Jesus Rescues the Accused Woman [John 8:1-11] by Lucas Cranach – (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Telepathy (from Ancient Greek τῆλε (têle) ‘distant’ and πάθος/-πάθεια (páthos/-pátheia) ‘feeling’).
No man-made machine will ever match the greatest human gift. Given true humility – the under-appreciated reward of all suffering – we humans can and docommunicate (spiritually, emotionally and intellectually) – with the mysterious source of all that exists – and all that has still to happen.
This is the evolutionary destiny of humankind – communion with our Source, and then – lovingly – with one another. It is a gift that comes with humility – which comes, in turn, from disaster – often the inevitable consequence of what we tend to call ‘success’.
The current triumphalist hype over computerised artificial intelligence – ‘AI’ – is certain to prove hollow. While often helpful, AI will also mislead and deceive, especially by flattery – and far too much is expected of it (especially in the role of ‘friend’). How could any mere human artifact be the end of human history? AI is dwarfed in importance by a gift that will come to our aid in the deepest danger – to clarify our minds and take us through the most harrowing historical test – now ongoing because of techno-grandiosity.
The Imposters – Triumph and Disaster
Historical and personal triumph is not what it seems but the threshold of disaster. This is confirmed by scripture as well as history.
To take some historical examples: the triumph of the USA following two World Wars 1914-45 and then the Cold War with the USSR by 1989. Overreach in Vietnam 1955-75 and then in the Middle East led to the disasters of 9/11 in 2001 and then the ignominy of the Trump presidencies 2016-20 and 2024-2028 – ending the American century that had begun in 1917 with US entry into World War I. The apparent victory of US liberal democracy, touted by one commentator as ‘the end of history’ in 1990, has been revealed as fleeting by a home grown populist autocrat driven by contempt for the power-limiting principles of those who designed the US constitution. But populism too is set for disaster. Was it truly the destiny of the USA to become a mirror image of China and Russia, misled by the myth of the ‘great leader’?
Biblical examples of hubris ending in disaster include:
The Downfall of the Tower of Babel, built to reach to Heaven (Genesis 11:1-9)
The Downfall of Saul – first King of Israel – in paranoid hatred of David, after early victories (1 Samuel 9-31)
The Downfall of Samson after early invincibility(Judges 13-16)
The Downfall of Belshazzar king of Babylon, after triumph over Israel (Daniel 5).
As for History itself, was it inevitable that US triumph in the Cold War in 1989 – the highest point of ‘the American Century’ that began with US entry into World War I in 1917 – would be followed by the humiliation of ‘9/11’ ? Earlier historical examples include the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. – and the defeats of Napoleon I and Adolf Hitlers after their invasions of Russia in 1812 and 1941. Triumphalist heroes always go too far and unite their enemies – so supreme victory is always paradoxical.
The development of nuclear weapons beginning during World War II 1939-45 was another obvious example of technological development far outstripping moral development. Why are we so much more skilled at making war than making a lasting worldwide peace?
As for the reign of Pope John Paul II – lauded for his role in the collapse of the USSR – was it inevitable that his ignoring of early warnings of the scale of clerical child sex abuse would tarnish his record once this became a global issue?
‘Power tends to corrupt,’ insisted the Catholic historian Lord Acton in 1887 ‘and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ He was referring specifically to popes and kings who had abused power.
Jesus of Nazareth was aware of this pattern from the beginning – the reason he resisted the temptation of not only political but institutional religious empowerment. He also knew from the scriptural record that disaster is often the necessary training for spiritual growth.
Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
“… sorrow, if welcomed with sincerity, becomes a place for conversion.”
Pope Leo XIV said this on August 13th, 2025 – at a general audience. Commenting on the scriptural account of Jesus’ poignant last meal with the apostles he was highlighting just one of many passages in scripture that speak of disaster as the necessary threshold of better beginnings.
Other examples include:
The throwing overboard of Jonah the prophet – by the crew of the ship on which he had attempted to flee from the mission given him by God – to warn the Ninevites of impending catastrophe. Rescued from this disaster he went on to fulfil this commission and become one of the many renowned prophets of Israel. (Jonah)
The selling of Joseph, son of Jacob, into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers – where Joseph won the favour of the Pharaoh and then became the saviour of his people, the Israelites, from famine. (Gen 37)
The flight of the young Moses from Egypt into the wilderness – to escape the consequences of a crime he had committed in anger. It was there, in desolation, that Moses received the call to return to Egypt – as liberator of his people. (Exodus 2 &3)
The death of King David – seen as disaster by his son and heir Solomon, who thought himself unready to follow his father. The prayer then said by Solomon (1 Kings 3:5-14) led to the telepathic wisdom that made him renowned throughout the world of his time. That prayer is ready for repetition by anyone still today.
The blinding of Paul of Tarsus on his way to Damascus to persecute the followers of Jesus. Convinced he had been waylaid by Jesus himself, now risen from death, Paul became an apostle to the non-Jewish world, setting a Jewish reform movement on an entirely new historical tack. (acts 9)
And Paul also used the gift that Jesus possessed to the highest degree – the gift of knowing what to say. This included ‘death has no dominion’ (Romans 6:9) – the truest summary of the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus.
