Believing in God in a Secular Age Bishops’ Lenten Catechesis. Lent 2015
The title of this Catechesis is
Believing in God in a Secular Age. We can take for granted that we are living in secular times. Secular times mean worldly times, with a worldview blinded by the times, living only for today and have stopped looking at life with their eyes on Eternity, even though Heaven is the home of every human heart and only in God is any soul truly at rest. In our own English speaking world secularism is the same as the kind of angry humanism we come across that is determined to exclude religion and belief in God from all public institutions and debate, especially when it is about morality, or right from wrong, and the right way for people to live and die. This process of secularisation is already quite old and well established and has been growing in our midst for a long time that can be traced back to the 1850s.
But recently these secular times have started to have a bad effect on our mentality as Catholics. Firstly we now presume it is harder to be Catholic these days and almost take for granted that there will be a steady decline of the Church because of it. I hear Catholics say all the time, ‘Well what can you do? They see secularism as some kind of tsunami that has hit the world and the Church and there is nothing we can do to stop it, except run and hide. Secondly Catholics think this is a brand new problem for the Church, the likes of which we have never seen before, like some new superbug, and we do not have any antibiotics for it.
The first thing I want to say to you is that there is absolutely no inevitability at all that the Church has to decline in these secular times. In fact difficult times like these have always been part of our history and, as often as not, they become perfect conditions for a new springtime of the Catholic faith. We have seen time and time again in the history of the Church that it is exactly when the times are most against us, when we are most up against it, that we Catholics are at our best. And it will be the same again in these times. And, anyway, secular times are not new at all to the Church. We were actually born as a Church and took our first confident steps in a very secular world two thousand years again. The world of the Acts of the Apostles is nothing other than a secular world. And it was this self-same secular world witnessed the first tsunami of Christianity break upon it and change it forever, the new Catholic faith spreading like wildfire across the planet through the mission and preaching of Saint Paul the Apostle. To this day St Paul is known by the very name of secularism. He is called the Apostle of the Gentiles, the Apostle of the pagan world, the Christian upstart revolutionary who triumphed over the secular world and planted in its midst, the Christian faith which would transform creation. So let’s turn to St Paul and ask him how we are supposed to believe in God in our own secular world.
The Bishop and Priests Bishop John has to go to St Paul first and ask him what kind of bishop he should be like in secular times. St Paul says three things to bishop John. 1. Be converted. 2 Be holy and wise. 3. Be missionary. 4. Be full of hope. 5. Build up the Church. All of these things you should be able to find in me and I promise to try to live by them so that your faith finds new strength and joy in these secular times. They are also qualities you should be able to find in our priests. So the first catechesis of the Lenten Season is directed to me and, by me, to our priests. They are wonderful priests and I am constantly amazed at their dedication to the diocese and to you. So what I say is intended only to build them up and renew them in this season of grace.
To believe in God in secular times St Paul says that the bishop and his priests have to be converts like St Paul. Paul’s whole life as priest was founded on his memory of that meeting he had with Jesus on the road to Damascus. For Paul it was an experience of infinite, unconditional love and mercy that Jesus had for him and it was so overpowering that it made Paul fall to his knees. In that moment Paul fell in love with Jesus passionately and never stopped loving him for a second till the day he died. How could Jesus love me, such a sinner, and yet He does! From then on Paul lived his whole life as a love affair with Jesus. He said, ‘The love of Christ is what drives me on’. So brother priests fall in love again if you have to with Jesus and His endless loving mercy for you. Secondly we have to be holy and wise. We should be men of prayer and study. A little known fact about Paul is that after he met Jesus he spent the next seven years in the desert and then at home in Tarsus in constant prayer and study. Brother priests be men of prayer and try to be also men of books. Your people want you to lead them to God and to do so you have to be holy and learned of the ways of God. Thirdly we have to be missionaries. For much of his life as a priest Paul was on the missions and he was homeless and was found not to be found in his own place but living in the homes and lives of his people. Brother priests find a way to get back in your homes, the living rooms and the lives of our people so that you can be part of their marriages, in the midst of their young, tending the sick and the dying. In order for to do this you need to help of the laity to take out of your hands the things that should not have been left to you. Try to get the laity to look after the leaky roof and pay the heating bills and make up the lists for readers so that you can be ministers of the Word and the Sacraments out in the highways and byways of your parishes. Fourthly you should be men full of hope. When St Paul returned to Headquarters at Antioch after his first missionary journey that lasted a few years he was ecstatic with joy and excitement and reported how the Lord had opened to door of faith widely to the pagans. He forgot to tell them that on that same mission he had been beaten up badly by non-believers frequently, once within an inch of his life, had been sent to prison routinely for his faith and was, as he spoke, a man on the run with a warrant out for his arrest up and down Europe. He did not bother his backside about opposition he encountered but only about the tremendous growth of the faith. Brothers it is natural for you to get fed up by the powers and opposition of the world but St Paul, in his missionary zeal, proved that all the forces of the world gathered together cannot do a thing to stop the spread of the Gospel when it is being lived witnessed and spread by a true believer. Finally, as priests we have to build up the Church as well as proclaiming the Gospel. On the way out on his missionary journeys Paul preached the Gospel and stayed around to give catechesis and got many people to become believers but on the way back he organised them into a Church, ordaining priests and training them in the liturgy and Christian living. Brothers try to train your people to be good leaders running well organised parishes and knowing how to be leaven, salt and light in the world.
