Position Papers - February 2016

A review of Catholic affairs

Man as the ‘Priest of Creation’ Siobhán Ó hAodha

Book review:

The Name of God is Mercy Austen Ivereigh

Film review:

The Revenant Number 496· February 2016 €3 · £2.50 · $4

Bishop Robert Barron

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Number 496 · February 2016 Editorial

by Rev. Gavan Jennings

In Passing: The Empire strikes back?

by Michael Kirke

“People should live peacefully together”

by Michael Cook

Three impediments to proclaiming the mighty acts of the Lord today

by Rev. Patrick G Burke

Irish Catholics, where are you?

by Rev. Patrick Gorevan

Man as the ‘Priest of Creation’

by Siobhán Ó hAodha

Create in me a clean heart

by Rev. John McCloskey

Book review: The name of God is Mercy

by Austen Ivereigh

Film review: The Revenant

by Bishop Robert Barron Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

2 5 10 13 18 22 29 33 37

Rev. Gavan Jennings Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann Liam Ó hAlmhain Dick Kearns Víctor Díaz

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Editorial B

efore providing you with a brief synopsis of the articles in this month’s issue of Position Papers, I would like to

draw your attention to two exciting new developments for Position Papers. Firstly, we have completed a redesign of our website which you can find at: www.positionpapers.ie. In it you can easily access past articles and even download pdf versions of entire past issues. If you wish, you can subscribe to the print version for yourself or a friend quite easily here (or indeed make a donation to Position Papers and so help to promote the work we do). A nice feature of the new website is that it can be accessed and easily read on phones and tablets so you have even easier access to our content. Please do use the new website to promote our content among your friends and acquaintances. Secondly, Position Papers now has a regular monthly slot on Radio Maria Ireland which has recently come on air. From 2pm to 3pm on the second Monday of each month, one of the Position Papers team analyses and comments on each of the articles of the latest issue. If you’d like to tune in go to www.radiomaria.ie and click on ‘listen live’.

Michael Kirke, in his In Passing column, take his cue from a recent exchange in the New York Times between their columnist Ross Douthat, and a group of liberal US Catholic theologians who wrote a letter to the paper questioning the wisdom of allowing Douthat free rein to give his interpretation of Catholic Church teaching; essentially they

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didn’t like his orthodox take on things Catholic. Well, Douthat’s dignified response left the disgruntled liberal Catholic group looking a little silly. He also raised the question which Michael Kirke examines in his piece: the resurgence of a liberal version of Catholic theology and consequently a growing struggle between the liberals and the conservatives in Catholic theology to attain the position of dominance in the Church.

Editorial

In his article, Rev Patrick Burke suggests – in the context of Church Unity Week – that different Christian denominations would be well advised to set aside their differences and combine their resources in combating the three major forces afflicting Christians so grievously: militant Islam, strident secularism, and religious indifferentism. One would hope and expect that a certain rapprochement between the beleaguered Catholic and Protestant faith traditions on this island would be the silver lining on the terribly dark clouds of these three forces.

Perhaps such a meeting of minds might require that both faith traditions – paradoxically – be coming from a position of strength rather than weakness; in the case of Irish Catholicism this healthier version of the faith might be something like that envisaged by Fr Patrick Gorevan in his piece Irish Catholics, where are you? Fr Gorevan looks at how the historical circumstances of Ireland since penal times produced an Irish version of Catholicism sundered from its cultural medieval roots, disengaged from the public square and everyday life in general.

In our cover-story, Siobhán Ó hAodha revisits the ecology of the recent encyclical Laudato Si from the standpoint of a contemporary Greek Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas. In her densely argued piece she shows how

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the work of Zizioulas throws light on the ecological thought of Pope Francis. For Zizioulas, man has a key priestly task of restoring creation’s communion with God – lost since the Fall. In this man is essentially, as the title of her article puts it, a ‘Priest of Creation’.

Editorial

We carry another very interesting article from our regular writer Fr CJ McCloskey on a recent pastoral letter from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the plague of pornography which is sweeping the world with consequences much more disastrous than any of the virus epidemics we’ve been lead to fear so much. The US bishops address the question head on in this very helpful pastoral letter, one which, Fr McCloskey suggests, should be read by all parents and family members and I would add that this is not limited to the USA. The pastoral letter is, incidentally, twenty-eight pages long with no less than 113 scholarly footnotes, making it an invaluable resource.

This month we carry Austen Ivereigh’s review of the book length interview with Pope Francis, The Name Of God Is Mercy, in which the Holy Father explains why mercy is the defining theme of his papacy, and defends this to some degree against his critics. Given that much, if not almost all, of the teachings of Pope Francis come to us filtered through the lens of a media which is often theologically illiterate and sometimes downright devious, it strikes me as important that we Catholics can engage more directly with the mind of our Supreme Pontiff through works such as this.

Finally we look at Bishop Robert Barron’s review of Alejandro Iñárritu’s new film The Revenant which looks to be quite a gripping, if raw, film which contains a very timely lesson regarding the role of our belief in God to break the spiral of vengeance and violence.

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In Passing: The Empire Strikes Back?

by Michael Kirke

E

ven if one considered it as another magnificent literary artifact, one among many other great letters from the ancient world, surely the perennial prophetic ring of this would signal that it is different. Why does this letter lead us to ask some overwhelming questions, what is it all about, why was it written and how does it mean something to us today, making millions of people read it again and again?

the graces given to them are part of this same remnant.

"I ask, then,” St. Paul wrote, “has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.”

He then talks about Elijah and how in his frustration this prophet pleaded with God to punish the faithless Israelites.

Elijah moaned to his God, "Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life”. But God was having none of it, telling him, “I have kept for myself seven

It is St. Paul writing to the Roman Christians about “the remnant of Israel” whose companions they are. All those who have, down through the ages and in our own age, doggedly tried to remain true to

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thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”

We need this encouragement – and may need it more if the fears of people like New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, are even partially realized. As readers of this column in Position Papers and the Garvan Hill blog will know, even to the point of trying the patience of some, I pay a good deal of attention to Mr. Douthat and generally find myself in agreement with him.