Exaggeration of the potential of technology will inevitably precipitate a crisis – because it postpones the necessary task of repentance – the radical rethinking that is needed to bring realisation of our greatest human need – the need to belong to something greater than ourselves. Techno hubris leads instead towards the aggrandisement of a minority – the technocrats – and the inequality and injustice that follow cannot be resolved by personality cults. The corruption of governance has always called forth the gift of prophecy – of speaking the truth fearlessly to power.
Do Not Worry About How to Speak
In all four Gospels Jesus of Nazareth – the greatest of all prophets – insists that the source of all wisdom and insight lies outside of us – but can nevertheless inspire – breathe in to – us at times of the greatest danger.
“But when you are handed over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes.” (Matt 10:19)
“And when you are taken to be handed over, do not worry beforehand about what to say; no, say whatever is given to you when the time comes, because it is not you who will be speaking; it is the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 13:11)
“When they take you before synagogues and magistrates and authorities, do not worry about how to defend yourselves or what to say, because when the time comes, the Holy Spirit will teach you what you should say.’”(Luke 12:11,12)
“Make up your minds not to prepare your defence, because I myself shall give you an eloquence and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to resist or contradict.” (Luke 21:14-15)
Jesus made clear that he too relied upon this source:
“For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it.” (John 12:49,50)
For a breathtaking example of the use of this gift by Jesus, read John 8:1-11.
Attunement?
How can it happen that in a crisis we can know what to do – and can speak then as God would want us to?
First, we must already know and freely obey the Great commandments of love – of God above all and then of our neighbours – all other humans.
No hatred of any others – even of those who may hate us – can be given any room in what we feel.
This is the ‘tuning’ – the attunement – we must seek if we truly wish to serve the truth – and prayer – the honest addressing of our most serious concerns to God, as a persistent habit – is indispensable.
Note especially that ‘telepathy’ strictly means not ‘thought transference’ but a communication of feeling – our deepest emotions – over distance. To be spoken the truth must first be felt, lovingly. There is far too much evidence of the ability of honest people to speak wisely – and with inexplicable courage and insight – to those who misuse power – for this to be dismissed as mere accident. Solomon’s request for a heart that is wise tells us where true wisdom comes from – not from our analytical brain but from our deepest emotional centre.
Experience of suffering – of powerlessness, grief and pain – is also vital – the necessary loss of the illusion of being somehow in control – for all experience of power is truly deceptive and deeply dangerous. Only if our experience from the beginning has been one of powerlessness can we avoid the need to be stripped of power.
To suffer is essentially to experience humiliation – to realise that we are utterly powerless to save ourselves – and humiliation is almost always the necessary path to humility, the acceptance of our powerlessness as we now are.
A sudden loss of all power is the experience of desolation – but conversion is the experience then of rescue – and the realisation in that moment, and forever afterwards – that we are held close by the One who made us.
Do not believe that there is a technological fix to the historical crisis now upon us – a consequence of the grandiosity that technological progress afflicts us with. Trust instead in the Trinity, and in your own mind and heart – and pray.
In this confidence you will then be given wisdom by the one who made you – and you will know what to do and what to say.
Eli tells the young Samuel that he had not woken him – that the voice Samuel had heard in the night must have come from God himself.
‘Here I am,’ said the young Samuel, waking up in the dark to a voice that only he could hear (1 Samuel 3:1). Are we not all being called awake in the night these times?
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‘The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond’, Michael McGuckian SJ, Xlibris, US 2021.
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’2Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, Richard Rohr, Hodder and Stoughton 2017. 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 report3Bishop Moriarty statement: ‘I accept that, from the time I became an auxiliary bishop, I should have challenged the prevailing culture’, Irish Times, Thursday Dec 24th, 2009. 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.’4Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009
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 20th 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.5Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (The Ryan Report) Vol. 4, Chapter 6: Conclusions https://childabusecommission.ie/?p=951 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 unexplained6RTE 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.”.
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.”7Third Interim Report of the Disclosures Tribunal, under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 (2017)
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 suicide8A Force for Justice: The Maurice McCabe Story, Michael Clifford, Hachette Books Ireland 2017 – 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?
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 18709Mary MacKillop: Patron Saint of Sexual Abuse Victims?, James Martin SJ, America, Sep 29, 2010, 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‘Holier than thou’ Michael McGuckian SJ: Interview by Pat Coyle https://www.jesuit.ie/podcasts/holier-than-thou/ 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 24th, 2009
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.”
How the Easter story explains the continuing inability of Catholic bishops to be fully transparent about the cover up of clerical abuse of children.
First drafted in 2020 – on the brink of the coronavirus pandemic – this summary of my own understanding of what scripture is telling us about God’s reason for the Crucifixion of Jesus is now re-edited and published in 2024.
On the way to Jerusalem Peter the apostle proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, the great promised leader of the Jews, and the Son of God.
He was stunned when Jesus then told him that he expected to be crucified in Jerusalem – the cruel punishment meted out by Rome to intimidate and shame rebellious slaves.
Then, taking Jesus aside, Peter started to rebuke him. ‘Heaven preserve you, Lord,’ he said, ‘this must not happen to you.‘ (Matt 16:22)
This advice was itself instantly rejected by Jesus in the strongest possible terms:
• Q1. Do we understand fully why Peter was appalled by the prospect Jesus had just unfolded – of his own crucifixion? • Q2. Secondly, can we grasp why Jesus responded to Peter as he did – identifying the first person to call him ‘Son of God’ with the personification of all evil – ‘Satan’?
