Talk at Imagining the Ecumenical Book Launch
14 Oct 2016 - by
On Thursday October 6, 2016 Paul Collins launched John D'Arcy May's book, Imaging the Ecumenical: A Personal Journey, at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. Below is a copy of Mr Collins address (or you can download the speech here).
This book is a drama in four acts. The first brilliantly details John May's formation in the OTC – "the one, true church", i.e. Catholicism; the second outlines John's transition or, if you like, conversion from the OTC to a broader ecumenism; the third is John's encounter with the "convoluted" ecumenism of Papua New Guinea; and the fourth looks at ecumenism in Ireland as a way to peace and pluralism. As John says life stories are "a fruitful medium for theological reflection" (p 11), and that is especially true when the reflector is a theologian par excellence.
By ecumenism John doesn't mean politics between the churches, but "the much more dramatic story of humanity's quest to live together peaceably and in harmony with the planet which is our home. This, in the end, is what 'the ecumenical' really means" (p 13). This, for John May, and for all of us is a long journey.
The first part of the story focuses around a formation in the OTC and begins in the Western District of Victoria, a region that was the scene for a number of dreadful Aboriginal massacres. John describes a country Catholic boyhood in very Protestant town—Hamilton. He was educated at Monivea College named from the original house on the property which, in turn, was named after the Ffrench family's Monivea Castle in County Galway. The college was run by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC) and after leaving secondary school John chose the priesthood over the law and entered the MSC order's minor seminary at Douglas Park, NSW in 1959. He had grown-up in a strong Catholic community. "We were Catholic and that was that. There was no information, not even a mention, of non-Catholic Christians, or non-Christian religions" (pp 29-30).
After a year finishing secondary school John entered the novitiate in 1960. Essentially this was a kind of boot camp preparing for religious life and the priesthood. But despite the harshness of the training John perceived that he was actually being trained to join an elite. He says: "Although we were being systematically humiliated and corrected at every turn, by virtue of this very discipline we were acquiring an insidious sense of superiority. We were the elect…fortified by a sound education and impeccable manners…[working for] the good of humankind" (p 32). This kind of training worked reasonably well for well-nurtured young men but, as John shows for some it was appallingly destructive.
Graduating from novitiate "boot camp" in 1961 John was sent to Canberra to study philosophy. After philosophy and some university studies at the Australian National University, he went on to theology at Croydon in Victoria. And so after a year's novitiate and seven years philosophy and theology John was ordained on 2 July 1967 in Saint Patrick's Cathedral by Bishop Arthur Fox, the man who famously said during the Labor party split of the 1950s and 1960s that "it was a sin to vote for the Labor Party"!
There is a real sense, as John points out, that he lived in a kind of "cloud-cuckoo land" while his contemporaries were dealing with much more serious issues; an example is the young women who were dealing with life and death at age 19 and 20 as trainee nurses. However, John correctly points out: "Though from one point of view one could say that we wasted the best years of our lives on futile casuistry and logic-chopping, from another point of view it is equally true that we enjoyed an unparalleled education which provided us with what photographers call 'depth of field', an ability to bring into focus the ancient and medieval sources of what became Europe and the modern world" (p 43). There is a sense in that while parts of the education were unrealistic and antiquated, there was also much within it that was of value.
He also mentions that soon after ordination the encyclical Humanae vitae was issued in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. He says that "For me, looking back, this was to be a turning point" (p 48). As he points out the key reason why the pope didn't approve contraception, despite all the advice he got, was that he was trying to protect papal authority and the good of couples was sacrificed to that.
The second part of the story begins after John's ordination. It was then that he was sent to Rome to do post-graduate theology, and after completing that he decided to go to Münster in Germany to do his doctorate. His superior (boss) at the time was an Oxford educated priest, Father John F. McMahon who commented that "The Germans: they're difficult people to live with!" It was at this time that John published his first article "What is Political Theology?" in the small circulation Australian theology journal Compass in 1970.
