Moriarty of Kildare Leighlin in November 2009, in the wake of the Murphy report³. The culture referred to was that of the administration of the archdiocese of Dublin in the period before 1994, in which Bishop Moriarty had served as an auxiliary. In early December 2009 the Irish bishops named that culture as one of ‘cover up’ – in which ‘the avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children.’⁴

That this particular sequence of events should mirror so closely repeated accounts of victimisation and concealment in scripture – also to preserve the reputations of individuals (e.g. the brothers of Joseph, King David and the Herods) – and that Jesus by contrast risked his own reputation and his life by lambasting the shortcomings of the religious establishment of his own time and place – must surely clarify a key aspect of Christian holiness in the wake of ongoing and global church scandal: the holiness of Jesus is inseparable from what is called integrity, and from the role of what contemporary culture calls the ‘whistle blower’ who calls out any significant abuse of office or power.

Does the Catholic church even yet clearly acknowledge this obligation of integrity, and therefore the limitations of the obligation of obedience to fallible designated authority, even in the context of the church itself?

My own strong impression is that the connection of holiness to integrity of that kind has not yet been explicitly made by the episcopal magisterium, despite four decades of scandal – and that its own authority therefore continues to suffer. That the clerical institution can become secretive, unaccountable and abusive has been amply demonstrated in our time. Moreover, inherited models of holiness that elevated obedience to authority above the call to integrity in Ireland have left the lay church supine and unobservant of one obvious response to the call to ‘take up your cross’ (Matt 15:24-26): to do that by questioning 20^th century church-run institutions that shamed the poorest and weakest.

Even yet in 2025 we have never yet in Ireland had an open, honest and thorough discussion of the Ryan report of 2009, which indicted the habit of deference to clergy that led Irish civil servants to impose no real accountability for the use of public funds upon the religious orders that ran those institutions.⁵ The ‘multi-disciplinary study’ initially called for by Bishop Noel Treanor, to establish conclusively the causes of that disaster, never happened – and this too remains unexplained⁶.

Integrity in the Secular Sphere

As Lumen Gentium also calls the church – and especially lay people – to ‘consecrate the world to God’ (LG 34) – and Ireland has suffered multiple examples of civil institutional corruption in recent decades – this inability of clergy at all levels to speak of Jesus as history’s outstanding ‘whistle blower’ is surely an ongoing disability in the task of synodal ‘mission’ in Ireland.

A single example will suffice to make the point: that of the Third Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry established by the Irish Government into ‘protected disclosures’ (i.e. disclosures by ‘whistle blowers’) related to alleged abuses within Ireland’s policing service, the Garda, in 2017. The ‘Afterword’ to that report ends with the following:

“The question has to be asked as to why what is best, what demands hard work, is not the calling of every single person who takes on the job of service to Ireland. Worse still is the question of how it is that decent people, of whom Maurice McCabe emerges as a paradigm, are so shamefully treated when rightly they demand that we do better.”⁷

That Maurice McCabe, a Garda whistleblower, had to suffer a vile campaign of innuendo at the hands not only of colleagues but of superiors – a campaign that took him by his own account close to suicide⁸ – is now well known. We cannot know what private reflections prevented auxiliary bishops in Dublin from blowing any whistle on the cover up of clerical abuse in Dublin in the period before 1994 – but is it unreasonable to suggest that the lack of anything like a ‘Protected Disclosures Act’ (or ‘whistle-blowers charter’) in the church’s own canon law – inspired by the example of Jesus himself – was one of them? Or that a confused understanding of Christian obedience, as something owed always and above all to ecclesiastical superiors, may have been another?

whistle-blowing in the secular sphere — If businesses encourage whistle-blowing for their own sake, why doesn’t the church – in memory of Him?

The Gethsemane of the Whistle-Blower

The patterns of fear of loss of reputation in all ‘covering up’ – and of deliberate assault upon the reputation of those who do stand up for what is right – suggest yet another pressure upon anyone challenged to do that: the frailty of all human self-esteem, dependent as that is upon some degree of approval from a peer group. Our intense need to belong will transmute quickly into an intense fear of being cast out if we are faced with the challenge of standing utterly alone in calling out any corrupted ‘prevailing culture’. None of us should throw stones at others who fail in that situation, before we have been there ourselves.

And yet wasn’t that – hugely amplified – precisely the challenge met, faced and overcome by Jesus in Jerusalem, in his ‘conquering’ of ‘the world’ (John 16:33)?

Holiness, Integrity and the Meaning of the Cross

Here yet again we encounter the inadequacy of a theology of atonement and redemption that explains Jesus’ acceptance of the cross in terms of the Father’s need for ‘satisfaction’ for sin. If the Trinity are not always in solidarity with anyone faced, like Maurice McCabe and the Australian St Mary McKillop, with an ultimate test of integrity – assuring us too of vindication and resurrection – we are indeed utterly alone then. If St Mary McKillop could become a patron saint of victims of abuse in Australia, for holding firm in the calling out of clerical abuse, despite excommunication in 1870⁹, what prevents the Catholic magisterium from teaching that divine solidarity with whistle-blowers – to help anyone to stand firm in any such crisis of conscience – is also the message, and calling, of the Cross?

The answer lies surely in the historical legacy of Christendom, which aligned the clerical institution always with the secular establishment, biasing theology toward the encouragement of submission to state and ecclesial authority. A God who needs satisfaction for sin is a celestial paradigm of the worldly king who demands and merits fealty and subordination – while any view of Jesus as a divine whistle-blower against injustice – and especially any injustice within the church – could encourage sedition and disorder. Christendom was always a discouraging climate for prophets, and Christian theology became complicit in that discouragement. That God could ever support any conscience that disagreed with the hierarchical church was obviously unthinkable.

Holiness and the Domestic Church

That the Trinity cannot be as close to and as supportive of the family as to those who follow the evangelical counsels is obviously a mistake – and so therefore must be any denial of the holiness of committed and loving sexual relationships. That family life could not ‘manifest heavenly goods’ as plainly as the friary or the monastery – an inference too easily drawn from Lumen Gentium 44 – is mistaken also, and patently so. Maurice McCabe’s own story is testament to the role of family in forming and strengthening character for the crises of conscience that could fall on anyone in service today.

This is not to deny that the family can also be a location of abuse and addiction and broken relationships, and therefore of ‘sin’ – or that family life is not seriously challenged by an economy in cruel flux. Yet Jesus was never just a ‘coenobite’, confined to life within a male community separated from ‘the world’. His sole reference to the option of celibacy (Matt 19:12) made it preferable to the option of divorce, not the circumstance of marriage – and there is no reason to believe that his own celibacy was a necessary condition of the instruction to ‘be perfect’.

Surely it is significant that Jesus’ call to holiness – to be ‘perfect’ (Matt 5:48) – occurs as part of the call to love – and to love even one’s enemies? Michael McGuckian is persuasive¹⁰ that it is to the two Great Commandments (Mark 12:30-33) we must all look for the decisive test of holiness – and that we are always equally and solemnly challenged in that regard. To want to win an argument over whose way is the holiest is to lose the plot.

Notes

‘The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond’, Michael McGuckian SJ, Xlibris, US 2021
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, Richard Rohr, Hodder and Stoughton 2017
Bishop Moriarty statement: ‘I accept that, from the time I became an auxiliary bishop, I should have challenged the prevailing culture’, Irish Times, Thursday Dec 24^th, 2009
Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009
Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (The Ryan Report) Vol. 4, Chapter 6: Conclusions
RTE Interview of Bishop Noel Treanor by Tommy O’Gorman, May 24th, 2009.
“I believe simply that as a church within society we have to recognise honestly that these things have happened. We cannot in any way at any level within the church be indifferent. I don’t think anybody is. We can’t wash our hands of it. We can’t deny it. We simply have to see the evil and the crimes that were perpetrated straight in the face, and that means we have to examine why they happened. That will require if I may say so an inter‑disciplinary discussion with people who are members of the church ‑ involving victims, those who were abused and indeed going beyond the borders of our church, so that we have the best anthropological and scientific analysis available to try and understand why this happened.”
Third Interim Report of the Disclosures Tribunal, under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 (2017)
A Force for Justice: The Maurice McCabe Story, Michael Clifford, Hachette Books Ireland 2017
Mary MacKillop: Patron Saint of Sexual Abuse Victims?, James Martin SJ, America, Sep 29, 2010
‘Holier than thou’ Michael McGuckian SJ: Interview by Pat Coyle

The Pyramid Will Stay Inverted

May 3, 2025Abuse of Power, Articles, Benedict XVI, Christendom, Corruption, Division, Evangelisation, Francis, Hypocrisy, Laity, Magisterium, Papacy, Pope Francis, Safeguarding, Sexual Abuse, Vatican IISean O'Conaill

Pope Francis receives flowers from children at the presidential palace in Baghdad March 5, 2021. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

Pope Francis’ enemies in the church were ‘talked up’ by some media as capable of reversing the direction he set over the twelve years of his pontificate.

