(Published in the Southern
Cross 17/8/89 and following)
In 1988 Pope John Paul II, preaching at the Pontiac Silverdome in
the USA, quoted from Philippians: “Conduct yourselves in a way worthy of the
gospel of Christ”. His concluding
admonition was delivered in a deep stern voice: “Measure the things of this
world by the standard of the Kingdom of God”.
He then asked the US bishops: “Your music, your poetry and art, your
drama, your painting and sculpture, the literature you are producing, are all
those things which reflect the soul of a nation being influenced by the Spirit
of Christ?”
Everywhere the Pope has gone
he has preached on the dangers of the mass media and its manipulation of
people’s minds and values. At Knock the
Pope said: “So many different voices
assail the Christian in today’s wonderful, but complicated and demanding
world. So many false voices are heard
that conflict with the Word of God.
They are the voices that will tell you that truth is less important than
personal gain; that comfort, wealth and
pleasure are the true aims of life...”
The Black writer and British
Broadcasting Corporation governor, Jocelyn Barrow, warned that television is
“one of the most powerful influences in our lives in modern society and is an
influence people are not always conscious of.
You put on and take in a certain number of values, trends and behaviour
patterns almost by osmosis”. (1)
DALLAS:
A good example of this is
the TV programme Dallas. Nearly
everybody watched this programme as nobody wanted to be the4 odd man out by
being ignorant of the episodes. So this
peer pressure resulted in church meetings having to be rescheduled as few
people would turn up – a case of the tail wagging the dog! Fr Bonaventure Hinwood says that Dallas and
programmes like it “present a lifestyle in which God and religion do not
feature, nor very much morality. The
outlook of most of the characters most of the time is: get what you want, how and when you want it,
and it does not matter who gets hurt in the process. Making money, business success, getting
other people in one’s power to be used for one’s own ends, emotional and sexual
self-indulgence with no thought for the effect on the other person: these and similar drives are the motivation
for many of the activities and relationships portrayed”. (2)
Charles Worrod of the Natal Witness says that “there
seems to be no let up in the war television wages against beauty. Our tiny tots are bombarded with grotesque
cartoons and puppet shows; our teenagers
are subverted by crude, lewd, artless and ugly pop videos, while so-called
adult fare is an almost continuous parade of thuggery and murder against a
background of anarchy”. (3) The same newspaper reported a survey which
showed that one out of two French TV viewers wants the screen blocked out at
least one day a week to help cure what they see as a habit as bad as smoking or
drinking! (4) Many people seem to get
easily addicted to television and are incapable of exercising restraint and
discrimination in watching something so unedifying. No wonder the famous study of TV by Marie
Winn was called The Plug-in Drug! (5)
Hollywood TV programmes like
Dallas were universally popular. People
were addicted to Dallas in Ireland and England in 1980 when I left for South
Africa, and here it was almost essential viewing – provoking the response by Fr
Bonaventure mentioned above. Once, when
travelling in states to the north of South Africa, I found people watching
Dallas in Zimbabwe and Zambia. Many of
them were poor illiterate people who were crammed tightly into a better-off
neighbour’s house in silent fascination at the antics of J.R. and his ilk. Cultural imperialism? Hollywood TV programmes are everywhere. I think we can learn a lot from fellow
Christians in America who have been grappling with the detrimental effects of
TV for some time.
I remember attending a
wedding in Ireland in 1980. The groom
was an ardent admirer of J.R. – perhaps clone would be a better word! – and in
true macho fashion left his bride high and dry after the wedding ceremony to go
and drink with the ‘boys’. Obviously I
wasn’t surprised that his marriage was a disaster from the start. People are being changed and their minds
brutalised by this constant brainwashing by television. Many people can no longer tell truth from
fiction or light from darkness. Many
Christians are still watching highly questionable programmes that are destroying
marriages, the family, our society and the church. Marie Winn, an expert on the media, is
convinced that “television has played an important role in the disintegration
of the American family”. (6)
ALL THE WORLD’S A SAGE:
In 1970 I was told by an
Irish friend in London that in the old days if one did not like the company
one’s children mixed with, one could haul them off the street, lock the door
and keep them occupied at home. But
now, he said, all parents have to contend with a third party in the home who is
contradicting everything that the parents hold true, noble right, pure, lovely
and honourable – namely the television.
Even though this man had four children (two of them teenagers), he had
the courage to get rid of the TV altogether.