“So too”, Paul then reminds the Romans, “at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace,” His words surely resonate with meaning for our own time when he says, “Israel failed to obtain what it sought.

The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened, as it is written, ‘God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that should not see and ears that should not hear, down to this very day.’”

At the end of last year he delivered the Erasmus Lecture in New York, an event sponsored by the magazine, First Things.

The lecture, entitled A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism, was published in the magazine last month.

Christians today, faced with the accumulation of pseudo-wisdom in which modernity and postmodernity prides itself, can be reminded and encouraged by these words that come from God's revelation to mankind.

They remind us that this “spirit of stupor” has been mankind’s constant affliction and an everpresent threat to happiness and well-being, earthly as well as eternal. But from both history and in the unfolding of this same revelation we know that this spirit of stupor has never prevailed – no more than the gates of hell have – and never will.

Now there is no doubt but that there are people who are by their disposition conservative.

Although it is a corruption of the true meaning of the word, by this it is generally meant that they have an aversion to change.

As such this is an unhelpful term when we are looking at those whom Douthat was addressing in his lecture – essentially Catholics with a strong commitment to the defined

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teaching of the Catholic Church as it has developed over two millennia. Faithful Catholics are not averse to change as such.

They first ask “what is changing?” and then decide their stance, for or against.

This for many was well illustrated by all the shenanigans – still going on – surrounding the two recent synods on the family.

Extrapolating from Douthat’s analysis, it is as though the opening of the windows of the Church which was attributed to St. John XXIII is now paralleled

by Pope Francis’s commitment to an evangelization of the peripherary. One reading of history says that the postconciliar moment was seized on by heterodox theologians to pursue an agenda not consistent with the actual teaching of the Council. A reading of the current moment is that the same is happening again in the open atmosphere of Pope Francis’ papacy. Heterodox elements are fighting hard to regain ground lost over the past thirty-five years.

Leaving aside the baggage which this term brings with it, the lecture itself has provoked a lively debate among Catholics in America. Douthat himself has now begun to respond to some of those who have taken issue with his analysis of the situation of the Catholic Church in what is now called “the era of Pope Francis”.

Essentially he is saying – regardless of the actual teaching of Pope Francis – that the movement within the Church which in the past identified with what was called the “spirit of the Second Vatican Council”, and which some would say paid little attention to the actual teaching of that Council, has now got a new lease of life. Not only that, but this movement is now threatening to destabilize the unity and orthodoxy established painstakingly in the Church during the past two pontificates.

One response to the Douthat’s lecture, in two installments, came from Professor John Martens in the Jesuit magazine, America. Martens is a professor in St. Thomas University in Minnesota. Although he was not among them, this institution was

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well represented among the signatories to an outrageous and arrogant letter sent to the New York Times questioning the paper’s editorial judgment and the columnist’s right to be commenting at length on Catholic theological issues.

Thus my sudden fears for the church’s unity, in the years of Francis and under papacies to come. Divisions there will always be, but these divisions are simply deeper than I had (fondly? naively?) imagined. And nothing in Catholic history suggests that the church is exempt from Jesus’s warning about a house divided or from the consequences when those divisions can no longer be denied.

Douthat, in his response to Martens, talks about the fears provoked in him by the implications he draws from the latter’s championing this newly revitalized heterodox movement.

Having read what he describes as Professor Martens’ “learned, sincere, respectful response to my columns” he says:

Those words about being on “very different places on the continuum of Christianity” are reminiscent of a passing remark made by Joseph Ratzinger – written while he was still just that – in his little autobiographical volume, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977.

In it he was reflecting on those early years of the Second Vatican Council and the development of his own ideas, rubbing shoulders with other priest-theologians involved in the Council as advisors. Among these was Fr. Karl Rahner. Rahner was one of those who very definitely went with the flow of the “spirit of

We clearly have some religious common ground, but in other ways the professor and I just seem to occupy very different belief structures, very different places on the continuum of Christianity – and the distance is great enough that our differences can feel less like an intra-Catholic argument and more like a kind of interdenominational dispute.

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Vatican II”, indeed many would say was at the head of the flow.

Ratzinger wrote in that book of his gradual realization that he and his colleague, Rahner, were theologically on different planets.

the nones in the Christian world – those who in surveys about religious affiliation profess themselves as belonging to no denomination, – we may be looking at a coming struggle between two claimants to the title of “remnant of Israel”.

In the era of St. John Paul II and his successor, now no longer Joseph Ratzinger but Pope Benedict XVI, one of those two planets seemed to have receded to an outer orbit of the Church.

It would now seem, for better or worse, to be back in play in the history of Catholicism again.

Drawing solace and strength from the words of St. Paul, while we do not know how the true remnant will win the day, we do know that the true remnant will be the victor. That remnant will be found in neither the Conservative camp nor in the Liberal camp – it will just be Christian, conservative and liberal as their Faith prescribes, and it will be One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

Clearly and emphatically we have not reached the “End of History”, neither for Christianity nor for any other dimension of our lives. With the advance of

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Kirke is a freelance writer, a regular contributor to Position Papers, and a widely read blogger at Garvan Hill (www.garvan.wordpress.com).

His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@gmail.com.

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“People should live peacefully together”

by Michael Cook Photo: Salah Farah in his hospital bed (Voice of America)

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ews of Islamic terrorism

never seems to leave the front page. Last month, Taliban suicide fighters slaughtered about twenty students randomly at a university in Pakistan; a suicide bomber in Kabul killed seven; and a 1400-year old Christian monastery in Iraq was obliterated by ISIS. But it would be quite false to think that all Muslims endorse these atrocities. Some live up to the oft-quoted verse from the Qur’an: “If anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all mankind” (Surah 5, verse 32). Such was Salah Farah, a 40-year-old Kenyan Muslim and a father of five

children who died on Sunday evening at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi.

Farah was deputy headmaster at Mandera County Primary School in northern Kenya. On December 21 he was on a commuter bus on his way back from classes in Nairobi. At about 7am four terrorists from AlShabaab, a Somali group allied to al-Qaeda, sprang an ambush.

