Requiem for Dom Klaus Schlapps

Posted on Wednesday, 23 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Tomorrow, I will be celebrating a Requiem Mass in the Use of Sarum for Dom Klaus Schlapps who died last Sunday, probably around 11am GMT tomorrow. Those who wish may unite themselves spiritually with this Mass from wherever they are, however far away.

As I mentioned in the Facebook page, I never met Dom Klaus. I have been told that he enjoyed reading my blog. I have always heard about the way he wanted to raise standards of quality of the clergy and a sense of professionalism. He took a dim view of the more “sleazy” and “amateurish” side of independent clergy.

port-royal-des-champs

I have read short accounts about the history of the Order of Port Royal. The original Abbey of Port Royal des Champs was a Cistercian community in France which was suppressed by order of Louis XIV in the context of the Jansenist controversy. The Jansenists were forced to flee from France and were welcome in the Netherlands. Thus a very solid link was forged between the Archdiocese of Utrecht and the “Jansenist” Cistercians. There was the inspiration.

Dom Klaus did an admirable job of reviving the Cistercian ideal in an Old Catholic context, and their web site can be seen by all. It is my hope and prayer that Dom Klaus’s spiritual legacy will live on and that the community may overcome this tragic bereavement and loss of such a fine Abbot.

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The “Classical Anglican” Golden Age

Posted on Wednesday, 23 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Classical Anglicanism™ in Retro Church is worth a read in the light of some of our recent discussions. I don’t have anything new to add, but it seems a fair evaluation.

There is also Anglican Rose with a very interesting article and series of comments from last autumn – ACC Makeover. We need to read these texts, not from the point of view of “I’m right and he’s wrong”, but with an analytical mind to discover the reasons for each argument.

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Technological Prometheanism

Posted on Tuesday, 22 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Now, that’s a mouthful! It’s nothing new, but Pope Benedict XVI is giving warnings of terrible dangers of “technological prometheanism”, meaning something like the message of Mary Shelley in 1816 when she wrote Frankenstein.

It has been a big concern ever since the beginnings of post-Renaissance science and the Industrial Revolution, the fear of the machine and a dystopian future as described by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and just about every science fiction author of our own time. We see the facts in our world. Whether or not we believe in global warming caused by mankind, we do see extreme weather and the effects of pollution, the continuing rape of our planet to profit the few. We are surrounded by noise and we are made to need ever increasing amounts of money to live. Despite being a high-technology user (I’m typing on a computer at this very moment), I have Luddite tendencies. I prefer to be away from the cities and use as little technology as possible, but it can’t be avoided altogether. At least it can’t without some very radical decisions being made in life.

Well the Pope is adopting a strange kind of language that hasn’t been heard since the days of the Popes Pius from the heady days of La Tradizione son’io to the anti-Modernism of the early 1910’s and the post-World War II period. He means well, but we haven’t to forget that he has no personal experience in the world of science and technology. Yes, He’s had a go with Twitter – big deal! I doubt he has used it more than once. I don’t blame him, as Twitter and Facebook belong to a philosophy of communication that it foreign to anyone over the age of some of our kids with little more intelligence than a computer of the 1980’s with its hard disk and RAM measured in kilobytes! Benedict XVI is a priest, someone who has studied theology to a very high level, and who has a small amount of experience administering a diocese before he became a Vatican bureaucrat. Most of us clergy tend to be attracted to the humanities rather than the sciences – and so we are natural Luddites.

I am wary about clergy making judgements about aspects of human society with which they have little knowledge and experience. People often make this observation, as with celibate men making judgements about marriage, family and sexuality.

Little has changed since 1816 and the idea of sewing together pieces of dead bodies, the best bits from each and bringing the creation to life with lightning bolts during a thunderstorm. Sixty years ago, it was nuclear energy and atomic bombs. Now it is genetic engineering, cloning and enhancing human bodies with machines. We also have quantum physics and enormous underground machines that can create “God particles”, matter from pure energy, and antimatter. I admit it is frightening, especially the biological revolution.