Rightly has the media expert, Marshall McLuhan, stated of modern day
parents that “character is no longer shaped by only two earnest fumbling
experts. Now, all the world’s a
sage!” (7) The world is dictating the agenda for many
Christians not the Word of God. Many
parents are afraid and want to avoid conflict by plugging in the drug. If our TV causes us to sin, should be not
cast it out? Perhaps getting rid of the
aerial and keeping the TV as monitor for showing religious and educational
videos to be watched by parents with their children would be a better
idea.
But because of peer pressure
on children, parents need to get together to provide an environment where children
can grow up in an atmosphere suffused by faith and not by the world and its
favourite TV programmes. This may
entail making a few sacrifices or taking a reduction in income but our faith
and our children are the most precious things we have. In Natal, South Africa, I noticed that great
numbers of families have moved into the Kwasizabantu Christian community at
Mapumulo so their children can grow up in a faith environment. Often in the evenings Christian videos are
shown to the whole community to build up faith and as a common topic for
conversation.
NON-CONFORMISM:
Cardinal Ratzinger says that
we need to rediscover the courage of non- conformism in the face of the trends
of the affluent world. Instead of
following the spirit of the times we ourselves must witness that spirit of
non-conformity with evangelical seriousness.
He says that we have lost the sense that Christians cannot live just
like ‘everybody else”. Today, more than
ever, he says, the Christian must be aware that he belongs to a minority and
that he is in opposition to everything that appears good, obvious, logical to
the ‘spirit of the world’ as the New Testament calls it. Among the most urgent tasks facing Christians
is that of regaining the capacity of non-conformism i.e. the capacity to oppose
many developments of the surrounding culture Cardinal Ratzinger maintains. (8)
I remember when I was at
Library School in Britain in 1969, we were shown round new library/cultural
complexes in Manchester that were “to promote art and culture” – factories to
crate culture so to speak. This seemed
to me to be pretty absurd at the time as places of worship were excluded from
these complexes, and religion was never mentioned. Yet, as Christopher Dawson, Arnold Toynbee,
Kenneth Clarke and others have shown, religion is the origin of all true
culture. Arthur Koestler has said that
“all art is of religious origin”. (9)
To ignore religion is to ignore the greatest stimulus there is to art,
culture and civilization. T.S. Eliot
rightly says that “you cannot, in any scheme for the reformation of society,
aim directly at a condition in which the arts will flourish: these activities are probably by-products
which we cannot deliberately arrange the conditions”. (10)
Marshall McLuhan points out
a number of times in his writings on the media that “the Balinese have no art,
they do everything as well as they can”. (11)
He pointed out that they were very religious so every artefact and
mentefact (product of the mind e.g. poetry) reflected their very religious
beliefs. For example, a canoe would not
just be a functional thing for them to get from A to B. It would lovingly be carved with religious
symbolism. If we want to study the
culture or art of the Balinese, we can go to a great museum and see all their
artefacts and mentefacts collected together, created obviously with religious
devotion, and we say what a great artistic culture they had. They did not set out to create art as such,
or a culture as such, but the sum total of these religiously imbued items we
call their art and culture.
Similarly with Christianity,
and even more so. All art consists of
two main aspects: the message (implicit
or explicit) and the technique. If the
message expresses a universal truth portrayed with a superb technique, the
resulting art becomes a masterpiece.
Christian civilization may have created so many masterpieces because its
message deals with Jesus who is the Truth and He is the one everyone
must draw near if they wish to understand themselves fully according to Pope
John Paul II. Christian art creates a
resonance in the hearts of sincere seekers of truth.
When a person is converted
and gives his life to Christ, and puts on the mind of Christ by meditation on
the Gospel, he begins to do everything “in Christ” as the New Testament says we
should, whether it’s speaking or acting, eating or drinking, working or
playing, waking or sleeping, putting our hearts into it as if it were for the
Lord and not for men (Col. 3:23), working hard and willingly, but doing it for
the sake of the Lord (Eph. 6:5-7). This
transformation in Christ, not conformism to the world (Rom. 12:2), imbues
everything with a deeper meaning and purpose.
The poet George Herbert put it so well:
“He who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, makes that and the action fine”.
CANTERBURY:
In the museum at Canterbury
in England, people can admire the artefacts of the early Roman Christians of
Kent. Some are very simple, like spoons
with the Chiro or Ichtus fish symbolism.
