Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney
Mob: 0417 279 437
mike.delaney@aohtas.org.au
Assistant Priest: Fr Paschal Okpon
Mob: 0438 562 731
paschalokpon@yahoo.com
Priest in Residence: Fr Phil McCormack
Mob: 0437 521 257
pmccormack43@bigpond.com
Postal Address: PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310
(Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10am - 3pm)
Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160
Email: merseyleven@aohtas.org.au
Secretary: Annie Davies
Finance Officer: Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair: Felicity Sly
Mob: 0418 301 573
fsly@internode.on.net
Mob: 0417 279 437
mike.delaney@aohtas.org.au
Assistant Priest: Fr Paschal Okpon
Mob: 0438 562 731
paschalokpon@yahoo.com
Priest in Residence: Fr Phil McCormack
Mob: 0437 521 257
pmccormack43@bigpond.com
Postal Address: PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310
(Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10am - 3pm)
Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160
Email: merseyleven@aohtas.org.au
Secretary: Annie Davies
Finance Officer: Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair: Felicity Sly
Mob: 0418 301 573
fsly@internode.on.net
Parish Mass times for the Month: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au
Weekly Homily Podcast: mikedelaney.podomatic.com
Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.
PLENARY COUNCIL PRAYER
Come, Holy Spirit of Pentecost.
Come, Holy Spirit of the great South Land.
O God, bless and unite all your people in Australia
and guide us on the pilgrim way of the Plenary Council.
Give us the grace to see your face in one another
and to recognise Jesus, our companion on the road.
Give us the courage to tell our stories and to speak boldly of your truth.
Give us ears to listen humbly to each other
and a discerning heart to hear what you are saying.
Lead your Church into a hope-filled future,
that we may live the joy of the Gospel.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, bread for the journey from age to age.
Amen.
Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for us.
St Mary MacKillop, pray for us.
Come, Holy Spirit of the great South Land.
O God, bless and unite all your people in Australia
and guide us on the pilgrim way of the Plenary Council.
Give us the grace to see your face in one another
and to recognise Jesus, our companion on the road.
Give us the courage to tell our stories and to speak boldly of your truth.
Give us ears to listen humbly to each other
and a discerning heart to hear what you are saying.
Lead your Church into a hope-filled future,
that we may live the joy of the Gospel.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, bread for the journey from age to age.
Amen.
Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for us.
St Mary MacKillop, pray for us.
Parish Prayer
Heavenly Father,
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
to the Gospel and build an amazing parish.
Amen.
Our Parish Sacramental Life
Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Benediction with Adoration Devonport: First Friday each month - commences at 10am and concludes with Mass
Legion of Mary: Wednesdays 11am Sacred Heart Church Community Room, Ulverstone
Prayer Group: Charismatic Renewal – Mondays 6.30pm Community Room Ulverstone
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
Amen.
Our Parish Sacramental Life
Baptism: Arrangements are made by contacting Parish Office. Parents attend a Baptismal Preparation Session organised with a Priest.
Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist: Are received following a Family–centred, Parish-based, School-supported Preparation Program.
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: prepares adults for reception into the Catholic community.
Marriage: arrangements are made by contacting one of our priests - couples attend a Pre-marriage Program
Anointing of the Sick: please contact one of our priests
Reconciliation: Ulverstone - Fridays (10am - 10:30am), Devonport - Saturday (5:15pm– 5.45pm)
Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Benediction with Adoration Devonport: First Friday each month - commences at 10am and concludes with Mass
Benediction with Adoration Devonport: First Friday each month - commences at 10am and concludes with Mass
Legion of Mary: Wednesdays 11am Sacred Heart Church Community Room, Ulverstone
Prayer Group: Charismatic Renewal – Mondays 6.30pm Community Room Ulverstone
Weekday Masses 22nd – 25th October, 2019
Tuesday: 9:30am Penguin … St John Paul II
Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe … St John of Capistrano
Thursday: 12noon Devonport … St Anthony Claret
Friday: 9:30am Ulverstone
Next Weekend 19th & 20th October
Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Devonport
6:00pm Penguin
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell
9:00am Ulverstone
5:00pm Latrobe
MINISTRY ROSTERS 26th & 27th OCTOBER, 2019
10:30am
E Petts, K Pearce,
O McGinley
Ulverstone:
Penguin:
Latrobe:
Port Sorell:
Readings this Week: 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY’S GOSPEL:
Readings Next Week: 30th Sunday
in Ordinary Time – Year C
Let us pray for those who have died recently:
Let us pray
for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 17th - 23rd October
May the souls of the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen
Envelopes are available at all Mass Centres
Weekly Ramblings
On Wednesday I travelled to
Bendigo to attend the ordination of Bishop Shane Mackinlay. As a young deacon
Shane visited the parish and, over the years, has returned and spent time with
friends made on that occasion. It was a great celebration and in his words of
thanks at the conclusion of the ordination he said: “I acknowledge the
difficulty of being Catholic and building up the reign of God in contemporary
Australia. These are challenging times in which to do this, with many people
feeling deeply hurt and disillusioned by the Church.” He continued “I take
those challenges very seriously; responding to them must be integral to
whatever we do. We can only be faithful to this by placing our trust in God,
sharing our gifts generously with those around us, and valuing and celebrating
the riches that are brought by each member of our community.”
Take care on the roads and in your homes, 
KNIGHTS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS – NATIONAL PRAYERS
CRUSADE FOR VOCATIONS:
NOVEMBER REMEMBRANCE BOOKS:
AUSTRALIAN CHURCH WOMEN: will host World Community Day at
St. John’s Church Friday 25th October at 1:30pm. The Least Coin
will be dedicated at this Service.
Mt
St Vincent Auxiliary will be holding a Craft, Cake and small Christmas gifts
stall Sunday 3rd November after 9am Mass in the
Community Room, Sacred Heart Church.
Bring a friend or two AND your spare change and buy
some goodies to help support this great fundraiser.
THURSDAY 24th October Eyes down 7:30pm. Callers Merv Tippett & Tony Ryan
FOR THE EXTRAORDINARY MISSIONARY MONTH
Heavenly Father,
Empower us by the gifts of the Holy
Spirit to be courageous and zealous in bearing
witness to the Gospel, so that the mission entrusted to the
Church,
which is still very far from completion, may find new and efficacious expressions
that bring life and light to the world.
Help us make it possible for all peoples to experience the saving love and mercy
of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you in the
unity of the Holy Spirit, One God, for ever and ever. Amen.
PLENARY 2020 Part
2 MacKillop Hill
MacKillop Hill 123 William
Street Ph. 6428 3095 M.
0418 367 769.
2020
PLENARY COUNCIL
PLENARY 2020
Part 2
We are inviting parishioners to
participate in the next step, Listening and Discernment of these
themes, to discover where God’s Spirit is leading the People of God in
Australia at this time.
Wednesday evenings: 7.00 – 8.30pm, 90 Stewart Street,
Devonport
As each session is a separate and
different theme – all those attending any session are encouraged to read the
material prior to the meeting.
The suggested material for each session will
be the Snapshot report for that theme and will be used in conjunction with the
Discernment Material on the website.
All the material can be accessed from the Plenary Council website - https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/themes/ and click on each of the Themes button. However, please contact the Parish House by email: merseyleven@aohtas.org.au or Phone 6424:2783 if you need a hard copy of the material for any session.
Synod on the Amazon
Amazonia: Under the Forest , A People
Isabelle de Gaulmyn, Vatican City (Oct 4, 2019)
The Amazon has been on our screens for months.
The apocalyptic images of burning forests have shaken the entire planet, even heads of state, who have also been forced to unite in collective emotion.
The Amazon story has now moved to Rome where Pope Francis has invited Catholic leaders from the region for three weeks starting Oct. 6.
It is what the Church calls a "synod."
Is this a "pontifical" way of alerting people to these square kilometres of canopy that are going up in smoke?
No. Through one of these intuitions of which he has a secret knack, Pope Francis does not want to arouse pity or emotion. It goes much further; he seeks nothing less than to overturn the tables. Not to draw the world's attention to the Amazon. But to put Amazonia at the center of the world.
In Rome, some prelates are strangling themselves with indignation, grumbling that we have now seen everything in the kingdom of Pope Francis.
There is a world outside Europe
For it is an almost Copernican revolution, in a Roman Church that has been built for centuries on the idea that the only "accomplished Christianity" was that which came from Europe, strengthened by its heritage, its books, its theology and its tradition.
It is a little like the third-world world maps that lined the walls of colleges and chaplaincies in the 1980s and reversed perspectives, putting distant territories at the center, which we had previously considered with a certain condescension.
An irony of history: 300 years after Matteo Ricci and the rites dispute, in which Pope Clement XI forbade the Italian Jesuit from adapting the Catholic religion to Chinese culture, it is another Jesuit, now Pope, who would like the Church to be able to live in the Amazon time zone as well.
One of the challenges is indeed to know how to adapt Catholicism to the specificities of a distant territory, where today's priests are hard to find and Christian communities left to abandon, where the merchants of easy prosperity, the Pentecostal pastors, are gradually replacing Catholic parishes.
But it is not only a question of rites or internal organization in the Church.
The Rome meeting was prepared through intensive field consultations. Hundreds of meetings, in this huge area of seven million square kilometres, were held with the inhabitants and the participants in this synod come to Rome with the firm intention of giving them the floor.
We must listen to the words of these women and men, victims for centuries of exploitation, massacres and genocides. These women and men are still considered, on the shores of the Amazon and its tributaries, as the lowest of the citizens, despised, exploited by loggers, herders, agricultural owners and mining companies.
Because under the trees, there is a people; Amazonia is not only the lung of the planet. We would have almost forgotten it this summer, focusing on the loss of our own oxygen reserves that were going up in smoke.
The burning forest is also a sign of a deeply unfair system that reduces some of the inhabitants to the greatest poverty to reclaim their land.
Everything is linked: the exploitation of the forest, but also that of men, restricted even in their own spiritual imagination.
We will not extinguish the gigantic problem with firefighting planes but by rebuilding the Indians' ecosystem. These indigenous peoples whose gallantry the Pope has the gall to think of not only in terms of the future of his Church but also, more broadly, of our planet.
Synod Stands As One With Indigenous People of Amazonia
For more than a week bishops have given damning evidence of human rights violations
Nicolas Senèze; Vatican City, October 16, 2019
The voice of the Amazon's indigenous peoples is loud and clear in the Synod Hall.
"Let us entrust to our Mother the Ecuadorian brothers who have been killed, wounded, persecuted or taken prisoner," said Pope Francis.
The pope, who had only day earlier said in his Angelus prayer that he was "concerned" by the situation in Ecuador, mentioned it again on Oct. 14, at the opening of the Synod's morning prayer to mark the start of the second week.
The Ecuadorian situation is emblematic of what the synod fathers are debating.