Believing that this passage in the Gospel is pivotal in helping us to understand the complex predicament of the Church at this time, I offer here a summary of the argument.
Q1. Why was Peter so anxious to persuade Jesus to turn away from Crucifixion?
That Peter was intent on saving Jesus from physical torture and death on the cross, and that Jesus was convinced that he must suffer that fate, is a familiar understanding of the passage.
Consider also, however, the probability that Peter was horrifiedon his own behalf.
Moments earlier Peter had proclaimed Jesus to be the son of God – the God who was bound by covenant to the cause of the salvation of Israel. For Peter that must surely involve freedom for the people of Israel, as we still tend to understand freedom – the expulsion of the hated occupying Roman legions and their flaunted eagle battle standards, the defeat of all Jewish collaborators with Rome (such as King Herod) and the recreation of the independent Kingdom of Israel.
The inexplicable disaster foreseen instead by Jesus – Rome’s humiliation of yet another Jewish rebel by crucifixion – would surely also now mean Peter’s own climactic public failure and disgrace.
Peter had not signed up for that.
Is Physical Suffering Our Greatest Fear?
By a process that is mysterious, the Gospel story has come to be read as though only physical suffering could have been at stake in crucifixion. Always unremarked is the human emotional dimension within which all high enterprises are conceived and evaluated – our acute worry about ‘what people will think’ – if, on the one hand things go well or, on the other, they do the very opposite.
To proclaim Jesus as Son of God was to bind oneself to the full consequences of ‘what people would think’ if this story was to end as Jesus had foretold – that Jesus was just another crazy ‘loser’, shamed and obliterated by Rome, and that Peter had been crazier still to follow him.
What About Shame?
This dramatic context of all vital decision-making is the never-absent issue of honour and shame. We ignore this dimension at our peril if we suppose it to be unimportant in the interpretation of scripture. Fear of shame is fear of ‘what everyone will think’ if something shameful happens to us. Aware that a multitude of others – gazing – will judge and jeer at us, we fear their scorn and contempt.
And crucifixion was designed by the rulers of Rome to be the most shameful possible death.
That Peter is constantly aware of this dimension is also revealed in that passage from the Gospel of Matthew. Those three words ‘taking him aside’ alert us to Peter’s realisation that to question Jesus’s judgement in the hearing of the rest of his closest followers would be to diminish him in the eyes of others, and that his own role should be that of respectful and unobtrusive adviser.
Peter obviously hopes that if he first takes Jesus aside this great leader – who has attracted the poorest in Galilee for his compassion and wisdom, and worked miracles to strengthen their faith – will rethink his dire prediction of crucifixion and announce a change of plan.
Must Not Jesus be Greater than David?
Peter must surely have thought that this Messiah could easily call on the wisdom and almighty power of the God of Israel – the power that – according to the Jewish scriptures – had drowned the entire army of Egypt, had helped Gideon to triumph over the Midianites with just three hundred men, and had guided the aim of David’s sling when faced with the giant Goliath.
Surely Jesus was simply testing his followers’ understanding of this history, and would appreciate Peter’s tactful hinting at it?
Obviously much more could be said on this by those with a more detailed understanding of what Peter’s own experience of Roman occupation could have been – including the Roman taxes that crippled people of his social class. For now I want to reflect on the rule that guides the plots of all superhero movies still today. How many would turn up to watch their chosen hero finally stripped naked, beaten flat and humiliated by his most terrifying adversary?
This must not happen!
Q2. Why did Jesus reject Peter’s advice so vehemently, and identify this very first person to recognise his stature in God’s eyes, with Satan – the source and instigator of all evil?
Most of us can have a shot at this question, I suspect, based upon the theological understanding that informed our own early education, an understanding shaped by St Anselm of Canterbury in the 1090s CE1Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm of Canterbury, c.1098 CE. Jesus had to undergo crucifixion to undo the huge offence to his Father given by all of the sins of us humans throughout the past, present and future – because our own sufferings are insufficient to repay this enormous debt.
According to this theory, in trying to persuade Jesus to avoid crucifixion, Peter was unknowingly standing in the way of God’s forgiveness, and so serving Satan – the malignant power intent on frustrating God’s plan from the very beginning.
This understanding, first put into words by St Anselm of Canterbury c. 1098 CE, and still repeated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church2Catechism of the Catholic Church 1994, Article CCC 615 can certainly be presented in a way that does some justice to the compassion and mercy of God.
Was God the Father Dissatisfied?
However, in my experience, it can also mislead us into thinking that the Father whom Jesus called Abba is a distant and disapproving parent, more concerned about his own dignity than to affirm the dignity of every single one of us, right now.
If we think of God the father as self-absorbed rather than bent upon releasing us from the power of evil right now, this is not the best of Good News – the news that the Kingdom of Heaven is still at hand for all of us, in this present moment.
Before even trying to make sense of St Anselm’s answer we must first of all remember what Jesus said: ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14: 9) and… ‘the Father and I are one’ (John 10: 30), and ‘Anyone who loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home in him’. (John 14: 23)
The Father is Always Close
Any explanation of the crucifixion that separates God our Father from our brother Jesus who comes to us in our deepest pain, falls short of the Gospel. Led in by Jesus, the Trinity wait even now to make their home within us, if that is our dearest wish.