Others are more ornate but lovingly done by religious people. Canterbury Cathedral was a labour of love
built by people of faith, as was Chartres Cathedral. The breviaries, altar missals, and Gospel
books of the ancient Irish Christians indicate the joy and peace they had found
in the Word of God and had never found in their pagan religion of fear and
superstition. In gratitude for the
Gospel, the only source of salvation, they were inspired to embellish
everything containing His holy Word.
They did not set out to create art or culture (as the Manchester public
libraries mentioned above), these were a by-product of the religious fervour of
their faith in Jesus as the critical difference between life and death. This is still the case today Vatican II has
made clear when it ways that “whosoever knowing that the Catholic church was
made necessary by God through Jesus Christ, would refuse to enter her or to
remain in her, could not be saved”.
(Lumen Gentium 14)
AUTHORITY:
The traditional Catholic
virtues of “discipline, order and sacrifice” have been a great impetus to
cultural activity. Sir Kenneth Clarke,
the Anglican art critic said in his BBC TV series Civilization shown on South African TV, that the
civilization of the 17th century depended on certain assumptions
that are out of favour in England and America today. The first of these he said was belief in
authority, the absolute authority of the Catholic Church. This belief he said extended to sections of
society which we now assume to be naturally rebellious e.g. artists. He says it comes as something of a shock to
find that with a single exception, the great artists of the time were al
sincere, conforming Christians.
Guercino spent much of his mornings in prayer; Bernini frequently went into retreats and
practised the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius; Rubens attended Mass every morning before
beginning work. “This conformism”,
Clarke says, “was not based on fear of the Inquisition, but on the perfectly
simple belief that the faith which had inspired the great saints of the
preceding generation was something by which a man should regulate his whole
life”. (12)
This faith which has
“inspired the great saints” is the faith of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as
interpreted by the Catholic Church with the authority given to her by Jesus
himself. It demands a very high and
sublime ethic and then gives an extraordinary power to live it: the power of the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to live the Christian ideals
of purity and holiness either in marriage or the single life without the Spirit
of Jesus Christ. Someone once said that
it’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best,
you very often get it! The Catholic
insistence on the high ideal of holiness is a case in point.
ARNOLD TOYNBEE:
Arnold Toynbee, one of the
greatest experts on world cultures. Studied at great length, why European
culture and civilization was so rich and advanced compared to other world
cultures. He dismissed racial factors
and concluded it had a lot to do with the strong discipline that Christianity
brought to Europe. (I would add that
Christianity also brought Truth).
Discipline and strict morality meant chastity and purity before
marriage, allowing children to imbibe a good all-round education before the
awakening of disorderly sexual urges.
Free gratification of mankind’s instinctive needs is incompatible with
civilised society: renunciation and
delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress. For culture to flourish there must be
authority, discipline and self control.
If these things do not
exist, the culture and art will be superficial like the old pagan Samoan
culture. Rosemary Haughton says that
their culture was crude, limited and rather dull, they had no national heroes
or religious leaders, and their personal relationships were superficial. (13)
Marriages were not sexually exclusive and pre-marital sex was
“everyone’s favourite sport”. The result
of all this was a free and easy atmosphere in which nobody felt very strongly
about anyone else and sexual ‘passion’ or ‘being in love’ was just not
done. In this situation sex is used to
‘defuse’ emotions and passions, unbend the springs of action and enervate the
soul. It’s fun. It’s cheap, it’s easy
and it keeps people occupied and they don’t want other things – just as in the
permissive West today. It disinclines
people from having strong convictions, feeling or desires about anything else. Hence the art of the Samoans was crude and
superficial in contrast to the disciplined Balinese who esteemed chastity
before marriage. Obviously the principle
of sublimation was not at work in Samoan society!
SUBLIMATION:
Sublimation is important in
understanding culture. William Barclay,
the scripture scholar, says that sublimation is the process by which
instinctive emotions are diverted from their original ends and redirected to
purposes satisfying the individual and of value to the community. There is no need for repression which can
easily lead to mental and physical disorders.
(14)
The Redemptorist priest,
Father Russell Abata CSSR, says that “sex that is not released (promiscuously)
is like the power of an active storage battery.
It has good physical, psychological and moral effects. As sex seeks out a dozen or more ways to find
an acceptable release, it alerts one’s whole being’s sensitivity. It prompts a seeking out of another to show
that other kindness and consideration.