The Pope brings the philosophy of gender into the discussion. The problem of men and women is as old as humanity itself. There have been times when men oppressed women as today in fundamentalist Islam and certain periods of Christian history. At other times, it has almost been the other way around. Extremes oscillate, and sometimes society finds the happy medium for brief periods of time. Perhaps our own time is unique in the question of some people wanting to change their gender by surgical and chemical means. There must be statistics somewhere. I don’t think I have met more than one or two “transgendered” people in my whole life.

Short of this grotesque surgical procedure, some of us can have passing ideas and fancies about the opposite gender. Years ago, little boys were not discouraged from growing long hair and dressing up as girls to play in the house. I have seen a portrait of my wife’s grandfather dating from the 1900’s with beautiful locks of long hair. This is a part of the discovery of life. Jung’s psychology describes the animus and the anima in man, his masculinity and femininity, the primitive androgynous state of man. I think that the exaggeration of masculinity presents a danger to boys, just like the opposite for girls. A part of our individuation is to discover the balance of masculine and feminine within ourselves. There are no simple answers, but the danger is certainly found in extremes.

The surgical procedure involving making a person appear to be of the opposite gender is something I find quite revolting, because it is no more than a change of appearance, however convincing in cosmetic terms. The person remains his or her self, and the gender is not truly changed. If it were, then I would find the idea less abhorrent. But, as I say, it seems to concern a low proportion of human individuals.  The Pope doesn’t seem to be very clear about specifics.

What does the Pope want in the place of modernity and our problems of society? Does he want the old Altar and Throne Alliance, the Third Temptation by which he can “correct Christ’s work”? I doubt it as his theology and philosophy are more sophisticated than those of Torquemada and Bernard Gui, but the underlying temptation is there. We are all concerned with the idea of a return of men like Hitler, Stalin and big bankers who would hoard billions and leave the rest of us to starve. We live in fear like in the 1940’s and 50’s – or some of us do.

It is also true that we are faced with the fundamental choice between God and Satan, but without human freedom, God becomes his nemesis, the Demiurge of the Gnostics and the tyrant of the Old Testament. With unbridled freedom, man becomes rebellious and refuses to serve, because sin enters the picture. What is the Pope proposing, a return to the late eighteenth century – powdered wigs and Gucci sunglasses?

I am often criticised for upholding freedom, but there is freedom and freedom. Freedom is limited by the freedom of other people and the common good. Our rights are limited by the rights of others. Here is an essay on freedom by Nicholas Berdyaev – The Metaphysical Problem of Freedom, and it will be seen that true freedom is not simply being allowed to do anything you want. Freedom is a really tough concept to deal with, but you don’t solve it by eliminating it.

Yes Wahrheit macht frei, as our German Pope would say in his own language. Yes, Wahrheit and not Arbeit. The former means truth and the latter means work, the cruel distortion the Nazis introduced and set up over the gates of their concentration camps. As Jesus told us, the truth makes us free, but which truth? That is the question.

I have always been impressed with many beautiful philosophical and theological ideas from this Pope, as from many books in Fribourg University Library I read in the 1980’s (and I bought copies of them since). There is so much inspiration, but the reality is that words will have little effect until there are profound reforms in the clerical system of the Roman Catholic Church.

The sex abuse crisis is getting hackneyed, but it can’t be swept under the carpet. The clerical system in the Church is accountable to society.

Another hammer blow came this morning: How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini’s millions. Now who is being Promethean? Where is the credibility in this? From whom was all that money stolen from in the first place? Well, journalism is journalism – but there is never smoke without fire.

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Dom Klaus Schlapps

Posted on Monday, 21 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

dom-klaus-schlappsI have just received the news that Dom Klaus Schlapps of the Abbey of Saint Severin in Germany died yesterday afternoon of a heart attack. This community had recently been accepted as a part of the Nordic Catholic Church and the Union of Scranton by Bishop Roald Flemestad. He was born on September 30th 1959 and died on Sunday January 20th 2013, and therefore was only 53 years of age.