Moreover, to every one of us they offer a role in making themselves known, as family, to those who need them most. They wish to free all of us from the fear that we have lost that love, or could lose it.It is an urgent desire, becauseno one just now should be without a sense of the Father’s nearness, compassion and presence – or of their own importance in the story now unfolding.
We need above all to try to understand why we doubt our own value, and then tend to look in the wrong place for self-respect. And how scripture – the Old and New Testaments – is always the guide to home.
Where do doubt and shame come from?
Two stories from the Old Testament help greatly here.
I. Genesis and the Roots of Shame
‘Who told you that you were naked?’ the Lord asked. (Gen 3: 11)
Straight away what Christians came to call ‘original sin’ is linked in the Genesis allegory with sensitivity to shaming, to possible ridicule and loss of both the respect of any observer and then of self-respect also.
The storyteller is suggesting that earlier, in Paradise, Eve had not known shame, but somehow the idea has come to her that there is something wrong with her. She should not be just a ‘creature’, something ‘made’ by God, the maker of all things. She should be ‘like Gods’ – equal to God. She is held back, some voice has assured her, only by her obedience to God’s ban on the ‘forbidden fruit’.
Notice how close that is to the pitch of any car salesman when you have just turned up for a service and find yourself looking at the latest gleaming apparition from the design studios:
“Great choice, that model, Sir, the xf469. Heganu designed it to help them figure out the optimal settings for the dynamic twosome in the boggle transcender that gives the next model – the xf475 – 50% more power for 20% less fuel. You probably weren’t aware of that, so no matter – very few people would notice the difference. Funny, though, one of those xf475s came in this morning – just to show a very excited customer later today… You wouldn’t believe the inertial dampers!”
Our biggest human problem down the ages has been our uncertainty about our own value and judgement, our chronic fear that we are insufficient as we are – our status anxiety. It always tells us that we lack something important, and to wantwhatever that is.
Eve could not have been influenced by this voice if she had not already been vulnerable in her self-esteem, and ready to believe that she needed something she did not already have.
This is our ‘original weakness’, and – as we are human – it never completely leaves us.
How could we not be uncertain, coming to a uniquely human kind of consciousness at the dawn of time, tiny beings under the great dome of the stars, in a world that we ourselves have not made?
We call this vulnerability to shame ‘self-consciousness’, but it is not merely ‘consciousness of self’. It is our problematic awareness that others are aware of us – and our fear of the value judgements they will make about us.
Moreover, are we not surrounded from our birth by really important people whom many admire, while nobody is interested in us because we are nobodies? What must we do to become a somebody?
In the ancient world the greatest of all somebodies were the Gods. There just had to be far more powerful beings in charge of everything out there. Who wouldn’t want to be one of them?
That’s why we humans tend to be wannabes – until we discover that this is a serious mistake – that from the beginning nobody was a nobody.
Notice that this passage in Genesis is also insisting that our ‘maker’ is not the one who told Adam and Eve they were nobodies, by pointing in scorn at their nakedness. We have all been made, the text tells us, in God’s own image and He has already blessed us, naked.
This passage in Genesis is clear also on where our doubt about our own value comes from – not God, the source of all that is good, but Satan, the serpent, the source of all evil.
In saying ‘This must not Happen‘ – to Jesus – Peter is giving voice to the power that evokes fear of the judgement of others, the power that had also overwhelmed the greatest of Israel’s kings.
II. King David of Israel
“You have worked in secret, but I shall work this for all Israel to see, in broad daylight.”
This, delivered by the prophet Nathan, is God’s warning to King David, following the latter’s seduction of Bathsheba and his underhanded murder of her husband, Uriah – to avoid the scandal of Bathsheba’s pregnancy. (2 Samuel 11 & 12).
Far from denying this charge, David admits at once to grave sin. In doing so this heroic defender of Israel against the Philistine giant Goliath confesses to surrender to an even greater terror – his fear of shame – of ‘what people would think’ if they came to hear the full story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah.
That scene has been set in the account of David’s earlier triumphant return from the victory over the Philistines, when the women of Israel sang: ”Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands”. (1 Samuel 18: 7)
This is the role of ‘fame’, ‘celebrity’, or ‘status’ in ramping up our fear of shame. Acclaim by a multitude, by the crowd, will inevitably turn to disgust on the part of that same multitude if David does not hide his disgraceful behaviour! It is his horror at this prospect that entraps David into something far worse than adultery.
That David – Israel’s greatest hero king – could not overcome his fear of shame is central to the story. So is the implication that it is Satan who ‘enters in’ to exploit that very fear: David’s attempt to hide his disgraceful behaviour is the equivalent of the ‘covering up’ to avoid shame by the first humans in Genesis. It had been Satan, not the God of Genesis, who had precipitated the problem of shame.
And that is why Jesus saw Peter as ‘channelling’ Satan when the former said ‘this must not happen’ on the road to Jerusalem. Faced with the prospect of crucifixion – of what would be seen as total failure and disgrace – and assured by Peter that he must not accept this denouement, he responds with:
Because, obedient to the Father and the Holy Spirit, it is Jesus’ intention to overthrow the power of Satan, the ‘prince of this world’, the powerto shame us. Peter does not know that he is simply repeating a human pattern of behaviour – the pattern that had overwhelmed David also – of giving in to fear of shame.