It stimulates imagination. The
daydreams technicoloured by unreleased sex are beyond numbering. They become the searching themes of love
songs, art, poetry and other high forms of culture. It excites passion that can be converted into
energy. It inspires idealism and urges
the undertaking of noble causes. It
gives life buoyancy and zest”, Abata concludes.
(15) The Troubadour at the time
of St Francis of Assisi are a classic example of this redirecting of
instinctive emotions to greater things as the Troubadours were famed for their
beautiful love songs and poetry.
Many of the examples of
culture I have given above are of ‘high culture’ or ‘élite culture’. But culture is also the social air we
breathe, it is a whole way of life with levels of culture within it (16)- from
great masterpieces of art and literature (high culture) to the characteristic
activities and interests of a people (mass culture). The Vatican Council defined culture as “all
those factors by which a man refines and unfolds his manifold spiritual and
bodily qualities”. (17)
BEING AND DOING:
The preaching of God’s Word
has tremendous power to influence all levels of culture be it élite or mass
culture, as it challenges and changes people from within making them new beings
in Christ. This is where the reformation
of society begins. Evelyn Underhill said
that “the reconstruction of character and reorientation of attention must
precede reconstruction of society. Again
and again it has been proved, that those who aim at God do better work than
those who start with the declared intention of benefiting their
fellow-men. We must BE good before we
can DO good; be real before we can
accomplish real things. No generalized
benevolence, no social Christianity, however beautiful and devoted, can take
the place of this centering of the Spirit on eternal values; this humble,
deliberate recourse to Reality. To
suppose that it can do so, is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect
for cause”.
CULTURE RENEWED:
Even the most debased
culture can be revamped and its tawdry symbols be given new meaning and purpose
by Christianity. For example, there was
a teenager, Anne Ward, in the USA in the 1960’s rock and roll era who lived in
a poor downtown area of a big city. As a
child of American mass culture her early heroes were the Walt Disney
characters, Snow White, Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty etc. She was a victim of the permissive society at
the time, had two illegitimate children and led a life of misery before her
conversion and new life in Christ. The
heroes of her childhood now became beautiful symbols of her Saviour Christ, the
Prince of Peace, and they appear again and again in her early songs performed
with her brother, Matthew Ward, and her sister, Nellie Ward, who were members
of one of the first gospel rock bands in the USA - the famous “Second Chapter
of Acts”. They used the only medium they
knew – popular music and the mass culture they imbibed as they grew up – to
create beautiful and often very moving music.
Anne Ward was better known by her married name of Anne Herring.
AFRICAN CULTURE:
What should our attitude be
as Christians towards the culture we live in? Whether it be the mass culture
emanating from Hollywood or the traditional African culture. As regards the latter, Bishop Bucher said
that the genuine conversion of a people and its culture will only come about as
a result of the confrontation between that which ‘people were told in the past’
and Christ’s “but now I tell you”. (18)
In the Washing of the Spears, the
history of the rise of the Zulu nation, the great Zulu warrior, King Cetshwayo,
says “it is the custom of our nation to kill”. (19) In another neighbouring kingdom – that of the
Swazis, the kings have professed Christianity and yet it is in their culture to
have many wives.
Obviously attitudes like
these need to be confronted with the Gospel. Jesus warns of the danger of
“neglecting God’s commands in favour of mere human customs”. (Mark 7:8-9). In line with St Paul’s advice to the Galatians
in dealing with their culture, we need also to “test everything and hold fast
to what is good” (1 Thes. 5:21). Vatican
II said that the church “through her work, whatever good is in the minds and
hearts of men, whatever good lies latent in the religious practices and
cultures of diverse peoples, is not only saved from destruction, but is also
healed, ennobled, and perfected unto the glory of God, the confusion of the
Devil, and the happiness of man”. (Lumen Gentium 17). Some superficial and ill-considered attempts
at inculturation are to the glory of the merely human, the confusion of genuine
believers and the happiness of the Devil I think! Ralph Martin maintains that “much spreading
syncretism in the Church’s missionary work takes place undere the rubric of
‘cultural adaptation of the gospel to inbdigenous cultures’”. (20)
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM:
Sometimes the Church in
evangelising nations has had to use the stick as well as the carrot and to send
men like St. Boniface to Germany to put the axe to the root of some elements in
cultures strongly at variance with the Gospel of liberation from fear,
superstition and magic. Of course, many anthropologists determined on
preserving cultures in a static state of primitive simplicity would throw up
their hands in horror at St Boniface’s tree chopping prowess! But
one wonders, looking at the paganism, witchcraft and barbarism sweeping Europe
today as faith declines, if an unevangelised Germany could have produced
cultural giants like J.S. Bach or W.A. Mozart.