The bus stopped. The sixty passengers all knew what was going to happen next. In 2014 terrorists stopped another bus in the same region, divided the passengers by religion, and shot dead twenty-eight non-Muslims.

But not this time.

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The militants ordered the passengers off. “The women who were Muslims started removing their hijabs and lesos [decorative scarves] and handing them to the non-Muslims,” Farah recalled. They were ordered into a field.

“We were told to separate — the Christians, this side, the Muslims, this side”, Farah said.

But Farah and the others refused. “We asked them to kill all of us or leave us alone. As we argued, they shot me.” He was hit by two bullets, one in his hip and the other in his abdomen.

Three other men were shot as

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well; two died. But amazingly, the terrorists left without executing their plan.

The intransigence of the Muslims had saved the lives of the Christians on the bus. Farah told Voice of America that the Al-Shabaab are not Muslims.

“Islam is a religion of peace, it’s not a religion of terrorists”, he said. “No, it is people who have different ideology, because people who have that ideology, they want to kill…. People should live peacefully together.

We are brothers. It's only the religion that is the difference, so I ask my brother Muslims to

take care of the Christians so that the Christians also take care of us … and let us help one another and let us live together peacefully.”

This article is reprinted from www.mercatornet.com.

Farah was airlifted to Nairobi for an operation and appeared to be recovering well. But a month later he succumbed to complications from his wounds.

He paid the ultimate price for his courage. Farah’s brother Rashid said the death ought to encourage Kenyans to live as one community. “He was responding well to treatment. On Sunday, the situation worsened and was in deep pain,” he said. “But Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un (to Allah we belong and to him we return).”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

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Three impediments to proclaiming the mighty acts of the Lord today

by Rev. Patrick G Burke

T

he theme for this year’s Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity was ‘Called to Proclaim the Mighty Acts of the Lord’, which is taken from the First Letter of St Peter. It is a powerful theme, reminding us as it does of the great commission our Lord gave his disciples at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, telling them to make disciples of all nations. It prompted me to think about what forces are at play today that make more difficult our task of proclaiming the mighty acts of the Lord.

Three things occurred to me. I do not suggest they are the only ones, but I do think they are important ones; and all are issues which transcend

denominational boundaries and which, if we were to set aside our human divisions and work together more closely as Christians, would help us all to be more obedient to Jesus’ command to make disciples of all people. These three are: militant Islam; strident secularism; and the religious indifferentism that afflicts so many Christians today.

Militant Islam It should be obvious to all that militant Islam is a terrible scourge in the world today. We have only to look to the two horrific incidents of terrorism that took place in Paris since the last week of prayer for Christian

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Unity to know that. We also have the near daily news reports of the savage atrocities taking place in lands under the control of militant Islamic forces, which in turn have led to the vast influx of refugees from those places into the Western World, as further proof – if further proof were needed.

Alongside of its more general threat to Western society, we have to keep in mind the profoundly anti-Christian bias that is held by adherents of militant Islam. Not only do they wish to destroy our society, they wish to destroy our religion as well. We see this happening in the parts of the Middle-East that are under their control where they martyr, enslave, or drive out Christians. What is happening there has been described by political leaders such as Hilary Clinton and religious leaders such as Pope Francis as genocide.

This persecution is not confined to the Middle-East. The Christian advocacy group Open Doors has identified Christians as the world most persecuted

group in the world today; and in forty of the fifty countries where that persecution is most severe the perpetrators are Islamic extremists. We must help these our brothers and sisters with both our prayers and material aid. There are many reasons why we have to do this.

We must do this out of justice, for it is not right that anyone suffer persecution for their religious faith. We must do it out of solidarity, because the Church they belong to is our Church also. We must do so out of basic self-interest, for what they do in these places these extremists hope to do in our lands, and if they go unchecked there, they will use those lands as a launching pad to attack the West. And we must do so because to allow such a situation to continue, one where there are places where it is not safe for Christians to even let others know they follow Jesus, makes it impossible to proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord in those places.

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Strident secularism The next issue is strident secularism. Secularism in its current form is a very disingenuous philosophy. Its adherents present it as being in some way neutral, while at the same time promoting a very specific agenda, one that is in many ways hostile to religion. It is not for nothing that Ireland’s atheist and humanist societies, groups which have a vision for this land that does not include religion, have among their stated goals that Ireland should be a secular state.

Particularly disingenuous is the manner in which secularists argue that people of faith should leave their faith at the door, as it were, when it comes to public debate, and claim that anyone who allows their religious faith to inform their public actions amounts to an attempt to force their religious beliefs on others.

This is false for many reasons, but I will mention just two.

The first is that it leaves out of the equation the fact that Christian morality is, and always

has been, in perfect accord with what is called by philosophers ‘natural law’. A Christian does not oppose murder only because the Bible condemns it, but because we know innately that murder is wrong, that it is an act of grave injustice to deprive an innocent person of their life.

Scripture does not give us an arbitrary set of rules; rather the law of God conforms perfectly with the law of nature. And this should not surprise us, for both have the same divine author.

The second reason is that it is completely unreasonable for those with a particular belief system to assert that those whose beliefs differ to their own should have to keep silent, while at the same time maintaining that their own beliefs, in this case secularism, should be given free reign, and indeed given priority in all debate. We must, of course, resist vigorously all attempts to silence us; for if we allow ourselves to be silenced, how are we to proclaim the mighty works of the Lord to the World?

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Religious indifferentism The final issue is what I have termed religious indifferentism, those who are lukewarm in their faith – something that is condemned in the Revelation to St John. Far too many know little of their faith and practice it only half-heartedly. They would expect to be married in their local church, have their children baptised there, and when the day comes have their funeral there. But they will otherwise during the course of their lives spend little time in prayer, attend Sunday Mass or some other divine services sporadically, read the Bible seldom if at all, know no more about the teachings of their faith than the average educated Westerner might just have picked up from cinema and television, and lead lives that are virtually indistinguishable from the atheist living down the road from them.