"What is happening in Ecuador can be applied to the entire Amazon basin," said José Gregorio Mirabal, who is representing the Congress of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon in Rome.
While attending the debates as an auditor, he is also keeping an eye on events in Ecuador where an agreement was finally reached on Oct. 13 after the indigenous people rebelled against the government's removal of a fuel subsidy.
Fighting the destruction of their lands
It was the International Monetary Fund which had requested the removal of the subsidy, in exchange for a large loan, but it caused fuel prices to double and a furious backlash by the indigenous people.
Indeed, it is difficult for Amazonian Indians not to understand the abolition of this subsidy as a barely disguised blackmail.
'Let us drill … we'll have cheaper fuel'
For years, the indigenous people of Amazonia have been fighting the exploitation and ruination of their lands by multinational mining companies.
In Rome, for more than a week, bishops' testimonies on violations of indigenous rights have echoed the interventions of the synod fathers.
"Multinational corporations do not hesitate to corrupt indigenous leaders, sometimes even making them drink to get their signatures," warned Bishop Medardo Henao del Río of Mitú, Colombia, for whom "the Church is best served when accompanying these peoples and underlining the consequences of their exploitation."
"The Church is the only institution that cries out for the whole planet to awaken," added Gregorio.
Although he is not baptized, he warmly thanked the pope for having given a voice to the indigenous peoples through this Synod.
"Only the pope can help us to make ourselves heard from the new gods of this world, from Google to the IMF," he said.
"We want our lands to be demarcated and an end to their violent invasion and major "development projects" such as dams, mines and monoculture. We want an end to the land grabbing that has killed many of us."
'Moving from human lives to decisions'
"The Synod allows us to listen to voices that we usually do not have access to in the North," said Josiane Gauthier, Secretary General of the International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity, a group of Catholic development agencies.
"Our job is to transmit their demands so that they can be taken into account in international reflection. It's about moving from human lives to decisions."
Several bishops have insisted on the role of Vatican diplomacy in promoting the welfare of indigenous populations. The creation of an international observatory on the violation of the human rights of the Amazonian populations was even mentioned.
'The comfort of development is destructive to life'
"The defence of the earth is the same as the defence of life. Local governments must therefore put an end to injustices against indigenous peoples, who are often discriminated against or 'showcased,' not considered as a living culture, with their own customs, languages and traditions," it was said in the Synod hall.
An appeal was also made to the international community to "put an end to crimes against indigenous people."
"This region cannot be treated as a commodity," said another participant. "The protection of our common home is not an object of propaganda or profit, but a real safeguard of Creation, far from the economic, social and cultural 'colonialism' that wants to modernize the territory by imposing development models foreign to local cultures."
As Gregorio Mirabal explained, indigenous peoples want to "be actors in a future development that respects nature."
"The comfort of development is good but it is harmful and destructive for life," he said. "We do not want to change this development into a primitive sort of development, but into harmony. But right now, there is no harmony."
John XXIII And The Amazon Synod
The synod gathering in Rome is the latest fruit of the Good Pope's still-unfolding reform
Robert Mickens, Rome, October 11, 2019
It is providential that the Church should mark the Oct. 11 liturgical memorial of Saint John XXIII in the very first week of the Synod of Bishops' special assembly on Amazonia.
It is hard to image that something like this gathering at the Vatican (Oct. 6-27) could have happened had Angelo Roncalli not been elected pope in 1958. In just four-and-a-half years as Bishop of Rome he laid the foundations for a major reform of the Catholic Church that has yet to be fully realized.
This month's synod assembly – in fact, Pope Francis' bolstering of the Synod of Bishops as a major governing institution and his attempts to implement synodality as the modus vivendi for the universal Church – is but the latest manifestation of John's ground-breaking and still-unfolding reform.
The Good Pope was only three months into his short-lived pontificate and already 77 years old when he announced plans to hold the Church's first general council in nearly a hundred years.
Vatican Council II, as it was called, marked a monumental paradigm shift in the Catholic Church, a shift that – in so many ways – has only just begun.
Papa Roncalli's propulsive movement of reform
Pope John was able to oversee the council's preparatory phase and preside on Oct. 11, 1962 at the opening of the first of its four annual sessions. However, he died the next the summer (June 3, 1963) as Vatican II was only just beginning, bequeathing to his beloved Church a propulsive movement of reform that continues today.
Certainly, Paul VI, who succeeded him, deserves much credit for continuing the council. There is no way of knowing if another pope would have done so or in the same way.
But the foundations and legacy of Vatican II and its ongoing reform belong to no one more than John XXIII.
In these past five decades the Church's pastors and people have struggled to embrace and implement the full spiritual force and institutional/structural consequences of John's reforming council.
But other Catholics – including men at the highest levels of the hierarchy – have tried to domesticate, halt and even reverse the changes wrought by Vatican II and its aftermath.
Quite simply, Catholics continue to be divided by their contrasting attitudes towards the Second Vatican Council.
And this has become more pronounced and dramatic in our digital age, evidenced by the active resistance of a small (but very well organized) group of rules-obsessed, fundamentalist Catholics to the reforming pontificate of Pope Francis.
They have been busy this week in Rome and on social media – particularly because the current pope has allowed participants at the synod assembly for the Amazon to openly discuss whether celibacy is a necessary requirement for being a priest.
He is the first pope in the Vatican II and post-conciliar era to do so. And the fundamentalists are not at all happy about it.
Synod participants in the very first days opened their discussion on the issue of ordaining viri probati, married men of proven Christian virtue.
These would be senior members of the local Catholic community who would be recognized as spiritual leaders. Church authority (the local bishop) could then depute them sacramentally and juridically to administer the sacraments and preside at the Eucharist.
A missionary bishop and the viri probati
One of the main proponents for instituting this plan is Bishop Erwin Kräutler, an 80-year-old Precious Blood Missionary who has served almost his entire priestly life in the remote areas of the Amazon rainforest.
Traditionalist Catholic journalists and bloggers have pilloried the retired Austrian-born missionary.
"Quoting Scripture, Bishop Kräutler said he believes it more important to bring the Eucharist to people than maintain mandatory celibacy," one of them tweeted.
And, to that, one can only say, "Amen!"
"There are thousands and thousands of communities in the Amazon who do not have the Eucharist except one or two times a year," the bishop said at an Oct. 9 press briefing.
"These people are practically excluded. They are excluded from the context of the Catholic Church," he added, estimating that some two-thirds of Catholic parishes and communities in the Amazon are led by women.
"St. John Paul II said the Church doesn't exist unless it is around the altar," Bishop Kräutler continued. "For the love of God, these people don't have it!"
Since the popes – including Francis – have consistently said the Church cannot ordain women (a position Kräutler evidently disagrees with), the missionary bishop is pushing hard for ordaining viri probati.
"There is no other option," he said emphatically.
This is not the only issue at the synod gathering that has Church traditionalists in an uproar.
Most of them, at least among the English speakers, appear to espouse the right-wing political views championed by ultra-nationalists and, therefore, they are opposed to the attention this synod assembly is giving to ecological issues.
And no one is surprised. These same people have been highly critical of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si', the document on human responsibility for the care of creation that is one of the main texts for the synod's discussion on ecological and social justice issues.
Francis' critics have tried at every turn to undermine his pontificate, his teachings and efforts at reform.
Some of them are actively working – with the help of priests, a small number of bishops and even a few cardinals – to put obstacles in his way. Most of them, however, are quietly "waiting him out" and preparing for (hoping for) a successor more to their liking.
The spirit and vision of John XXIII are still alive
The opening words of Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the Amazon synod assembly's general rapporteur, are not the sort of things these people want to hear.
"The Church cannot remain inactive within her own closed circle, focused on herself, surrounded by protective walls and even less can she look nostalgically to the past," said the 85-year-old Franciscan.
"The Church needs to throw open her doors, knock down the walls surrounding her and build bridges, going out into the world and setting out on the path of history," he said.
Hummes did not mention Pope John XXIII in his opening address. But the spirit and vision of the late pope could be felt in his words. And they are clearly alive in the person of Pope Francis, too.
Cardinal Hummus inspired Jorge Mario Bergoglio to take the name Francis after he whispered into the ear of the just-elected pope, "Don't forget the poor."
And while St. Francis of Assisi – especially because of his love for the poor, the marginalized and all of God's creation – is certainly a major inspiration for the soon-to-be 83-year-old pope, there is another figure that continues to animate his reform-minded pontificate.
Remember that Bergoglio almost was elected Bishop of Rome in 2005. The late Cardinal Francesco Marchisano told a journalist before he died that he had asked the Argentine what name he would have taken had he been elected that year.
This is how he responded: "John, I would have called myself John, like the Good Pope; I would have been completely inspired by him."
And about this there should no longer be any doubts.
Brazilian Cardinal Urges Synod To Open Doors
Knock Down Walls And Build Bridges
The first working session of the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon began on Oct. 7, with a call from a leading Latin American cardinal for new pathways in service to indigenous peoples and protection of the rainforest.
Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes gave the talk as "relator," or the person appointed by Pope Francis to guide the bishops in the synod. Hummes spoke after the pope warned the bishops against being captives of ideologies, which attempt to impose solutions while ignoring the concrete situation.
In the past, the pope noted, ideology divided peoples into those who are civilized and those who are barbarians. Such an approach led to contempt for indigenous peoples and attempts to annihilate them. Instead, Francis said the synod should listen to the indigenous and work together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Prior to meeting in the synodal hall, the pope and bishops participated in a prayer service in St. Peter's Basilica that included indigenous people some dressed in native garb, some barefoot. Afterwards, they walked through St. Peter's Square to the the hall carrying items from the Amazon, including a canoe, oars and a net. When the pope saw the net, he quipped, "I hope it can catch piranhas."
In his 50-minute address, the 85-year-old Hummes, a former prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, spoke of the need for the Church to move forward.
"The Church cannot remain inactive within her own closed circle, focused on herself, surrounded by protective walls and even less can she look nostalgically to the past," he said. "The Church needs to throw open her doors, knock down the walls surrounding her and build bridges, going out into the world and setting out on the path of history."
To those who think this is a rejection of tradition, Hummes responded, true tradition "is the Church’s living history," which accepts what has been handed down but "enriches this tradition in current times with their own experience and understanding of faith in Jesus Christ."
Quoting Francis’ 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Hummes affirmed: "Whenever God reveals himself, he brings newness." So, "we must not fear newness, we must not fear Christ, the new. This synod is in search of new pathways," he said. Citing John Paul II, he spoke of the necessity of inculturating the Christian faith in different situations.
While acknowledging the work of Catholic missionaries of the past and present in the Amazon, he noted "an almost total absence of the Eucharist and other sacraments essential for daily Christian life." The cardinal reported that, during the consultation period, indigenous communities "requested a path be opened for the ordination of married men resident in their communities."
They also requested that service of women leaders in their communities "be acknowledged and there be an attempt to consolidate it with a suitable ministry for them."
