A Good Pastoral letter from our Bishop this weekend

Dear brothers and sisters of Arundel & Brighton,

 

Next Sunday, 24 November and the Feast of Christ the King, marks the end of the ‘Year of Faith’ announced by Pope Benedict in 2012. The year began on 11 October 2012, the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Vatican Council.

 

As a diocese we have not really placed great emphasis on the celebration of this ‘Year of Faith’, mainly because what the pope asked us to do was something we had already committed to; we already had in place our plans for the celebration of our diocesan Jubilee in 2015. These plans gave priority to a four-year programme of renewal, based on our study of the four major documents of the Council. This is what the pope asked people to do during the ‘Year of Faith’. Many people throughout the diocese have joined groups to do this work together.

 

Studying Church documents can be hard work – the language isn’t always the easiest – and can seem unrewarding if it’s not clear why we do it. Is it just to learn more about what the Church teaches? Is it to be better informed about our Catholic faith so that we can either explain or defend it? I would suggest that, in the first place, it’s neither of these things.

 

If someone were to ask you – I’ll assume you’re Catholic, listening to this, though I know that this might not be the case – if someone were to ask you what the Church believes, what would you first answer be? Think for a moment.

 

Would it be about the authority of the pope? Would it be about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or the importance of Mass? Would it be about the Sacraments? It would be quite understandable if your response were about these things, because these are the things that are distinctly Catholic, the things that mark us out as different from other churches.

 

If you were to put this question about belief to someone from a pentecostal-evangelical church, you would probably get a very different answer. I suspect it would be a burst of enthusiasm about God’s love for us and how we are saved by Christ’s death on the cross. In other words, it would be about what God has done, not about what we are doing. It would put God in the centre of things, not ourselves.

 

At a talk I gave in Worth Abbey in September, I tried to look at this question of what we mean by ‘faith’ and looked at what was said in the first Vatican Council in its document Dei Filius (‘The Son of God’) of 1870, which deals with revelation. There the text says, “This faith… is a supernatural virtue by which we, with the aid of the grace of God, believe that the things revealed by Him are true.” So faith is seen as an acceptance by the intellect or mind of things shown or said to us by God; it is agreeing to a set of propositions.

 

In the document on revelation in the Second Vatican Council, nearly a hundred years later, faith is seen not as the communication and reception of facts, but the giving of God himself, and our response is not an intellectual response, but, the document says, “by faith man freely commits his entire self to God.” In other words our faith is a personal response to God’s love and an acceptance of that offer of God’s friendship.

 

The gospel today speaks of the difficulties that will face believers. It is full of the worst threats of persecution and disaster, and we easily slip into the mistake of transferring this into our own situation. We are a Church that is persecuted, marginalised, misunderstood and threatened, so is it any wonder that it is difficult to believe? I would suggest that this is largely irrelevant. The reason that faith is a struggle for many people is that it is difficult to believe that God can really love me. We can be like the man in the gospel reading a few weeks ago, who stood at the back of the Temple and just said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” We can sit at the back and tell God that he must have more important things to think about, more urgent things to attend to. And anyway, if he really did turn his attention to me he’d see what a failure I am and what a mess my life is.

 

But faith is accepting all of this, that despite me and my mistakes, God loves me intensely and without reservation or condition. Faith is believing what the basic gospel message is: it’s not, “Do this,” but see what God has done. God loved the world so much that he sent his Son to die for us and free us from our sins.

 

So as we come to the end of this ‘Year of Faith’ let’s try to shift our focus. Let’s not worry so much about all the things that confuse and mystify us about the Church, all the words we don’t understand. Let’s just try and grasp more and more each day that God loves and cares for me now. And, just as being loved by another person changes our life, so this love will change our life. It will take  us out of ourselves, open our hearts to others, widen our eyes on the world and make us part of the gospel, not just observers at a distance.

 

Rejoice in your gift of faith, share it with others in conversation and gestures. Bring joy and peace to where you are, show that you know what it is to be loved by God. If you don’t get to pray today, at least say, “Hello, God,” and “Thanks very much.” Then say a bit more tomorrow.

 

With my prayers and good wishes for you all.