Many anthropologists show an ignorance in the well attested power of the
Gospel to transform cultures from within and a pessimistic view of human
nature’s ability to rise to new heights of cultural expression. One wonders if Ireland could ever have
produced the exquisite Book of Kells if St Patrick had not been so thorough in
confronting the pagan culture he found when he arrived in Ireland. Of course, as Ralph Martin rightly says:
“Uniquely Western cultural values should not be presented as essential elements
of Christian faith”. (21) This would be
a form of cultural imperialism and some missionaries unfortunately have been
guilty of it.
As regards the mass culture
emanating from Hollywood which tends to cater for the lowest common denominator
in taste, many solutions have been put forward to deal with this hostile flood
of materialism. What is fashionable now
in America tends to hit other parts of the world years later. We can learn from those Christians in the USA
who have been working for some time to produce a culture that is counter
suggestible and defies the advertisers and manipulators of this world.
CELTIC LANGUAGES:
One suggestion put forward
recently in Ireland was from an Irish language activist who stated that
“Western civilization is decaying and an inept morality permeates our lifestyle
......... the Irish language is the key to rediscovering our character”.
(22) In South Africa we hear people of
different language groups extolling their own language and its importance in
preserving their culture. But I think
this is misguided. Our faith is MORE
important than our language or culture.
I was in Wales in 1969 when
Welsh nationalism was a fever pitch due to the presence of Prince Charles at
the University of Wales in Aberystwyth.
There was a demand by the nationalists for street signs, TV, radio and
pop songs etc., to be in the Welsh language.
The result was that we had the same superficial English pop songs of
questionable morality sung, not in English, but in Welsh! Language reflects the morals of a people it
does not crate them. Similarly in the
past, the Latin language was never a cause of the Church’s unity, only a sign
of it. Some people think the restoration
of Latin is the key to renewing the Church.
But the answer is not so easy, I think.
CULTURE AND MORALITY:
Another solution to the
detrimental effects of mass media and its baneful influence put forward by
Allen Bloom in his bestseller The
Closing of the American Mind, is to get people back to ‘culture and
reason’ and to the ‘Great Books’. (23)
He forgets that the Nazis were very cultured and well-read and Nazi
commandants at Belsen read Goethe! They
were cultured as was the Marquis de Sade, but completely without morality of
any kind.
In Western nations morality
came from Judeo-Christian teaching and when observance of this teaching went
into decline, so did morality at large.
At the turn of the century the elder Huxley and his fellow agnostics
believed that society could retain the Christian ethic after the Gospel had
disappeared. They were proved
wrong. (24)
Some historians reckon that
the Roman Emperor Constantine made Catholicism the state religion as a way of
purifying and restoring his decadent Empire.
Also with Napoleon, it was not out of love of Christ that he restored
the religion of France after the Terror.
He could see no other way of restoring order. Napoleon well knew the power of a subversive
ideology. He proscribed the writings of the ‘Enlightenment‘ with the terse
comment: “I am not enough to rule a nation that reads Voltaire and Rousseau”!
(25) Would that our contemporaries could
see the dangers in the media so clearly as Napoleon!
Lenin tried to erase
religion during the Terror in Russia and thought Russians could be moral beings
without it. He was obviously wrong and
Mr Gorbachev seemed to want to restore religion to prop up a corrupt and
decaying Soviet order.
HIERARCHY OF VALUES:
At this point I think it
very important to state that in the hierarchy of values cultural ones are NOT
the most important. Dietrich von
Hildebrand, the philosopher, says that moral values are the highest among all
natural values. “Reverence, goodness,
fidelity, responsibility, truthfulness and humility of man rank higher than
genius, brilliancy, great vitality, higher than the beauty of nature or of art,
higher than the stability and power of the state. What is realised and what shines forth in an
act of real forgiveness, in a noble and generous renunciation, in a burning and
selfless love, is more significant and more noble, more important and more
eternal than all cultural values”, he says.
(26)
For example, Jonathan
Garett, the hero in the popular Australian TV series Against the Wind, is a slow, ponderous, uncultured person,
but after a struggle involving good and evil, he is eventually praised in an
official citation for his ‘loyalty, integrity and justice’. Moral beauty is far more impressive than the
beauty of nature and of science, Alexis Carrel maintained, and he saw moral
beauty as the basis of civilization.
