Meeting with Younger Priests 

Seamill Hydro, 1^st March 2007

The Context of Our Lives and Ministry Today

 1.     Culture

 The dimension of our culture which most affects our lives and ministry as priests today is the advance in the western world of secular humanism as a concept of man and of the world without God. This has become in our times an all-embracing ideology which provides a totally secular view of our human dignity, our freedom, our environment, our progress, our future, our potentialities and possibilities.  

This does not mean that religion is dead. It was supposed to die, but it has not. A resurgent, militant and often unstable Islam, the Pentecostalist movement, immigration and the movement of peoples, the surprising phenomenon of the survival and indeed flourishing of religion in the United States, the vitality of the Catholic Church in many places throughout the world, the search for inwardness and spirituality: all these things have confounded the prophets of the death of God and of the death of religion. Religion is alive in our culture. People sense that the great advances in science and technology, wonderful and welcome as they are, do not fulfil all the needs of the human heart. People are open to talk about God. People are open to the mystery of otherness. They seek the transcendent. This is a under-estimated part of our culture that we can work with, draw upon, promote, develop. Wherever we find people searching for God, we as priests have to be ready to bring the light of mystery of Jesus Christ.

What has happened, however, is that these two worlds have clashed: the secular world and the religious world, and this clash is shaping our culture, our lives and our ministry. We live in a context where liberal secular humanism is the predominant force. This has produced social phenomena such as abortion, divorce, the advance of the homosexual agenda including civil partnerships and gay adoption, and other serious issues, which all have in common an appeal to unlimited human autonomy over nature and the proclamation of the gospel of choice. These phenomena, as we know, constitute an unfriendly and unreceptive environment for the priestly life and ministry, and indeed for the whole life of faith and mission of the Church. In this respect, secular humanism has largely displaced a generally theocentric and Christian view of the human project.

 Displaced, but not destroyed. But the clash between secular humanism and a faith-based world-view is becoming even more subtle and even more menacing. Unable to destroy religion, secular humanism is now attempting to control it by influencing the internal realities of faith communities, by increasingly relegating the influence of religions to the margins of society, and by threatening to penalise and even criminalise their message and their mission.

 All of this is the broader cultural and social context in which we live our priesthood. There is no doubt that this constitutes a challenge. Priests more than ever need to be men of faith, prayer, vision and courage, who can interpret the signs of the times and bring the light of Christ to bear on the world in which we live.

2.     The Church 40 Years after Vatican II

 We are priests of the Church instituted by Jesus Christ which subsists in the Roman Catholic Church governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him. The reference points of our ecclesial identity are the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, the Ecumenical Councils and the history of the Church since the beginning. But our most recent reference-point for our understanding and experience of the reality of the Church is Vatican II. Vatican II is not ground zero. The Church did not begin at Vatican II. The Church was not re-founded at Vatican II. We want to avoid a Vatican II absolutism. But Vatican II is and remains the most significant movement of the Holy Spirit for the life of the Church in our times.

 Forty years on from the Council we can see the fine things which are the fruit of Vatican II: a new and deeper theology of the Church as the Mystery and Communion of the new People of God; a closer and deeper and more first-hand experience of the Scriptures; a liturgy in our own language and for the modern era; a Church open to the world and fully engaged with the world.

 Yet in these 40 years, the selfsame graces of the Council have been twisted and deformed to produce darker reality which has been very negative for the Church. The Church, the scriptures, even Christ himself have been subjected to reductionisms which made them unrecognisable. There is no truth of faith which has not been disputed, re-interpreted, and denied. The liturgy has been a battle-ground between rival agendas in the Church. Openness to the world has sometimes become almost total surrender to the world. External secularisation has become internal secularisation and a consequent loss of the supernatural. Priests and religious have abandoned their vocation in droves. Bishops have been at a loss to stem the tide. Vocations to the priesthood in Western Europe plummeted to dangerous levels. Surely Vatican II did not want these things!

 Four seriously negative theological trends or tendencies have bubbled to the surface in the post-Vatican II period and have accompanied the turmoil of these years: a rationalistic understanding of faith and of revelation; a reduction of the person of Jesus Christ to suit liberal humanism; a merely sociological interpretation of the Church; and the widespread phenomenon of moral relativism and subjectivism. These tendencies have literally poisoned the wells of the faith and the minds of the faithful. These are huge barriers to evangelisation and catechesis in our context.

People talk optimistically of a new springtime of the Church, and indeed some wonderful things are happening across the world, particularly where the new movements have taken root. In the developing world, it is said that the Church is once again young and vibrant. Signs of a new springtime in our context are not so obvious, although there are many fine priests and good Catholics. One would have to conclude that the project Vatican II is still a work in progress and that the Church the Council wanted has not quite emerged in its fullness.

 For all the difficulties, Vatican II remains our firm point of reference for the present and future of the Church. We want to avoid the excesses and problems of the early post-Vatican II period. But we also want to avoid a useless nostalgia for a pre-Vatican II Church that never existed. If priests of my generation stand accused of standing by while Catholic life was de-constructed in deference to a Council that never existed either in letter or in spirit, then perhaps priests of your generation are inclined to take refuge in a sterile traditionalism which they never experienced. But we should not get sucked into a blame game. There is one Lord, one Church, and one priesthood. We are all part of that. The priests of my generation did well to implement the Council piecemeal and to cope with an unprecedented wave of change both in the Church and in the world. The priests of your generation have reached out for the integrity of faith and the depth of devotion which are also hallmarks of Vatican II, but which were to some extent obscured by new things that had to be done, by the dizzying pace of change and, it has to be said, by a liberalising agenda which held away in the early post-Vatican II period.

 We are all children of Vatican II. We are all still engaged in allowing the Church of Vatican II to emerge from the documents into the light of day. What Vatican II stood for is timeless and there is no going back. We can only move more fully into the authentic teaching of the Council: the Church as mystery of communion; the real presence of the Word of God in the Scriptures and in the Tradition of the Church; a sacred liturgy worthy of the mystery of Christ and suitable for modern man, in which the participation of all Catholics is full, conscious and active; a Church which is fully faithful to Christ, fully Catholic, and at the same time open to the world, engaged with the world, and for the world.

 I have to say that I have been deeply influenced in these years by the witness of Pope John Paul II and by the ministry of Pope Benedict XVI. For me, these men have given unfailing guidance and inspiration to the Church since 1980. When I wondered sometimes what on earth was going on in the Church, I found wisdom, inspiration and consolation in their teaching and witness. When I heard them, I said to myself: “This is the true Vatican II.”  They are truly a gift from God to the Church. Quite literally in my view they saved Vatican II from oblivion and kept its true light shining. Their witness to the Council is apparent in many ways – in teaching, preaching, gestures, and journeys, but perhaps the most enduring witness will prove to be the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a resource which we are only beginning to harness in Scotland.

 So this is the ecclesial context in which we are priests and in which we minister. It is again a challenging reality, and it calls for the priest to be a man first of all who is in his entire being conformed to Christ and at the service of the Church. He will be a man of prayer and spirituality; a man who understands and who can communicate his faith; a man of pastoral love, sensitivity, energy and skill; and a man of great humanity, compassion, wisdom and patience.   

At a future meeting, the Bishop will continue these reflections on the priesthood today.