In Münster John first joined Walter Kaspar's doctoral seminar (later Cardinal and Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity) and then after Kasper, in Peter Lengsfeld seminars which "became the driving forces of my intellectual development" (p 60). He describes Lengsfeld as a German professor trying hard not to be a German professor, but John was inspired by him to take up the analysis of the use of language in official ecumenical documents as he tried to reconstruct how institutions think and "do" theology. Applying Berger and Luckman's sociology of knowledge, John focused on the way churches use their teaching as "plausibility structures" to maintain their legitimacy. He talks about "the manoeuvring of churches and ecumenical institutions as they sought to preserve their power and authority while going through the motions of ecumenical rapprochement. At the heart of these studies was the fragility of denominational identity as an historical product, rather than the expression of divinely revealed truth it was given out to be" (p 75).
Another key issue in the book is John's conviction that "there is little point in striving for church unity without considering the growing awareness of the unity of humankind as its context" (p 72). It struck me reading this that perhaps this explains the decline in interest in ecumenism: nowadays there is serious questioning of the unity of humankind and the re-assertion of particularity and nationality.
At the same time John describes with discretion and delicacy his developing relationship with Margareta Klopp. No doubt he had an writing-assistant here! He describes the painful process of leaving the priesthood: "It was the loneliest decision of my life, the only one I made on my own and with full conviction. It unleashed the shadows of the unconscious to plague me with feelings of guilt and dread; eight years of intensive formation in the opposite direction were not easily laid aside. But…it brought peace" (p 67). He also faced the degrading process of "reduction to the lay state", a legal process demanded by the Vatican of anyone leaving the Catholic priesthood. The use of the word "reduction" to describe the "lay state" tells you everything about the hierarchical church's regard for the laity.
Meanwhile John was studying Sanskrit and Pali and he took the opportunity to visit Sri Lanka. Here he met Aloysius Pieris, a Jesuit priest who had developed an Asian approach to spirituality and theology, going beyond the colonial Euro-centric faith that had been imposed on Sri Lanka by foreign missionaries. Here he also developed his interest in Buddhism and its complexities. Out of the Sri Lankan experience came a new project: "to determine if and how there could be communication between the great religious 'systems' to which they gave rise in a world of evolving religious pluralism" (p 88). Interestingly, John thinks that Buddhism "presents the most profound intellectual and spiritual challenge to Christianity" (p 90). He was later to experience more of the complexities of Buddhism in Thailand and Japan
In 1983 the third act began. John, Margret and daughter Katrin moved to Papua New Guinea where after complex ecclesiastical manoeuvres John was funded to do "ecumenical work…with the Melanesian Council of Churches" (p 91), an outfit that turned out to be "in dire straits". But what emerges from John's account is the sheer diversity of Christianity in PNG and how ridiculous it is to maintain the old-style Christian divisions there. In the early-80s the missionaries and to an extent the locals were still rehearsing Reformation and Counter-Reformation scenarios with an admixture of evangelicals and fundamentalists thrown-in. What PNG Christianity has to discover is a Melanesian way of living Christian faith and the gospel. John quotes a local Lutheran elder who said: "Enough of Lutherans, Catholics, the SDA (Seventh Day Adventists). Jesus Christ is one, and Christians must be of one mind and one faith with him!" (p 106).
But, as anyone with a nodding knowledge of church history will tell you—particularly a knowledge of the post-fall-of-Rome conversion of Europe—all this takes time, like probably several centuries! Here John quotes an historian of the South Pacific, Ron Crocombe. Crocombe says that the Melanesians as well as the missionaries "seemed to realize that the alienating European package that was dumped on their house steps contained something unique, transcendent, universalizing and liberating, both personally and socially, which, though itself complex, we can call 'the Gospel' for short. Buddhism performed the same function for Asia, as did Islam for Arabia and later North Africa. This, in the end, is just as 'alien' to us as it is to them; contact with it undermined the imperial might of Rome just as surely as it released the creative energies of the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Gauls and Germans and created Europe; and if they let it, it can do the same for the Pacific" (p 109). How true that is!
Suffice to say that John's and Margret's and Katrin's experience of PNG had its fair share of exasperation. He says of the Melanesian Council of Churches: "It is beyond my comprehension how anybody…could be so wantonly, so all-embracingly inefficient and disorganized" (p 125). That sounds like PNG to me!