The indigenous people also want "the church's support in defending and upholding their rights as well as in the creation of their future," reported Hummes, who believes that "humankind has a great debt toward indigenous peoples." Their right to be leading players in their own history should be returned to them, and they should not be the victims of anyone's colonialism.
"Their cultures, languages, history, identity and spirituality are humanity's wealth and must be respected and preserved as well as included in global culture," he asserted.
Quoting from the working paper distributed prior to the synod, Hummes complained that life in Amazonia has perhaps never before been so threatened "by environmental destruction and exploitation and by the systematic violation of the basic human rights of the Amazon population. In particular, the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples, such as the right to territory, to self-determination, to the demarcation of territories, and to prior consultation and consent."
The threats to the region include political violence, water rights, logging and mining projects as well as concessions to hydroelectric dam construction. The poverty that results from the denigration of the Amazon, he reported, promotes the drug trade, sex work and human trafficking and puts pressure on a society already coping with the loss of its cultural identity.
These threats, according to Hummes, come from "the financial and political interests of dominant sectors in today's society, in particular those of companies that extract riches below the ground in a predatory and irresponsible manner (legally or illegally) also altering biodiversity."
In his report, Hummes focused especially on water. Clean water is a critical issue in the Amazon as well as around the world. It is essential to the survival of Amazonian residents as well as the rainforest.
Hummes concluded by listing six core issues on which he thinks the synod should focus:
* The outgoing Church and its new pathways in Amazonia;
* Inculturation in a missionary-ecclesial context;
* Ministries in the Church in Amazonia
* Looking after our "shared home"; listening to the earth and to the poor; integral environmental, economic, social and cultural ecology;
* The Amazonian Church in the urban reality;
* The issues concerning water.
As the synod continues, bishops and other participants will have their chance to speak, and we will see if they are on board with the direction Hummes would like to see the synod travel.
[Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese is a columnist for Religion News Service and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.]
An Alternative Story
This article is taken from the Daily Email sent by Fr Richard Rohr OFM from the Center for Action and Contemplation. You can subscribe to receive the email by clicking here
The theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At its worst, it has led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure who demands acts of violence before God can love creation. There is no doubt that the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—is filled with metaphors of sacrifice, ransom, atonement, paying the price, opening the gates, et cetera. These are common temple metaphors that would have made sense to Jewish audiences at the time they were written. But they all imply that God is not inherently on our side.
Anthropologically speaking, these words and assumptions reflect a magical or what I call “transactional” way of thinking. By that I mean that if we just believe the right thing, say the right prayer, or practice the right ritual, things will go right for us in the divine courtroom. In my experience, this way of thinking loses its power as people and cultures grow up and seek actual changes in their minds and hearts. Then, transformational thinking tends to supplant transactional thinking.
Christianity’s vision of God was a radical departure from most ancient religions. Instead of having God “eat” humans, animals, or crops, which were sacrificed on altars, Christianity made the bold claim that God’s very body was given for us to eat! This turned everything around and undid the seeming logic of quid pro quo thinking. As long as we employ any retributive notion of God’s offended justice (required punishment for wrongdoing), we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in many cultures throughout history. We offer no redemptive alternative, but actually sanctify the very “powers and principalities” that Paul says unduly control the world (Ephesians 3:9-10; 6:12). We stay inside the small “myth of redemptive violence”—which might just be the dominant story line of history. I think the punishment model is buried deep in most peoples’ brain stem.
It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the real biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation, healing, and reconciliation, not punishment. (Read Ezekiel 16, especially the revelatory verses 53-63, for a mind-blowing example of this.) We should call Jesus’ story the “myth of redemptive suffering”—not as in “paying a price” but as in offering the self for the other. “At-one-ment” instead of atonement!
Restorative justice, of course, comes to its full demonstration in the constant healing ministry of Jesus. Jesus represents the real and deeper level of teaching of the Hebrew Prophets. Jesus never punished anybody! Yes, he challenged people, but always for the sake of insight, healing, and restoration of people and situations to their divine origin and source. Once a person recognizes that Jesus’ mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and authority.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019), 141-142.
Grieving As A Spiritual Exercise
This article is taken from the archive of Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. You can find this article and many others by clicking here
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”
He’s right; your heart is greater than your wounds, though it needs caution in dealing with them. Wounds can soften your heart; but they can also harden you heart and freeze it in bitterness. So what’s the path here? What leads to warmth and what leads to coldness?
In a remarkable essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, tells us what hardens the heart and what softens it. She does so by outlining a particular drama that commonly unfolds in many lives. For her, giftedness does not refer to intellectual prowess but to sensitivity. The gifted child is the sensitive child. But that gift, sensitivity, is a mixed blessing. Positively, it lets you feel things more deeply so that the joys of living will mean more to you than to someone who is more callous. That’s its upside.
Conversely, however, if you are sensitive you will habitually fear disappointing others and will forever fear not measuring up. And your inadequacy to always measure up will habitually trigger feelings of anxiety and guilt within you. As well, if you are extraordinarily sensitive, you will tend to be self-effacing to a fault, letting others have their way while you swallow hard as your own needs aren’t met and then absorb the consequences. Not least, if you feel things deeply you will also feel hurt more deeply. That’s the downside of sensitivity and makes for the drama that Alice Miller calls the “drama of the gifted child”, the drama of the sensitive person.
Further, in her view, for many of us that drama will only begin to really play itself out in our middle and later years, constellating in frustration, disappointment, anger, and bitterness, as the wounds of our childhood and early adulthood begin to break through and overpower the inner mechanisms we have set up to resist them. In mid-life and beyond, our wounds will make themselves heard so strongly that our habitual ways of denial and coping no longer work. In mid-life you realize that your mother did love your sister better than you, that your father in fact didn’t care much about you, and that all those hurts you absorbed because you swallowed hard and played the stoic are still gnawing away bitterly inside you. That’s how the drama eventually culminates, in a heart that’s angry.
So where does that leave us? For Alice Miller, the answer lies in grieving. Our wounds are real and there is nothing we can do about them, pure and simple. The clock can’t be turned back. We cannot relive our lives so as to provide ourselves with different parents, different childhood friends, different experiences on the playground, different choices, and a different temperament. We can only move forward so as to live beyond our wounds. And we do that by grieving. Alice Miller submits that the entire psychological and spiritual task of midlife and beyond is that of grieving, mourning our wounds until the very foundations of our lives shake enough so that there can be transformation.
A deep psychological scar is the same as having some part of your body permanently damaged in an accident. You will never be whole again and nothing can change that. But you can be happy again; perhaps more happy than ever before. But that loss of wholeness must be grieved or it will manifest itself in anger, bitterness, and jealous regrets.
The Jesuit music composer and spiritual writer, Roc O’Connor, makes the same point, with the added comment that the grieving process also calls for a long patience within which we need to wait long enough so that the healing can occur according to its own natural rhythms. We need, he says, to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. What’s helpful, he suggests, is to grieve our human limitations. Then we can endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment, and humiliation without looking for a quick fix – or for a fix at all. We should not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting.
And we won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.
On Consulting The Amazon: Newman And The Amazon Synod
‘The tradition of the Apostles manifests itself sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history.’ The words of John Henry Newman, who is to be canonised on Sunday 13 October, make apt reading in the light of the Amazon Synod, says Theodora Hawksley. Theodora Hawksley is responsible for Social and Environmental Programming at the London Jesuit Centre.
This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here
The Synod on the Amazon is only in its first week, and it has already become the focus of considerable disagreement. The Catholic news media and Twittersphere are alive with reciprocal accusations of paganism and racism, two bishops have launched a ‘crusade of fasting and prayer’, and the discussion over what did or did not happen during a tree-planting ceremony in the Vatican gardens is not over yet. Were people ‘bowing down before carved images of pregnant women’? Was it ‘Our Lady of the Amazon’? If all this online warfare seems unseemly, it is worth remembering that the Council of Chalcedon involved actual beard-pulling.
Amid all the criticism and counter-criticism circulating online are more serious critiques of the Synod’s working document (Instrumentum laboris), including from Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.[i] Müller’s criticisms focus on what he describes as the document’s defective understanding of revelation. Revelation, he argues, is contained in Scripture and Tradition: it is not found in particular geographical territories. Müller’s critique does raise some important areas for reflection, but this particular objection seems an odd one: Catholic theology has always acknowledged ‘general’ revelation as well as the ‘special’ revelation of scripture and tradition, and Catholic social teaching has a long tradition of reflecting on the signs of the times – those social, political and historical events that demand ethical reflection and a response from the Church.[ii] That the working document reflects seriously on the ecological crisis as a sign of the times is entirely appropriate; that it does so in relation to the destruction of a particular place and the suffering of its peoples is no more remarkable than Leo XIII’s reflection on the suffering of the workers of Europe caused by the industrial revolution in his Rerum novarum (1891).[iii]
It is in this sense that the Synod on the Amazon invites us to look at the Amazon as a site of revelation: it is a situation that God is inviting us to read or listen to, and to reflect upon in light of scripture and the Church’s teaching. It is a situation in which – as in every situation – God’s will can be sought and discerned. The working document’s claim that territory in general, and the Amazon in particular, is ‘a theological place where faith is lived, and also a particular source of God’s revelation: epiphanic places where the reserve of life and wisdom for the planet is manifest, a life and wisdom that speaks of God’, is no more problematic than Benedict XVI’s statement that:
A precious treasure is to be found in the soul of Africa, where I perceive a ‘spiritual “lung” for a humanity that appears to be in a crisis of faith and hope’, on account of the extraordinary human and spiritual riches of its children, its variegated cultures, its soil and sub-soil of abundant resources.[iv]
At a press conference before the launch of the Synod, the Synod Relator Cardinal Baldisseri downplayed the criticisms of the working document circulating in advance of the Synod. ‘If there is a cardinal or a bishop who does not agree, who sees that there is content that does not correspond to church teaching,’ he said, they should understand that ‘it’s not a magisterial document. It’s a working document that serves as a basis to construct from zero the final document.’[v] The point, he emphasised, was to gather the voices of the 80,000 people consulted during the process of preparation for the Synod.[vi] Cardinal Hummes, the President of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM) stated:
It is the voice of the local church, the voice of the church in the Amazon – of the church, of the people, of the history and of the very earth, the voice of the earth.... And this has value, it is not fake news.
He went on to add: ‘The church didn’t do it for the sake of doing it to only ignore them. No! If it was done, it was so that [the church] could listen to them. This is the synodal path: to seriously listen.’[vii]
To seriously listen: this, perhaps, is the point of connection with Newman. In an editorial for the Rambler in 1859, ‘On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine’, Newman stated that ‘One man will lay more stress on one aspect of doctrine, another on another; for myself, I am accustomed to lay great stress on the consensus fidelium.’[viii] He went on to explain,
… the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and … their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the Infallible Church.