That fiery preacher, St John Chrysostom, who exemplified the role of the
prophet to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, said that
“Nothing was nobler than to mould the moral character of the young and that
someone doing this is truly greater than all the painters, sculptors and all
others of that sort”. (27) So in the
Catholic scheme of things, moral values rank higher than cultural ones.
SAINT FRANCIS:
St Paul said that we are
‘God’s work of art’ (Eph. 2:9) So man
is more important than art or culture, because he is made in God’s image and
likeness, Saint Francis of Assisi showed
this true emphasis. Though he is
renowned for his aesthetic love of nature and beauty, he would be astounded at
Christians who could admire a sunset or a snow-capped mountain, pamper a cat or
pet of some sort and ignore a poor person created in God’s image. St Francis exemplified this true hierarchy of
values when he changed his designer clothes for poor rags to show contempt for
so-called good taste that emphasises lesser values at the expense of greater
ones. He broke a bowl he was carving
once because it distracted him while he was praying to God; he sent a lute player away once when he was
sick and longing for some fine music to console him because people might b e
scandalised. So out of deference to them
he did without the music. (28) The great
St Bonaventure, the second founder of the Franciscans, continued this emphasis
of St Francis on moral values over aesthetic ones exemplified in his book On Retracing the Arts to Theology. However, though Franciscans have
produced few artistic works themselves, they have inspired a tremendous amount
in others by preaching the Good News and allowing it to leaven society. Numerous composers, poets and artists have
produced works inspired by the Franciscan vision.
ISRAEL:
The pre-eminence of moral
over cultural values can be seen clearly in Israel’s history. Christopher Dawson says that the religion of
Israel was unique in all world religions, as the latter were all linked to some
great world culture and Israel by comparison, was neither rich, cultured or
highly civilized. (29) But Israel was pre-eminent in the moral
sphere. It had the most sublime morality
at the time and was the envy of surrounding pagan nations. Many cultured and civilized Romans and Greeks
became proselytes of the Jewish faith because of the admiration hey had for its
religious and moral values. The Jewish
writer, Haim Kreisel, said: “It is morality that distinguishes our heritage
from the heritage of Athens and Rome.
Morality, not beauty, is our overriding concern”. Jerusalem
Post, 19/1/95. Dawson maintains
that “civilization is a road by which man travels not a house for him to dwell
in. His true city is elsewhere”. (30)
With the Church, the New
Israel, there is a continuity in this pre-eminence of the moral sphere. Pope Pious XI has stated that “the objective
of the Church is to evangelise, not to civilize. If it civilizes it is for the sake of
evangelisation. Christ gave his Church no proper mission in the political,
cultural, economic or social order. The
purpose He set before her is a religious one”.
MEDIUM AND MESSAGE:
Pope Gregory the Great is
quoted favourably in an essay by SA Lewis on culture to the effect that Gregory
said our use of secular culture was comparable to the action of the Israelites
in going down to the Philistines to have their knives sharpened! If we are t convert our pagan neighbours, we
must understand their culture, Lewis maintains.
He noted that Pope Gregory vaunted the barbarity of his literary style
to show the message was more important than the medium. (31)
In another place Lewis
stresses the importance of people over culture:
“There are no ordinary people.
You never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilization – these are mortal, and their life
is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it
is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal
horrors or everlasting splendours. Next
to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object present
to your senses.” (32)
EVANGELISATION:
If we are really concerned
about the decline of Christian culture and about the bad influence of the media
and the permissive society, the best and most constructive thing we can do is
to undertake a course in evangelisation and start evangelising so as to allow
the leaven of the Gospel to change minds and hearts. If we look after the pence (changing people)
the pounds (culture) will look after themselves! This may meet a lot of resistance initially
as often the Good News is bad news first to our sinful selves that have to die
and be born again and this can be a painful thing.
Pope John Paul II said that
if we are not evangelising we have never been evangelised ourselves! Evangelism is an imperative for all and
whether culture or aesthetics develop is of course a secondary thing to the
urgency of binging souls to salvation in Christ.
If we find the many changes
taking place in society disturbing and feel besieged by the mass media’s
hostility to our attempts at evangelisation, we can learn from our Church’s
history how similar storms in the past have been faced. When in 410 AD the savage barbarians invaded
and sacked Rome, the centre of civilization, it seemed like the end of the
world for the Christians at the time.