Peter is doing what David had done and what almost everybody does when faced with the possibility of public disgrace. He gives in to the fear of total condemnation and of the shaming that crucifixion symbolised for every subject people in the empire. Peter is sure that at all costs it must not be Jesus who is shamed. Someone else must suffer that fate – those opposing him – but Jesus knows that this is why violence almost always begets violence, and he and the Father are bent on teaching us this.
For Jesus and the Father there was no other way of taking all of us, as quickly as possible, to the realisation that it is those who do the shaming who are always in the wrong – and that no one can truly shame those who are innocent. By rejecting his offer of the kingdom of God they have proven to Jesus, and the Father, that the limits of human power must now be revealed.
What Easter Means – the Overcoming of the World
Here we can see why the event commemorated by Christians at Easter – Jesus’s determination not to be overwhelmed by fear of shame, and to submit, forgivingly, to the worst that we humans can physically do to one another, was the pivotal moment in human history. (John 16:33)
Reflect right now on your own uncertainty. If you are unsure of your own judgement, have you any good reason to rely on the judgement of others – especially when those others can see only what you see – appearances – and know nothing about your inner self?
This is to know that the judgement of the world – of the multitude we mistakenly tend to look to for reassurance of our own value, for ‘fame’ – is totallyunreliable and can never be trusted to pass a true verdict on ourselves.
At its worst it can lynch us, simply because in its blind anger and fear it often needs someone to blame and punish. Worse still, if we can find no reassurance from others that we have some worth, we may turn against ourselves, fatally.
To know why Jesus reprimanded Peter is to know also why the world can never shame you, or anyone else, in God’s eyesand in truth.
Jesus is Greater than David
Certainly Jesus knew that even Israel’s greatest hero king – David – had been defeated and disgraced by the temptation to let someone else die so that he, the Great King David, could avoid shame. He knew also that the first murder story told in the Jewish scriptures was of a competition between two brothers, Cain and Abel, for greater favour in the eyes of God. And he also knew that this theme of competition or rivalry between two men who want the same prize, leading to conflict between them, was an ever repeating pattern in the recorded history of his own people.
Jesus also knew well that the Roman Empire that held his own land captive had arisen from the same process of rivalry, beginning with Roman envy of the Greek hero Alexander the Great and followed by warlord rivalries and civil war under the Roman Republic. The assassination of Julius Caesar in BCE 44 had been caused by the same resentment of Caesar’s dictatorial power and was followed by the expansion of the Roman Empire by Caesar’s heir, Augustus, and his successors – the very tyranny that was holding Jesus’s own people, the Jews in captivity in his own time.
Satan is history’s name for the fear that can grip any of us, and can grip a multitude simultaneously, if we are in danger of being shamed by the dramatic crises of our own lives – scorned, derided and pushed out into the dark.
Especially vulnerable is anyone who has both an elevated position in society – and knowledge of any secret that could bring disgrace.
The Predicament of Catholic Bishops in the 1900s
Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, c. 2003
That was precisely the predicament of all bishops of the Catholic Church in the late 1900s CE. Once inducted into that office every bishop soon learned that among his most important duties was the keeping of a secret that had been kept for generations: solemn ordination to the priesthood had not prevented a significant minority of ordained clergy from abusing the trust placed in them by Catholic parents and children.
No one knew what people would think and do if everyone learned this secret. Possibly this would mean not only the disgracing of the abusive priests and every bishop who had shielded them – but the total dissolution of the church. For every individual bishop there was therefore the additional fear of being the first to ‘drop the ball’ – and therefore they all believed that …
This must not happen!
The Bishops’ Predicament in 2024
Almost four decades after the first widely publicised revelation of Catholic clerical child sex abuse (in Lousiana, USA, in 1985) the historical origins of the cover up of clerical child sexual abuse are still unknown in the detail that full transparency calls for. Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of all Christian churches, was far more clearly opposed to any adult abuse of a child than he was to his disciples marrying (Matt 18: 6) – so the protection of the reputation of professedly celibate priests never justified the keeping of a secret that endangered every Christian child.
Why and when was it first decided that any priest known to have sexually abused a child should retain his priestly status – and that such infractions should be dealt with in strict secrecy?
No one knows – even though this could quickly be discovered by historical investigation.
If St Peter Damian in the mid 11th century 3St Peter Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus, c. 1050 CEcould strongly condemn the secrecy maintained by some bishops over abusive sexual behaviours by priests under their jurisdiction, and could advise that abusive priests should be laicised – and have his efforts at reform praised by Pope Leo IX – why were these efforts apparently in vain by the late 1900s?
Why, finally, has the papacy made absolutely no effort to initiate a full discovery of the historical origin of the procedures that have so scandalised the church and now been discontinued – especially when it has initiated a process of synodal discussion that led to the following advice about the need for transparency in July 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.”4How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73
Defeating this call to transparency, continuing denial of the obvious need for full historical disclosure can suggest only one conclusion: it is thought by those who keep the church’s historical secrets that what is still unknown would cause even more trouble if it were known than what has so far been revealed – so that, yet again this must not happen!
The Expanding Church of Lost Sheep
The devastating impact of the abuse revelations upon churchgoing in Ireland, the USA and elsewhere conceals a vital truth: those revelations have been the most important learning experience for Catholic Christians since the 2nd Vatican Council of 1962-65.
