Let’s heed the tough but reasonable challenge issued by Bishop Murphy

THE former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, came in for criticism recently over comments he made about Muslim culture.

He lamented the fact that very few Muslim leaders condemned “the evil of suicide bombers who kill innocent people”. He also criticised the decline in Muslim theological scholarship over the last 500 years. This, he said, had led to “strong resistance to modernity” throughout the Islamic world.

The Muslim Council of Great Britain accused Dr Carey of “recycling religious prejudice”. But within a few days they wrote to mosques across the country urging them to help police fight terrorism. They asked imams and community leaders to be alert for possible illegal activities and to report potential terrorists. Maybe the archbishop’s words had had their desired effect.

If something is going wrong, it is nearly always better to speak out than to stay quiet. That’s why the Bishop of Kerry, Dr Bill Murphy, deserves applause for what he had to say last week about those who pick and choose from the Catholic Church’s sacraments.

Like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Murphy was more careful than some of his quoted words might suggest. He said it did not make any sense “if a couple who are not believers ask for a church wedding”. More gently, he asked if it made any sense when “parents who do not share the faith of the Church, or parents who do not go to Mass, present their children for the sacraments”.

He got a mixed reaction. Least helpful was the suggestion that the bishop had no right to speak out at all in view of past transgressions by some clergy and that the Church should rebuild its own credibility first.

That suggests a sulking, adolescent mentality so obsessed with the Church’s past wrongs that it refuses to listen to anything a Church leader might say.

Other analysts recognised that the Church’s sacraments are being widely abused, but wondered if the Church’s desire to build a relationship with lukewarm believers should take precedence. An open and generous approach to the sacraments might therefore be preferable.

This is the nub of it. Church leaders have to promote and defend the faith in full and to remind people that sacraments have real meaning and purpose.

These sacraments, according to Catholic doctrine, are signs of God’s mercy and love but also have the power to bring believers closer to God. For example, the Church has always pointed out that even if a priest is guilty of some wrongdoing, the Mass which he celebrates remains valid. So, sacraments are serious. They require reverence. Those who want them should try to follow the teachings of the Church which confers them.

On the other hand the Church believes that Christ died for all, saints and sinners. Blocking people’s access to the sacraments because they do not accept Church teachings or obey the rules is not something to be done lightly. According to the Church’s own version of events, this course of action denies people the necessary tools they need to grow in holiness and love of God.

This poses a particular problem when parents no longer have faith in the Church themselves but retain their belief in God and the conviction that their children are better off within the Church than outside of it. One person I know has a very deep faith despite the fact that his parents never did. He attributes this partly to his Catholic schooling, but partly to the fact that he was never denied access to the sacraments, even though his parents may not have been attending Mass.

Yet there is no denying the problem of certain baptised Catholics who regard access to the Church’s sacraments as a right to be enjoyed without any corresponding responsibility on their own part. Fashion weddings are the worst. Vain and irreligious people leave priests feeling like flower-pots, because they bring so little religious feeling to the solemnisation of their commitment.

A few years ago an outraged woman contacted RTÉ because her local Catholic church wouldn’t change its usual arrangements to allow her get married on a Sunday. She ‘threatened’ to get married in a registry office instead. She clearly believed that the church, and not herself, would be the loser if this happened. A rather debatable point.

SOME people see no real harm or discourtesy in attending the sacraments without believing in them. They see the Church as a collection of religious leaders (whom they may or may not like) rather than as a community of people united by certain sacred beliefs.

The church wedding or First Communion ceremony is just another service to be bought and consumed. The priest is just another professional, no different from the accountant or solicitor, and certainly not the representative of a community of believers. The stipend repays him for his effort. No further effort of friendship or commitment is required.

Maybe what they have done is more akin to barging in on a family as it sits down to a meal.

They help themselves to the Sunday roast, interrupt the conversation, criticise the cooking and the senior members of the household, show no interest in the lives or welfare of their hosts and leave again. At best, they leave a few quid to pay for their dinner.

We can easily sympathise with the Church’s frustration if the intruders are well-heeled, middle-class types who are simply using the church as a fashion accessory, an art gallery to form the backdrop to a significant moment in their lives.

But what of those who haven’t enough faith to attend frequently, but still want the benefits provided by the Church community to be enjoyed by their children? Aren’t they freeloading too? Isn’t it also possible that they are doing their children a disservice because, instead of exposing their children to religious faith, they are vaccinating them against it?

Yes, the children are exposed to the ritual, ceremony and language of the Church. But they also see that their parents don’t really believe and quickly lose faith themselves. When life’s big challenges come, or when the Church approaches them in future, faith will have no meaning for them. They have been through all that stuff, as they see it, and it holds no fascination for them.

That’s the pessimistic outlook. The optimistic version sees the religious ethos rubbing off on the children and perhaps in time influencing their parents as well.

Bishop Murphy’s colleague, the coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, observes that irregularly practising Catholics have yet to arrive at “maturity of faith”. Young people getting married are at a stage of least church practice, he says, but this situation may change as they grow older.

The Bishop of Kerry used language that was provocative, yet careful. He chose to open a dialogue, not issue an edict. He did not try to ban irregularly practising Catholics from approaching the sacraments.

He simply challenged them to reflect on the contradictions and discourtesy of what they are doing.

A mature society will see the value in chewing over what he has said.