How can such a person proclaim the mighty acts of God? No one can give what they have not got; and just as if you have no food you can not feed a starving man,

if you know nothing of the faith you can not share it with those who are spiritually hungry.

This last issue is perhaps more serious than the first two, for its existence makes dealing with those others more difficult if not impossible. The fight against militant Islam is as much a spiritual battle as a temporal one; and if we will not arm ourselves with the spiritual strength that comes from our faith in Jesus Christ it is a battle that we will lose. And if we will not educate ourselves with the God-given wisdom of our faith, how can we expect to oppose secularism and prevent it from driving faith into an ever smaller corner of society.

These issues are serious challenges for us as members of the Church of God; but they are not insurmountable. Nothing is, for truly when it comes to fighting that which makes it hard for us to proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord God is on our side.

When it comes to militant Islam we must pray, both for the

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persecuted and those who persecute that their hearts may be turned from their evil ways; and we must urge our government, in Ireland and Europe, to take action. When it comes to secularism we must refuse to be silenced and put forward our views with pride; and we must pray that those who are in positions of influence, particularly those we elect to represent us, will have the courage to speak boldly on our behalf.

communities. For if we do not have the courage to proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord to those whom we love most, how can we hope to proclaim it to others?

This is a task for all people of faith, regardless of their specific traditions, to work on together for the greater glory of God so that all those who are brothers and sisters in Christ will joyfully together proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord.

And when it comes to indifferentism, we must realise that evangelisation begins on our own doorsteps. It must take place within our homes, among our families, in our

ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR The Rev Patrick G Burke is the Church of Ireland rector of the Castlecomer Union of Parishes, Co Kilkenny. A regular contributor to Position Papers, he was formerly a broadcast journalist with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network. He blogs at 
 http://thewayoutthere1.blogspot.ie.

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Irish Catholics, where are you?

by Rev. Patrick Gorevan

I

rish Catholicism has gone underground, leaving the public square and the forum of public argument and amusement to whoever may wish to have it.

Many observers on both sides of the vote on changing the definition of marriage last year agreed that there was an abdication of argument; the killer blows were mere slogans such as ‘equality’, which needed an unpacking they never really got, which the Catholic tradition (source of ideas such as ‘equality’) was well qualified to do, but was not listened to. The majority of the citizens of Ireland identify as Catholics, and many of them sign up to the teaching of the Church.

So why the silence?

Where we are today has a lot of different sources and influences, which go to make up the ‘Irish Catholic Experience’. Professor Vincent Twomey, in The End of Irish Catholicism? (Veritas, 2003), has offered an interesting tour of these developments.

During the penal times, from 1697 to 1793, the Catholic Church was forced to live underground. After the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1849, we effectively lost our native language and so lost the last cultural link with the ancient and medieval Catholic tradition.

A rootless faith Irish Catholics find it hard to access their roots, compared to Catholic cultures such as

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Germany, Spain or the Tyrol, where people celebrate the saints of their forefathers, indeed praying much more to Irish saints (Killian, Ita, Columbanus, Gall) than we do in Ireland. The ancient Christian heritage here at home has become a hobby of historians and a museum piece: the Book of Kells, Ardagh Chalice, etc. and their artistic genius, fired by Christianity, seems very distant and antiquarian; our history has taught us to ‘forget’ it. But this forgetfulness has a price. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that we need ‘narratives’ in order to have an identity: the history of each of our own lives is … made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions (After Virtue, 222).

No wonder the Irish bishops have been encouraging the cherishing and liturgical celebration in their dioceses of many of our Irish saints in recent decades.

‘We don’t do God’: Catholicism and the Public Square This lack of roots and identity makes us slow to identify with our faith in daily life. The awkwardness which Irish Catholics today feel in speaking about their faith and expressing it openly forms part of the ‘Irish Catholic Experience’ today. Think, for example, of the uneasy way we celebrate St Patrick’s Day here in Ireland, unable or at least reluctant to link Irish modernity with the tradition of Christianity which St Patrick represents; and so we reduce him to a pantomime-like figure. The same awkwardness may have something to do with the silence of many Catholics on issues which we actually feel strongly about, with the recent referendum an example of this, but you could also refer to the unspoken materialism with which we are served up all the time: it is a soft dictatorship of consumerism and we feel powerless to say anything about it.

In many other countries the Catholic Church is precisely the one doing the boring intellectual

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spadework on such social, moral and religious matters, and encouraging others to do so: think of the Linacre Institute in England, Catholic Voices (which, thankfully, is spawning Catholic Comment over here) Joseph Ratzinger’s mutually respectful debates with prominent atheist philosophers (Jürgen Habermas, Marcello Pera) on the future of Europe and religion, etc., to mention only some recent examples.

A ‘respectable’ faith Blessed John Henry Newman was struck by the contrast between Catholicism he found in Italy and the Protestantism in which he was formed: Catholics were natural, unaffected, easy, and cheerful around sacred things, mixing fireworks with feastdays, while Protestants needed to be solemn: public respectability was all. That ‘respectable’ approach was part of our colonial/provincial experience too; Puritanism, that ‘haunting fear that somone, somewhere, may be happy’ rubbed off even on our nineteenth century Catholic emancipation, and taught us to keep church, chapel and

conscience for God, leaving the great outdoors for Caesar.

The Second Vatican Council has severe words for this faith-life split: ‘One of the gravest errors of our times is the dichotomy between the faith which many profess and the practice of their daily lives.’ (Gaudium et Spes, 43).

Loving the world We can’t turn the clock back and resurrect a pre-Famine, less ‘respectable’ and more rowdy Catholicism, with pattern days, pilgrimages and celebrations (though pilgrimages seem to be ringing our bell a bit more). I believe we need to go to a deeper solution, a short cut to a more spontaneous and outgoing faith, a deeper sense of God’s presence in the world. After all, God is the Creator, in whom I have the foundation of my being; ‘in Whom I am more myself, than in myself alone’ (Romano Guardini). St Josemaría Escrivá makes a similar claim in one of his later works:

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The Lord wants his children, those of us who have received

the gift of faith, to proclaim the original optimistic view of creation, the love for the world which is at the heart of the Christian message (The Forge, 703).