However, the historical circumstances in which Francis came to the chair of Peter in 2013 had not changed by 2025. Those same circumstances made the 21st century Franciscan ‘startup’ – synodality – irreversible.

The Inverted Pyramid

“Jesus founded the Church by setting at her head the Apostolic College, in which the Apostle Peter is the ‘rock’ (cf. Mt 16:18), the one who must confirm his brethren in the faith (cf. Lk 22:32). But in this Church, as in an inverted pyramid, the top is located beneath the base.”

It was in this celebrated passage in his address to bishops in 2014 that Pope Francis first introduced the idea of the church as an upside-down pyramid, with bishops in the role of servants rather than overlords. He went on:

“Let us never forget this! For the disciples of Jesus, yesterday, today and always, the only authority is the authority of service, the only power is the power of the cross. As the Master tells us: ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave’ (Mt 20:25-27). It shall not be so among you: in this expression we touch the heart of the mystery of the Church, and we receive the enlightenment necessary to understand our hierarchical service.”

The Synodal Pathway

The Synodal Pathway then launched in Ireland and globally from 2021 followed logically – by insisting that Baptism – not Ordination – is the foundational sacrament of the church – and by calling all of the baptised people of God to communion, participation and mission

Was this vision of the church’s future truly in danger now that Francis had passed? Media would hype this as a cliff-edge moment, with the return of ‘Command Catholicism’ – a bid for tight control from above on sexual practice – a real possibility. Might that truly be the direction taken by the Conclave of 2025?

Teachers Must Also be Witnesses

To understand why this was highly unlikely we needed only to remind ourselves of a key insight of Pope Paul VI, expressed in the 1975 document Evangelii Nuntiandi. Writing on the vital topic of evangelisation – the communication of the ‘Good News’ of the Gospel to the modern world – that pope declared:

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” (Evangelii Nuntiandi 41)

An unavoidable question arose from this declaration:

If teachers are not witnesses will anyone listen?

And what of the church’s supreme teachers, its official magisterium, its bishops – who did not, as a body, witness to the paramount importance of the safeguarding of the innocence of children until – beginning in the last two decades of the 20^th century – Catholics – globally – discovered that the safety of their children had been considered much less important than the reputation of ordained men? And that this was true even of the era of Pope Paul VI?

Lay Victims of Abuse Were its Witnesses

Had even one Catholic bishop been the source of this revelation the shock would have been that much less – but in fact it had been some of the affected Catholic families – lay people – in Louisiana, USA in the mid 1980s – who first informed the wider church of this ghastly anomaly, not any Catholic bishop anywhere.

So all bishops – and all cardinals attending the 2025 Conclave – knew well that the truth of clerical sexual abuse of children was imposed upon the church not by its leaders but by the innocent victims of that abuse.

For many observant Catholics it became impossible from then on to think of bishops – the church’s official magisterium – as necessarily witnesses to the Gospel and even necessarily as exemplary moral leaders of the church. This inevitably applied also to the bishop of Rome, the pope. In the era of Pope Benedict XVI – the era in which Archbishop Bergoglio of Buenos Aires emerged as a likely successor – this was the climate that inevitably gave shape and direction to the Conclave of 2013.

Moreover, as if to underline the fact that bishops were not holy ex officio, the internal wranglings of the Vatican bureaucracy were by then also on public display – in the so-called ‘Vatileaks’ affair. Had not this same scandal helped to bring about that conclave by influencing Benedict XVI’s astonishing decision to retire? If he was truly disabled finally by insomnia, as recently reported, who can fail, now, to see the causes?

Cardinal Bergoglio Reads the Times

Francis then became the name of Benedict XVI’s successor because, more clearly than anyone else, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio saw that the centuries-old strategy of governing and leading the church by moral edict from above had backfired disastrously. Focused on imposing tight discipline on sexual morality on the non-ordained people of God it had exposed the hierarchical clerical church to the charge of rank hypocrisy, in the concealment of the sexual sins of clergy.

Who now could not see also that, on a global scale, children had been sacrificed to preserve this secret? So obviously sinful was this mistake that only penitence on the part of leadership could now be persuasive.

“I Am a Sinner!”

And so, when asked directly ‘Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?‘ the new Pope Francis declared:

“I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.“

Stunning the Catholic world as it did this declaration told us not just about Jorge Bergoglio but about the times – the circumstances – in which he had been elected. Everything else about his pontificate followed logically from this declaration. We Catholics – people, priests, bishops and even popes – are all sinners – and are taught – if we pay attention – to understand our greatest sins.

Of these perhaps the greatest is a tendency to believe that we are qualified to tell others what to do – but had not Jesus himself warned even the apostles – the very first bishops – against doing that?

The Culmination of Centuries of Scandal

Schooled well in the history of the church Francis could see also that the clerical abuse cover-up scandal was but the latest in a centuries-long series of church scandals.

Already, just before the Jubilee year 2000 Pope John Paul II had issued the document Memory and Reconciliation lamenting:

the medieval Inquisitions,
the church’s own role in causing conflicts between Christians
the persecution of Jews in Catholic countries even into modern times,
the abuse of women,
the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples in supporting European imperialism and colonialism across the globe.

Had not the church also supported imperial European regimes that had gone to total war in 1914 – a major cause of the rise of secularism and atheism in the 20th century West?

The abuse scandal – by no means over yet in 2013 (or even in 2025) – was merely the final blow – a blow delivered by a church system of ‘moralising from above‘ that had backfired – justly – on the moralisers.

The Meaning of Synodality

So, if moralising from above could not lead the church any longer, what could?

Pope Francis’ answer – an answer derived obviously from deep prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit – was synodality – communion, participation and mission – a new era in which Catholic ministers would accompany those to whom they minister – instead of talking down to them .

Those who cannot get on board with this must be prayed for very seriously – to receive the insight to understand their own times. No effective leadership can ever emerge from historical blindness, the prime disability of the church faction that opposed and sometimes disgracefully vilified Pope Francis.

Constantinian Nostalgia Not the Answer

Almost certainly the historical worldview of the opponents of synodality is one that idealises Christendom – that long era in which the church was patronised by nominally Christian kings. Even today the perceived danger of tyrannical anti-Christian government leads some to yearn for a new union of Catholic church and state – the union that began with the first Roman emperor to patronise the church – Constantine.

But who cannot see now that it was that long privileging of the church – and especially of clergy – that corrupted and divided it originally?

Had it not been the mission of the first St Francis – in the 1200s – to restore Christ’s Church in an era of nominally Christian kings?

Were not the divisions of the church – into East and West and then into the Protestant fragmentations in the West – caused and widened by that same corruption?

And what of Christian and Catholic minorities today in e.g. China, India, Pakistan, Israel and elsewhere? How could any new movement to unite church and state in the West not be seen by people of other faiths as proof of the danger of tolerating Christians anywhere?

Constantinianism – or Christian nationalism – is yet another historical cul de sac. Too close a relationship with political power will always corrupt the church and endanger the sincere belief of those without it – and reconnect the church scandalously with privilege, mendacity and violence.

No Other Future

What, truly, is the alternative to the direction that Pope Francis has set? What, truly, are the signs of these times?

What would any victim of clerical abuse – or any kind of abuse in, or by, the church – make of a turning back by bishops – to moralising from above?

Where in this media-saturated world could any bishop hope to succeed with such a strategy? Could the 2025 Conclave truly think seriously of abandoning synodality and reverting to that same stilted mode of leadership – when all who attend it will know that Pope Francis is revered globally for his humility?

Did not the Covid pandemic reveal the shortcomings of governments everywhere – and reveal also the potential of ordinary yet extraordinary people to save one another and to show us the truth of the Beatitudes? It is the compassionate and the powerless who will liberate and inherit the Earth.