And the most important lesson we have learned is that while some priests are indeed holy it is not ordination that has made them holy – for otherwise all priests would be holy.
Was it this truth above all that the bishops of the church wanted to keep from us? Did they think that belief that every priest is holy was the bedrock of our faith?
That we don’t know the answer to this question even yet is another mystery! No bishop anywhere has sat down with his flock – including the many living faithful departed – to explain, frankly, why he believes this secret was kept. And so we become, increasingly, lost sheep.
Yet this does not mean that we have forgotten Jesus, the one who told the parable of the lost sheep – or the assurance he gave:
“See that you never despise any of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in heaven are continually in the presence of my Father in heaven. For the Son of Man has come to save what was lost. Tell me. Suppose a man has a hundred sheep and one of them strays; will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hillside and go in search of the stray? In truth I tell you, if he finds it, it gives him more joy than do the ninety-nine that did not stray at all. Similarly, it is never the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.” (Matt 18:10-14)
Awakened to the weakness of the clerical church by both clerical abuse and the cover up of clerical abuse, those of us who become lost sheep are very well placed to experience the truth of this parable. Everyone reading this also knows that the Lord who goes in search of the lost sheep does not go in vain – for we, those who believe the Creed – in spite of the failures of bishops – are the lost sheep who have been found.
If you, the person reading this, have realised that you too are inexpressibly loved by the Lord of the Gospel, you are also well placed to explain to any bishop why the fear of shame was the fear of Peter in the beginning, and the root cause of the cover up that has devastated the church.
And, as Jesus forgave Peterfor abandoning him, He will forgive also the concealment of the truth that still continues – the cause of the very worst schism the church has experienced.
To understand why Jesus had to overcome his fear of the world – his fear of shame – is to overcome in that moment the same fear in ourselves.
Apparantly paralysed still by fear of shame in 2024, Catholic bishops need to realise that the truths of the Gospel are greater than all of us, and that they too need to overcome that fear, as Jesus did – to agree to a complete discovery of the roots of the catastrophe that has nearly overwhelmed us.
For the Trinity are as busy as ever rounding up the lost sheep, and need the help of every Christian to complete that task. It is time for all Catholic bishops to realise why complete honesty and transparency must now happen.
Notes
Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm of Canterbury, c.1098 CE
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, Article CCC 615
Liber Gomorrhianus, St Peter Damian, c.1050 CE
How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of 16th Synod of Bishops – on Synodality – Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73
On Jan 24th, 2017 the Irish Government established a commission of inquiry into the origin of false allegations of sexual abuse against the Garda whistleblower, Maurice McCabe.1On 11-10-2018 Maurice McCabe was vindicated by an interim report of the Disclosures Tribunal established by the Irish government in 2017, and led by Judge Peter Charleton.
This was the latest in a long series of deeply depressing scandals involving all of the institutions once respected in Ireland, including the Catholic Church. Why does integrity seem to be so rare, and how we are to find it?
Nothing in Ireland has been as dispiriting in recent decades as non-stop revelations of misuse of power and even of serious corruption in high places. All major institutions of church and civil society have been implicated. Not even the major beneficiary of these scandals, the media, have been exempt.
We have long known that all power tends to be abused, but Irish revelations of abuses of power have become almost epidemic in the lifetime of everyone born before 1990 – so much so that we can come to wonder, like Diogenes, whether an honest individual can any longer be found in high places. That whistleblowers – those who shout ‘stop’ to abuses of power – still do surface is a bright light in the darkness, but Garda Maurice McCabe’s experience of malicious ‘blowback’, the most damaging of false allegations – and even of high-level ‘fitting up’ – is truly frightening. Everyone who might still be called upon to be a whistleblower in Ireland knows now what could happen to themselves in the very worst case.
The standard secular solution to this problem of abuse of power is to divide and limit power by making it always subject to accountability. Strictly applied this means that everyone exercising power must be ready to account for their actions to someone else, and ready to resign or be sacked if found wanting. Yet here again there is huge depression in Ireland over apparent mass immunity from the accountability principle. The guiltiest individuals will take great pains to hide their tracks, while tribunals of inquiry are always costly and tend to grant immunity to witnesses in exchange for testimony. This then leads to a dispiriting popular verdict on all of Ireland’s educated elites: ‘those people always look out for one another’. In reviewing the Garda McCabe case, and an earlier Garda precedent, the ‘Kerry Babies’ case of 1984, the historian Diarmaid Ferriter concluded that the McCabe commission might unveil the truth of what happened – but (he finished) ‘don’t expect justice‘. There is a real danger of the total victory of cynicism in Irish society – even a loss of faith in human nature itself.
Secularism has never stemmed the human desire for privilege
No Irish secularising intellectual has yet pointed out that this near-despair directly challenges the basic optimism of the secularEnlightenment – the belief that human nature, freed by science-based ‘reason’ from religious faith, can build Utopia. Mass rational education alone, it was argued by some in the 1700s, would give everyone an honest livelihood, put an end to all crime and social hierarchy – and create a society at perfect peace. That same faith in reason, often to the exclusion of any faith in God, still undergirds the Irish secularising establishment today. I haven’t yet seen any persuasive rationalist explanation of the complete failure of that optimistic 18th century prophecy.