I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church in its various constituents and functions per modum unius, manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of these channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect; granting at the same time fully, that the gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion of that tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia docens [the Magisterium].[ix]
The process of preparation for synods usually includes consultation of the bishops of given areas, who feed into the working document information about the challenges facing the Church in their area of pastoral responsibility. New in recent years has been the inclusion of laypeople in that process of consultation, first for the Synod on Marriage and Family Life, then for the Synod on Youth, Faith and Vocational Discernment, and now for the Synod on the Amazon. Some 80,000 people were consulted during the process of preparation for the Synod, through local gatherings held across a territory massive, remote and challenging. It is their voices, as Baldisseri points out, that are gathered in the Synod document, and the point of those gatherings was not to sort and judge – the job of the Ecclesia docens, which begins this week – but simply to listen.
This is what Newman is getting at in ‘On the Consultation of the Laity’: the importance of listening to the people, and to the faith that resides within them, as well as to bishops, liturgies, events and movements. All of these are places in which God speaks to us, and all need to be weighed and judged. When we speak of consulting the laity, Newman states, we mean ‘consult’ not in the sense of asking opinion or counsel. Rather,
… we talk of ‘consulting our barometer’ about the weather:– the barometer only attests the fact of the state of the atmosphere. In like manner, we may consult a watch or a sun-dial about the time of day. A physician consults the pulse of his patient; but not in the same sense in which his patient consults him. It is but an index of the state of his health.[x]
Newman says that we consult the laity in this way, in the same way that we consult rites and doctrines, as witnesses to the faith that resides in them. This captures in part the aim of the Synod process so far: to consult the inhabitants of the Amazon region, to ask them to speak about their faith, the challenges facing them as indigenous peoples, and the pastoral challenges facing the Church. Newman, then, is a good advocate for listening attentively to the facts.
But is that all? Are the faithful of the Amazon simply being consulted like a barometer, or like a doctor consults a pulse? Newman’s medical analogy slightly downplays something that is clear in the rest of his article: that the encounter between ‘doctor’ and ‘patient’, ecclesia docens and ecclesia discens, [xi] can be mutually transformative. The reason he engages with the theme of consulting the faithful in the first place is because of objections raised to an earlier Rambler piece, in which he had stated that, ‘in the preparation of a dogmatic definition, the faithful are consulted, as lately in the instance of the Immaculate Conception.’[xii] The example of the Immaculate Conception makes it clear that sometimes the peripheries – popular faith and devotion – can change the centre. In the ‘On Consulting the Laity’ article, Newman gives the even starker example of the Arian controversy in the fourth century, in which ‘the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the Episcopate.’[xiii] We are not in such a situation here, thank God, but Newman’s point is worth holding on to: there are times faith that resides in ordinary people can be transformative for the centre. If this is a medical consultation, it is one in which the doctor, as well as the patient, can go away healthier.
Reflecting on Newman’s medical analogy also helps us think more deeply about the dispositions that such a transformative listening encounter requires. The anthropologist Jeanne Favret–Saada’s fascinating study of witchcraft in the Bocage region of France, Deadly Words, reports the comment of a local psychiatrist that ‘Medicine round here is a veterinary art.’ Belief in witchcraft and the evil eye was widespread in the area, with the result that the psychiatrist did not trust his patients’ assessments of their symptoms or diagnoses of their illnesses. They attributed illness to the evil eye, he to psychiatric conditions: there was no shared ground of interpretation on which they could meet, and so he treated his patients more or less as a vet would treat a cow, without presuming any intelligence on their part. Müller dismisses the working document’s reference to the Amazonian cosmovision along these lines, calling it ‘a cosmovision with its myths and the ritual magic of Mother “Nature”, or its sacrifices to “gods” and spirits which scare the wits out of us.’ He goes on:
In all seriousness, in the formation of future pastors and theologians, shall the knowledge of classical and modern philosophy, of the Church Fathers, of modern theology, of the Councils now be replaced with the Amazonian cosmovision and the wisdom of the ancestors with their myths and rituals?[xiv]
Müller consistently presents it as a choice: the Amazonian cosmovision, or Christianity.[xv] There is no shared ground of understanding: the approach to indigenous people’s worldview is basically veterinary. It is true, as he points out, that not all of the traditional beliefs of indigenous peoples are healthy or compatible with Christianity. The same goes for British culture, American culture or German culture: the gospel of Jesus Christ no more permits the worship of natural forces than it permits the worship of market forces. But a real listening demands that we accept that indigenous peoples are genuinely Catholic Christians, and that there is a shared ground of belief, meaning and experience that allows a real conversation between bishops and people, centre and peripheries, ecclesia docens and ecclesia discens. Without this basic assumption, the encounter is not a medical consultation, as Newman would have it, but a veterinary one.
Newman is right that doctors do not consult patients in the same way that patients consult doctors but, nevertheless, medical encounters regularly assume a degree of intelligence and reflective ability on the part of the patient. The patient is not completely passive: in a doctor’s consulting room he is already making judgements about which of his symptoms are relevant, which most concerning and severe, and so on. The doctor may ask the patient to elaborate or question him further, or she may rate differently the importance and significance of the symptoms troubling him, but the patient is by no means consulted as an inert collection of facts. On the contrary, good medical diagnosis and successful treatment requires the doctor to engage with the patient as a whole person, possessed of intelligence and free will, hopes and fears, and bound up in relationships with others. It requires a shared ground of understanding, and a disposition of trust and charity. St Ignatius, in the Presupposition that begins the Spiritual Exercises, describes the disposition needed:
In order that both he who is giving the Spiritual Exercises, and he who is receiving them, may more help and benefit themselves, let it be presupposed that every good Christian is to be more ready to save his neighbour’s proposition than to condemn it. If he cannot save it, let him inquire how he means it; and if he means it badly, let him correct him with charity. If that is not enough, let him seek all the suitable means to bring him to mean it well, and save himself.[xvi]
Such a spirit of charity in listening, trust and encounter, both at the Synod itself and in the discussions around it, is something worth fasting and praying for.
Thanks to Séverine Deneulin and Frank Turner SJ for their comments on an earlier version of this piece; and to Thomas Knieps-Port le Roi at the Journal of Marriage, Families and Spirituality (formally INTAMS review) for permission to reuse material from Theodora Hawksley, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Morals’, INTAMS Review 20.1 (2014), pp.26–31.
[i] Cardinal Gerhard Müller, ‘On the Concept of Revelation as presented in the Instrumentum Laboris for the Amazon Synod’, Catholic News Agency, 16 July 2019: www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-test-of-cardinal-muellers-analysis-on-the-working-document-of-the-amazon-synod-78441.
[ii] Müller is correct that more theological work needs to be done to define key terms, if these are to be used in the apostolic exhortation after the Synod.
[iii] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum (1891):
http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.
[iv] Benedict XVI, Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Africae munus (2001), §13.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20111119_africae-munus.html. See also John Paul II’s address to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders in 1986: ‘You do not have to be people divided into two parts, as though an Aboriginal had to borrow the faith and life of Christianity, like a hat or a pair of shoes, from someone else who owns them. Jesus calls you to accept his words and his values into your own culture. To develop in this way will make you more than ever truly Aboriginal…Take this Gospel into your own language and way of speaking; let its spirit penetrate your communities and determine your behaviour towards each other, let it bring new strength to your stories and your ceremonies. Let the Gospel come into your hearts and renew your personal lives. The Church invites you to express the living word of Jesus in ways that speak to your Aboriginal minds and hearts. All over the world people worship God and read his word in their own language, and colour the great signs and symbols of religion with touches of their own traditions. Why should you be different from them in this regard, why should you not be allowed the happiness of being with God and each other in Aboriginal fashion?’ §12
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1986/november/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19861129_aborigeni-alice-springs-australia.html
[v] https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/10/03/cardinals-hummes-and-baldisseri-respond-critics-working-document-amazon-synod
[vi] Baldisseri added: ‘It is not a pontifical document. It’s a collection of the input from the grassroots of the Amazonian people and the result of what they said in 170 assemblies and in other forums.’ Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] John Henry Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, Rambler July 1859, §2: http://newmanreader.org/works/rambler/consulting.html
[ix] Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, §2
[x] Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, §1 (emphasis original).
[xi] The ‘teaching church’ and the ‘learning church’.
[xii] Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, Introduction.
[xiii] ‘Here, of course, I must explain:—in saying this, then, undoubtedly I am not denying that the great body of the Bishops were in their internal belief orthodox; nor that there were numbers of clergy who stood by the laity, and acted as their centres and guides; nor that the laity actually received their faith, in the first instance, from the Bishops and clergy; nor that some portions of the laity were ignorant, and other portions at length corrupted, by the Arian teachers, who got possession of the sees and ordained an heretical clergy;—but I mean still, that in that time of immense confusion the divine dogma of our Lord's divinity was proclaimed, enforced, maintained, and (humanly speaking) preserved, far more by the ‘Ecclesia docta’ than by the ‘Ecclesia docens;’ that the body of the episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism; that at one time the Pope, at other times the patriarchal, metropolitan, and other great sees, at other times general councils, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth; while, on the other hand, it was the Christian people who, under Providence, were the ecclesiastical strength of Athanasius, Hilary, Eusebius of Vercellæ, and other great solitary confessors, who would have failed without them.’ Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, §3.5
[xiv] Müller, ‘On the Concept of Revelation’, §4.
[xv] See Sandro Magister, ‘Cardinal Müller: They have driven Jesus out of the Amazon Synod,’ Lifesite News October 8 2019: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/cardinal-mueller-they-have-driven-jesus-out-of-the-amazon-synod.
[xvi] Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §22
Weekday Masses 22nd – 25th October, 2019
Tuesday: 9:30am Penguin … St John Paul II
Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe … St John of Capistrano
Thursday: 12noon Devonport … St Anthony Claret
Friday: 9:30am Ulverstone
Next Weekend 19th & 20th October
Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Devonport
6:00pm Penguin
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell
9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
11:00am Sheffield
5:00pm Latrobe
5:00pm Latrobe
MINISTRY ROSTERS 26th & 27th OCTOBER, 2019
Devonport:
Readers: Vigil: V Riley, A Stegmann, G Hendrey
10:30am E Petts, K Pearce, O McGinley
10:30am E Petts, K Pearce, O McGinley
Ministers of Communion:
Vigil M Heazlewood, G Lee-Archer, M Kelly, P Shelverton
10.30am: M Sherriff, T & S Ryan, D & M Barrientos
Cleaners 25th
Oct: B Paul, D
Atkins, V Riley 1st Nov: M.W.C.