I am sure that this monastic community would be grateful for our prayers for their future and for Dom Klaus.

If you wish, it is possible to leave messages of sympathy on their Facebook page.

Requiescat in pace.

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Help, the Loonies are taking over the Asylum!

Posted on Sunday, 20 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Sorry for the provocative title, but the current exchange of comments on Re-reforming Anglicanism? raises many questions about the validity of the assumptions of any of us. Just this morning, I read in a magazine about the fact that the municipal and state authorities in France can no longer afford to maintain the churches those authorities have legally owned since 1905. In consequence, 5% (1 in 20) of those churches will be sold for symbolic prices to developers. Some will become homes, others will become business premises, museums, educational and cultural centres and just about anything we could imagine. Some of the crosses, stained glass windows and statues will remain as a rebuke and a reminder to what is lost.

On the other hand, we might turn this thing around. Many people simply turn around and say “The Church brought it upon itself. It only got what was coming”. As I mentioned in another article, what is life without Christianity? A simple answer is that it is life as it is. Just go out into the street, get on a train, go to work, go shopping. Is it the end of civilisation without religion? No, life goes on. Are people looking for the transcendental absolute or meaning to life. A few might be, but not most people.

If we see things from that point of view, what viability is left to religious groups whose orthodoxy becomes increasingly narrow and exclusive. Comprehensiveness and inclusion seem to be illusions because we feel the need to establish limits. If we want Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals under one roof, why not also women bishops and LGBT people? Why not? On the other hand, you go for narrow orthodoxy and it finishes up like Communism with its purges and pogroms. The knife edge becomes so narrow that no one can live on it. So where do we go? Who are the winners, the loonies or the shrinks? Which ones are crazy and which ones are “normal”?

People are intuitively conscious about this, and realise that human life and Christian religion have drifted so far apart that no relationship between the two is possible. Christianity has to be a sect or has to become so involved in modern human life that it will lose it specificity. Is there a third way? I’m not so sure.

What is the purpose of religion? Let’s face it. It’s us. It is about survival after death in the place of our annihilation and the ultimate emptiness of nothingness. All our achievements and what we thought important – for nothing? It is also a pre-scientific attempt to understand the origin of the universe and where we came from. That is where our interest in history comes from. Otherwise, why should we care about working conditions in a northern English coal mine in 1840?

The second part is over for churches. We don’t look in the Bible for an explanation of what now belongs to historians and scientists. Even ethics are now a secular branch of philosophy. The real “business” of churches is metaphysics, something no one else cares about. This notion is also put into doubt, since those who are interested in scientific evidence of the afterlife and quantum physics discover explanations for metaphysics other than by way of mythology. What have churches to offer?

It would seem that the only things left are certitude and security. The problem is the most ancient of problems, managing our freedom as human beings. Or are we truly someone’s property despite what we find in the laws and constitutions of all civilised countries who learned something from the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946? One fundamental human right is to doubt and ask questions – the essential attitude needed for discovery and creativity.

The ever-widening gulf between conservatives and liberals is the essential cause of the sectarianism from both sides and which has led to the “death of God”. Perhaps this is the greatest evidence for the existence of Satan, that Christianity as Christ meant it to be was nipped in the bud at about the time of St Paul.

Most people I know have either been influenced by liberal Christianity, or their fundamental intuitions agree with it. I have often argued for generosity and inclusuivity, but how generous and inclusive are we. What about those who are beyond “our” limits, those who lie beyond our care and empathy? We are beyond someone else’s care and empathy and are fit only to die and be gone. Surely, there is a distinction between a person’s condition (having only one leg, being poor, etc.) and being sinful! Christ pardoned his own executioners and didn’t even tell them they were doing wrong.

We hear about the trajectory of history, a positive narrative of evolution. After all, if we were going down into disaster and apocalypse, why did Hitler not win the war? Why didn’t we have the ultimate nuclear barbecue in the 1960’s? Why are we still here in spite of the prophets of doom? If that is so, to what are we evolving? Utopia or dystopia? What are we doing with our technology? What has any of that to do with Christ or a story that is more than two thousand years old?

