Abbé Pierre (d. 2007), the legendary French street priest, would chastise those Catholics for whom the “presence” of Christ was “real” in the consecrated host but only “symbolic” in the poor person with whom Jesus identifies in the Gospel of Matthew.

Spirituality has its full place in this time of renewal. Let us abandon the negative term “non-believers” and open ourselves to the diversity of the spiritual aspirations of our contemporaries. The sharing of convictions, beliefs and faith requires each community to strive to be understandable and credible.

Let us not remain confined in old theological and pastoral approaches. Let us not remain enclosed behind our walls!

April 2020, La Croix

God speaks to us through the events of this world. It is up to us to read the signs!

We believe the current crisis is an opportunity for Christianity to find its full domestic dimension and live the grace of fragility in a creative way.

As the Czech priest and theologian Tomas Halik says:

“Maybe we should accept the present abstinence from religious services and the operation of the Church as kairos, an opportunity to stop and engage in thorough reflection before God and with God… Maybe this ‘state of emergency’ is an indicator of the new face of the Church.”

Far from polemics, the baptized have invented new forms of community life during this time of pandemic: gathering together through broadcast or live-streamed liturgies, video-linked prayer groups, Bible study sessions…

Catholics, like others in our society, have also continued to serve their neighbors through many associations and various solidarity initiatives.

Being in community is constitutive to our faith. But for what sort of worship and to what sort of God?

In the Eucharist, Christians remember the death and resurrection of Christ and of the gift of his life. In the same spirit, they commit themselves to give absolute priority to the service of their neighbor. It is a question of combining “interiority and commitment”, “struggle and contemplation”…

Abbé Pierre (d. 2007), the legendary French street priest, would chastise those Catholics for whom the “presence” of Christ was “real” in the consecrated host but only “symbolic” in the poor person with whom Jesus identifies in the Gospel of Matthew.

Spirituality has its full place in this time of renewal. Let us abandon the negative term “non-believers” and open ourselves to the diversity of the spiritual aspirations of our contemporaries. The sharing of convictions, beliefs and faith requires each community to strive to be understandable and credible.

How can we fail to notice that much of our Catholic discourse seems foreign to our contemporaries. Even more serious has been the silence over sexual abuse of minors and the slowness of the Church’s process of reform.

Once they are back inside their church buildings, how will our Catholic communities reexamine this need for transparency, integrity and truthfulness? Certain ways the Catholic Church functions should also be up for discussion.

What can be done to make sure that our communities, parishes and dioceses move forward in a more collegial way? How can we better articulate the diversity of ministries, those already existing or those yet to be created? How can we better include women in Church governance and decision-making?

Also, what will be the concept of the priest or the role of the parish priest? What about our relationship to the sacred and the rites? And what kind of discussion can we have about the liturgy?

Let us not remain confined in old theological and pastoral approaches. Let us not remain enclosed behind our walls!

Let us set out on the roads of our wounded world and make our churches, not storehouses of customs or fortresses of truth, but places of openness and freedom. Places that are truly freed from lockdown.

Guy Aurenche, former president of the CCFD-Terre solidaire; Laurent Grzybowski, journalist and singer; Monique Hébrard, former Panoramajournalist; René Poujol, former editorial director of Le Pèlerin; Jean-Pierre Rosa, former general delegate of the Semaines sociales de France (Social Weeks of France); Gérard Testard, former chairman of Fondacio.

**

The Didache: it is about a small-sized Church – less than a hundred people – who had a sense of belonging within a covenant as a community, it calls them to a moral lifestyle, and they have to look out for one another.  Christianity is the opposite of an ethical individualism.

While the world is up-side-down

Perhaps the greatest discovery about vocation is that capitalism’s values cut right through the Christian view of life as vocation. The sense of vocation is the belief that we are called to exercise our skills for the building up of the whole people.

Before the crisis how many of us had slipped into the view that human importance is derived from earning potential?  The value we give to a job is a direct consequence of the amount of salary that it can attract. In this view, the more I can generate income, the more I am worth in salary, and so the more I am worth in the economy, and so the more significant I am.

It seems so logical that we do not question it, normally. But this time is not normal.

We realize that nurses – and nursing is often seen as a demeaning job because it involves service to others – are the difference between life and death, then we see that this is what is really valuable rather that they ability to generate cash.

We have discovered that we need those who empty bins, drive delivery lorries and do a hundred other humdrum jobs.

Called to serve

I am not a dreamer who imagines that this realization will last: capitalism has been too successful over centuries at bringing material progress (despite its costs) for it to be abandoned now – it will return!