They were not too far wrong, as the devastation of the barbarians led to
the Dark Ages. It was to address this
profound anxiety and disorientation that St Augustine began writing his
monumental City of God. It is divided into five main parts: The Creation, the Fall, the Revelation, the
Incarnation and the Resurrection. (33)
THE CITY OF GOD:
The purpose of Augustine’s
work was to answer the pagan anti-Christian philosophers and give direction to
confused Catholics. According to one
writer commentating on The City of God
– “material civilizations and social cultures have their rise and fall,
but their value lies simply in their capacity to assist mankind in its progress
towards the City of God. This is the
standard by which they are to be judged.
Our own civilization will pass as those of the past have done; there is no need either to fear or to regret
it. For the ‘schema’, the ‘outward form’
of this world as St Paul called it (1 Cr. 7:31) is passing away; but beneath the outward form, there is being
built up continually the Body of Christ which is the unity of mankind in Truth
and Charity”. (34)
At this moment in history
many Christians feel as besieged by the scientific mentality with its
horizontal view of reality and resulting practical atheism as Augustine’s
contemporaries were besieged by the barbarians.
F.S.C. Northrop noted that “Einstein’s experiments, later confirmed by
many experiments, indicate that there is no privileged frame of reference for
the observation of phenomena. Neither
the sun nor the earth is the centre of the Universe. All objects are cosmically equal as
permissible primary reference points, the mathematical laws of nature remaining
the same regardless of which one is chosen”.
(35) This, of course, can lead to
profound disorientation and relativism, but John Macquarrie states that in our
Christian religion the event of Jesus Christ is believed to be revealing of the
meaning of all history. It becomes a
kind of paradigm for the interpretation of all experience. It founds a worldview for it provides a basic
perspective (or blik) from which one looks out on experience and in the light
of which events are evaluated and one’s own conduct is regulated. (36)
CHRIST THE ROCK:
So we Catholics are not
totally adrift in a sea of relativism for thanks to Revelation we have secure
and realistic information about God, man, the Church and the world. Christ, the Rock, who is the same yesterday,
today and forever (Heb. 13:8) is an anchor for our souls (Heb. 6:19) and by our
faith in Him we are sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see
(Heb. 11:1). For confused Catholics
today the reality is Christ and the Catholic Church he set up as the ‘pillar
and the ground of truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15) and against which the gates of Hell will
never prevail (Mt 16:18). We should not
be confused by the numerous conflicting theologians but rather follow the
official Magisterium of the Church. We
do not need to start from scratch to found a New Testament church and re-invent
the wheel – as some are attempting to do in South Africa. The Church has already been set up by
Christ. Great Britain, the home of many
Protestant churches, is littered with manmade churches now defunct as a warning
for us.
The Catholic, Apostolic, One
and Holy Church founded by Jesus on Peter the Rock, has seen incredible storms
in her history and survived, which surely indicates the guidance of the Holy
Spirit, as lesser institutions would have collapsed ages ago. No wonder the great Protestant historian,
J.A. Froude, was forced to admit: “Yet the Roman Church, after all, is
something. It will survive all other
forms of Christianity and without Christianity what is to become of us?” (37) Another great Protestant historian who had no
love for the Catholic Church, but could make an objective assessment – Lord
Macaulay, said there was never an institution on earth like the Roman Catholic
Church which has seen the demise of so many historical institutions and may
still exist in undiminished vigour when London is a heap of ruins! (38)
The Catholic Church is
bigger than any one country or continent and when it declines in one place it
seems to triumph in another. Christ
loves His Church so much that as Ralph Martin says “at critical times in God’s
work He cares enough to send His mother” as at Guadaloupe, Lourdes Fatima (and Medjugorje?) How can we doubt or worry with such concern
shown by Christ and His Mother for the Church he built on Peter and his
legitimate successors? The Anglican art
historian, Sir Kenneth Clarke, was full of praise for the vast contribution the
Catholic Church has made to civilization and culture, and before he died, he
entered the Church he had admired for so long.
MORAL BANKRUPTCY:
Unfortunately many Catholics
take the Church for granted. They have
been living on the moral capital built up by the prayers, sacrifices and good
works of previous generations without ever trying to replace the rapidly
diminishing resources or give back anything in gratitude for what they have
received. One day we face moral and
religious bankruptcy unless sacrifices are made for the most precious heritage
we have – our faith. Like the great
artists mentioned above by Sir Kenneth Clarke, we should aspire to keep the
faith which has inspired the great saints and see it as something by which we
too should regulate our whole lives.