All Catholic bishops and cardinals now are surely done with Lording. The only possible future for the church is to suffer – i.e. to put up with – the vulnerability of its founder – Jesus of Nazareth – rather than ever again to seek – or to accept – a position of privilege and power.

What, seriously, were the chances that the conclave of 2025 would not be led, by prayer, to see the future of the church as Pope Francis so clearly saw it?

Sean O’Conaill
April and May 2025

On Exodus? From What?

February 26, 2024Abuse of Power, Articles, Hypocrisy, Status AnxietySean O'Conaill

“We are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value.”

So wrote Alain de Botton, philosopher, in 2004. His name for this affliction – status anxiety – is the title of an accessible book on the subject.¹ Outlining its role in Victorian snobbery, class conflict, consumerism, the idea of ‘meritocracy’ and many other things he makes a persuasive case for status anxiety as a pernicious source of unhappiness in all eras and cultures – but especially in the West today.

De Botton suggests also that religion, especially Christianity, might be a cure. Could this offer insight into our ongoing hesitation over ‘mission’, and maybe much more than that?

Status Anxiety in the Church

Take, for example, the ‘shock’ expressed by the late Cardinal Bernardin Gantin in 1999, for the rampant ‘social climbing’ of bishops who had looked to him, as a Vatican official, for transfer to ‘more prestigious’ dioceses.² If other Vatican officials were not prone to the same affliction would there have been a ‘Vati-leaks’ affair in 2012, or a papal retirement the following year?

[It is, of course, untrue that Irish parishes and dioceses are ranked in much the same way by Irish clergy, and that transfer to the least prestigious (poorest) parish or diocese is regarded as demotion – even if scurrilous rumours of this persist!]

Take also the embarrassment suffered now by sincere clergy over the plethora of questionable clerical titles such as ‘Monsignor’ (My Lord) or ‘Canon’. Would so many of those have been invented if ordination was an instant cure for the yearning for higher status?

Take then something far more pernicious – the practice by Irish bishops until 1994 of secrecy on clerical child sex abuse. When the bishops of Ireland admitted in December 2009 that this had arisen out of a desire to preserve ‘the reputations of individuals and of the Church’ were they not also admitting to the role of clerical status anxiety in the deepest church scandal of our time?³

The Crisis of Faith Formation

Why, finally, are Irish bishops so slow in getting to grips with what is now an existential problem for Irish Catholicism – described in the August 2022 national synodal report as ‘a crisis in the transmission of faith’?⁴ Why the failure, over decades, to conduct and publish research on the effectiveness of school-dependent faith formation – to get to the root of the indifference of so many baptised teenagers while still at school? Are we to believe there is no fear of further embarrassment by Irish campaigners against faith schools, on foot of any such research?

Could it be also that although now committed – at least on paper – to permanent synodal ‘mission’ we lack even a clear view of the ‘salvation’ from the ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ that the ‘Good News’ promises? Are we Irish Catholics largely inarticulate about our faith simply because we have failed to recognise that our own national history of imperial conquest and occupation has made us especially inclined to doubt our own value – i.e. to suffer from status anxiety – and embarrassed even to admit this to be an ‘affliction’ in need of a spiritual cure?

If the sixth commandment was especially emphasised in the past by Irish clergy was that because we could not see the repeated ban on covetousness in commandments nine and ten as a warning against desire for the higher status that our wealthy neighbours, secular or religious, might ‘show off’ in their possessions or titles? Has our inability to categorise status seeking as a spiritual problem – and often also our uncritical embracing of a ‘meritocratic’ ethos in our schools – been a huge beam in our discerning eye – an inability to focus something deeply problematic that was always in plain sight?

Have we even yet fully absorbed the meaning of the Catholic social principle that all of us, as children of God, are already strictly equal in dignity – and St Peter’s own mature conclusion that ‘God has no favourites’ (Acts 10:34)?

Could it even be that status anxiety is at the root of the ongoing reluctance of many priests to engage in fully committed synodal discussion?

On Exodus?

‘We are a people on Exodus,’ said Bishop Donal McKeown of Derry in 2016.⁵ This reminder of the association of the God of Israel, and of Jesus, with ‘redemption’ – i.e. with liberation from enslavement – surely prompts a critical question for faith formation today: From what enslavement is the Gospel offering us – the people of Ireland and the world – liberation today?

‘From the power of evil’ is surely true, but also far too abstract to be helpful. In what visible, real phenomena do we see that power of evil begin to work?

If we find that question baffling, could that be the root of our problem with articulating the ‘Good News’ to younger generations?

That Jesus of Nazareth, though born in poverty, was entirely free of status anxiety is a dominant theme of the Gospels. ‘Master, we know that you are an honest man and teach the way of God in all honesty, and that you are not afraid of anyone, because human rank means nothing to you,’ say those seeking to entrap him in political opposition to Rome (Matt 22:16). ‘Why do you eat with sinners?‘ is another frequent complaint (e.g. Luke 5:30).

‘Why do you worry about what you wear?’ Jesus asks in return (Matt 6:28). Berating the tendency of religious hypocrites to dress up to impress others was he not identifying their status anxiety as their core problem? (Matt 23:5)

Before the crisis of the crucifixion the apostles were also clearly trapped in deference to the honour pyramids of their world. ‘An argument also began between them about who should be reckoned the greatest.’ (Luke 22:28) James and John, the sons of Zebedee, looked for a promise of the highest places in Jesus’s future kingdom (Mark 10:35-45) – pointing to what lies at the root of all conflict. Then finally Jesus’ forecast of his own crucifixion – the fate of a rebellious slave – was for Peter an impossible prospect (Matt 16:22). As Jesus’ first lieutenant, how could he himself now escape ultimate social disaster?

So when Peter told Jesus that his crucifixion ‘must not happen’, and Jesus called him ‘Satan’, are we being told to look to Peter’s fear of shame – to his status anxiety – as the wellspring of all evil?

Overthrowing the Judgement of the World

“Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among. “

This for Alain de Botton is the self-imprisoning consequence of status anxiety. All seeking of the positive regard of others can follow only from the mistake of attributing to those others the authority to evaluate ourselves. Who can justly claim such authority?

When Jesus asked his critics why they looked only to one another for glory was he not nailing a mistake we all tend to make? When he assured his more attentive listeners that some Galileans recently slaughtered by Pilate were not worse sinners than anyone else was he not revealing that Jews of that time were drawing exactly that conclusion from Roman occupation and brutality – that this was a ‘thumbs down’ from their own God as well? (Luke 13:1-4)

‘Do not judge,’ insisted Jesus. The religious elites of his time, the pharisees and scribes, were inclined to do exactly that. An ability to memorise and deploy any of the 613 laws of Leviticus led naturally to hypocrisy and judgementalism – and therefore also to extreme status anxiety on the part of the poor and illiterate. Is not that what it was to be ‘poor in spirit’?

‘I have overcome the world,’ said Jesus in response to his own impending judgement (John 16:33). Did he not obviously mean that he had overcome the human tendency to internalise the criticism and judgement of others – including those at the summit of the honour pyramids of his own time, in both ‘church’ and state?

Saying this, has he not told us also the purpose of the crucifixion: to subvert our tendency to fear the judgement of others, a tendency that empowers all who are ready to exploit it – from schoolroom and workplace and media trolls to religious charlatans, globalising entrepreneurs, racist agitators and scandal-hungry journalists?

How could Jesus have challenged us to face, and to overcome, in prayer, our own fear of shame if he had not faced that same challenge?

That Jesus’ resurrection was for the first Christians liberation from the fear of being looked down upon, especially by Rome and by their own religious elites, is altogether plain in the detail and conviction of the New Testament texts. What else could St Paul have meant when he wrote of a ‘new creation’? (2 Cor 5:17)

And was not status anxiety – this human tendency to doubt our own value as we are – also the original human frailty attributed to Adam and Eve in the Genesis allegory? Do we need seriously to rethink what we mean by original sin?

Lying at the root of all social ambition was it not status anxiety that drove Alexander the Great, the Pharaohs and the Caesars? Is it not the wellspring of all modern imperialism, inequality, oppression and conflict – and now of the rampant desire to be media icons?

Deployed now by social media as a core strategy for making digital addicts even of children, is not the fostering of status anxiety – via the lottery of ‘going viral’ and ‘celebrity’ and ‘influence’ – the most pernicious of global plagues?