Irish Catholicism, to break out of its somewhat concealed state, needs to see God as the Creator, who ‘saw that it was good’ and gave it (the world) to us to perfect by our efforts. Pope Francis, in Laudato Si, asks us to read into this ‘Gospel of Creation’: ‘the best way to restore men and women to their rightful place … is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates’ (75).

‘Without the Creator, the creature would disappear’, as Gaudium et

Spes puts it (36). It is not a matter of laboriously making human freedom and values ‘compatible’ with God, in a puritanical and zero-sum way, but of seeing our world of work, progress and culture emerge precisely from an un-grudging and un-jealous Creator and Father, proud rather than suspicious of his children’s spontaneity and freedom. It is surely right to base our faith’s engagement with Irish modernity on the bountiful and creative Fatherhood of God; could this awaken the sleeping giant and bring the values of Catholicism out of the catacombs, to contribute to the reasonableness, joy and goodness of Irish public life?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rev. Patrick Gorevan is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature. He lectures in philosophy in St Patrick’s College Maynooth and is academic tutor at Maryvale Institute. He has written on the early phenomenological movement, virtue ethics and the role of emotion in moral action.

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Man as the ‘Priest of Creation’

by Siobhán Ó hAodha

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n the foreword to his latest encyclical letter Laudato Si, the Holy Father singles out the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew for special mention for having enriched the Church’s thinking on ecological questions. It is interesting therefore to look at the work of another well-known Orthodox theologian with regard to the ecological question as it can help us deepen in the theology which forms the backdrop to the encyclical. John Zizioulas, metropolitan of Pergamon, is one of the better known contemporary Greek theologians, whose theology and writings have become wellknown outside of Orthodox theological circles.

The current ecological crisis began to receive popular worldwide focus in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At a series of lectures given at that time in London, Zizioulas described this crisis as perhaps the number one problem facing the world-wide human community. These lectures are to be found in his work: Preserving God’s Creation. Three lectures on Theology and Ecology, in King's Theological Review 12 (1989), pp. 1-5; 41-45; 13 (1990), pp. 1-5.

(Quotations from Zizioulas here are taken from these lectures).

He sees this crisis not simply in terms of the well-being of each individual person, but more importantly to do with the “very

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being of humanity and creation”.

Zizioulas believes that the ecological crisis is, at root, a spiritual issue and needs to be addressed by Christian theologians in order to respond in a meaningful way to the challenges presented by our contemporary culture. It is clear from the whole tenor of Laudato Si that the Holy Father sees the issue in that light also and wants Christians and all people of good will to address it in a serious manner.

According to Zizioulas, a philosophical trend that contributed to the ecological crisis was the elevation of man to a position of superiority over the material world with the emphasis on the human person’s capacity to reason. A core idea that he wants to highlight in developing his theology of creation is that:

Occupying a central place in Zizioulas’ response to the ecological crisis is the theological notion of communion and the human person as “the priest of creation”. In this respect, communion not only involves communion with the Trinity, other persons and churches, but it also involves being in communion with the rest of creation. In the Encyclical, Pope Francis describes this same fundamental concept under the heading of ‘A Universal Communion’ (nos. 89-92).

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Our culture stands in need of a revival of the consciousness that the superiority of the human being as compared with the rest of creation consists not in the reason it possesses but in its ability to relate in such a way as to create events of communion whereby individual beings are liberated from their self-centredness and thus from their limitations, and are referred to something greater than themselves, to a ‘beyond’ – to God, if one wishes to use this traditional terminology.

This man can do, not as a thinking agent but precisely because the human being is a person.

The contribution of faith to a rational understanding of the origin of the world With regard to the specific contribution of Christianty, Zizioulas highlights the doctrine of creation from nothing: ex nihilo. The early Church Fathers had postulated this doctrine primarily to uphold God’s freedom and transcendence in creation. It also allows us to see more clearly that space and time are categories that came into existence with the creation of the world. Zizioulas writes that, “Created being … is subject to these conditions of time and space, which not only mark the difference between God and the world, created and uncreated being, but also determine the world existentially.” By ‘existentially’, Zizioulas here means that being limited or finite implies an end, that is, death.

In other words once we accept the doctrine of creation ‘ex nihilo’, we also realise that creation has nothing that is intrinsic to itself in order to survive eternally and that death

implies natural extinction. Since Christian faith is grounded in the notions of love and hope, however, Zizioulas rhetorically asks if God created the world out of love, then must there not be hope for the survival of the world? A simple response, in the form of a ‘Deus ex machina’ intervention of God at the end of times is rejected by Christianity because the answer is more sophisticated than such an easy and unilateral solution implies.

Christians believe in a Trinitarian God who has left the world the means whereby creation and mankind may be saved. For Zizioulas, therefore, the key to the answer lies in the creation of the human person.

The Creation of Man In the first chapter of Genesis, we have the familiar description of God’s decision to create man: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man wearing our own image and likeness; let us put him in command of the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle, and the whole earth, and all the creeping things that move on the earth.’” For

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Zizioulas it is clear that the fact that man has been created in the image of God, should point us to how he can be the link between God and the world.

Zizioulas holds that the imago Dei or image of God in man is not rationality, as might have been generally assumed, but rather freedom. To illustrate this he points to the fact that the human being alone can create a world of its own with culture, history and art. “The difference between man and all other animals is freedom. An animal may have the ability to adapt to its environment, but it does not set out to re-create its own environment”. Thus, only man can be an artist. “To reject the existing world and create a world of its own which will bear its personal stamp, is a characteristic only of man, and it can be observed from man’s very first steps”. For Zizioulas therefore, the freedom of man is a central concern of the doctrine of creation.

Zizioulas contends that man’s tendency to create a new world, which is an essential expression

of the image of God in him, implies that he wishes to make everything that exists his own in some way. This means that he can ‘use’ creation for his own benefit in a utilitarian manner and in that way have dominion over the earth. In other words, man can make himself the ultimate point of reference for the rest of creation, rather than God. As Zizioulas says: “the ecological problem has its philosophy rooted deeply in this kind of anthropology.” The Holy Father is very clear throughout the encyclical that this kind of utilitarian approach towards other human beings and the rest of creation, apart from being unacceptable from a Christian point of view, is inherently unsustainable.