And so to part four: Ireland and the Irish School of Ecumenics (ISE). Founded by Michael Hurley, SJ, the School aimed to introduce "to Ireland the new theology emanating from Vatican II …within an interdisciplinary theoretical framework which would integrate interreligious relationships and issues of social justice into ecumenical theology" (p 142). And just when you thought it was going to get easy for the Mays—after all "living in a third world country involves considerable culture shock for Westerners", John says it is "as nothing compared to the reverse shock of returning to live in the West" (p 139).
However, Ireland in the 1980s was, as John suggests, a little like PNG, and underneath the smiles there was "layer upon layer of political and religious complexity" (p 139). As Professor Oliver McDonagh points out in his book States of Mind the Irish and the British (and Australians) have very different "states of mind" and attitudes to life. Essentially John was facing the Irish conundrum of "denominational dead ends" (p 147), a kind of madness resulting from a problem "fraught with historical resentments, economic injustices and political complexities" (p 147).
Here we need to remember that the Mays came to Ireland right at the high point of "the troubles". As someone who has been going to the Republic since 1978 (when I was trying to escape the cold of Boston) I noticed—like John—that no one ever really mentioned the north or "the troubles". As John says: "No one in Dublin had crossed the border and never intended to" (p 151). In contrast John's job constantly took him up and down the dangerous road to Belfast. But here we must remember that people blocked out "the troubles" because the Irish Civil War had occurred only 60 years previously and the bitter memories of that period lasted right through until quite recently. As John shows, quoting Una O'Higgins O'Malley (daughter of Kevin O'Higgins, justice minister in the Provisional Government who was gunned down as he was going to Mass in 1927 by anti-treatyites) the historical root of the conflict was land. "The memory of being driven off their land by the invading English centuries before had never died in the native Irish, and the difference between Anglicans, Catholics and dissenters served, in the end, merely as tokens of this deep-seated enmity" (p 151). While, finally, a kind of political solution was reached, John emphasizes the role of small groups and individuals, including the ISE, who reached across the divide to lay "the spiritual foundations for the eventual political outcome" (p 152).
One section of the book that I particularly loved was John's recollection of the World Council of Churches Assembly (WCC) in Canberra in February 1991. I was there with the ABC contingent and I do recall some of the highlights John mentions. The theme was Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. The Assembly had both highlights and low lights. (1) It was held during the First Gulf War and the WCC called on the churches to give up any theological justification for the use of force. This was overwhelmingly supported in the morning and then rejected after pressure from the Church of England (supporting the Blair government) in the afternoon, the fastest turn-around in history! (2) A real highlight was the extraordinary presentation by the Presbyterian women theologian, Chung Hyun-Kyung on the theme "Come Holy Spirit—Renew the Whole Creation". Her approach was religiously all-embracing and it led Orthodox participants to reject what they called to her presentation and the efforts of the saintly Australian-Greek priest, Father John Chryssavgis, now theological advisor to the Orthodox Patriarch, to keep the Orthodox within the WCC fold. And finally there was a near-revolt by the the Catholic present against instructions not to receive Communion at the Lima Liturgy.
But back to Ireland: by 2003 John was able to summarise what the ISE was doing: "We explore the links between international relations and interreligious relations" (p 163). In the end John stands for pluralism—which simply means that the transcendent has many manifestations that go far beyond the exclusivist pretensions of the OTC, the churches and all the great faiths.
As he says: "The challenge we face goes beyond tolerance…[and] dialogue…as a non-committal exchange of views. We are caught up in a process that is on-going and constantly developing in a world knit together by globalization" (p 171).
"Ecumenism is not merely pluralism applied to religion: it must develop an interactive pluralism that is constantly negotiating differences and building relationships. Where the Roman Catholic Church stands in all this is at present not easy to determine…The word 'catholic' means openness to the whole of human culture, endeavour and faith…Unless we learn to acknowledge our differences, to welcome strangers into our midst, and to be reconciled with our enemies, we are doomed and our beautiful planet with us. Despite what secularist and scientistic prejudice decrees, the religions are an indispensable part of this, both as parties to conflicts and resources for reconciliation" (p 178).