Piety Shop 26th Oct: L Murfet 27th Oct: O McGinley
Mowing of
lawns at Presbytery – October: S Berryman
Ulverstone:
Reader/s: R Locket
Ministers of
Communion: M
Murray, J Pisarskis, C Harvey, P Grech
Cleaners: M McKenzie, M Singh, N Pearce Flowers: C Stingel
Hospitality:
Filipino Community
Penguin:
Greeters J Garnsey, S Ewing Commentator:
Y Downes Readers: A Landers, K Fraser
Ministers of
Communion: J
Garnsey, S Ewing Liturgy: Penguin Setting Up: E Nickols
Care of
Church: M Bowles,
J Reynolds
Latrobe:
Reader: H Lim Ministers of Communion: M Eden Procession of Gifts: Parishioner
Port Sorell:
Readers: G Duff, M Badcock Ministers of Communion: G Gigliotti Cleaners: V Youd
Readings this Week: 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C
First Reading: Exodus 17: 8-13
Second Reading: 2 Timothy 3: 14 – 4:2
Gospel: Luke 18: 1-8
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY’S GOSPEL:
As I come to pray, I take time to relax into God’s
presence, grateful that I have this time to spend with the Lord.
I become aware of my feelings as I settle to pray.
Do I feel relaxed and content, or am I feeling discouraged,
saddened or anxious …? Knowing that the Lord accepts me as I am, I accept his
invitation to meet him in prayer and not to lose heart.
I carefully read the text, slowly.
I ponder the parable. How do I respond to the widow’s situation?
She is poor, powerless but persistent. How is this
reflected in my life, my prayer, my action for justice for others?
I speak to the Lord of this. I consider Jesus’s spirit of
justice, his attitude to the poor and oppressed.
I think of others who have inspired – or inspire me now –
to respond to injustice, to be persistent when I see no results. Perhaps I ask
for such graces and especially not to lose heart.
In response to Jesus’s last question, I may pray for
faithfulness for myself, my community and the wider world.
Readings Next Week: 30th Sunday
in Ordinary Time – Year C
Your prayers
are asked for the sick:
Tony Kiely, Brenda Paul, Carmel Leonard, Philip Smith, David Cole, Frank
McDonald, Pam Lynd & …
Let us pray for those who have died recently:
Aydan Fry, Joyce Thompson, Sr Joan Campbell, Sr Francesca Slevin, Wendy Parker, Brian Reynolds, Dale Sheean, Bob Hickman, Michelle Gibson, Sr Martina Roberts, Danny Reardon, Glenn Harris
Let us pray
for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 17th - 23rd October
Bruce Beard, Freda Jackson, Vonda Bryan, Frances Roberts,
Kathleen Kelly, Betty Wells, Margaret Williams, Paul McNamara, Denise O’Rourke, Margaret Watson, Hilda
Peters, Francis McQueen, Robert Grantham, Jedd Carroll-Anderson
May the souls of the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen
Envelopes are available at all Mass Centres
Weekly Ramblings
On Wednesday I travelled to
Bendigo to attend the ordination of Bishop Shane Mackinlay. As a young deacon
Shane visited the parish and, over the years, has returned and spent time with
friends made on that occasion. It was a great celebration and in his words of
thanks at the conclusion of the ordination he said: “I acknowledge the
difficulty of being Catholic and building up the reign of God in contemporary
Australia. These are challenging times in which to do this, with many people
feeling deeply hurt and disillusioned by the Church.” He continued “I take
those challenges very seriously; responding to them must be integral to
whatever we do. We can only be faithful to this by placing our trust in God,
sharing our gifts generously with those around us, and valuing and celebrating
the riches that are brought by each member of our community.”
Last
weekend we included some details regarding the next stage of the Plenary 2020
Process – copies of the information can be found on the Mass Centre
Noticeboards. We ask that you contact the appropriate person for the day and
time you wish to attend so that material might be prepared for you.
Our month
of prayer continues and I would encourage Parishioners as we move towards
Mission Sunday next weekend to continue using the Mission Prayer included on
the newsletter.
Also
you can find further updates on the Synod on the Amazon on the online version
of the newsletter (http://mlcathparish.blogspot.com/)
or you can visit https://www.ncronline.org/feature-series/synod-for-the-amazon/stories
for daily reports.
Take care on the roads and in your homes,
KNIGHTS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS – NATIONAL PRAYERS
CRUSADE FOR VOCATIONS:
The Knights of the Southern Cross 13th National
Prayer Crusade for vocations began on 1st September and runs to 23rd
November. During this time Catholic organisations and individuals are invited
to join the Knights in praying for an increase in the number of Catholics
willing to serve the Church in the priesthood, diaconate and religious life,
including service as Catholic Chaplains in the Australian Military Services.
The Mersey Leven Branch of the Knights will participate in
this prayer crusade this week. You are invited to join the Knights in this
endeavour, by reciting the following prayer:
Heavenly Father,
You know the faith,
courage and generosity of your people throughout Australia
Including men and
women serving at home and overseas with the Australian Military Services.
Please provide your
people in Australia with sufficient Priests, Deacons and Religious to meet
their needs
And be with them
always as they endeavour to meet the challenges of their daily lives.
We ask this through
Jesus Christ, Your Son. Amen.
NOVEMBER REMEMBRANCE BOOKS:
November is the month we remember
in a special way all those who have died. Should you wish anyone to be
remembered, write the names of those to be prayed for on the outside of an
envelope and place the clearly marked envelope in the collection basket at Mass
or deliver to the Parish Office by Thursday
24th October.
AUSTRALIAN CHURCH WOMEN: will host World Community Day at
St. John’s Church Friday 25th October at 1:30pm. The Least Coin
will be dedicated at this Service.
Bring a friend or two AND your spare change and buy some goodies to help support this great fundraiser.
THURSDAY 24th October Eyes down 7:30pm. Callers Merv Tippett & Tony Ryan
FOR THE EXTRAORDINARY MISSIONARY MONTH
Heavenly Father,
when your only begotten son Jesus Christ
rose from the dead, he commissioned his followers to ‘go and
make disciples of all nations’ And you remind us that through Baptism we are made sharers in the mission of
the Church.
Empower us by the gifts of the Holy
Spirit to be courageous and zealous in bearing
witness to the Gospel, so that the mission entrusted to the
Church,
which is still very far from completion, may find new and efficacious expressions
that bring life and light to the world.
Help us make it possible for all peoples to experience the saving love and mercy
of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you in the
unity of the Holy Spirit, One God, for ever and ever. Amen.
PLENARY 2020 Part
2 MacKillop Hill
All submissions to
the Plenary Council have now been organised into six (6) key themes.
The next step is the Listening and Discernment of these themes to discover where
God’s Spirit is leading the People of God in Australia at this time.
We will then forward our responses to the
Plenary Council Committee.
There will be three meetings: Wednesdays: 30th Oct; 6th Nov; 20th Nov; 10.30
- 12pm
Please indicate your attendance so that we
can provide sufficient material for each session.
MacKillop Hill 123 William
Street Ph. 6428 3095 M.
0418 367 769.
2020
PLENARY COUNCIL
You are invited to join 1, 2 or 3 meetings for the
next phase of preparation for the PLENARY COUNCIL. Relevant
materials will be available at each of the meeting.
Meetings will be held
At the Parish House,
90 Stewart St, Devonport on
THURSDAY October 31,
10.00 – 11.30am
THURSDAY November 7,
10.00 – 11.30am
THURSDAY November 14,
10.00 – 11.30am
Please contact Clare Kiely-Hoye (0418 100 402) to book
a chair by 28th October.
PLENARY 2020
Part 2
The submissions to the Plenary Council
have now been organised into six (6) key themes. These themes are – Missionary
& Evangelising; Inclusive, Participatory & Synodal; Prayerful &
Eucharistic; Humble, Healing & Merciful; A Joyful, Hope-filled &
Servant Community; and Open to Conversion, Renewal & Reform.
We are inviting parishioners to
participate in the next step, Listening and Discernment of these
themes, to discover where God’s Spirit is leading the People of God in
Australia at this time.
Wednesday evenings: 7.00 – 8.30pm, 90 Stewart Street,
Devonport
6th November – Missionary & Evangelising
20th November – Inclusive, Participatory & Synodal
27th November – Prayerful & Eucharistic
4th December – Humble, Healing & Merciful
5th February – A Joyful, Hope-filled & Servant Community
12th February – Open to Conversion, Renewal & Reform
As each session is a separate and
different theme – all those attending any session are encouraged to read the
material prior to the meeting.
The suggested material for each session will
be the Snapshot report for that theme and will be used in conjunction with the
Discernment Material on the website.
All the material can be accessed from the Plenary Council website - https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/themes/ and click on each of the Themes button. However, please contact the Parish House by email: merseyleven@aohtas.org.au or Phone 6424:2783 if you need a hard copy of the material for any session.
Synod on the Amazon
Amazonia: Under the Forest , A People
Isabelle de Gaulmyn, Vatican City (Oct 4, 2019)
The Amazon has been on our screens for months.
The apocalyptic images of burning forests have shaken the entire planet, even heads of state, who have also been forced to unite in collective emotion.
The Amazon story has now moved to Rome where Pope Francis has invited Catholic leaders from the region for three weeks starting Oct. 6.
It is what the Church calls a "synod."
Is this a "pontifical" way of alerting people to these square kilometres of canopy that are going up in smoke?
No. Through one of these intuitions of which he has a secret knack, Pope Francis does not want to arouse pity or emotion. It goes much further; he seeks nothing less than to overturn the tables. Not to draw the world's attention to the Amazon. But to put Amazonia at the center of the world.
In Rome, some prelates are strangling themselves with indignation, grumbling that we have now seen everything in the kingdom of Pope Francis.
There is a world outside Europe
For it is an almost Copernican revolution, in a Roman Church that has been built for centuries on the idea that the only "accomplished Christianity" was that which came from Europe, strengthened by its heritage, its books, its theology and its tradition.
It is a little like the third-world world maps that lined the walls of colleges and chaplaincies in the 1980s and reversed perspectives, putting distant territories at the center, which we had previously considered with a certain condescension.
An irony of history: 300 years after Matteo Ricci and the rites dispute, in which Pope Clement XI forbade the Italian Jesuit from adapting the Catholic religion to Chinese culture, it is another Jesuit, now Pope, who would like the Church to be able to live in the Amazon time zone as well.
One of the challenges is indeed to know how to adapt Catholicism to the specificities of a distant territory, where today's priests are hard to find and Christian communities left to abandon, where the merchants of easy prosperity, the Pentecostal pastors, are gradually replacing Catholic parishes.
But it is not only a question of rites or internal organization in the Church.
The Rome meeting was prepared through intensive field consultations. Hundreds of meetings, in this huge area of seven million square kilometres, were held with the inhabitants and the participants in this synod come to Rome with the firm intention of giving them the floor.
We must listen to the words of these women and men, victims for centuries of exploitation, massacres and genocides. These women and men are still considered, on the shores of the Amazon and its tributaries, as the lowest of the citizens, despised, exploited by loggers, herders, agricultural owners and mining companies.