The people
But you, the lay faithful, have come for Catechesis too. Why are you here? You are here because your bishop called you here to be with him during Lent. But you are also here because something tells you it’s good to be here. First of all it is good for us to gather together and build up our faith.
The past years have been very hard for you as Catholics. On your televisions and in your newspapers you have seen report after report of the scandals in the Church, globally and then at home. They have been awful and they have been relentless and you have had to go out of your front doors to your neighbours and into your work, feeling confused, exposed and embarrassed and you wondered why none of the leaders in the Church would take a stand and offer some understanding, some answers and some hope. You felt isolated and alone, harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd. I am sorry for that and for all you had to suffer and I salute your courage and faith, your love of Jesus and your Church that kept you faithful throughout and keeps you still here. All I can say is well done. During the Synod process we will stop and listen to you and hear what it was like for you. We will take time to learn the lessons you teach us as a precondition for us moving on and building up the Church again into something of which we can be publicly proud. But these six weeks of Catechesis are a start. We all know it’s good just to come together and enjoy being together, sharing our faith. Our beloved bishop John Mone used to meet Saint John Paul, one-to-one, in private meetings when he was out in Rome and the pope said to him, ‘Bring your people together as often as you can to be with you’. St Paul also said, ‘when Christians come together the devil is confounded’. So the main point of this Catechesis is just to bring us together again so that we can have a good time and say, ‘It was great being here’.
But you have also come for Catechesis because you want to know your faith better so that you can believe in and love God more. Catholics tell me this all the time. ‘The times have changed so much from when we first learned our faith. Things have moved on and we are not sure what we believe as Catholics anymore or why we believe it and we cannot explain it when we are challenged. That’s not good! St Peter said Christians should always be able to give a good account of their faith to anyone who asks and be able to defend it against anyone who attacks it. In these six weeks you will learn basic Catholic faith again and in a way that makes sense so you can pass it on.
Evangelised So back to Saint Paul to find out how we go about this. Before Paul taught catechesis the first thing he did was to proclaim essential core message of the Faith so that it was rooted in the heart and soul of every single believer. We should all know this short proclamation of our faith which is the foundation of all our belief, the basis summary of our first meeting with Christ when He called us to conversion. It is this:
Jesus is my Saviour and the Saviour of the World. He was crucified, died, and is risen. Through him I am set free from sin, evil and death; Through him God I live a "new life" that is divine and eternal.
This is the heart of our faith, really all you have to know and really believe. Just this basic message, loud and clear, about the mercy of God for the world in Jesus the Lord. This is the truth that one time overwhelmed you and made you entrust your whole life in faith to Jesus Christ. This is the Good News that you as a Catholic believe.
Catechised But, once Saint Paul had brought about the conversion of a person on this basic evangelisation, he then went on to introduce them into a period catechesis that would prepare them to be ready for baptism. At the same time as Paul was doing this the whole Church of the apostles did the same. They introduced an RCIA, a period of catechesis and preparation for those who had been evangelised to learn the Catholic faith, to learn enough about what the Catholic Church believed to allow them to be baptised. Within a few decades the Church had made a summary of these basis truths that were enough for a Catholic to know in order to be baptised. They called it the Apostles’ Creed. Next they made a rule that this summary should be recited aloud by all the baptised at every Mass to remind the m of what they believed and we still do it today. So, if I were to ask you, ‘Are you Catholic?’ you would say, ‘Yes!’ But then if I said, ‘Well what do you believe as a Catholic?’ you would say, ‘……That’s why I’ve come along today, to find out’. And that is what I am going to tell you. You know what Catholics believe because every Sunday you stand up and say what Catholics believe. After the homily the priest says, ‘let us stand and profess our faith’. He could have said, ‘Let us stand and say what Catholics believe’. And you all say, ‘
I believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth..’
The Creed is the answer, in summary, to what Catholics believe. So you already know what you believe. You even know it by heart. From now on, if someone asks you what you believe as a Catholic you just have to recite the Creed. So let’s look at it. When we do we see it is divided into two parts; Who God is, and what He has done for us’.
We Catholics believe in One God, but we also believe He is a Trinity, a Father Son and Holy Spirit. So we are not agnostic or atheist or polytheist. Believing in one God makes us mono-theist like the Jews and Muslims. But believing in a Trinity makes us unique. Its why the Jews and Muslims do not really like what we believe. We believe in a God who is three Persons who are three C’s. Co-eternal, co-equal and consubstantial.