There is also a question of society. I live in a village, but am more connected with people in America and Australia than in the house next door! We are a global village thanks to the Internet and computers that can be bought for about a day’s work. The present Churches are unable to conceive of that reality, yet anything devised to work by internet is scoffed at. How long will we have technology, and what would cause us to lose it and be forced back to pre-modern life? Is that not what we secretly wish for in our agony?

Personally, I have always lived with scientific and liberally-minded people, and I believe in the necessity of accommodating discovery and creativity. It seems as though life after death and a pathway towards light and happiness, perhaps another parallel universe, is possible without the person having been under the domination of a human organisation calling itself a “true church” offering salvation in exchange for a pledge of total obedience and devotion. Quantum physics have changed many things from invalidating Newtonian physics, fundamentalist religion – and – nihilistic atheism. Get used to it? Not easy for any of us…

What is spirituality and prayer? Those words mean so many things to so many people. They would seem to be a connection to something higher than ourselves. Those who are not narcissists are “hard wired” to seek something higher because we lack complete confidence and certitude in ourselves. We find in that higher being a source of empathy and love. It is in our nature to seek to find a better life through some kind of journey and linear evolution, whether by going from one place to another using a means of transport or by making an inner or spiritual journey. It is said that happiness is not having but wanting. It keeps us on the move. Some people look for material things, money and power over others, because they are narcissists. Others seek wisdom and better ways to empathise with others and oppose selfishness and the root of evil.

We Christians are often motivated by the saying of Christ: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will abide. Vanity of vanities! Everything is so fleeting and temporary, including ourselves. Why do we care so much about our fiefs and certitudes? On the other hand, is that not the root of despair and nihilism. Can we not find something of an image of God’s love here in our present life, in our fragile homes, churches, whatever?

There are also parables about caring for what we have and what we are called to do in our present life. We do care about our church communities if there is a glimmer of what it all seems to be about. I don’t think we will ever get down to the bottom of it all.

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Article on the Octave of Christian Unity

Posted on Sunday, 20 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This is an interesting one in Virtue Online – Anglicanism, the Universal Church and the Octave of Christian Unity. Some parts of it could almost have been written by Soloviev!

Towards the end of this long article, I see where it is all going – the union of Anglicanism with Orthodoxy. What kind of Anglicanism? Obviously not what prevails in ECUSA and the Church of England, obviously not Calvinism. Is Orthodoxy ever going to be open to anything larger and ecclesial than small micro-manageable “ordinariates” or vicariates?

I also note that the author of this article, Fr Novak, a priest of the Reformed Episcopal Church/Anglican Church in North America, is not sidelining the Continuing Churches.

We also have a question of interpretation of “completing the Reformation”. The extent to which the Orthodox Churches might accept some Reformation developments and ideas might be a key to what can be united within Anglicanism. This all needs to be clarified from ambiguity. Ideas?

Here is what Fr Novak says, and comments would be welcome. The emphasis in bold type is mine.

* * *

What is Anglicanism’s future? Its future can only be found in completing the Reformation begun in 1534. That means corporate reunion with the ancient patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem as it existed before the Norman invasion of 1066. The provinces of the Anglican Churches in the Global South should simply enter the already existing Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Anglican provinces in the West and North should simply enter into corporate union with the canonical Orthodox Churches in their nations. There are already Western Orthodox congregations in North America, Great Britain, Continental Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of the national Orthodox Churches, has had Western Rite congregations for more than a century.

God has preserved Anglicanism, but not the Anglican Communion. Canterbury is lost, and it would be tragic if Anglicans tried to set up altar against altar in Alexandria, or tried to recreate something that Divine Providence has not preserved, whether it is in Kenya or elsewhere. I am not advocating that Anglicans abandon their identity and Church, and become something that they are not. What I am advocating is that Anglicans fully embrace what they have always professed to be – the English branch of the Catholic Church – and to enter into corporate reunion with the Orthodox Church with which they had been united for more than a millennium. I am not advocating a Western Rite Orthodoxy divorced from the last 1,000 years of history, but an orthodox Anglicanism reunited with Eastern Orthodoxy, and a rebirth of Anglican Orthodoxy. Metropolitan Jonah pointed the way at the first provincial Assembly of the Anglican Church in North America in 2009, and did so again at the second provincial Assembly in 2012.