Because under the trees, there is a people; Amazonia is not only the lung of the planet. We would have almost forgotten it this summer, focusing on the loss of our own oxygen reserves that were going up in smoke.
The burning forest is also a sign of a deeply unfair system that reduces some of the inhabitants to the greatest poverty to reclaim their land.
Everything is linked: the exploitation of the forest, but also that of men, restricted even in their own spiritual imagination.
We will not extinguish the gigantic problem with firefighting planes but by rebuilding the Indians' ecosystem. These indigenous peoples whose gallantry the Pope has the gall to think of not only in terms of the future of his Church but also, more broadly, of our planet.
Synod Stands As One With Indigenous People of Amazonia
For more than a week bishops have given damning evidence of human rights violations
Nicolas Senèze; Vatican City, October 16, 2019
The voice of the Amazon's indigenous peoples is loud and clear in the Synod Hall.
"Let us entrust to our Mother the Ecuadorian brothers who have been killed, wounded, persecuted or taken prisoner," said Pope Francis.
The pope, who had only day earlier said in his Angelus prayer that he was "concerned" by the situation in Ecuador, mentioned it again on Oct. 14, at the opening of the Synod's morning prayer to mark the start of the second week.
The Ecuadorian situation is emblematic of what the synod fathers are debating.
"What is happening in Ecuador can be applied to the entire Amazon basin," said José Gregorio Mirabal, who is representing the Congress of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon in Rome.
While attending the debates as an auditor, he is also keeping an eye on events in Ecuador where an agreement was finally reached on Oct. 13 after the indigenous people rebelled against the government's removal of a fuel subsidy.
Fighting the destruction of their lands
It was the International Monetary Fund which had requested the removal of the subsidy, in exchange for a large loan, but it caused fuel prices to double and a furious backlash by the indigenous people.
Indeed, it is difficult for Amazonian Indians not to understand the abolition of this subsidy as a barely disguised blackmail.
'Let us drill … we'll have cheaper fuel'
For years, the indigenous people of Amazonia have been fighting the exploitation and ruination of their lands by multinational mining companies.
In Rome, for more than a week, bishops' testimonies on violations of indigenous rights have echoed the interventions of the synod fathers.
"Multinational corporations do not hesitate to corrupt indigenous leaders, sometimes even making them drink to get their signatures," warned Bishop Medardo Henao del Río of Mitú, Colombia, for whom "the Church is best served when accompanying these peoples and underlining the consequences of their exploitation."
"The Church is the only institution that cries out for the whole planet to awaken," added Gregorio.
Although he is not baptized, he warmly thanked the pope for having given a voice to the indigenous peoples through this Synod.
"Only the pope can help us to make ourselves heard from the new gods of this world, from Google to the IMF," he said.
"We want our lands to be demarcated and an end to their violent invasion and major "development projects" such as dams, mines and monoculture. We want an end to the land grabbing that has killed many of us."
'Moving from human lives to decisions'
"The Synod allows us to listen to voices that we usually do not have access to in the North," said Josiane Gauthier, Secretary General of the International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity, a group of Catholic development agencies.
"Our job is to transmit their demands so that they can be taken into account in international reflection. It's about moving from human lives to decisions."
Several bishops have insisted on the role of Vatican diplomacy in promoting the welfare of indigenous populations. The creation of an international observatory on the violation of the human rights of the Amazonian populations was even mentioned.
'The comfort of development is destructive to life'
"The defence of the earth is the same as the defence of life. Local governments must therefore put an end to injustices against indigenous peoples, who are often discriminated against or 'showcased,' not considered as a living culture, with their own customs, languages and traditions," it was said in the Synod hall.
An appeal was also made to the international community to "put an end to crimes against indigenous people."
"This region cannot be treated as a commodity," said another participant. "The protection of our common home is not an object of propaganda or profit, but a real safeguard of Creation, far from the economic, social and cultural 'colonialism' that wants to modernize the territory by imposing development models foreign to local cultures."
As Gregorio Mirabal explained, indigenous peoples want to "be actors in a future development that respects nature."
"The comfort of development is good but it is harmful and destructive for life," he said. "We do not want to change this development into a primitive sort of development, but into harmony. But right now, there is no harmony."
John XXIII And The Amazon Synod
The synod gathering in Rome is the latest fruit of the Good Pope's still-unfolding reform
Robert Mickens, Rome, October 11, 2019
It is providential that the Church should mark the Oct. 11 liturgical memorial of Saint John XXIII in the very first week of the Synod of Bishops' special assembly on Amazonia.
It is hard to image that something like this gathering at the Vatican (Oct. 6-27) could have happened had Angelo Roncalli not been elected pope in 1958. In just four-and-a-half years as Bishop of Rome he laid the foundations for a major reform of the Catholic Church that has yet to be fully realized.
This month's synod assembly – in fact, Pope Francis' bolstering of the Synod of Bishops as a major governing institution and his attempts to implement synodality as the modus vivendi for the universal Church – is but the latest manifestation of John's ground-breaking and still-unfolding reform.
The Good Pope was only three months into his short-lived pontificate and already 77 years old when he announced plans to hold the Church's first general council in nearly a hundred years.
Vatican Council II, as it was called, marked a monumental paradigm shift in the Catholic Church, a shift that – in so many ways – has only just begun.
Papa Roncalli's propulsive movement of reform
Pope John was able to oversee the council's preparatory phase and preside on Oct. 11, 1962 at the opening of the first of its four annual sessions. However, he died the next the summer (June 3, 1963) as Vatican II was only just beginning, bequeathing to his beloved Church a propulsive movement of reform that continues today.
Certainly, Paul VI, who succeeded him, deserves much credit for continuing the council. There is no way of knowing if another pope would have done so or in the same way.
But the foundations and legacy of Vatican II and its ongoing reform belong to no one more than John XXIII.
In these past five decades the Church's pastors and people have struggled to embrace and implement the full spiritual force and institutional/structural consequences of John's reforming council.
But other Catholics – including men at the highest levels of the hierarchy – have tried to domesticate, halt and even reverse the changes wrought by Vatican II and its aftermath.
Quite simply, Catholics continue to be divided by their contrasting attitudes towards the Second Vatican Council.
And this has become more pronounced and dramatic in our digital age, evidenced by the active resistance of a small (but very well organized) group of rules-obsessed, fundamentalist Catholics to the reforming pontificate of Pope Francis.
They have been busy this week in Rome and on social media – particularly because the current pope has allowed participants at the synod assembly for the Amazon to openly discuss whether celibacy is a necessary requirement for being a priest.
He is the first pope in the Vatican II and post-conciliar era to do so. And the fundamentalists are not at all happy about it.
Synod participants in the very first days opened their discussion on the issue of ordaining viri probati, married men of proven Christian virtue.
These would be senior members of the local Catholic community who would be recognized as spiritual leaders. Church authority (the local bishop) could then depute them sacramentally and juridically to administer the sacraments and preside at the Eucharist.
A missionary bishop and the viri probati
One of the main proponents for instituting this plan is Bishop Erwin Kräutler, an 80-year-old Precious Blood Missionary who has served almost his entire priestly life in the remote areas of the Amazon rainforest.
Traditionalist Catholic journalists and bloggers have pilloried the retired Austrian-born missionary.
"Quoting Scripture, Bishop Kräutler said he believes it more important to bring the Eucharist to people than maintain mandatory celibacy," one of them tweeted.
And, to that, one can only say, "Amen!"
"There are thousands and thousands of communities in the Amazon who do not have the Eucharist except one or two times a year," the bishop said at an Oct. 9 press briefing.
"These people are practically excluded. They are excluded from the context of the Catholic Church," he added, estimating that some two-thirds of Catholic parishes and communities in the Amazon are led by women.
"St. John Paul II said the Church doesn't exist unless it is around the altar," Bishop Kräutler continued. "For the love of God, these people don't have it!"
Since the popes – including Francis – have consistently said the Church cannot ordain women (a position Kräutler evidently disagrees with), the missionary bishop is pushing hard for ordaining viri probati.
"There is no other option," he said emphatically.
This is not the only issue at the synod gathering that has Church traditionalists in an uproar.
Most of them, at least among the English speakers, appear to espouse the right-wing political views championed by ultra-nationalists and, therefore, they are opposed to the attention this synod assembly is giving to ecological issues.
And no one is surprised. These same people have been highly critical of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si', the document on human responsibility for the care of creation that is one of the main texts for the synod's discussion on ecological and social justice issues.
Francis' critics have tried at every turn to undermine his pontificate, his teachings and efforts at reform.
Some of them are actively working – with the help of priests, a small number of bishops and even a few cardinals – to put obstacles in his way. Most of them, however, are quietly "waiting him out" and preparing for (hoping for) a successor more to their liking.
The spirit and vision of John XXIII are still alive
The opening words of Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the Amazon synod assembly's general rapporteur, are not the sort of things these people want to hear.
"The Church cannot remain inactive within her own closed circle, focused on herself, surrounded by protective walls and even less can she look nostalgically to the past," said the 85-year-old Franciscan.
"The Church needs to throw open her doors, knock down the walls surrounding her and build bridges, going out into the world and setting out on the path of history," he said.
Hummes did not mention Pope John XXIII in his opening address. But the spirit and vision of the late pope could be felt in his words. And they are clearly alive in the person of Pope Francis, too.
Cardinal Hummus inspired Jorge Mario Bergoglio to take the name Francis after he whispered into the ear of the just-elected pope, "Don't forget the poor."
And while St. Francis of Assisi – especially because of his love for the poor, the marginalized and all of God's creation – is certainly a major inspiration for the soon-to-be 83-year-old pope, there is another figure that continues to animate his reform-minded pontificate.
Remember that Bergoglio almost was elected Bishop of Rome in 2005. The late Cardinal Francesco Marchisano told a journalist before he died that he had asked the Argentine what name he would have taken had he been elected that year.
This is how he responded: "John, I would have called myself John, like the Good Pope; I would have been completely inspired by him."
And about this there should no longer be any doubts.
Brazilian Cardinal Urges Synod To Open Doors
Knock Down Walls And Build Bridges
The first working session of the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon began on Oct. 7, with a call from a leading Latin American cardinal for new pathways in service to indigenous peoples and protection of the rainforest.
Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes gave the talk as "relator," or the person appointed by Pope Francis to guide the bishops in the synod. Hummes spoke after the pope warned the bishops against being captives of ideologies, which attempt to impose solutions while ignoring the concrete situation.
In the past, the pope noted, ideology divided peoples into those who are civilized and those who are barbarians. Such an approach led to contempt for indigenous peoples and attempts to annihilate them. Instead, Francis said the synod should listen to the indigenous and work together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Prior to meeting in the synodal hall, the pope and bishops participated in a prayer service in St. Peter's Basilica that included indigenous people some dressed in native garb, some barefoot. Afterwards, they walked through St. Peter's Square to the the hall carrying items from the Amazon, including a canoe, oars and a net. When the pope saw the net, he quipped, "I hope it can catch piranhas."