CONCLUSION:
Finally, I would like to
conclude with a quotation by Jack Grossert on Mariannhill, which sums up many
of the elements touched on above. The
story of the Mariannhill missionaries is one of the greatest and most moving
stories in the annals of missionary endeavour in the whole of Christian
history. Great parts of Southern Africa
were evangelised by an uncompromising band of Trappist monks in the 19th
century led by the extraordinary Abbot Franz Pfanner. Many of the monks were learned and educated
professional men who gave up al as the cost of discipleship in bringing the
Gospel to the Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho peoples.
Grossert writes:
“Religion is the expression
of man’s belief in God. Organised
religion is a ritual which embraces prayers, hymns, testimonies of individuals
and groups of people, as well as respectful actions and gestures and these are among
the greatest art of the world. When the
heart of man overflows with a desire to express his wonder in God and joy in
all that God has done for him in opening his eyes to God’s Glory, in allowing
him to see God’s salvation, in helping him to walk in the path of righteousness
and in feeding him on the Bread of Life, it is only natural that man should
express his feelings in what we call works of art-painted pictures, sculptured
figures, beautiful buildings with fine decoration, as well as in music, poetry,
hymns and acts of worship.
The work of the missionary
is not complete until those who have accepted Christianity express through
their works of art, the joy which this has brought them. When this happens one can be sure that the
teachings of Christ have taken root. In
the grafting process a change is made to the character of the fruit and it is a
wise and understanding missionary who can accept this change and rejoice in
seeing the freshness of a new vision of the world which God has created.” (39)
REFERENCES
1. The London TIMES 8 Aug. 1988.
2. The Southern Cross, South Africa, 3 May 1981
3.&
4. The Natal Witness, 16 Oct. 1986;
3 March 1986
5. Marie Winn, The Plug-in Drug: TV,
Children and the Family, Penguin 1985
6. Winn, op. Cit. p.148
7. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the
Message, Penguin, 1967, p.14
8. Cardinal Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report,
Ignatius Pr., San Francisco, 1985, p.114f
9. cf Arnold Toynbee, Life after Life,
Weidenfeld, 1976, p.239
10. T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, London 1939, p.39
11. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message!
12. Sir Kenneth Clarke, Civilization, BBC,
London 1969, p.175
13. Rosemary Haughton, The Mystery of
Sexuality, Darton, Longman, Todd 1973,
p.12
14. William Barclay, Ethics in a Permissive Society, Fontana 1971, p.83
15. Russell Abata CssR, Sex Sanity in the Modern
World, Liguorian, 1975
16. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture, London 1948, p.31
17. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, No 53
18. Bishop Bucher, Spirits and Power in Shona
Cosmology, p.15
19. D.R. Morris, The Washing of the Spears,
Sphere Books, p.283
20. Ralph Martin, A Crisis of Truth, Servant
Books, Ann Arbor 1982, p.60f
21. Martin,
op. Cit. p.61
22. The Irish Catholic, 1 Sept 1988,
Article by Peregrinus
23. Allen Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind,
Penguin, 1987
24. Robert Bergin, This Apocalyptic Age,
1972, p.24
25. Bergin,
op. Cit. p.94
26. Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living,
Franciscan Herald Press, 1965, p.1
27. Leonard Foley OFM, Saint of the Day, Vol. 1, p.80
28. Thomas of Celano, Second Life of St
Francis, 97 and 126
29. Religion and World History, edited by J.
Oliver, Image Books, 1975, p.113
30. Op. Cit.
p.21
31. C.S. Lewis, Christianity and Culture,
Collins, pp.17 & 36
32. C.S. Lewis,
The Weight of Glory, p.15
33. H. Daniel-Rops, History of the Church of
Christ, Dent, 1959, p.41
34. B. Griffiths, The Golden String, Harvill Press, London, 1954, p.157
35. Concern Magazine, no.14, April 1970
36. John Macquarrie, Existentialism, Penguin,
p.91
37. J.A. Froude, in M. Geffin, Objections to
Roman Catholicism, Constable, Louvain, 1967
38. Macaulay in his review of Von Ranke’s
Political History of the Popes in 1940
39. Helen Gamble, Mariannhill 1882-1982,
Mariannhill Mission Press, Mariannhill, South Africa, 1982, p.196
