A Church for the times we are living |
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About fifteen hundred years ago the Church lived the upheaval which accompanied the fall of the Roman Empire and in its wake the social and religious confusion which gave birth to the so called Dark Age. Five hundred or so years later came the Great Schism, the split which became a deep divide between Rome and Constantinople. Five hundred years ago Martin Luther proclaimed a Great Reformation of the Church which resulted in the foundation of the Protestant tradition in Western Europe and beyond. Another five hundred years later we could well ask about the moment of crisis our Church is living at this moment in time. Similar to those previous moments, our crisis is lived within a broader social, economic and political context also immersed in crisis. We have spoken before of the apocalyptic age in which we are living, an age in which the limits of arrogant human reason, the rapacity of human greed, the hubris engendered by imperial power, the violence in the human heart, the coldness of religious absolutism and the disregard for the integrity of the human person are being unveiled. We the Church are also living in an apocalyptic moment. Something new is being unveiled. We are moving from a church whose authority we recognise in accepting its teaching, hearing its sermons, singing its hymns etc. This church, however, is in decline due to its recurring dreams of past glory, its inability to speak to the dominations and powers of this age, its lack of joy, its corrupt and corrupting clerical power and its obsession with structures, rites and sex. We are moving toward a church which is mystical, prophetic, freeing and at (dis)ease with the surrounding secular culture. That is to say that we understand its idiom but denounce its materialistic values. The experience of moving is bleak, lonely and debated. We are in an experiential, perhaps liminal, mode of being church. We are anchored in the person of the Risen Transfigured Christ and in his living Body, the Church. That Church is changing, but not in all its members. The experience of Christians of engagement with environmental concerns is engendering a new awareness of what it is to be church for the life of the planet. The engagement of Christians with the issues of peace and nuclear disarmament, arms sales, ethnic conflict etc is engendering a new awareness of what it is to be church for the fullness of life. The commitment of Christians in the alleviation of poverty, the reduction of international debt, the creation of just international structures which facilitate the participation of the most marginalised is creating a church at the service of the poor. The outreach of Christians to persons in danger, to ‘illegal’ immigrants and asylum seekers, to victims of sex trafficking, to the victims of sexism and racism, to those afflicted by aids etc is creating a church more sensitive to the dignity of the human person. Here outside the sanctuary is where a different church is aborning, where a new spirituality and mysticism are being experienced, where the Eucharist is taking on a denser more profound meaning and where the disfigured Christ awaits with his people their transfiguration. Both churches will survive the crisis. Paradoxically, both need each other. The first will experience a revival as the experience of the second seeps into the life stream of the first. The experience of the second church will embed itself in the community and will find its way into the story and tradition of the perennial church. These last few months we of CCC have been brooding and mooting a concerted effort to Stand Up for Vatican II. Our context is a church in meltdown returning to past ritualisms and dogmatisms in the vain attempt to inject itself with new life, even to the ham-fisted manoeuvre of facilitating the ingress of a few misogynistic and homophobic Anglicans. What do we seek as we stand up for Vatican II? We seek to be a church for the life of the world, not for the life of the church; a church for all of humanity, especially the poor of the depredated earth, the excluded, the vulnerable; a church without sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, an institutional ethos which corrupts its clergy and disesteems its laity; a church in the Spirit of Vatican II, inclusive, sensitive of the suffering of the planet and its most afflicted humanity; a church whose only concern is for a humanity living in peace, justice and wholiness. Frank Regan
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