Is the Gospel truly irrelevant there, especially for the victims of all ages?

Salvation?

Jesus insisted: ‘whoever sees me sees the one who sent me‘ (John 12:45). Why then is Christianity, and Catholicism – and faith formation – still vexed by the medieval notion that the crucifixion of Jesus was demanded by a heavenly father who needed ‘satisfaction’ for the offence caused to him by sin? Why this attribution to God the Father of the same affliction of status anxiety that Adam and Eve – and medieval monarchs – had, when Jesus had no such problem?

The earliest Christians made no such charge. They clearly understood the passion and resurrection of Jesus in a totally different way: as liberation for themselves – by the Father – from fear of judgement and humiliation by the ‘principalities and powers’ of their own time (e.g. Rom 8:38).

Why should we not believe that the challenging and healing of status anxiety – essentially fear of shame from the negative judgement of others – was from the beginning the purpose of the Incarnation, the intention of the Trinity? When we say in the Creed that we believe in Jesus as final judge of ‘the living and the dead’ have we ‘relativised’ all other judges?

As for the Eucharist don’t we need to restore its meaning as a celebration of release from fear of the judgementalism of our own time, if we are to be joyfully ‘on Exodus’?

From what do we think we have we been liberated when we say:

‘Lord, by your cross and resurrection you have set us free.’ ?

As for the marginalised and the self-harming and the lonely – all those who are supposedly in need of our ‘mission’ – from what do they need liberation most of all? If we do not already know, why is that?

Notes

Status Anxiety, A de Botton, Penguin 2005
See Wikipedia article on Bernardin Gantin
Statement of the Winter 2009 Conference of Bishops in Ireland
Synthesis of the Consultation in Ireland for the Diocesan Stage of the Universal Synod 2021-23
‘Bishop Donal McKeown welcomes delegates to the European Laity Forum Study Assembly’, June 23, 2016 – Irish Catholic Bishops Conference website.

[This article appeared first in The Furrow (Maynooth) in January 2024.]

What is it to be Holy?

September 7, 2021Articles, Evangelisation, Formation, History, Holiness, Hypocrisy, Integrity, SpiritualityRecentSean O'Conaill

The Judean desert, where Jesus may have fasted and resisted temptation

What exactly is holiness? Will we know it when we see it? Is it attainable by anyone, or only by those who have made a lifelong commitment to the ‘religious’ or ‘consecrated’ life and to celibacy? How does holiness relate – if at all – to the secular virtue of integrity?

In The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond, Michael McGuckian SJ ¹provides essential historical background to the long debate on holiness in the Catholic Church and explains why complete agreement by Catholic bishops at Vatican II proved impossible to achieve. Arrested by this unexpected discovery, the author is currently busy on a sequel – not only to reinforce the call to all to ‘be perfect’ but to explain why no one should suppose that this calling is ever impossible for themselves, whatever their situation or time of life.

That all Catholics are called to holiness by Lumen Gentium (‘Light of Nations’ – a key document of Vatican II 1962-65) – is known at least vaguely to many of that generation and later. However, if asked to explain clearly what holiness is and how that call can best be answered, how many could confidently respond? If asked, perhaps scathingly, what the purpose or point of holiness could be now – by someone of a secular mindset – how many would be ‘up’ for that as well?

Necessarily the standard for holiness for all Christians was set by their founder, Jesus of Nazareth – and from the beginning those called by him to ‘follow’ and to ‘be perfect’ needed to discern how exactly to do that. Given that Jesus’s own ‘way’ was not simply one of poverty and celibacy but of exceptional risk, suffering and – in the end – catastrophe, was it even sensible to think of following all of that perfectly? If not, what ‘way’ would be best?

The greatest virtue of The Charismatic Structure of the Church is the copious evidence it provides for the conclusion that there has never been a time in the long history of the church when Christian ‘holiness’ was a settled question, with its meaning and practice harmoniously agreed by all who sought to follow and to teach.

To marry in uncertain times, or not?

The difficulty of the choice between the married and celibate states was an obvious one from the start, a choice made more problematic in the first century by uncertainty over how soon Jesus would return in glory, for the Final Judgement. St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians clearly reveals that this was an issue in his time (e.g. 1 Cor 7).

St Monica, Mother of St Augustine of Hippo

Those who opted for perpetual virginity in those early years set an example that proved durable down the centuries, but so did those who did not. From the latter came subsequently many Saints who then themselves became enthusiasts for virginity. A notable example is St Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century, who strongly advocated celibacy following his conversion. If his sainted mother Monica had been able to opt for virginity when of marriageable age, and had been so inclined, the medieval church would have been deprived unknowingly of one of its greatest luminaries.

The Monastic Model – and ‘Secular’ Clergy

Soon also there were those who decided that ‘following’ required a way of life that was separated entirely from the distracting and profligate ‘world’, and was lived within a separated community of like-minded ‘ascetics’. This ‘coenobitic’ option was the origin of monasticism.

And yet – especially after the early fourth century legalisation of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine – the diocesan successors of the apostles needed local parish ‘presbyters’ or clerics who would not live in a separated and dedicated community but in ‘the world’ among ordinary citizens. This was the origin of the ‘secular’ or ‘diocesan’ clergy – and for the first Christian millennium many of the latter lived married rather than virginal lives.

It followed, then, that from an early stage there could and would be strong differences of opinion on how best to follow Jesus faithfully. Where St John Chrysostom (347-407) would insist that none of the baptised should feel unable to follow the Lord faithfully, others took Jesus’s solitary and debatable reference to ‘eunuchs’ (Matt 19: 11-12) as an injunction to lifelong celibacy. That inevitably consigned the married state to the relative disapproval of many of those who chose that option.

We are the Holiest

The question of who was the holiest became even more unsettled with the arrival of the mendicant orders – e.g. the Franciscans and Dominicans – in the 1200s. Given a universal missionary mandate by the pope, they inevitably came into conflict with the hierarchical claim of diocesan bishops – that even the monks and friars should consider themselves subordinate to themselves in the scale of holiness – since ‘perfection’ was a distinctive ‘sign’ or attribute of the bishop’s apostolic office.

When the Dominican friar St Thomas Aquinas disagreed and prioritised three ‘evangelical counsels’ – of poverty, chastity (i.e. celibacy) and obedience, as a ‘holocaust’ or total consecration of the person to God (1256), he was therefore setting this ascetic option up in opposition to any association of a superior holiness with the hierarchical principle – and a centuries-long disagreement between ‘secular clergy’ and ‘religious’ ensued.

That such tensions could exist between ‘regular’ clergy (those who belong to religious orders whose members are bound to a founder’s ‘rule of life’) and ‘secular’ clergy (those directly under the authority of a diocesan bishop) will astonish those lay Catholics who may fondly have supposed that no historic disharmony could ever have intruded into the equally edifying holiness of all of their ordained ministers.

Vatican II – Same Old Same Old

However, many will be even more mind-boggled to learn that this same dispute was to surface – 800 years later – at Vatican II (1962-65).

Whereas there was strong support among many bishops at the council for an emphatic statement in Lumen Gentium that regular clergy, secular clergy and laity (married or unmarried) were equally called to and capable of manifesting the same holiness (by God’s grace), a powerful lobby for the manifest superior claim of the evangelical counsels was eventually successful in frustrating that aim.

Two consequences followed: not only does Chapter 5 of Lumen Gentium (‘The Universal Call to Holiness in the Church’) lack the insistence that all of the baptised are called to the same holiness, but immediately following, in a separate chapter entitled ‘Religious‘, there is an assertion of the superior claim to holiness for the following of the evangelical counsels, including celibacy.

As a result, while Chapter 5 of Lumen Gentium stresses that all in the church are called to holiness, Chapter 6 of the same document insists that the evangelical counsels of poverty, celibacy and obedience ‘are based upon the words and examples of the Lord’. Furthermore, this ‘religious state whose purpose is to free its members from earthly cares, more fully manifests to all believers the presence of heavenly goods already possessed here below’. (44)

That marriage and the nurturing and the safeguarding of children are thereby declared ‘earthly cares’ that are inherently less capable of ‘manifesting the presence of heavenly goods’ (i.e. of holiness) will baffle lay Catholics today, especially in light of the revelations of the last three decades. Global church events since the 1980s have raised the most serious questions over any claim to a moral or spiritual superiority for any chosen ‘state of life’ or hierarchical office – up to and including the office of pope. Jesus’s most solemn adjurations re the protection of the innocence of children have had a new and shocking impact. Pope Francis’s frank and welcome admission that he too is a sinner – and has also made mistakes in handling clerical child abuse – provides a postscript to Lumen Gentium Chapter 6 that underlines its shortcomings.