What happened with the Fall Man can sin; animals cannot, for it is the exercise of freedom rather than the act itself that makes something sinful”.

Zizioulas sees the Fall of man and, with him, the rest of creation in terms of man applying his desire for absolute freedom in the wrong way. For

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him it is clear that “man was given the drive to absolute freedom, the imago Dei, not for himself but for creation.” Man forms an organic part of the material world, but precisely because of the image of God which he possesses he is able to transcend the world and thus ensure its survival.

carry through this mystery of Christ.”

But after the fall, man too became trapped in the cycle of life and death from which it was impossible to free himself. For Zizioulas the fall of man actualised the limitations that were inherent in the fact of being creatures, if creation were left to itself. It is only the creator who can set things right again and so the uncreated God took the initiative in the incarnation of the second person of the Blessed Trinity. God did not take away man’s freedom however, and therefore the incarnation also had to safeguard that freedom in some way. As Zizioulas puts it: “The complete and proper expression of human freedom came at last in the unforced ‘yes’ given by the Virgin Mary to God’s call to

The Son of God, who is a divine person, now assumes and represents human nature too, he unites himself to all of humanity and therefore to the rest of creation also. In this way, human nature and the rest of creation can be liberated from the limitations to which they were subject after the fall.

For Zizioulas the Fall did not damage the natures of things, but broke their communion with God; it made difference into division and persons into individuals. Conversely, ‘theosis’ is not about divinising the natures of things, but about changing the way they exist, by imparting to them divine communion. From this point of view, man becomes truly man, only if he is united with God and the mystery of personhood is what makes this possible. In his understanding, a person cannot be understood in isolation but only in relation to something or someone else. The particular identity of the human person arises from his relation with

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what is not human; with God and with the rest of creation.

It is the task of man to introduce what Zizioulas calls the personal dimension into his relationship with the rest of creation. This is crucial, because, as we have seen, creation does not contain within itself the means to overcome its own mortality.

Man, who can form a personal relationship both with God and with the rest of creation, can somehow be the link that can overcome this threat of death hanging over all that is created.

This role as the link between God and the world is what forms the basis of man’s priesthood with respect to the rest of creation. It is also clear, in following Zizioulas’ explanations that this theosis in personhood occurs in Baptism where the individual human being becomes or puts on Christ as St. Paul puts it.

Man’s role as ‘Priest of Creation’ According to Zizioulas, the ancient liturgies of the church point very specifically to man’s priestly action as representative

of creation. This can be seen in the fact that the Eucharistic liturgies began their canon with a thanksgiving for creation in the first place, and only afterwards for redemption through Christ. Furthermore, he sees that the place where the mystery of Christ ‘in space and time’ occurs now is precisely in the Eucharist. As he says, in the Eucharist: “the Son presents us to the Father together with all creation as his own body.” It is precisely in the Eucharist, which we also call communion, where this renewal of created reality can actually occur. It is in this mystery that the ‘here and now’ of creation can encounter eternity, which is none other than the future accomplishment of God’s plan in Christ.

This, ultimately, is what he means by man being ‘priest of creation’ and what determines the salvation of creation as a whole. We could sum up by saying that, for Zizioulas, the union of the created with the uncreated occurs in the person of man who has been re-created in Christ. Through the hypostatic union Christ, the

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second divine person, assumes human nature and bridges the gap between the uncreated and created without confusion of the two natures. As Zizioulas neatly puts it, “The human creature will freely participate in the life of the persons of God and so all creation will be saved in and through man, in Christ.”

heart of this world, the Lord of life, who loves us so much, is alwas present. He does not abandon us, he does not leave us alone, for he has united himself definitively to our earth, and his love constantly impels us to find new ways foward. Praise be to him!” (no.245).

To conclude this brief reflection on a theological response to the ecological crisis it would seem fitting to echo the words of Pope Francis with which he draws to a close the rich insights of the encyclical: “God, who calls us to generous commiment and to give him our all, offers us the light and the strength needed to continue on our way. In the

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Siobhán Ó hAodha is originally from Galway and has a background in Electronic Engineering. She recently completed a Licenceature in Theology in the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome on The Christian doctrine of Creation in the Theology of John Zizioulas. She currently lives in Dublin and is working in the area of Data Analytics.

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Create in Me a Clean Heart

by Rev. John McCloskey

T

he United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently issued a letter addressing the plague of pornography. Entitled “Create in Me a Clean Heart: A Pastoral Response to Pornography”, it has been a long time coming. This is an important document that should be read by every family and discussed in all Catholic schools and universities.

Francis noted in 2014, “How much pain is caused in families because one of their members – often a young person – is in thrall to alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography!”

The bishops state in their letter:

The Bishops Conference makes it quite clear that pornography is an offense against chastity and human dignity and that it also is a link to other sins. Pornography has a range of victims and is pervasive; it is addictive, destroys marriages, and exploits both men and women. Pope

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“Parents today face increasing challenges in protecting their children’s innocence…. The use of pornography by anyone in the home deprives the home of its role as a safe haven and has negative effects throughout a family’s life and across generations.In response, they counsel the women and men who use pornography, “Be not afraid!

Come to the Lord Jesus, whose mercy endures forever! The Lord never tires of forgiving.”

accountability groups, couple to couple group conferences, and retreats for men and women....

Cultivating chastity takes work, as does any growth in virtue. It is a lifelong task and a daily choice.... There is no shame in confessing repeated sins of this kind.

Once you are free, helping others find their way out of pornography can be an effective way of staying committed and strong in your own faith. God can use your experience to touch the hearts and lives of others who are struggling.

The bishops address the various groups harmed by pornography.

To those, they counsel: Many good people struggle with this sin. You are not alone, there is always hope!

Satan, the father of lies, uses shame and fear to keep souls from Jesus’ mercy, but God, the most loving of Fathers, is waiting to meet with joy those who repent and to give them the grace they need to combat future temptations.