We believe God is Our Father Who created the world and so we are different from the atheists who believe it’s just here. They say everything just came about by random chance. According to them there is absolutely no cause or reason for the world. The universe and everything in it is just there and has no meaning and in the end is absurd. Atheism is not a belief system it is a non-belief system. If you say, ‘will the sun rise tomorrow’ they answer, well it is highly unlikely but maybe if we are galactically lucky again there is an astronomically small chance that it might. We, on the other hand, say yes it will because a clever God created it with order and purpose, as man has seen with every sunrise, every day God has sent, since the beginning of the world. Do not be afraid of atheism. In this most important physical sense it is a ridiculous position to hold that the sun rises each day by sheer fluke. It is literally a nonsense, a non-sense refuted by every single new sunrise and new day. I promise you it really is sensible to believe in God is a secular age.
We believe in Jesus Christ, who is God from God, light from light, true God from true God and who for our sake came down from Heaven and was made man. So who is Jesus? He is true God and true man. Or, as the young people would say, ‘Totally God and totally man’. Why did He come? For us men and for our salvaiton. To free the world from sin and death so that we could have life to the full on earth and be with God forever in Heaven. There are people who deny that humanity is fallen, even though we fought wars that killed one hundred million of us in the twentieth century. That we have fallen is the most obvious thing in the world. There are others who say that the human race is evil and has done nothing good for our planet, even though they have been to our museums and seen our most beautiful works of art. But we Christians know the real story. That humans are still good, the very best in Creation, but we are also fallen somewhat and need to be redeemed. What else fits the evidence better than that or makes more sense. It really is sensible to believe in God is a secular age.
And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the God who guides us, makes us holy and who has given the Church’s thousands on martyrs the courage to stand up for our faith.
So what do Catholics believe? We believe in this God. And what do we believe this God has done for us?
We believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. That is, we believe our Church was founded by Jesus, by God Himself and that, even though it is made up of sinful and ignorant people, it will never deceive us in the truth we need to be redeemed and will always have the means to give us the holiness we need to be saved. We believe in a God who is so full of mercy He can and does forgive any sin and every sinner. I said that you already know your faith. Maybe I should make an exception for this one next teaching that most Catholics do not know. We believe in the resurrection of our bodies, not just the immortality of our souls, but that our bodies will rise again on the last day. When we get to Heaven please God, we will be there as men and women, body and soul. God created us in the flesh, He came in the flesh, he died and rose in the flesh so that we could have Eternal Life in the flesh.
The Creed tells us what Catholics believe. That there is a God so full of love and mercy for mankind that He came down to be with us on earth so that He could take us to be with Him forever in Heaven.
Conclusion
St Peter tells us always to be ready to give reasons to anyone who asks you to give an account of the hope to which you have been called. Always be ready to give reasons for what you believe. As Catholics we should know what we believe and why we believe it and be able to explain it to others. Today, as in the days of early Christians, many people are intrigued by the Catholic Faith. But they also have difficult questions to ask. Just like the early Christians we are called to explain and defend our faith today.
This means knowing the four pillars of our faith; what we believe, how we celebrate, how we live and how we pray.
Lenten Catechesis is here to help anyone who has questions about the Catholic faith. It will also help to refresh and deepen our knowledge of our faith.
It is good for us to ask questions about our faith. Jesus did this in the Temple, listening to the doctors and asking them questions. Questioning is important because the kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field and we have to dig by questioning and thinking
There are many reasons people do not believe in God but most of them do. Every culture has a word for god because to believe in him is the most natural thing. And its not just a belief for the simple. The greatest philosophers, scientists, artists and writers have all believed in God: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Newton, Einstien. Pioneers of science, subtle thinkers, of past and present.
Even atheists believe in a kind of God. Something very great that caused this world, like an impersonal multiverse. Some want to deny God because they of moral reasons. They think if there is a God they cannot be free, somethings are right and wrong. But denying God’s existence entirely changes our moral framework. As Dostoevstky, if there is no God everything is permitted. So 100,000 million have been killed.
Modern science has not shown we are just clever apes. The very existence of science shows the uniqueness of man.
The Secular Age
The life of man is to know and love God
We have a capacity for God. We desire him, we have ways of coming to know him, we can know a lot from reason and we can speak sensibly of God.
But God comes to meet us. He has revealed himself and his plan of loving goodness in stages and in its fullness in his son Jesus.
He is alive and guiding us in the Church, he life, SS and Tradition, the truth of which is guarded by the Church.
But we have to respond. I have to say I believe, in obedience. This means knowing and assenting in freedom and trust along with the Church that says We believe so that the Lord can look on the Faith of the Church, one voice throughout the earth.
The God in whom we believe is one and no other.
He is almighty and He is Creator of the visible and invisible.