What the secularEnlightenment ‘got wrong’, it seems to me, was to suppose that, freed from ‘faith’ by ‘reason’, everyone – with just enough education – would become heroically virtuous. Those secularising evangelists did not see how dependent we are on others to shape even our desires for wealth and status. They hugely overestimated the capacity of any of us to stand freely apart from the human context in which we find ourselves. That we are always hugely dependent upon peer groups for self-esteem and self-fulfillment – and even for a sense of personal security and safety – was overlooked. That mass education would produce not equality but a sense of entitlement to privilege among the most successful, was not foreseen.
If we abandon all faith that there can be any higher power than ‘society’, we may then, as individuals, be totally bereft of support in the face of ‘peer pressure’ – the pressure simply to conform to the norms of the group we aspire to belong to. Secular egalitarianism has never found a cure for the human desire for social superiority, but still cannot acknowledge this failure.
Catholic hierarchy was also a corruptive force in Ireland
The former Magdalen Laundry, Sean McDermott St., Dublin
Far from advocating here a restoration of the power of ‘the church’ as it was before 1992, I would argue instead that the Catholic clerical establishment in Ireland was also oblivious of its own power to corrupt individuals – especially by exaggerating the individual Catholic’s obligation to defer to higher clerical authority in matters of moral judgement, as a matter of faith. Why else would no cleric – and no strong lay voice – have cried ‘shame’ when defenceless young women were imprisoned and shamed by the Magdalen system? Why else would whistleblowers have been so scarce among the religious orders that ran the institutions for helpless children indicted in the Ryan report of 2005? Why else would Bishop Jim Moriarty have been the sole bishop to confess serious personal failure in the handling of clerical abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, following the Murphy report of 2009? And why else would Dublin Gardai in some instances have failed to investigate credible allegations of criminal clerical abuse, at the request of a bishop?
The ‘prevailing culture’ that Bishop Moriarty agreed he had failed to challenge in Dublin was precisely analogous to the culture of toleration by the Gardai of the abuses that Maurice McCabe reported, while the harm caused to countless children by clerical failure was far greater than the harm caused by Garda inconsistency in the awarding of motoring penalty points. We must never forget that the Irish clerical establishment left it to outraged Catholic families to blow the whistle on the fact of – and the deadly dangers of – clerical sexual abuse of children.
This blindness, to the harm caused to the church – the people of God – by the equation of faith with unquestioning obedience to clerical authority, continues to this day. And this in turn is surely the reason that the full contemporary significance of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is neither seen nor preached by our clergy, in the context of the growing crisis of hope in Irish civic society. Never can it be seen or said (at least in my experience) that in Gethsemane Jesus was resisting precisely that fear of ‘the world’ – the threat of ‘blowback’ from our always hierarchical human power systems – that confronts every genuine whistleblower today.
Instead it is (or at least it was until recently) far more typical of clergy to contrast ‘the world’ with ‘the church’, to characterise ‘the world’ as at best ‘dangerous’ and at worst ‘profane’ while ‘the church’ – always to be equated with clergy – was to be seen always as ‘holy’ and unquestionable. ‘Worldliness’ got translated, mistakenly, as merely getting ‘caught up’ in the pleasures and distractions of the ‘material world’, while Jesus and his clergy could necessarily have their minds only on ‘heavenly things’. In accepting crucifixion Jesus was merely atoning for human historical sin at his Father’s request, not setting an inspiring example of courage and integrity for all of us to try to emulate.
Nothing could be better calculated to make the story of the crucifixion totally incomprehensible to the modern mind – and to make the Catholic sacramental system irrelevant to the crisis of hope that afflicts Ireland today.
Jesus the abused whistleblower
The religious system that Jesus roundly criticised was also abusive of power. It excluded the poorest from a sense of God’s compassion, by imposing money barriers to divine mercy. It shut the Temple door on all of the ‘unclean’, including lepers and menstruating women. What if we were to see Jesus in Gethsemane as an exemplary whistleblower – awaiting the most excruciating humiliation for his rejection of that oppressive religious system? What if we were to see him as standing in solidarity with all who were and still are excluded and oppressed – including the church’s own victims? What if we were to see him at the side of Garda Maurice McCabe – and at the side of the falsely accused priest as well as the clerical abuse survivor – when their trials are at their worst?
‘In the world you will have tribulation, but be courageous. I have overcome the world.’ (John 16: 33). What if we could believe that here Jesus is speaking precisely to this time in Ireland today – and speaking also for the power of belief in a transcendent reality to give us the integrity we so desperately need, the grace to withstand the world – i.e. ‘the prevailing culture’ of our own peer group’s abuses, whatever those may be – in church or business, bank or civil service, TV studio or political party, policing unit or even Olympic sport?
And what if Jesus’ strength – the grace of integrity – is also the grace on offer in the Eucharist – for those who can believe these things? Those given charge of the Eucharist have surely a special obligation to discover its relationship to the supreme moral problem of our time – the problem of maintaining integrity in the face of corrupt power. That it could have no such relationship is unthinkable.
It is far more likely that integrity and holiness are one and the same.
Notes
On 11-10-2018 Maurice McCabe was vindicated by an interim report of the Disclosures Tribunal established by the Irish government in 2017, and led by Judge Peter Charleton.