Receive the sacraments regularly to gain God’s help in your trials, especially the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, through which the Lord forgives a person of mortal sin so that he or she can receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist worthily. Do not let the obstacles of denial, shame, fear, despair, or pride keep you from relying on the Lord’s grace! ... seek ongoing support such as counseling, spiritual direction, coaching,

The bishops also address those who have been hurt by their spouse’s pornography use:

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You are greatly loved by God our Father! You are not alone, nor are you to blame for your spouse’s pornography use. The Church accompanies you with love and tenderness as you confront this sin and its effects on your marriage and family life.... You feel betrayed, deceived, and even traumatized at finding out

about your spouse’s pornography use through their own disclosure or your discovery. If you are in a dangerous environment, remove yourself and your children from any danger and seek help. Christ can ultimately heal these wounds, and often it takes time. Seek solace in prayer, in receiving the sacraments and in eucharistic adoration.

Anger at your spouse is natural and often justified, and it can be helpful to have a spiritual director or trained, trustworthy counselor to help you work through powerful emotions.

and trust with your children, so they know that they can come to you if they see a sexual image; by talking about it with them calmly, you can give them a healthy framework in which to interpret it. The Holy Spirit is your guide as you assess the situation of each. Rely on the Father’s mercy, especially if you face the difficult situation of a child who has seen or uses pornography.

They also take note of the role of other adults:

To parents and guardians, they advise: ... [P]rotect your home! Be vigilant about the technology you allow into your home and be sensitive to the prevalence of sexual content in even mainstream television and film and the ease by which it comes through the Internet and mobile devices. Educate yourself about filtering software.... Foster openness

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Grandparents, godparents, teachers, religious educators, youth ministers, and safe environment coordinators: parents have given you a responsibility to protect their children not only from physical dangers but also psychological, moral, and spiritual dangers.... Create an environment suitable for learning chastity by modeling and teaching the chaste life. Be vigilant over technological access, and monitor it in age-appropriate ways.

And to young people themselves, the bishops write: Christ calls you to be strong, courageous witnesses of chastity and hope! Reject the lies of a culture that tells you that self-gratification is the road to happiness.... Refuse to objectify your body or someone else’s through sexual pictures or videos ... the Church looks at you with compassion and love, no matter what others may think or say or do.... If you have already engaged in pornography use, choose now to turn away from that road and toward true relationships. Do not be afraid to ask for help or

guidance from your mother and father or a trusted adult, family member, or pastoral minister, if you have grown up in an environment where pornography regularly occurred and if you were exposed to it at an early age.

This pastoral letter should be read by all parents and family members. The bishops have done a great service to us in having spent much time in putting it together; it may be found and downloaded from the website of the Catholic bishops of the United States (at www.usccb.org/cleanheart).

ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR Rev C. John McCloskey III is a Catholic priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei and member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross.

He is the former director of the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington.

Website: www.frmccloskey.com.

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Book review: The Name of God is Mercy

by Austen Ivereigh

T

he Church does not exist to condemn people but to help them encounter “the visceral love of God’s mercy,” says Pope Francis in a new book out Jan. 12, an exploration of the defining theme of Francis’ papacy that is also a gentle response to his critics.

The 150-page book – published in eighty-six countries and twenty languages – is in reality an extended conversation over four hours last summer with veteran Vatican journalist Andrea Tornielli, in which he explains how he has come to center his ministry and now his papacy on God’s constant readiness to heal and forgive.

“The Name Of God Is Mercy” (Random House, $26) was launched in Rome at a presentation this week by one of the Church’s most senior cardinals, a Chinese prisoner serving a 20-year term in an Italian prison, and the Oscarwinning Italian comic actor, Roberto Benigni, who joked that “only this Pope” could have organized his book launch in this way.

The prisoner, 30-year-old Zhang Agostino Jianqing, who immigrated to Italy in his youth, told a poignant story of being condemned to twenty years in prison for an unspecified “error” he committed at the age of 19.

While in prison, he resolved to

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change his life and was received into the Church, taking the baptismal name of Augustine.

Thanking Pope Francis, whom he met Monday night, for his attention to prisoners, Jianqing said he wanted his story to witness to “how God’s mercy changed my life.”

the confessor he met when he was 17. When Father Carlos Duarte Ibarra died a year later of leukemia, “I cried a lot that night, really a lot, and hid in my room,” he recalls. “I had lost a person who helped me feel the mercy of God.”

The book breaks no new ground doctrinally, and Francis is at pains to point out that his emphasis on God’s mercy builds on the teaching of his predecessors since Pope St. John XXIII, who are quoted throughout the text.

Yet the book is also striking in its directness and informality, as well as its personal stories of how Francis has experienced mercy in his personal life, his priestly ministry – above all, in the confessional – and in his spirituality. The pope says, for example, that he can read his own life in the light of Chapter 16 of the prophet Ezekiel, in which “shame is a grace: when one feels the mercy of God, he feels a great shame for himself and his sin.” And he recalls the impact on him of the death of

When Tornielli asks, “Can there be opposition between truth and mercy, or between doctrine and mercy?” Francis’ answer is that mercy is doctrine, for it is the truth about God – “God’s identity card.” Mercy is not an emphasis or an aspect of the divine but who God is; it is “the divine attitude which embraces, it is God giving himself to us, accepting us, and bowing to forgive.” Mercy, he says, “is real; it is the first attribute of God. Theological reflections on doctrine and mercy may then follow, but let us not forget that mercy is doctrine.”

Repeating a contrast he used in a homily to the cardinals in February last year, Francis critiques the approach of the “scholars of the law” who criticize Jesus in the name of doctrine, an approach he says is

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“repeated throughout the long history of the Church.” Whereas the “logic of the law” is driven by a fear of losing the just and the saved, “the logic of God” is shown in Jesus’ desire to save the lost and sinners. The logic of the law leads to the expulsion of the leper in order to protect the healthy from contamination; God’s logic is shown in Jesus entering into contact with the leper, touching him and seeking his integration. “In so doing, he teaches us what to do, which logic to follow, when faced with people who suffer physically and spiritually.”