But right now, let us see this inversion in our values as mirroring the inversion of values that is part of the Jesus vision. Right now we can read this account of an early Christian dispute and actually hear it:

A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. But he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors.

But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves (Lk 22, 24).

We could also take notice that for John the Evangelist, the main happening in his Last Supper narrative is about mutual service. Jesus – the Lord and the teacher – takes on the task of a lowest female house slave and washes their feet.

This is an inversion of the world values, gender roles, and social order. Needless to say it was controversial – Peter wanted nothing to do with it – and has remained so.

Cardinal Robert Sarah, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship at the Vatican, recently pointed out that the feet washing ritual on Holy Thursday is never anything more than optional!

But it was not optional for Jesus and he did not intend it to be optional for any of us who call themselves disciples. It was not a display of humanity (‘big boss nice to little people’) as it is often caricatured in our liturgy, but a display of the world of Christian relationship.

More challenging vision of discipleship

Moreover, Jesus did not tell those there to wash the followers’ feet, but that each person who wants to belong to Jesus and wishes to ‘have a share in him’ should wash the feet of others.

During this crisis we have found ourselves doing all sorts of small acts of service for one another. Are we discovering in this process that this is part of our Christian vocation?

In this situation we might be able to hear this even more challenging vision of discipleship:

And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.

Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”

Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.”

For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord — and you are right, for that is what I am.

So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.

Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them (Jn 13:3-17).

Vocations Sunday

The Fourth Sunday of Easter is usually referred to as “Vocations Sunday” because the shepherd/flock imagery in chapter 10 of John’s gospel is interpreted at an image of the pastor (clergy) and his people.  But I believe that “Vocations Sunday” is a misnomer. It should be called “Recruitment Sunday”.  Calling it “Vocations Sunday” when the aim is to pray for more unmarried men to volunteer to be presbyters (in most places we never even think about nuns or religious brothers) has two effects.

First, we think that a vocation is equivalent to becoming a full-time religious person: someone who takes on all that is associated with “a priest”. How often have I heard a man say, “I have no vocation”, when what he meant was that he did not want to be a cleric.

Second, it forgets that every formal ministry – such as that of being a presbyter – is but a part of an individual Christian’s vocation.

Let’s try to unravel this.

Every Christian has a vocation – it is wrapped up in the particularity of your life. You see the need there in front of you, you know what can be done, and what you can do, and you respond: this is the essence of vocation.  It is constant in that we are always being called to build the kingdom in response to the Spirit’s promptings and empowered for what is needed by the Spirit. There is no vacation from vocation, but what it calls us to do is ever changing.

Discovering one’s calling

A friend of mine now has discovered that he has the skills of a teacher because he has to help in home-schooling his two kids during this crisis. I know someone else who led prayer, i.e. presided at a liturgy, in their family for the first time on Easter Sunday.

Another has discovered the skills of the listener as lonely people need to talk, and this list goes on and on. As I move through the demands of my life I am called to use my gifts to build the kingdom of holiness, grace, justice, peace and love.

Then there are fixed ministries: skills we need as a Church.

We need those who can read, interpret and preach. We need people who have the skill to gather a community around them. We need those who can lead people in prayer.

We have to identify people who show these skills, and then help them to develop them and make them better in their tasks. Instead of recruitment for a special corps of clergy, we should think of finding ministers more in terms of a job-search or skills audit in a community.

If we believe that the Spirit is moving in the community of the baptized, then a ‘vocations crisis’ is nonsense. It is only a crisis of us failing to look, train, and empower.

Or maybe – just as in so many other areas of life – we have got it all so confused that we cannot see the wood for the trees.

This coronavirus crisis is throwing all our assumptions into the air! Where they will land we do not yet know, we do not know if things will really change or slip back to “normal”.

But after this latest “Vocations Sunday” we might make a start on a new way of living. Our focus today would not be on clergy recruitment, but on helping each Christian to see that she/he has a vocation as they respond to needs in their community.

This is a hard process of listening and then there is the challenge of doing. Then later we might find that individuals also have skills in the communities’ worship.

These people would be identified by a process of community discernment (can this person lead prayer and interpret the demands of discipleship for us?), rather than by a willingness to accept a priori criteria from a bygone age (e.g. male, celibate, full-time and willing to belong within a clerical corps).

If we moved to that, then we could really call this Fourth Sunday of Easter: Vocations Sunday.

Thomas O’Loughlin is a priest of the Catholic diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Eating Together, Becoming One: Taking Up Pope Francis’s Call to Theologians (Liturgical Press, 2019).

**