With the present dysfunctional state of the Anglican Communion it is probably unrealistic to expect the orthodox provinces of the Anglican Communion to act together for corporate reunion, but if a beginning could be made in North America, or elsewhere, a way forward would be shown for millions of faithful Anglican churchmen. God often brings great things to pass from the smallest and most humble of beginnings.

It has been said that when God closes one door He opens another. Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and the Holy Spirit has been leading us and preparing us for this moment in time for the last five hundred years. As Martin Thornton wrote in 1963, Anglicanism is “sane, wise, ancient, modern, sound and simple; with roots in the New Testament and the Fathers, and of noble pedigree; with its golden periods and its full quota of saints and doctors; never obtrusive, seldom in serious error, ever holding its essential place within the glorious diversity of Catholic Christendom” (English Spirituality, p. 14).

My prayer is that 2013 will be the year that Anglicans take action for unity in “the glorious diversity of Catholic Christendom.” We have nothing to lose in corporate reunion, but much to gain. I am convinced that we cannot even imagine what kind of renewal and revival we would see if we only learned to love one another again as Christ’s disciples should, and if the Body of Christ began to breathe again with both lungs, Eastern and Western. I love Anglicanism deeply, and have been working toward the goal of orthodox Anglican unity and Anglican-Eastern Orthodox reunion since 1997, when I was given that commission by Bishop Patrick Murphy.

Brother Roger of Taize has written, “When communion among Christians is a life and not a theory, it radiates hope… How, then, could Christians still remain divided? Reconciliation among Christians is urgent today; it cannot continually be put off until later, until the end of time. Over the years, the ecumenical vocation has fostered an invaluable exchange of views. This dialogue constitutes the first-fruits of reconciliation. But when the ecumenical vocation is not made concrete through a communion, it leads nowhere.”

During this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity will you pray for our bishops and priests in the Anglican Church in North America and its Ministry Partners, and in the Anglican Continuum, as well as for the bishops and clergy of the Eastern Orthodox Churches; and join with me in advancing this Biblical cause (John 17)? Four hundred years of dialogue is enough. May the year of our Lord 2013 be the year that the Reformation is completed and full communion and unity restored; and may this be the Octave of Christian Unity that prepares the way.

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Re-reforming Anglicanism?

Posted on Saturday, 19 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I always enjoy reading the Old High Churchman and the reasoned reflections of Archbishop Peter Robinson, a case in point being his most recent Keeping Things Tidy. As usual, I see the same binary choice being offered between an idealised “patristic” style of worship and doctrinal belief and “corrupt” Rome. Falsus in uno falsus in omnibus. A man has a small cancerous tumour on his back, so the surgeon removes the brain and puts it in some kind of futuristic life-support machine and sends the dead body to the morgue. The analogy is horribly crude, but this is what comes to mind.

How can anyone conceive of a church with formularies that go back four and a half centuries and expect some kind of tolerant comprehensiveness to come out of it?

I am brought back to the old article by William Tighe, Can the Thirty-Nine Articles Function As a Confessional Standard for Anglicans Today?. There may be two consequences of trashing the Articles and other relics of English legalism, becoming Roman Catholic or devising some form of English Gallicanism or Old Catholicism – a local or national Catholicism that transposes Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology onto a western idiom and cultural context.

It is surprising to find a systematic omission of the pre-Reformation English tradition, unless it is simply assimilated to the “abomination of Popery” or so-called corrupt Roman Catholicism. I don’t know if Archbishop Robinson has read Eamon Duffy and the work of other historians who concluded that early sixteenth-century religion in Europe was less superstitious and corrupt than previously believed.The Reformation seems to be just as much built on prejudice and ideology as infallibilist propaganda in the 1860’s. Or the racial and occultist theories of Göbbels and Rosenberg for that matter! Perhaps religion really is something for little children and to be grown out of!