Today we learn from the Tablet that Pope Francis has again explained to a bishop facing a manpower crisis “that he could not take everything in hand personally from Rome … that local bishops, who are best acquainted with the needs of our faithful, should be corajudos, that is ‘courageous’ in Spanish, and make concrete suggestions”. And that “regional and national bishops’ conferences should seek and find consensus on reform and … should then bring up … suggestions for reform in Rome”.
The Pope was speaking to Bishop Erwin Kräutler, Bishop of Xingu in the Brazilian rainforest.
And the topic of conversation? “The issue of the ordination of “proven” married men – viri probati.”
This is not the first clear signal from Rome to the Irish Bishops’ Conference to start thinking for itself. Surely also there is a need for a European bishops’ conference – to seek consensus on solutions to their own critical manpower crisis.
That crisis deepens another – the crisis of morale. And the morale of the Irish church generally is very seriously challenged by the apparent reluctance of Irish bishops to hear and respond to the clear call to their own spirit of courage and initiative. And not just on this particular issue.
So when will our bishops begin to show that they are not deliberately deaf?
Just how many trumpet blasts do our Irish Catholic Bishops need?
First , last March we got a new pope who admitted straightaway that he too is a sinner – i.e. fallible. Numb silence followed that in Ireland, as though deep shock had overtaken his Irish episcopal hearers.
Then we had a call from Rome for something unheard of since 1965 – feedback from the people of God on family issues. Most Irish bishops again reacted with apparent shock – and then scrambled to make a token response. None asked to be personally advised by his own flock in a diocesan conference, in preparation for Vatican synods on the family this year and next. A parlous fear of assembly still ruled the Irish church.
Then in November 2013 Francis issued his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, including this:
“I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything so that the Church’s customs, way of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can suitably be channelled for evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation. “ (Evangelii Gaudium § 27)
If this wasn’t an invitation to Irish church leaders to do their own dreaming about reawakening and renewal, what on earth are they waiting for?
Yet so far, even by Easter 2014, there was no similar exhortation from any Irish bishop.
So, why are we waiting still, and what are we waiting for?
It couldn’t be for this 77 year old Argentinian’s age to catch up with him, could it?
So, as our bishops still seem to be heading away from Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus, let us pray for the Lord to take them in hand, walk with them – and make their hearts burn strongly enough to blow away the mountain of ash that keeps them so torpid. And send them racing back to us with something more like excitement than disillusionment – as well as eagerness for that elementary particle whose absence erodes their authority day after day: dialogue with the people of God.
It’s surely time for a new Pentecost in the Irish Church, and time is running out for the current generation of Irish bishops to prove that they can lead it.
One year on from his election Pope Francis has already changed the image of the papacy, and modelled an entirely different style of leadership from that of his two predecessors. Reflecting the amiability and simplicity of his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, he may even be setting out to respond to the same challenge that the Italian friar heard from Jesus: to ‘rebuild my church’.
However, Pope Francis is now in his late seventies – and many younger bishops appointed by his predecessors may well be wondering if this new wind from Rome will last long enough to oblige them to amend their own way of going.
So far no Irish bishop has become quite so accessible, so open, so eager to meet people and hear their stories and grievances. Where Francis could meet with an atheist editor in Italy – and allow their exchange to be published – no Irish bishop will formally and openly meet with the leaders of the reformist Irish Association of Catholic Priests (ACP). Where Francis could call a synod on the family, no Irish bishop yet shows any sign of responding to the call Francis makes to all bishops in Evangelii Gaudium 31 – ‘to encourage and develop the means of participation proposed in the Code of Canon Law’.
For example, not even Archbishop Martin of Dublin has projected the holding of a diocesan synod – something his predecessor had done in his final years in office.
And no Irish bishop has shown any sign of taking up another suggestion offered by Evangelii Gaudium – the pope’s advice to every bishop to be willing at times to be led by his own people.
FOA – fear of assembly – still grips Ireland’s bench of bishops in a vice – that fear of ‘stirring up a hornets’ nest’ by, for example, arranging regular open diocesan forums to respond to the missionary challenge issued from the heart of the church.
There can be no missionary revival led by men gripped more by fear than the confidence shown by the pope. Where is the Irish bishop who will call all of his people to read and discuss Evangelii Gaudium and to feed back to him their vision of the future church, in a truly ‘developed’ diocesan synod?
And where is the Irish bishop who will commit himself to regular interface with a diocesan pastoral council – to respond, for example, to questions such as those that arise out of Ian Elliott’s concerns for the integrity, independence and strength of the NBSCCC?
If co-responsibility is the challenge of the moment, no Irish bishop has yet risen to that challenge – or responded to the Pope’s clearly given invitation to all national bishops’ conferences to freely consider the particular needs of their own societies, and to be proactive in finding solutions – even at the cost of making mistakes.
Here’s Pope Francis again: “I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.” (Evangelii Gaudium 27)
What are Irish bishops dreaming of these times? Why can’t they tell us? And listen to our dreams too? Which of them will show the same confidence in the Irish people of God, and in the power of the Holy Spirit to lead us?
And when will they ever change the closeted style of their quarterly meetings in Maynooth – those funereal huddles to prepare statements so guarded that they merely add to the mountain of verbal ash that buries the embers of the Irish faith.
They speak now of St Columbanus and his impending 1400th anniversary. They need to pray for his courage in venturing into another unknown land awaiting the Gospel – and step out, unguarded, onto the island of Ireland.