An Unsatisfactory Confusion

Michael McGuckian therefore concludes that at present the church’s formal teaching position on holiness is ambivalent and unsatisfactory. Whereas all are called to holiness by Lumen Gentium, this is not clearly – in this important document – the same call to the same holiness. By implication the holiness to which lay people can aspire can only be, at best, the avoidance of serious sin. Those bishops who insisted on the insertion of Chapter 6 into Lumen Gentium could not agree to the use of the phrase ‘same holiness’ in any part of the document other than article 39 – where it clearly refers only to those who observe the evangelical counsels. Subsequent magisterial treatments of holiness – e.g. Vita Consecrata by St John Paul II (1996) – have not resolved this problem either, in his view.

Can we avoid the conclusion that the recruitment crisis for the celibate priesthood is still preventing a full and unequivocal acknowledgement of the equal call to, and potential for, holiness of the unordained and non-celibate majority of the baptised people of God?

In light of this situation, and the hovering threat of the Vatican watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, what Catholic evangelist today would take on to preach on the meaning of holiness for lay people – especially in the wake of the revelation that, apparently, integrity – so emphatically modelled for us by Jesus – was never a consideration or an issue at Vatican II when holiness was under discussion?

Are Christian holiness and Christian love the same?

In a subsequent recorded interview Michael McGuckian promotes a persuasive solution to the problem of defining holiness: we should look to the Great Commandments of love of God above all, and of neighbour as oneself – the Shema Israel still recited and sung by observant Jews today and reiterated by Jesus (eg. In Matt 22: 37-40). We should look also to Jesus’s own new commandment in John 13:34 – to love one another as he has loved us. These, Michael insists, are a non-postponeable and binding call to be perfect in love – a call that can be heard and obeyed at any stage of life – or in any state of life – by any of the baptised without distinction.

On discovering that St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas had agreed that these Great Commandments of Jesus and the Torah were not real commandments – because they demand an unattainable perfection – Michael McGuckian was unimpressed and unconvinced, and is now bent on explaining why.

If anyone else has ever wondered why, in the wake of Vatican II, no Irish bishop ever convened his people of God to consider together how they could ‘consecrate the world to God’ (Lumen Gentium 34), this book will greatly help to explain all that. It has not only addressed most of my own questions on holiness, but given me an invaluable historical overview of the issue. My only slight complaint relates to its title. While ‘The Charismatic Structure of the Church’ may signal the book’s content clearly to experts on church structure, something like ‘Holiness? A History of Disagreement’ would have made it a ‘must read’ for me as soon as it was launched in April 2021.

It must surely be seen also now that the citation out of context of Matthew 19:12 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Article 1579) – the sole reference by Jesus to celibacy in the Gospels – is a scandalous leaning on the scales in the cause of making celibacy a necessary condition of ordination. That Gospel context was a discussion of Jesus’s teaching against easy divorce, a teaching that was obviously also ‘for the sake of the kingdom of God’. In light of the known contemporary Jewish expectation that religious men would marry, by far the most sensible inference to be drawn from Jesus’s subsequent reference to eunuchs is that celibacy could also serve the kingdom, not that it would better or would best serve the kingdom.

Holiness and Integrity

This needs especially to be said at this time, in light of the global revelation that priestly celibacy can as readily be a matter of mere appearances as of fact. Here Jesus’s denunciations of hypocrisy – of seeking to be regarded as holy – have not yet received the attention they deserve (e.g. Matt 6:1-6). That unknown multitudes of innocent children and vulnerable adults have suffered lifelong agonies as a consequence is now indisputable, and the cost of centuries of concealment of this reality has not yet been fully acknowledged and redressed.

We can therefore anticipate that in his next book – on that same subject – Michael McGuckian will be citing Jesus’s story of the equal reward given to the latecomers in the vineyard to question any claim that any office or chosen state of life can entitle anyone to a superior expectation of ‘the treasure hidden in the field’. We can also hope that the critical importance of integrity – the conformity of behaviour with what is vowed and professed, or is implied by any church role or office – will be emphasised.

The ancient belief that personal holiness must come automatically with the conferring of any particular office, even that of bishop, must surely also be finally rejected. Here Lord Acton’s comment on the danger of attributing holiness to a person solely on account of that person’s role or official status has too long been ignored: ‘There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.’²

**Can disobedience be holy?**

Also – in regard to the virtue of obedience – that a good conscience can oblige anyone to disobey a religious superior needs now also to be emphasised – since everyone understands now that unholy obedience was also a major factor in the global tide of recent scandal. Why, for so long, was Jesus’s courage in challenging the Jewish religious hierarchies of his own time never seen as a distinctive mark of his sanctity? That a fetish for lace-laden clerical attire could be preferred as a sign of holiness in the long era of clericalist illusion will forever be remembered.

The canonisation of the Australian Saint Mary McKillop in 2010 is conclusive proof of the need to qualify the elevation of obedience as a requirement for holiness. Personally pilloried for her calling out of a clerical abuser in Australia, the cross of excommunication she was obliged to carry in 1871 is a dire warning against a pernicious religious authoritarianism – the expectation of deference in all circumstances by a religious superior.

Finally, the ongoing promotion of the ‘domestic church’ to an indispensable role in the faith formation of adults as well as children has its own logic. If parents and grandparents are truly to have the primary responsibility for encouraging and guiding the faith development of their children, must this not be recognised as a call to a sacred role and a holy task, modelled on the example of the Holy Family? That we should still be so distant from a full and unequivocal recognition of the same call to every baptised person – to respond sincerely to the greatest commandments of integrity and love in whatever space we currently occupy – speaks loudly for the timeliness of this book.

Notes

The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond, Michael McGuckian SJ, Xlibris US, 2021
Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, 1887

Sean O’Conaill, 19th August 2021
(This article first appeared on the website of the Association of Catholics in Ireland)

Why the Show mustn’t go on

September 7, 2008Articles, Clericalism, Eucharist, Hypocrisy, Media, Secularism, Simulation, VanityAbuse, Andrew Madden, Bishops, clergy, Clericalism, Conflict, Courage, Cover Up, crash, evil, Good, Hope, Humanae Vitae, Humility, loyalty, Myth, vanityseanoconaill

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine and Life Sep 2008

I still vividly remember my first experience of live Shakespeare. Sometime in the late 1950s Anew McMaster took note of the reappearance of Macbeth on the Irish Leaving Cert English Syllabus – and produced the Scottish play in the old Olympia theatre in Dublin, with himself in the title role.

Never can that renowned actor have been more challenged by a defiant refusal to suspend disbelief than on the day I attended. Hungry for every histrionic slip, hundreds of us teenage Shakespeare detesters had been crammed by school decree into an already dingy theatre. McMaster gave us early encouragement by pausing to remove wads of very heavy red beard that were impeding his vocal freedom. Our joy became complete when, at a later stage, a youthful bearer of bad tidings rushed on a little too enthusiastically, slipped in coming to a necessary halt, and crashed to the floor in a perfect pratfall at the feet of the king.

Our sincere applause resounded far longer than the same baleful king thought warranted. We wanted an encore, and were deeply disappointed when we didn’t get it. Macbeth’s final ordeal at Birnam Wood was almost matched in its horror by our indifference to this honest actor’s unstinted efforts to re-create it. We thought, with all the savagery of adolescence, that he thoroughly deserved both his quietus and our cheers of relief when the whole performance was finally over.

I recall this theatrical debacle just now because I have a strong sense that I am observing another : the collapse of the theatre of Catholic clericalism in Ireland. Here we have another show that becomes far more embarrassing the longer it goes on.

I hope I am not being cruel here also. I know humble men aplenty struggling to maintain the integrity of the church, and giving splendid Christian service in so doing. But they too have a need for the truth to be spoken. A way of being Church that has always had far too much too much to do with maintaining an illusion has been exposed as unsustainable, and needs to be given a decent and explicit burial. So long as we were never fully conscious of its illusionary nature we could not strictly be accused of hypocrisy. Made conscious of it recently, we are all now open to that charge.