One thing that attracts me to Dr Tighe’s thesis is that he is a historian and submits belief to reason and knowledge.

It seem to become clearer that if the kind of “classical Anglicanism” that insists on the Articles and the other sixteenth century reformed formularies cannot tolerate the “Old Catholic” tendency, then it would seem appropriate for there to be a peaceful and courteous parting of the ways along that line. That would ensure coherence and stability in the two Christian communities.

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Please pray for Fr Laurence Wells

Posted on Friday, 18 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Fr Robert Hart informs us in his blog:

Fr. Wells

I have been informed by Archbishop Haverland that Fr. Laurence Wells is in the hospital because he has suffered a stroke. I urge prayers from all of you.

He will be remembered at my Mass, and may God grant him healing. I ask prayers of my readers for Fr Wells.

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Facing a World without Christianity

Posted on Friday, 18 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I occasionally look at the blog of Fr Ray Blake, who is a Roman Catholic priest in Brighton. He bewails the increasing secularism in England through his entry of yesterday, Like the Monks of Egypt. I have very simple questions to ask.

Essentially, what is it that Christians do that annoys the powers-that-be? I think it is two-sided. I have personally been “out of it” for too long, unused as I am to urban life, to say much of value, but I can offer a guess. On one side, I can only guess that there are hot-headed Evangelicals constantly “witnessing” and bothering people, and a very small minority of right-wing Catholics who think everything is due to the Church – all one-way. On another side, a nurse who holds the hand of a dying person and says a discreet prayer can lose her job. For the sake of the zealots, all Christians can be put into one basket and assumed to be “enemies of the people” – (Now where have I heard that one?).

It seems to be simple. If you are brash and bother people, the system will fight back. What place is left? Fr Blake suggests a return to the monastic life or something like the catacombs. Frankly, I think it would do us all a lot of good! The atheist and secular backlash must be reacting to something. On one hand, it may be inventing its own enemy like the Nazis when they burned the Reichstag and blamed the Communists! On the other hand, there has to be something to react against – bigotry and intolerance. Society then becomes increasingly polarised when everything is related to homosexuality and people wanting to “change sex” becoming something normal.

I had a long talk with my wife about the demonstration of last Sunday in Paris against the Socialists’ project of introducing same-sex marriage. Of course, we are talking about civil marriage, what happens before Monsieur le Maire before the couple goes to church for a sacramental wedding if they are believers and want a church wedding. The real issue here is not so much the couple of men or women, but that heterosexual married couples and single people can adopt children and the children have the right of paternity from their mother and father, or single parent. There is a problem when a child of two same-sex parents (the child being adopted or the result of artificial insemination in countries that allow it like Belgium) suffer from the separation of the couple or the death of the legal parent. The person who is not the legal parent cannot adopt the child and has no rights. Civil marriage of two persons of the same sex would resolve this legal difficulty so that all children would have the same rights as those of heterosexual married couples.

Of course, we could go back to imprisoning homosexuals like in the nineteenth century – but the genie is out of the bottle. Hitler stuck pink triangles to them and sent them to concentration camps and most were murdered. Nowadays, we have no choice other than to accept the trajectory of history, knowing there will be other changes and reactions in the future if the provocation is too great. For those who are Christians, the priest is called to minister to them pastorally like anyone else. Then it is a question of persons and conscience.

We are of course talking about civil law and people who for the most part are not Christians or believers. Intégriste Catholics go from the standpoint of the “social kingdom of Christ”, the rights of the Church over all humanity and the moral duty of all to convert to the true Church. Vatican II introduced ecumenism, the inter-religious dialogue, religious freedom. The 1983 code of canon law states that the Church claims jurisdiction only over baptised and practising Catholics. No claim is made over others. The Inquisition dies hard!