In his 50-minute address, the 85-year-old Hummes, a former prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, spoke of the need for the Church to move forward.
"The Church cannot remain inactive within her own closed circle, focused on herself, surrounded by protective walls and even less can she look nostalgically to the past," he said. "The Church needs to throw open her doors, knock down the walls surrounding her and build bridges, going out into the world and setting out on the path of history."
To those who think this is a rejection of tradition, Hummes responded, true tradition "is the Church’s living history," which accepts what has been handed down but "enriches this tradition in current times with their own experience and understanding of faith in Jesus Christ."
Quoting Francis’ 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Hummes affirmed: "Whenever God reveals himself, he brings newness." So, "we must not fear newness, we must not fear Christ, the new. This synod is in search of new pathways," he said. Citing John Paul II, he spoke of the necessity of inculturating the Christian faith in different situations.
While acknowledging the work of Catholic missionaries of the past and present in the Amazon, he noted "an almost total absence of the Eucharist and other sacraments essential for daily Christian life." The cardinal reported that, during the consultation period, indigenous communities "requested a path be opened for the ordination of married men resident in their communities."
They also requested that service of women leaders in their communities "be acknowledged and there be an attempt to consolidate it with a suitable ministry for them."
The indigenous people also want "the church's support in defending and upholding their rights as well as in the creation of their future," reported Hummes, who believes that "humankind has a great debt toward indigenous peoples." Their right to be leading players in their own history should be returned to them, and they should not be the victims of anyone's colonialism.
"Their cultures, languages, history, identity and spirituality are humanity's wealth and must be respected and preserved as well as included in global culture," he asserted.
Quoting from the working paper distributed prior to the synod, Hummes complained that life in Amazonia has perhaps never before been so threatened "by environmental destruction and exploitation and by the systematic violation of the basic human rights of the Amazon population. In particular, the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples, such as the right to territory, to self-determination, to the demarcation of territories, and to prior consultation and consent."
The threats to the region include political violence, water rights, logging and mining projects as well as concessions to hydroelectric dam construction. The poverty that results from the denigration of the Amazon, he reported, promotes the drug trade, sex work and human trafficking and puts pressure on a society already coping with the loss of its cultural identity.
These threats, according to Hummes, come from "the financial and political interests of dominant sectors in today's society, in particular those of companies that extract riches below the ground in a predatory and irresponsible manner (legally or illegally) also altering biodiversity."
In his report, Hummes focused especially on water. Clean water is a critical issue in the Amazon as well as around the world. It is essential to the survival of Amazonian residents as well as the rainforest.
Hummes concluded by listing six core issues on which he thinks the synod should focus:
* The outgoing Church and its new pathways in Amazonia;
* Inculturation in a missionary-ecclesial context;
* Ministries in the Church in Amazonia
* Looking after our "shared home"; listening to the earth and to the poor; integral environmental, economic, social and cultural ecology;
* The Amazonian Church in the urban reality;
* The issues concerning water.
As the synod continues, bishops and other participants will have their chance to speak, and we will see if they are on board with the direction Hummes would like to see the synod travel.
[Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese is a columnist for Religion News Service and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.]
An Alternative Story
This article is taken from the Daily Email sent by Fr Richard Rohr OFM from the Center for Action and Contemplation. You can subscribe to receive the email by clicking here
The theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At its worst, it has led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure who demands acts of violence before God can love creation. There is no doubt that the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—is filled with metaphors of sacrifice, ransom, atonement, paying the price, opening the gates, et cetera. These are common temple metaphors that would have made sense to Jewish audiences at the time they were written. But they all imply that God is not inherently on our side.
Anthropologically speaking, these words and assumptions reflect a magical or what I call “transactional” way of thinking. By that I mean that if we just believe the right thing, say the right prayer, or practice the right ritual, things will go right for us in the divine courtroom. In my experience, this way of thinking loses its power as people and cultures grow up and seek actual changes in their minds and hearts. Then, transformational thinking tends to supplant transactional thinking.
Christianity’s vision of God was a radical departure from most ancient religions. Instead of having God “eat” humans, animals, or crops, which were sacrificed on altars, Christianity made the bold claim that God’s very body was given for us to eat! This turned everything around and undid the seeming logic of quid pro quo thinking. As long as we employ any retributive notion of God’s offended justice (required punishment for wrongdoing), we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in many cultures throughout history. We offer no redemptive alternative, but actually sanctify the very “powers and principalities” that Paul says unduly control the world (Ephesians 3:9-10; 6:12). We stay inside the small “myth of redemptive violence”—which might just be the dominant story line of history. I think the punishment model is buried deep in most peoples’ brain stem.
It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the real biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation, healing, and reconciliation, not punishment. (Read Ezekiel 16, especially the revelatory verses 53-63, for a mind-blowing example of this.) We should call Jesus’ story the “myth of redemptive suffering”—not as in “paying a price” but as in offering the self for the other. “At-one-ment” instead of atonement!
Restorative justice, of course, comes to its full demonstration in the constant healing ministry of Jesus. Jesus represents the real and deeper level of teaching of the Hebrew Prophets. Jesus never punished anybody! Yes, he challenged people, but always for the sake of insight, healing, and restoration of people and situations to their divine origin and source. Once a person recognizes that Jesus’ mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and authority.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019), 141-142.
Grieving As A Spiritual Exercise
This article is taken from the archive of Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. You can find this article and many others by clicking here
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”
He’s right; your heart is greater than your wounds, though it needs caution in dealing with them. Wounds can soften your heart; but they can also harden you heart and freeze it in bitterness. So what’s the path here? What leads to warmth and what leads to coldness?
In a remarkable essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, tells us what hardens the heart and what softens it. She does so by outlining a particular drama that commonly unfolds in many lives. For her, giftedness does not refer to intellectual prowess but to sensitivity. The gifted child is the sensitive child. But that gift, sensitivity, is a mixed blessing. Positively, it lets you feel things more deeply so that the joys of living will mean more to you than to someone who is more callous. That’s its upside.
Conversely, however, if you are sensitive you will habitually fear disappointing others and will forever fear not measuring up. And your inadequacy to always measure up will habitually trigger feelings of anxiety and guilt within you. As well, if you are extraordinarily sensitive, you will tend to be self-effacing to a fault, letting others have their way while you swallow hard as your own needs aren’t met and then absorb the consequences. Not least, if you feel things deeply you will also feel hurt more deeply. That’s the downside of sensitivity and makes for the drama that Alice Miller calls the “drama of the gifted child”, the drama of the sensitive person.
Further, in her view, for many of us that drama will only begin to really play itself out in our middle and later years, constellating in frustration, disappointment, anger, and bitterness, as the wounds of our childhood and early adulthood begin to break through and overpower the inner mechanisms we have set up to resist them. In mid-life and beyond, our wounds will make themselves heard so strongly that our habitual ways of denial and coping no longer work. In mid-life you realize that your mother did love your sister better than you, that your father in fact didn’t care much about you, and that all those hurts you absorbed because you swallowed hard and played the stoic are still gnawing away bitterly inside you. That’s how the drama eventually culminates, in a heart that’s angry.
So where does that leave us? For Alice Miller, the answer lies in grieving. Our wounds are real and there is nothing we can do about them, pure and simple. The clock can’t be turned back. We cannot relive our lives so as to provide ourselves with different parents, different childhood friends, different experiences on the playground, different choices, and a different temperament. We can only move forward so as to live beyond our wounds. And we do that by grieving. Alice Miller submits that the entire psychological and spiritual task of midlife and beyond is that of grieving, mourning our wounds until the very foundations of our lives shake enough so that there can be transformation.
A deep psychological scar is the same as having some part of your body permanently damaged in an accident. You will never be whole again and nothing can change that. But you can be happy again; perhaps more happy than ever before. But that loss of wholeness must be grieved or it will manifest itself in anger, bitterness, and jealous regrets.
The Jesuit music composer and spiritual writer, Roc O’Connor, makes the same point, with the added comment that the grieving process also calls for a long patience within which we need to wait long enough so that the healing can occur according to its own natural rhythms. We need, he says, to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. What’s helpful, he suggests, is to grieve our human limitations. Then we can endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment, and humiliation without looking for a quick fix – or for a fix at all. We should not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting.
And we won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.
On Consulting The Amazon: Newman And The Amazon Synod
‘The tradition of the Apostles manifests itself sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history.’ The words of John Henry Newman, who is to be canonised on Sunday 13 October, make apt reading in the light of the Amazon Synod, says Theodora Hawksley. Theodora Hawksley is responsible for Social and Environmental Programming at the London Jesuit Centre.
This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here
The Synod on the Amazon is only in its first week, and it has already become the focus of considerable disagreement. The Catholic news media and Twittersphere are alive with reciprocal accusations of paganism and racism, two bishops have launched a ‘crusade of fasting and prayer’, and the discussion over what did or did not happen during a tree-planting ceremony in the Vatican gardens is not over yet. Were people ‘bowing down before carved images of pregnant women’? Was it ‘Our Lady of the Amazon’? If all this online warfare seems unseemly, it is worth remembering that the Council of Chalcedon involved actual beard-pulling.
Amid all the criticism and counter-criticism circulating online are more serious critiques of the Synod’s working document (Instrumentum laboris), including from Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.[i] Müller’s criticisms focus on what he describes as the document’s defective understanding of revelation. Revelation, he argues, is contained in Scripture and Tradition: it is not found in particular geographical territories. Müller’s critique does raise some important areas for reflection, but this particular objection seems an odd one: Catholic theology has always acknowledged ‘general’ revelation as well as the ‘special’ revelation of scripture and tradition, and Catholic social teaching has a long tradition of reflecting on the signs of the times – those social, political and historical events that demand ethical reflection and a response from the Church.[ii] That the working document reflects seriously on the ecological crisis as a sign of the times is entirely appropriate; that it does so in relation to the destruction of a particular place and the suffering of its peoples is no more remarkable than Leo XIII’s reflection on the suffering of the workers of Europe caused by the industrial revolution in his Rerum novarum (1891).[iii]
It is in this sense that the Synod on the Amazon invites us to look at the Amazon as a site of revelation: it is a situation that God is inviting us to read or listen to, and to reflect upon in light of scripture and the Church’s teaching. It is a situation in which – as in every situation – God’s will can be sought and discerned. The working document’s claim that territory in general, and the Amazon in particular, is ‘a theological place where faith is lived, and also a particular source of God’s revelation: epiphanic places where the reserve of life and wisdom for the planet is manifest, a life and wisdom that speaks of God’, is no more problematic than Benedict XVI’s statement that:
A precious treasure is to be found in the soul of Africa, where I perceive a ‘spiritual “lung” for a humanity that appears to be in a crisis of faith and hope’, on account of the extraordinary human and spiritual riches of its children, its variegated cultures, its soil and sub-soil of abundant resources.[iv]
At a press conference before the launch of the Synod, the Synod Relator Cardinal Baldisseri downplayed the criticisms of the working document circulating in advance of the Synod. ‘If there is a cardinal or a bishop who does not agree, who sees that there is content that does not correspond to church teaching,’ he said, they should understand that ‘it’s not a magisterial document. It’s a working document that serves as a basis to construct from zero the final document.’[v] The point, he emphasised, was to gather the voices of the 80,000 people consulted during the process of preparation for the Synod.[vi] Cardinal Hummes, the President of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM) stated:
It is the voice of the local church, the voice of the church in the Amazon – of the church, of the people, of the history and of the very earth, the voice of the earth.... And this has value, it is not fake news.
