Over the last few months, as I have been writing, I have been asking many questions and seeking the answer not in false certitude, but in a much deeper quest. I find the same malaise among many people in our times, among people who are believers and seek to serve other people, among people who are not materialists. These are the people, or I could say we are the people the Churches have not reached. Nowadays, in many places, trying to interface with the Church is like trying to communicate with a computer without a keyboard or a mouse. One interfaces with the Church through the parish and the local diocese. If those infrastructures have rotted away, then there is no Church in that place. You have then to move house or live your faith according to another conception of the Church.

From time to time, I look at “liberal” sites, and the issues seem to be pretty single – LGBT and women clergy. The more “they” want to ram these matters down our throats, the more we revolt on this new incursion on our freedom. “Liberals” are actually anything but liberal, and they do not seem to be interested in other people’s freedom. Truly liberal Christianity is to be found elsewhere than in the corridors of those screaming “injustice” when their Church decides to ordain women bishops but leaves a loophole open to those opposed to the ordination of women for theological reasons. For the radicals, there is to be no freedom for dissenters. It is human nature, like when the French revolutionaries proclaimed liberty, equality and fraternity and promised to shorten the necks of those who were against their way of bringing about these noble goals of modern democracy. Thus, the guillotine worked overtime, and the knitting ladies in la Place de la Concorde never missed a stitch as the heads fell into the basket! Charming…

Christianity is about freedom and the transformation of the person, about doing what Christ set out for us to do. Churches wander away from the Gospel in various ways, either by distorting the original Catholic tradition to such an extent as it is no longer recognisable or by gravitating towards the autocracy and spiritual totalitarianism of Roman Catholicism. That is normal, because it is human nature which is not very dissimilar to the behaviour of wolves and dogs. We hunt and wage war in packs and gangs, we fight to dominate and exercise power over the underdogs. The alphas get the best bits of meat and the underdogs only get something to eat if the alphas have stuffed themselves and can eat no more. They establish their territories and guard them with ferocity. Anyone who has kept a dog will know that this is the way they behave when a pack goes beyond about ten individuals. And so it is with humans. We are more rational, and have more than snarling faces and flesh-tearing teeth – we have guns and bombs and technology that can blow the whole planet to hell. That is humanity without God, at least the alphas and the psychopaths. The key is empathy and concern for others – just the two things that make us different from snarling wolves. Those are the things that make us underlings, the Untermensch or “sub-humans” as the Nazis used to say. The SS judged and punished men for compassion towards the people they were ordered to kill and work to death. They were wrong, because true nobility is in empathy and compassion, what separates us from brutes and ferocious beasts.

I see things in very simple terms. There is a religion of the Alphas, the mean exclusive world view that seeks to “own” God and every means of happiness. They would ration and channel the sun and make it available only for those who followed their way if they got half a chance! Of course this is the reductio ad absurdam of many who would never consciously go so far in their thinking and attitude. Thus we have fundamentalists in both Protestant and Catholic traditions. Perhaps a church run by anyone other than Alphas would not last very long. We non-Alphas are less well organised and have moral issues over trashing other people and quietly eliminating them when they are inconvenient for our agenda.

We desperately need an alternative to the religion of the Alphas and the kind of “liberalism” that is the same thing in a conjunctio oppositorum, a serpent eating its own tail. Voltaire in the eighteenth century hit the nail on the head when he identified the need for tolerance. If some of us have been ordained in the passage of our lives and we find ourselves eaten out of house and home by the Alphas, then we will be inclined to use the gifts we have received in a different way, to serve humanity and the planet according to that gift. Priesthood enables us to administer Sacraments to believers and to offer the Eucharist. The official Church says we are not allowed to do so and that we have “stolen” our ordination rather than hand it all back on the altar of laicisation. When I ask myself whether they are right, others say I should remain faithful and serve differently. That is a kind of call and mission, just as legitimate as one coming from the Pope or an official bishop in his state-recognised diocese.

And so, lacking buildings, money and stable congregations (people call on us priests when they have a particular need), our ministry is more of a presence. We are lights burning in the darkness, perhaps with little more than a dim glimmer like our sanctuary lamps, but giving light all the same. It is a matter of principle that I spend about 10 Euros a month on olive oil for my sanctuary lamp, which I carefully keep alight at all times. No one else sees it, except that a dim flicker can be perceived through the little false gothic windows at night. I find it difficult to believe that no one has noticed the glimmer even if they are cynical, unbelieving or committed to “staying with the true church or none at all”. The priesthood, even of the most déchu, is a permanent testimony and sacramental presence.

We have hashed out the questions of ecclesiology, whether the Church is a single organic – and above all human – entity, under a pyramid structure (as we still seem to be in the late nineteenth century for many). Is it rather something that works like a hologram? A hologram is one of those things schoolboys with enquiring minds find fascinating: it can be broken and the whole picture can be seen in each divided part, however tiny. I am convinced that people are fully “in the Church” even if their community consists of a priest and his cat and a couple of people with canonical irregularities that alienated them from Rome. I have often written in defence of the Old Catholic idea, which is lived nowadays outside that other “Alpha church” called the Union of Utrecht.

I go further in my thinking. The more a Church becomes numerous, institutionalised and “official”, the more it becomes an expression of human domination and the spirit of the Gospel is inevitably lost. If we “steal” Orders and the Sacraments, it is in the same spirit as a starving person steals food from a shop or a farm. The guilt of the theft is mitigated by necessity. We need to be able to offer the sacramental life and spiritual support above all to sinners, whether they be addicts, alcoholics, divorced people or simply those who have failed in their life and vocation. The institution would treat them as dead men, but they are not dead. Christ came to forgive the sinner and raise the dead, but the “official” Church screens and trashes. We need to stay small and humble, create relationships and friendships – but without empire-building, manipulating and abusing the weak, grabbing money and rushing for the highest places like the Pharisees.

The future seems bleak. We can’t live from our priesthood, but have to work for our living according to our skills, qualifications and professional experience. If we want to celebrate Mass in a nice chapel, we can work for it and do the concrete-laying, tiling, plastering, electrical work, carpentry and vestment making. We can do the rounds of the flea markets and buy what we cannot make ourselves. If we can’t do those things, then we have to make the living Temple of Christ out of a room in our house and common furniture. For each man to do what he can, as this is part of our ministry. We are often criticised for worshipping in garages and rented shops, but this is no more or less than what missionaries in Africa do. They build and think positively – and what a refreshing change from those who say that you have to be a stipendiary priest in a diocese with a parish and a nice church – or get stuffed! When you’re on a boat and the mast breaks, you either get home somehow or perish – that is jury-rigging. We do the same thing with our life in the wider Church and our priesthood.

But it is bleak and humbling, and seems so pointless to us at times. The temptations of pretending to be the official Church need to be nipped in the bud. We are “ordinary guys” but with a gift from God, as much “of the people” as anyone else, just as susceptible to getting ill or sick or facing adversity as anyone else. If we remember that, perhaps we might help to make of Christianity something other than a black stain on the history of humanity.

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Just to be clear about my use of the word Alpha. I use it to describe dominant dogs and humans, and do not intend to cast aspersions on the Alpha Course some churches use to introduce un-churched or ex-churched people to basic Christianity. The word Alpha in its original meaning is simply the first letter of the Greek alphabet. The word alphabet is derived from alpha – beta, the first two letters like A and B of our Latin alphabet. So, the target of my criticism is the instinct of dominance, which when unchecked becomes evil and criminal behaviour.