We Christians may disapprove of homosexuality on moral grounds and wish that society were more influenced by Christian tenets, but that is no longer the case. There is also abortion that involves the taking of human life. Abortion is wrong, but doctors and their clients will still do it. As a lesser of two evils, it seems better to allow abortions in proper surgical conditions than forcing the women concerned to resort to the use of knitting needles and coat hangers! And that after having shown the woman what abortion really involves, the bloody and gory killing of a human being. The Church can teach its own faithful about sin and wrong, but not those outside and beyond. The secularists now have strength and have the advantage over religious organisations and believers. Do we still go on rattling the sabre and provoking trouble?

It certainly doesn’t seem wrong to believe that secularism is showing an ugly side of intolerance and hatred of belief and Christianity in particular. English society is side-lining Christianity, and here in France, Christianity is closing down. French secularism has always been vigilant about les dérives sectaires, sectarian tendencies with a number of characteristics that present real dangers to the weak and vulnerable. To be fair, there are some very unpleasant organisations coming over from America, very aggressive, totalitarian and very interested in large amounts of money! There are always two sides to everything.

In recent history, France had anti-cléricalisme from about 1880 up to World War I. There were similar movements in Italy, and corresponding in time with the infallibilist movement of the 1860’s and Vatican I, amidst a number of skirmishes in Europe. Germany had the Kuturkampf, and the Church had to suffer. The clash was essentially an Enlightenment world view against the visceral anti-liberal combat of Pius IX.

How far can the Church go without ceasing to be the Church? In those days, it was a question of separation of Church and State and the believer’s attitude to science. Now, the extremes are pushed ever further apart.

Some unmarried young people might feel inclined to enter a monastery, and others are drawn to “alternative” lifestyles by buying abandoned villages in Spain and elsewhere and living the “good life”. Most of us have to stay where we are, dictated to by our jobs and need for money and the material necessities. We depend on the politicians and the businessmen, and they are holding the aces.

I have no simple answer to everything or even anything. However, I think we can make certain distinctions that will make it less difficult for Christians to live in a secular or even a hostile society. Perhaps in America, you can still knock on doors and “witness”. If I had some kind of “witness” at the door, even if he wasn’t from some weird cult, I would not accept Christianity coming from there. No one I know here in France would either, especially if the religion on offer is something irrational and inhuman.

We have to think as individual persons, think outside the box, and be sober about everything. People will do what they want, and we might feel offended. People have always done their own thing, including wrongdoing, and they haven’t always been punished by the law. We live in an unjust world. We are also “doing our own thing” by being Christians and doing what Christians do. Our rights find their limit at the beginning of other people’s rights, whether they identify with another religion or none.

We will probably be called to worship in houses and small churches, rediscover prayer and the value of spiritual experience. We will certainly need to rediscover the underground church like in China today, in the Soviet Union yesterday or the Roman catacombs centuries ago. The French réfractaires also survived when they didn’t get killed by the revolutionaries, and many of those people really gave their lives for the faith and not for politics and bigoted opinions. We can resist and fight like some people did against the Nazis in France during the war, but not be surprised when we suffer the consequences.

Above all, Christians are no longer the owners or policemen of the world. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, as he responded to Pilate that awful Friday morning. History is no longer in our favour, and it probably never has been. So, it is not a surprise that if we put our head on the block, we are likely to get it chopped off. We cannot provoke without expecting a reaction. So, it seems to be ad fontes!

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Euthanasia and Young People

Posted on Thursday, 17 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Euthanasia and Young People

One evening, my mother and I were sitting in the lounge and we were talking about life and death.

I said to her: “Mum, never let me live in a vegetative state in which I would have to depend on machines and bottles. If you see me in that state, disconnect the machines keeping me alive. I would prefer to die!”

In a spirit of admiration, my mother got up and disconnected the television, the DVD player, the cable Internet, the computer, the MP3/4 player, the Play-2, the PSP, the WII and the telephone. She took my cell phone, my IPod, my Blackberry – and threw away all my bottles of beer.

I nearly died!!!

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