I finally reached this conclusion when watching the recent documentary film ‘The Holy Show’. This detailed the private life of the late Fr Michael Cleary. While maintaining a public persona of exemplary rectitude, this nationally celebrated priest seduced a very vulnerable young woman who had come to him for spiritual support. He then ‘married’ her in an entirely secret ceremony, and conceived a son by her whom he could never publicly acknowledge.

Meanwhile, with monumental irony, he had become a troubleshooter in great demand by the hierarchy to defend on national media the church’s sexual code – exemplified by the encyclical Humanae Vitae. He climaxed this career by welcoming Pope John Paul II to a televised outdoor spectacle in Galway in 1979. (The fact that another of that day’s personalities, Bishop Eamon Casey, was exposed in 1992 for also having secretly fathered a son will always be remembered in connection with that day.)

The Holy Show clearly identified Cleary’s central weakness: his very celebrity was the greatest obstacle to his owning up to his own fallibility – and his wife and child suffered the worst of the consequences of that failure. The more celebrated he became the more reputation he had to lose. His greatest sin was therefore his vanity – his inability to lose public admiration by admitting his sexual indiscretion.

Inevitably I will be accused of generalising from these particular instances to indict clergy generally – but that is not in fact my drift. Knowing clerics who live lives of exemplary humility I point only to the danger of the illusion of clericalism, which rests upon a myth. This is the myth that ordination somehow magically confers virtue upon those who receive it. That many, many Irish Catholics had bought heavily into that myth was proven by the shock of the truth, a shock that still reverberates and has still not been fully absorbed.

The very architecture of Catholicism, focused upon a liturgical space designed for priestly ritual, facilitates myth and illusion in relation to clergy. Andrew Madden recounts in his autobiography ‘Altar Boy’ the impression made on his young mind by the appearance of the priest in the sanctuary of a Dublin church: “The people stood up because the priest was so holy and important…”. This explained Andrew’s own early desire to be a priest – the very desire that made him vulnerable to his priest abuser in a Dublin parish. “Neighbours, friends and others got to see me with the priest up close. I felt good.”

Historians interested in explaining extraordinary Mass attendance in Ireland as late as the 1970s, and our full seminaries then, should reflect upon the fact that most of Ireland was relatively starved of public spectacle before the coming of national TV in 1961. The parish church filled this gap for many people, providing the stage for the man who was usually the most important local celebrity – the priest.

And what most differentiated the lifestyle of the priest was the fact that he was celibate. And that he had an officially recognized role in identifying, decrying (and relieving the eternal consequences of) sexual sin. Every adolescent learned that this was the sin most offensive to God, and the sin that the priest had somehow, apparently, overcome. No one told us that the public role of the priest could be a temptation to another sin entirely: the actor’s sin, the sin of vanity, the coveting of public admiration. Needless to say, we were therefore unaware of its dangers for us also.

TV provided a far vaster national stage, and the story of Ireland since about 1961 is largely the story of how that electronic stage has replaced liturgical space as the dominant Irish theatre. It has also become the dominant temptation to our vanity. That in turn explains how Eamon Casey and Michael Cleary became national celebrities. From 1961 – entirely innocent of the dangers of the first of the deadly sins – the Irish church was sleepwalking towards the PR disasters that have traumatized it since 1992.

What happened to Andrew Madden well illustrates another of those PR disasters – the revelation not just of clerical child abuse but of the typical cover up of that abuse by bishops and other clergy. (The most serious charge levelled against Michael Cleary is the allegation by Mary Raftery that he turned a blind eye to the brutal abuse by a fellow curate in Ballyfermot, Tony Walsh, of young boys.)

The papal visit to the US in April 2008 has made important progress in recognizing the seriousness of the evil of clerical sex abuse but has failed completely to grapple with the reason for the cover up: the perceived need of bishops and other clergy to maintain the clerical myth – the myth of clerical immunity to sexual sin. With this clericalist myth, vanity has become virtually institutionalized in our church – the reason it still cannot be named as the root cause of every scandal that has befallen us since 1992.

For scandal is not just the revelation of human sinfulness. Sin itself is mundane. The archetypal religious scandal is the story of David, the divinely anointed Jewish national hero who covertly murdered Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, the woman he had seduced – to prevent it becoming known that he, David, had impregnated her. Scandal has always to do with a fall from grace by those in high places, and clericalism is essentially an unwarranted claim of entitlement to grace and social prestige. Until that has been fully recognized and acknowledged by those who lead the church, we will not be able to learn from what has happened to us. We will also remain troubled by periodic clerical scandal, especially if the mandatory celibacy rule for all priests is retained.

These days the Irish church is deeply divided between those who have lost the illusions of clericalism and those who believe that Catholic loyalty requires them to restore those illusions as rapidly as possible. The latter make that mistake because our leadership has not yet clearly differentiated Catholicism and clericalism. We will remain stuck in the ditch, spinning our wheels, until that changes.

In an earlier article here I pointed out that the ritual of the first Eucharist derived its solemnity and liturgical meaning only from the fact that it was followed by an actual self-sacrifice¹.We must never forget that all ritual is, to use a contemporary idiom, virtual reality – just like theatre. The integrity of the ceremony rests upon the integrity of those who celebrate it – priests and people. Clearly, ordination in itself cannot guarantee that integrity. This too needs now to be fully acknowledged – as does the fact that the public role of the cleric can entangle him deeply in the sin of vanity, the greatest threat to all integrity. On the credit side, the self-effacing and dutiful priest, and those married couples who fulfil all the obligations of a sexual partnership, restore the credibility of the church.

So, instead of lamenting the loss of an illusion we need to rejoice at it, and to notice that the vanity that led to it lies also at the root of the greatest evils that threaten everyone’s future. Vanity arises out of an inability to value ourselves without validation from others. That is why we seek attributed value through public admiration, and pursue the latter through exhibitionism, the cult of celebrity and ostentatious consumerism. This latter source of the environmental crisis is also the root of competition and conflict – and lack of a secure self-esteem lies also at the root of addiction.

‘Hard’ secularism – the kind that thinks that suppressing all religion will create a perfect society – doesn’t understand any of this. This is why it can’t explain the failure of untrammeled secularism (e.g, in the Soviet Union) to put an end to personality cults and to produce a perfect society. Meeting the challenge of secularism requires us to recognize fully the deadliest of the sins as it tempts ourselves in our own time. If we don’t do that now we will be guilty of something else – of choosing to learn nothing from the hardest and most helpful lessons we ourselves have recently received.

Notes:

The Role of the Priest: Sacrifice or Self-Sacrifice?, Doctrine and Life, Sep 2007

Catholic Schools: why they are not maintaining the faith

June 21, 2007Adult Faith Formation, Articles, Clericalism, Education, Faith, Holy Spirit, Hypocrisy, SchoolsAquinas, Cahal Daly, clergy, Clericalism, Commitment, Courage, Dialogue, Donal McKeown, Good, Jesus, reform, Vatican IIseanoconaill

“This will spell the end of Catholicism as a taught programme for good.”

That was one published reaction to recent news of pending inter-faith schools in Northern Ireland. A senior priest in Tyrone has publicly challenged Down and Connor Auxiliary Bishop Donal McKeown for supporting the idea.

But for Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas, nothing is ever taught until something has been deeply learned. This is the principle known to Catholic thought as reception. By contrast, according to a recent poll organised from Dublin, only one in twenty young people on the island can identify the first of the Ten Commandments, and most cannot even name the Blessed Trinity. A clear majority of those young people are products of Catholic schools.

The virtually total absence of young people in the age range 15-35 from Sunday Mass in most of the country tells the same story. So does the experience of Catholic chaplains in our universities – to whom only a small minority of nominally Catholic students ever introduce themselves. What was assiduously presented in Catholic schools over the past several decades was in most cases not received – certainly not at a depth that could retain key doctrine or maintain a lifetime’s interest or commitment from then on.

It is high time that all involved in Catholic education face up to this, and ask a fundamental question. Why should we ever have supposed that Catholic formation could effectively be confined to the years of childhood – the years before childhood faith is tested by further education, secularist challenge, adult trials and adult questions? Why should we ever have thought that greenhousing our children could educate and perpetuate our church?

