But my parish in south London appears to exist in a parallel universe, and a quick straw poll among friends who (reluctantly) attended mass at their churches at the weekend revealed it was the same in theirs. There were about 70 people at the morning mass I attended. Some of them were very elderly, and maybe deserve some understanding; but others were in their 30s, 40s, 50s. What on earth are they doing, standing up and sitting down by rote, parroting prayers that, in the light of last week’s revelations in Rome, ring so hollow? There was not a word about the horrors from the priest. In his sermon he talked about how lucky we were to be hearing that day’s reading from St Luke’s gospel, since it had last been read at Sunday mass in 2007. The only mention of the churning tumult in our institution came in a prayer read out by a layperson, which called on God to grant “wisdom” to those making decisions in the Vatican about the safety of young people and vulnerable adults.[...]
But there’s one thing we know for sure, and if I’d been a priest saying mass at a Catholic parish last weekend I would have based my sermon on it. Jesus Christ, the founder of the Catholic church, didn’t often get angry. But once or twice he got absolutely furious, and it was always about the same thing: the religious elite, who in his day were the Pharisees. “Do not imitate their actions, because they don’t practise what they preach,” he warned, telling them they were “like whitewashed tombs, which look fine on the outside but are full of bones and decaying corpses on the inside” (Matthew 23 v3, and v27).
If Jesus had been at last week’s abuse summit, he’d have been furious again; and he could have used those same lines. We, the Catholics who still have even a smidgen of faith in anything at the heart of this organisation, now have to be furious, too: we have to force change, and then we have to work out whether there is anything worth preserving in the whitewashed tomb that calls itself the Catholic church.
No comments:
Post a Comment