He went on to add: ‘The church didn’t do it for the sake of doing it to only ignore them. No! If it was done, it was so that [the church] could listen to them. This is the synodal path: to seriously listen.’[vii]
To seriously listen: this, perhaps, is the point of connection with Newman. In an editorial for the Rambler in 1859, ‘On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine’, Newman stated that ‘One man will lay more stress on one aspect of doctrine, another on another; for myself, I am accustomed to lay great stress on the consensus fidelium.’[viii] He went on to explain,
… the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and … their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the Infallible Church.
I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church in its various constituents and functions per modum unius, manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of these channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect; granting at the same time fully, that the gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion of that tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia docens [the Magisterium].[ix]
The process of preparation for synods usually includes consultation of the bishops of given areas, who feed into the working document information about the challenges facing the Church in their area of pastoral responsibility. New in recent years has been the inclusion of laypeople in that process of consultation, first for the Synod on Marriage and Family Life, then for the Synod on Youth, Faith and Vocational Discernment, and now for the Synod on the Amazon. Some 80,000 people were consulted during the process of preparation for the Synod, through local gatherings held across a territory massive, remote and challenging. It is their voices, as Baldisseri points out, that are gathered in the Synod document, and the point of those gatherings was not to sort and judge – the job of the Ecclesia docens, which begins this week – but simply to listen.
This is what Newman is getting at in ‘On the Consultation of the Laity’: the importance of listening to the people, and to the faith that resides within them, as well as to bishops, liturgies, events and movements. All of these are places in which God speaks to us, and all need to be weighed and judged. When we speak of consulting the laity, Newman states, we mean ‘consult’ not in the sense of asking opinion or counsel. Rather,
… we talk of ‘consulting our barometer’ about the weather:– the barometer only attests the fact of the state of the atmosphere. In like manner, we may consult a watch or a sun-dial about the time of day. A physician consults the pulse of his patient; but not in the same sense in which his patient consults him. It is but an index of the state of his health.[x]
Newman says that we consult the laity in this way, in the same way that we consult rites and doctrines, as witnesses to the faith that resides in them. This captures in part the aim of the Synod process so far: to consult the inhabitants of the Amazon region, to ask them to speak about their faith, the challenges facing them as indigenous peoples, and the pastoral challenges facing the Church. Newman, then, is a good advocate for listening attentively to the facts.
But is that all? Are the faithful of the Amazon simply being consulted like a barometer, or like a doctor consults a pulse? Newman’s medical analogy slightly downplays something that is clear in the rest of his article: that the encounter between ‘doctor’ and ‘patient’, ecclesia docens and ecclesia discens, [xi] can be mutually transformative. The reason he engages with the theme of consulting the faithful in the first place is because of objections raised to an earlier Rambler piece, in which he had stated that, ‘in the preparation of a dogmatic definition, the faithful are consulted, as lately in the instance of the Immaculate Conception.’[xii] The example of the Immaculate Conception makes it clear that sometimes the peripheries – popular faith and devotion – can change the centre. In the ‘On Consulting the Laity’ article, Newman gives the even starker example of the Arian controversy in the fourth century, in which ‘the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the Episcopate.’[xiii] We are not in such a situation here, thank God, but Newman’s point is worth holding on to: there are times faith that resides in ordinary people can be transformative for the centre. If this is a medical consultation, it is one in which the doctor, as well as the patient, can go away healthier.
Reflecting on Newman’s medical analogy also helps us think more deeply about the dispositions that such a transformative listening encounter requires. The anthropologist Jeanne Favret–Saada’s fascinating study of witchcraft in the Bocage region of France, Deadly Words, reports the comment of a local psychiatrist that ‘Medicine round here is a veterinary art.’ Belief in witchcraft and the evil eye was widespread in the area, with the result that the psychiatrist did not trust his patients’ assessments of their symptoms or diagnoses of their illnesses. They attributed illness to the evil eye, he to psychiatric conditions: there was no shared ground of interpretation on which they could meet, and so he treated his patients more or less as a vet would treat a cow, without presuming any intelligence on their part. Müller dismisses the working document’s reference to the Amazonian cosmovision along these lines, calling it ‘a cosmovision with its myths and the ritual magic of Mother “Nature”, or its sacrifices to “gods” and spirits which scare the wits out of us.’ He goes on:
In all seriousness, in the formation of future pastors and theologians, shall the knowledge of classical and modern philosophy, of the Church Fathers, of modern theology, of the Councils now be replaced with the Amazonian cosmovision and the wisdom of the ancestors with their myths and rituals?[xiv]
Müller consistently presents it as a choice: the Amazonian cosmovision, or Christianity.[xv] There is no shared ground of understanding: the approach to indigenous people’s worldview is basically veterinary. It is true, as he points out, that not all of the traditional beliefs of indigenous peoples are healthy or compatible with Christianity. The same goes for British culture, American culture or German culture: the gospel of Jesus Christ no more permits the worship of natural forces than it permits the worship of market forces. But a real listening demands that we accept that indigenous peoples are genuinely Catholic Christians, and that there is a shared ground of belief, meaning and experience that allows a real conversation between bishops and people, centre and peripheries, ecclesia docens and ecclesia discens. Without this basic assumption, the encounter is not a medical consultation, as Newman would have it, but a veterinary one.
Newman is right that doctors do not consult patients in the same way that patients consult doctors but, nevertheless, medical encounters regularly assume a degree of intelligence and reflective ability on the part of the patient. The patient is not completely passive: in a doctor’s consulting room he is already making judgements about which of his symptoms are relevant, which most concerning and severe, and so on. The doctor may ask the patient to elaborate or question him further, or she may rate differently the importance and significance of the symptoms troubling him, but the patient is by no means consulted as an inert collection of facts. On the contrary, good medical diagnosis and successful treatment requires the doctor to engage with the patient as a whole person, possessed of intelligence and free will, hopes and fears, and bound up in relationships with others. It requires a shared ground of understanding, and a disposition of trust and charity. St Ignatius, in the Presupposition that begins the Spiritual Exercises, describes the disposition needed:
In order that both he who is giving the Spiritual Exercises, and he who is receiving them, may more help and benefit themselves, let it be presupposed that every good Christian is to be more ready to save his neighbour’s proposition than to condemn it. If he cannot save it, let him inquire how he means it; and if he means it badly, let him correct him with charity. If that is not enough, let him seek all the suitable means to bring him to mean it well, and save himself.[xvi]
Such a spirit of charity in listening, trust and encounter, both at the Synod itself and in the discussions around it, is something worth fasting and praying for.
Thanks to Séverine Deneulin and Frank Turner SJ for their comments on an earlier version of this piece; and to Thomas Knieps-Port le Roi at the Journal of Marriage, Families and Spirituality (formally INTAMS review) for permission to reuse material from Theodora Hawksley, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Morals’, INTAMS Review 20.1 (2014), pp.26–31.
[i] Cardinal Gerhard Müller, ‘On the Concept of Revelation as presented in the Instrumentum Laboris for the Amazon Synod’, Catholic News Agency, 16 July 2019: www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-test-of-cardinal-muellers-analysis-on-the-working-document-of-the-amazon-synod-78441.
[ii] Müller is correct that more theological work needs to be done to define key terms, if these are to be used in the apostolic exhortation after the Synod.
[iii] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum (1891):
http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.
[iv] Benedict XVI, Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Africae munus (2001), §13.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20111119_africae-munus.html. See also John Paul II’s address to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders in 1986: ‘You do not have to be people divided into two parts, as though an Aboriginal had to borrow the faith and life of Christianity, like a hat or a pair of shoes, from someone else who owns them. Jesus calls you to accept his words and his values into your own culture. To develop in this way will make you more than ever truly Aboriginal…Take this Gospel into your own language and way of speaking; let its spirit penetrate your communities and determine your behaviour towards each other, let it bring new strength to your stories and your ceremonies. Let the Gospel come into your hearts and renew your personal lives. The Church invites you to express the living word of Jesus in ways that speak to your Aboriginal minds and hearts. All over the world people worship God and read his word in their own language, and colour the great signs and symbols of religion with touches of their own traditions. Why should you be different from them in this regard, why should you not be allowed the happiness of being with God and each other in Aboriginal fashion?’ §12
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1986/november/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19861129_aborigeni-alice-springs-australia.html
[v] https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/10/03/cardinals-hummes-and-baldisseri-respond-critics-working-document-amazon-synod
[vi] Baldisseri added: ‘It is not a pontifical document. It’s a collection of the input from the grassroots of the Amazonian people and the result of what they said in 170 assemblies and in other forums.’ Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] John Henry Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, Rambler July 1859, §2: http://newmanreader.org/works/rambler/consulting.html
[ix] Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, §2
[x] Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, §1 (emphasis original).
[xi] The ‘teaching church’ and the ‘learning church’.
[xii] Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, Introduction.
[xiii] ‘Here, of course, I must explain:—in saying this, then, undoubtedly I am not denying that the great body of the Bishops were in their internal belief orthodox; nor that there were numbers of clergy who stood by the laity, and acted as their centres and guides; nor that the laity actually received their faith, in the first instance, from the Bishops and clergy; nor that some portions of the laity were ignorant, and other portions at length corrupted, by the Arian teachers, who got possession of the sees and ordained an heretical clergy;—but I mean still, that in that time of immense confusion the divine dogma of our Lord's divinity was proclaimed, enforced, maintained, and (humanly speaking) preserved, far more by the ‘Ecclesia docta’ than by the ‘Ecclesia docens;’ that the body of the episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism; that at one time the Pope, at other times the patriarchal, metropolitan, and other great sees, at other times general councils, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth; while, on the other hand, it was the Christian people who, under Providence, were the ecclesiastical strength of Athanasius, Hilary, Eusebius of Vercellæ, and other great solitary confessors, who would have failed without them.’ Newman, ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, §3.5
[xiv] Müller, ‘On the Concept of Revelation’, §4.
[xv] See Sandro Magister, ‘Cardinal Müller: They have driven Jesus out of the Amazon Synod,’ Lifesite News October 8 2019: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/cardinal-mueller-they-have-driven-jesus-out-of-the-amazon-synod.
[xvi] Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §22
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