The ‘Pleasing Surface’ of Conformism

The answer was provided in 2002 by Cardinal Cahal Daly at a conference in Maynooth. Commenting on the phenomenon of over 90% Mass observance in Ireland until recent decades he observed that beneath “the pleasing surface” of those times there had been “dangers of conformism and routine” and even “sometimes hypocrisy, with people, for reasons of expediency, professing in public views which they rejected in private discussion or contradicted in private behaviour”.

No one is more ready to conform than a child. Catholic religious education as presently managed depends almost entirely upon the compliance of children. This explains not only why Catholic children conform to the Catholic faith norms of their schools, but why they then so quickly conform to the secular faith norms of their society when they leave school.

People of strong faith are never mere conformists: they have been encouraged to ask their own deepest questions, and to find their own faith, in freedom – and this is an adult affair. There is no scriptural evidence that Jesus spent any time instructing children. The virtually complete indifference to adult Catholic faith formation in Ireland (usually a small minority option for the well heeled) has been a tragic miscalculation. That miscalculation occurred because clericalism mistakenly supposed that to educate the child was to educate the adult as well.

It was the mass conformism of Irish Catholicism in the 1960s that misled the Irish Catholic hierarchy into supposing that the reforms of Vatican II weren’t needed in Ireland. These invited lay people to leave the passivity of childhood faith and to adopt an adult role, based upon a theology of church as ‘the people of God’. An era of dialogue and learning at all levels was supposed to ensue.

It never truly did in Ireland. Clericalism – the tendency of too many clergy to prefer the passive compliance of their people – continued to dominate. Clericalism is uncomfortable with dialogue, because dialogue presumes that people will relate as adults. Valuing conformity and docility above all other virtues, clericalism prefers lay people to remain children forever.

So, the huge efforts of well educated teachers to instruct Catholic children in the theology of Vatican II were unsupported by an adult programme that would have allowed the parents of those children to understand and reinforce that theology. A huge gulf developed between the generations. Passive parents, expected to ‘pay, pray and obey’ could not inspire their children with enthusiasm for the same passive role. It is the anticipation of responsibility that primarily motivates learning, and clericalism leaves lay people – parents included – without any real responsibility.

So children whose teachers told them that at Confirmation they became ‘Temples of the Holy Spirit’ soon found that, strangely, they would never have an adult speaking role in their own church. Clericalism insists that ordination trumps all the other sacraments, leaving nothing for lay people to discover or to say.

How then could those children ever rise to the challenge posed by Vatican II to the laity – to ‘consecrate the world to God’? Their parents had never been invited to discuss as adults what that might mean – and their bishops showed no sign of inviting their own generations to do so. So what were we ever educating our children for? The answer was shown in the failure even to develop parish or diocesan pastoral councils in most cases: for perpetual Catholic childhood. No wonder so many former Catholics in Ireland say: “I have outgrown all of that!”

A radical crisis of continuity now obliges Irish Catholics to completely rethink and reorganise our faith formation system. It is time to refocus that upon adult needs and adult questions, to discover as adults how to be church together – priests and people – and to make parents once more the chief religious educators of their children – while there is still time.

A reflexive resistance to any change – in defence of the failed totem of the segregated Catholic school system – is not the answer. To go on supposing that to instruct the child is also to educate the adult would be to deny a mountain of evidence to the contrary, and to guarantee the disappearance of our Irish Catholic tradition.

Is Human Consciousness Evolving?

April 5, 2005Articles, Christology, Cosmology, Ecology, Enlightenment, Evolution, Hierarchy, Hypocrisy, Psychology, Review, Science, Theology, VanityCopernicus, cosmology, Darwin, Einstein, Galileo, Jesusseanoconaill

A ‘paradigm shift’ is a radical discontinuity in the way in which we humans structure our mental picture of reality. Perhaps the most dramatic example was the impact of the new cosmologies of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton upon the late 17th, but more especially the 18th, century. The educated classes of Europe were by then faced with the indisputable reality that the earth was not the centre of the universe, and that universal laws of gravitation and motion governed the relationships of all heavenly bodies. Writing about 1730, Alexander Pope declared that before Newton:

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

But, as this quotation also illustrates, this particular paradigm shift did far more than provide a new cosmology. It created both a new intelligentsia, based upon secular scientific and technical expertise, and a new interpretation of history. Christian theologians and philosophers lost their pre-eminent intellectual status, and ‘salvation’ ceased to be the dominant historical theme. All at once the intellectual life of Europe became focused upon the belief that history was not static or cyclical but linear – moving especially from darkness into light, led not by the churches but by secular science. The possibility of total enlightenment took hold of the educated imagination, and the modern age had arrived.

Since then there has been a succession of lesser intellectual ‘paradigm shifts’. The theory of evolution provided by Darwin in 1859 is one such, and Einstein’s theories of Relativity in the early 20th century another. These revolutionised Biology and Physics respectively. In the course of the same century, Freudian psychology completely changed our perception of human sexuality. The impacts of quantum physics and ‘big bang’ cosmology are ongoing. The process of globalisation, begun by European voyages of exploration in the 1400s, has recently accelerated with the arrival of cheap air travel, globally mobile capital, and the Internet. This process has intermingled all cultures and faiths, laying siege to the certitudes of the past.

The Enlightenment Did Not Bring Utopia

However, the optimistic belief of the early Enlightenment that human reason could easily construct a perfect world suffered a series of shattering reverses. These began with ‘The Terror’, the orgy of blood-letting that followed the French Revolution of 1789, giving us the new and still indispensable word ‘terrorism’. Two world wars and the Holocaust had a similar impact in the 20th century. So did the ignominious failure of the Soviet Marxist system in the recent past.

The possibility of total enlightenment has also receded for many intellectuals. ‘Post-modernism’, born to some extent out of disappointment that secular utopianism led more often to hell than to heaven, now insists that we are fundamentally unable to escape from our own subjectivity: all paradigms are purely mental and therefore fictive, so (it is argued) we can never create solid intellectual foundations for our own convictions. All we have is a multiplicity of ‘stories’, no one of them capable of claiming superiority to any other.

The question of what happens to God in all of this is of critical importance for all religions. The notion that our perception of God might also require a ‘paradigm shift’ has alarmed some and enthused others. Among the latter, Anglican Bishop John Robinson of ‘Honest to God‘ fame in the 1960s stands out. Arguing that we can no longer believe in a ‘God out there’ he has influenced many in a search for ‘God within’. Among these in our own time are the Episcopalian Bishop John Spong, who has in turn influenced, among many others, Church of Ireland Canon Hilary Wakeman, whose book ‘Saving Christianity‘ I reviewed here recently.

Changing Perceptions of God?

Adrian B Smith’s The God Shift¹ is a continuation of the same theme, but this time by a Catholic priest. Beginning with the observation that many are now abandoning religion and embracing ‘spirituality’ he argues that a number of factors now tend towards a profound shift in the human perception of God. This paragraph is typical:

“It is my contention … that … for too long we have overemphasised the transcendence of God at the expense of appreciating God as immanent. The former causes us to think of God as aloof from creation and ourselves as miserable sinners seeking to placate a father-God or to win the love of a tolerant God. To restore the balance by emphasising more the immanence of God will enable us to appreciate that spark of divine life within all people and cause us to treat the natural world not as a dead, soulless machine existing purely for our use but as a reflection of its creator. The lack of this sense of the Divine within ourselves causes us to lack self-esteem and seek our self-worth instead in our role in society, our possessions, our personal achievements and our sense of superiority over others. Happily, we can recognise in some current trends – the feminist, ecological and human rights movements – a reawakening to the immanence of God.”

He places approaches to Christology within a similar progressive framework, arguing that there has been a shift from ‘Top Down’ to ‘Bottom Up’ approaches, presenting these as contrasting syllogisms:

Christology from above:

God is like this and this.
Jesus is God.
Therefore Jesus is like this and this.

Christology from below:

Jesus is like this and this.
Jesus is the icon of God.
Therefore God is like this and this.

The New Physics

For someone like myself, not well grounded in theology, but strongly inclined towards a Christology from below, this sort of thing is interesting and useful. So is the account of the new physics, in which the conceptual frontiers between matter and energy tend to dissipate. That matter appears to be – to put it crudely – compressed energy – or rather energy behaving in a remarkable way to provide the visible world with its apparently stable atoms and molecules – is a profound shock to a simplistic perception of reality. So is the revelation that it is the relationships between sub-atomic particles that provide this stability, not the particles themselves. Matter is not a hard and simple reality but a profound mystery in itself.