But the desire to change – however small and tentative – has to be there. Because God is misericordis – which the Pope defines as “opening one’s heart to wretchedness” – God’s mercy can only be received by people who acknowledge their wretchedness. “If you don’t recognize yourself as a sinner it means you don’t want to receive [mercy],” the Pope says, adding: “This is a narcissistic illness.”

While the Church “condemns sin because it has to relay the truth,” he says elsewhere, “it embraces

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the sinner who recognizes himself as such.”

But the Church has to look for opportunities. In order to help people encounter God’s mercy, the Church has to go out from itself and seek people out, offering them new possibilities, rather than focus on protecting the flock. “As a confessor, even when I have found myself before a locked door, I have always tried to find a crack, just a tiny opening, so that I can pry open that door and grant forgiveness and mercy,” Francis says.

deeply maternal and merciful side, a Church that goes forth toward those who are ‘wounded’, who are in need of an attentive ear, understanding, forgiveness and love.”

This article was originally published in OSV Newsweekly and is reprinted with the kind permission of Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.

The Pope expresses his hope that the Jubilee Year of Mercy, which opened before Christmas, “will serve to reveal the Church’s

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Austen Ivereigh is the author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (Henry Holt, $30).

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Film review: The Revenant

by Bishop Robert Barron

A

lejandro Iñárritu’s new film The Revenant is one of the most talked about movies, and for good reason.

The opening twenty minutes, which feature a frighteningly realistic Indian attack and a horrifically vivid mauling by a grizzly bear, are absolutely compelling viewing. And the remainder of the film is so involving that this viewer at least felt physically sick as he followed the sufferings of the main character.

The story revolves around a fur trapper from the early nineteenth century named Hugh Glass (very convincingly played

by Leonardo DiCaprio). After

being nearly killed by a bear protecting its cubs, Glass is bandaged up and then carried on a crudely constructed litter through miles and miles of rugged country in the middle of winter. So sick is he and such an encumbrance to his colleagues that many in the party wonder whether it might be better simply to kill him.

But Glass’s son, a half-white, half-Indian teenager named Hawk, vigorously defends his father. Eventually, however, Fitzgerald, one of the strongest advocates for eliminating Glass, makes his move, murdering Hawk in cold blood and placing Glass in a shallow grave, convinced that the profoundly

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injured man would never manage to extricate himself.

But in the first of a number of resurrection scenes, Glass crawls out of his grave and despite his appalling injuries manages to make his way. What follows is like something out of Dante’s Inferno or the book of Job. When he tries to take a drink, the water runs out of the wounds in his neck; when he seeks shelter in a cave, Indians find him and he is compelled to escape down a fast-flowing stream while arrows whiz by his head; when we think he is relatively safe, he is attacked again and forced to escape on horseback right over a steep cliff, killing the animal and leaving himself even more grievously injured; exposed to lethal cold, he eviscerates the horse and sleeps in the confines of the carcass.

What is driving him during this entire ordeal is a burning desire for vengeance against Fitzgerald, the man who killed his son and left Glass himself for dead. He will face down every obstacle and withstand any assault so

that he might bring this wicked person to justice. In this, he comes to imitate the bear with whom he had grappled to the death. Throughout the central section of the film, Glass is clad head to toe in furs, shuffles and grunts his way through the wilderness, eats animals and fish raw. He has become the grizzly, roused to fury because of an attack on his offspring.

The pivotal moment of the film occurs when, at the end of his strength, Glass encounters a Pawnee warrior who feeds him and shelters him during a ferocious storm. In conversation afterward, Glass learns that his benefactor had himself lost his entire family at the hands of white settlers. Filled understandably with rage and a desire for vengeance, the Indian concluded, nevertheless, that “vengeance is best left to the Creator�.

In a dream sequence just after this conversation, Glass finds himself in the midst of the ruins of a Christian church, where he spies and embraces Hawk, reaching out, as it were, across

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the divide to a transcendent world, where the Creator rules.

Without giving away too much more of the plot, suffice it to say that Glass tracks down Fitzgerald and engages in mano a mano combat with him until he remembers what the Pawnee had said and allows his wounded counterpart to drift down the river.

The film carries a crucially important message, especially for our secularist time, namely, that, as Evelyn Waugh put it in Brideshead Revisited, “the supernatural is the real”. The Revenant is unremittingly honest in its portrayal of people caught in the awful reality of this fallen world, which is marked through and through by

violence, suspicion, hatred, revenge, and the constant struggle to survive in the context of an indifferent nature. For the denizens of this universe, the correct mottos are indeed “kill or be killed” and “love your friends but hate your enemies” and “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”.

If there is no God, as Fitzgerald suggests to one of his underlings, survival at any cost, the law of the jungle, is the supreme law. But if there is a dimension that transcends nature, if there is a God who provides a moral compass and presides over human affairs, then one can let go of vengeance and seek a higher justice. The film ends just as this

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consciousness of God dawns on Glass.

How much of human history has been dominated by revenge which produces an endless cycle of violence? And how present is this dynamic in the struggles of today: Muslim factionalism in the Middle East, anti-Christian violence in Africa, terrorism everywhere? Nothing within fallen nature will ever break us free of these cycles. Only an openness to the transcendent God, a higher power to whom we can entrust our thirst for justice, will solve the problem that most bedevils the human heart.

birth undergone by Hugh Glass, and watching it happen is a very good reason to see The Revenant.

The slowly-dawning awareness of this truth is the greatest re-

ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire.

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Married couples: strengthen your marriage!

Marital Love is a course over five Sunday afternoons to help married couples deepen in their married love, navigate the challenges of marriage and to learn from the experiences of other couples.

When?

12pm - 3.45pm on Sunday 17 Jan, 6 March, 24 April, 15 May, 12 June.

Where?

Rosemont School, Sandyford, Co. Dublin.

(Child-minding as well as fun activities for the children will be provided).

The cost? €220 per couple.

This includes course materials, tuition and a meal.

For further information see www.familyenrichmentireland.org