Similarly, the book’s account of the emergence of ecology, establishing the interconnectedness of all life, is useful. So is the summary of the collision between the world’s great religions and the discernment that all speak of love as the highest virtue.

I was particularly struck also by the author’s perception that human hierarchies are a barrier to spiritual development, and that Jesus of Nazareth clearly lived within a non-hierarchical spiritual paradigm. This I believe to be profoundly true, and the root source of the attraction to Jesus that we find in the humblest people. It is true also that people grow and learn far more easily in a non-hierarchical context, and that this realisation appears to be a significant feature of our era.

An Evolution in Consciousness?

However, does all of this mean that we humans are undergoing some kind of rapid and beneficent species evolution, an evolution in consciousness? One gathers as much from the following:

“The development of our consciousness is precisely what is new. The leap we took out of the mythical Eden from subconsciousness to self-consciousness is now being followed by a further leap to super-consciousness. We are evolving from a physical to a metaphysical vision of reality. From viewing our world as purely physical, as scientists and western religions have done, we are beginning to appreciate the presence of consciousness in all matter. The “Gaia Hypothesis” of James Lovelock that planet Earth is a single, living, self-regulating organism – is witness to this. We are moving beyond the limitations of our rational minds, beyond what we learn through our five senses, beyond the boundaries of space and time, to the exploration of inner, deeper realms. We are stretching the boundaries of our consciousness. It is at this point in our history that we are moving beyond our physical potential to explore our spiritual potential.”

In the week I first read this paragraph I learned also that suicide bombers had taken a further toll in Iraq; that two teenagers in every classroom in these islands may be self-harming due to loss of self-esteem; that a fifteen-year-old had taken her own life in Belfast, following the suicide of her boyfriend – which had in turn been caused by the killing of his sister in a ‘hit-and-run’ accident; that Arab militias in Darfur were still burning African Sudanese alive – and that the consumption of fossil fuels had reached levels that OPEC could not meet due to problems caused in the Soviet Union by a struggle for power between the industrial oligarchs and President Putin.

Most Russian young people (we learned in the same week) admire those same moneyed oligarchs almost as much as rock stars, despite their virtually certain involvement in the murder of at least fifteen journalists in Russia since 2000 – journalists who have had the temerity to investigate their links with political corruption and organised crime.

Meanwhile the world’s most powerful republic was focused upon a different struggle for power between two highly moneyed patricians – a struggle that seemed oblivious to the environmental catastrophe that is already making densely populated but low-lying portions of the earth’s surface uninhabitable (e.g. the Maldives). This was confirmed by news from Greenland in the previous week that the arctic ice sheet is diminishing at an unprecedented rate.

And the news that many millions in China now aspire to an SUV (the ubiquitous, ridiculous, dangerous and environmentally indefensible ‘off road’ vehicle now preferred for ferrying children everywhere) was hardly cause for celebration either.

Who is becoming ‘Super-Conscious’?

So who exactly, I wondered, are the ‘we’ who have leapt to ‘super-consciousness’? Clearly it is not a majority of the human population. And if it is only a small minority of intellectuals, is the ‘we’ justified in anything other than self-congratulatory terms? Is it anything more than a repetition of the New Age rhetorical claim to era-superiority that we have been hearing, without any real justification, for decades?

Certainly it is possible for individual humans to develop greater insight and maturity – and a deep sense of God within – over a lifetime – but this has been happening to individuals for thousands of years. What characterised all of them was a realisation of the futility of most human desires, and a valuing of simplicity. Three distinctive marks of our age are, on the contrary, an elevation of desire itself to the status of supreme cultural and economic good, an infatuation with consumption and novelty, and an increasing violence.

I say this not because I am out of sympathy with my own era, and stuck in some mistakenly idealised past, but because I cannot ignore the fact that the data I receive from news streams daily is presenting me with an almost total contradiction to Adrian Smith’s optimistic claims. Humans in the aggregate are as far as ever from the super-consciousness that he claims to be the distinctive feature of the age. The pressure of an extremely doubtful future may be forcing increasing numbers to seek a deeper spirituality – but this has happened often in the past and simply cannot justify a claim that ‘we’ (i.e. the race) are undergoing some kind of evolutionary shift into ‘super-consciousness’.

Although ‘The God Shift’ is therefore a useful overview of some encouraging scientific and cultural developments, as well as a highly readable example of its genre, it is lamentably superficial in its understanding of the weaknesses that still afflict us. For example, the author admits that he doesn’t understand why humans build hierarchies – wondering, without much conviction, if these might originate in the need to overcome gravity!

Self-Consciousness and Status Anxiety

This is especially telling in the context of his conviction that the human arrival at self-consciousness, as recorded in Genesis, was an unalloyed good. It was indeed an evolutionary event of enormous importance – and inseparable from our human nature – but it had profoundly problematic consequences. Self-consciousness involves a critical awareness that others are conscious of us – and it is only then that we develop a dangerous desire to be highly-regarded. That is precisely why the self-conscious teen female is often currently aspiring to a breast implant.

That kind of self-regarding desire explains everything from conspicuous consumption to personality cults to mimetic rivalry, celebrity, power-seeking and violence – and human hierarchy arises easily out of all of these. Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced, of course, ‘Bouquet’) illustrates the point weekly on pop TV: it is precisely because she is self-conscious that she wishes to collect prestige china and rub shoulders with England’s aristocracy. Tony Blair’s meritocratic makeover of the British Labour party bears a similar explanation. (There is no more self-conscious politician on the planet.)

Self-Consciousness and Hypocrisy

For the same reason, self-consciousness explains the spiritual problem identified by Thomas Merton as the construction of the ‘false self’ – the problem identified by Jesus as hypocrisy. The original hypocrite was just a Greek actor, who, significantly, wore a mask. Modern culture provides an unprecedented variety of masks designed to flatter the wearer, and some of these are fashioned by a New Age ideology that has yet to recognise that human culture is still grounded not in super-consciousness but in mindless and deeply destructive imitation of one another.

It is self-consciousness also that explains the individual’s fear of opposing the crowd, and thus the mindlessness and danger of the crowd itself – and mob-violence, and, incidentally, the crucifixion.

It is remarkable that the ‘super-consciousness’ claimed in this book does not include an understanding of the connections between human self-consciousness, human vanity, human hierarchy, human hypocrisy and human violence. Especially when some of the available literature so well explains all of this.

Mimetic Desire and Violence

Scanning the reading lists that followed each chapter of this book I noticed a very striking absence of any reference to the work done on mimetic desire and violence by the Girard school. As this is profoundly illuminative of the Gospel texts, as well as modern consumerist culture, and as Girard has been publishing since the 1970s, I am at a loss to understand it – especially because Girard’s work provides every reason for optimism in the project of making a non-fundamentalist Christianity relevant to post-modernity.

The gathering human crisis will soon oblige people to grow rapidly in spiritual wisdom if the species is not to destroy itself in competition for declining fossil fuel resources. The message that they have already reached ‘super-consciousness’ is, like the first reports of Mark Twain’s death, premature. It is also strikingly similar to the flattery that this year’s presidential contenders feel obliged to heap upon ‘the great American people’.

And it is therefore, like all flattery, a profound mistake. Every one of us does indeed need to ‘evolve’ – but we must all begin with a radical honesty about our current temptations and failings. These are essentially identical to the spiritual shortcomings of our species from the beginning. Nothing could be more spiritually dangerous for an intellectual today than the conviction that he, or she, has become ‘super-conscious’. The correct name for this notion is spiritual inflation.

Other paradigm shifts notwithstanding, so long as vanity remains a human constant, we humans will remain trapped in that paradigm, and in the negative consequences of self-consciousness. Our cosmologies may change, but we will show-off nevertheless (perhaps with a lecture on cosmology). Vanity in 2004 is as pervasive as the SUV, the plasma-screen TV and the cosmetics industry, and global terrorism is born of frustrated envy of those who can afford all of these.

Super-consciousness, when it arrives, will be conscious of that to begin with.

Notes

The God Shift: Our Changing Perception of the Ultimate Mystery, Adrian B Smith, Liffey Press, Dublin 2004