Opplyst liv
Augmenting Religion
This talk was given to introduce and open the autumn plenary session of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference held in Rome 1-5 September.
As we embark on this plenary session here in the city, close to the Apostle’s tomb, we are drawn by the grace of Jubilee to affirm our determined hopefulness as Christ’s ministers in union with Peter. We wish to be true to the exhortation St Peter voices at the end of his First Epistle (5.2), when he tells the Church’s shepherds to tend their flocks ‘willingly, not grudgingly’, and to delight in service, conscious that whatever task we undertake, be it tedious and hard, is somehow service of God — so, liturgy — with effective potential to sanctify both us and the people entrusted to our care.
Liturgically, we are in Week XXII of Ordinary Time. By way of introduction to our work during these days, I should like to share three simple reflections on the collect set for this week. The Church offers it to us as a framework for our encounter.
In English it runs like this:
God of might, giver of every good gift, put into our hearts the love of your name, so that, by deepening our sense of reverence, you may nurture in us what is good and, by your watchful care, keep safe what you have nurtured.
In Latin:
Deus virtutum, cuius est totum quod est optimum, insere pectoribus nostris tui nominis amorem, et præsta, ut in nobis, religionis augmento, quæ sunt bona nutrias, ac, vigilanti studio, quæ sunt nutrita custodias.
The prayer begins with the phrase, Deus virtutum. The translation renders it ‘God of might’, but that is insufficient, really. Virtus can equally mean ‘virtue’. The point is: there can be no true strength devoid of virtue; even as virtue is strong, be it in the midst of fragility. The media often speak of ‘shows of strength’, these days, when they report on the interaction of superpowers or on the violence of ongoing conflicts, of which two in particular, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and Israel’s siege of Gaza, launched in reaction to the gruesome attacks of 7 October 2023, occupy us day and night. Might deployed as sheer strategy intoxicates, blinds, and poisons. It generates cycles of hatred. What a task we have to insist on the possibility of virtue in politics — that delicate art of enabling productive coexistence of peoples, groups, and individuals who live with the legacy of Cain’s fratricide. The Church must speak of this with clarity; above all, she must bear witness to virtue and its transforming power. When Cardinal Schuster lay dying in August 1954, he told a group of seminarians come to see him: ‘It seems that people do not any longer let themselves be convinced by our preaching, but in the presence of holiness, they still believe, they still kneel and pray.’ The call to holiness was, I’d say, of all the strongest note struck by Vatican II, resounding like a gong throughout its deliberations. It must equally stay at the heart of our episcopal charge as an imperative first addressed to ourselves, thus to be conveyed ‘with authority’ (Mt 7.29) to others. Only the new humanity which Christ, risen from the dead, enables can save our world; the Old Adam, left to himself, is still set on a path of ravaging and self-destruction.
The second aspect of the collect I wish to bring out is one we might overlook in translation. In Latin we ask God, to whom all that is best, optimum, belongs, to nurture what is good in us and to keep safe what he nurtures by means of religionis augmentum. The phrase merits attention. To speak, as the English Missal does, of ‘deepened reverence’ is right, but is that all ‘religion’ means? The Fathers deduced religio from religare: ‘to bind together’. The religious woman or man is a person trained to see wholeness where others see fragmentation, who is sensitive to patterns of purposed meaningfulness where the non-religious suspect nothing but chance. Our society in the West has with breakneck speed, within a generation, reached a tacit agreement that any collective pursuit of meaning is a lost cause. This is not just a matter of concern for intellectuals who like to analyse cultural trends so as to moan over them. No, it touches our personal lives with eery concreteness. The eclipse of the notion that life is meaningful, and thereby worthy of reverence, erodes our sense that lives, especially vulnerable lives, must be protected, and that such a pact of protection is what founds society. It is a bitter paradox that Norway, for example, last year rejoiced in the millenium of a Christian code of law that outlawed the murder of infants, recognised in 1024 as personal subjects, not anyone’s possession, while at the same time applying new legislation on so-called reproductive health with explicitly dehumanising character. The increased acceptance worldwide of euthanasia, now accounting for one in twenty deaths in Canada, reflects the same tendency from a different angle, nibbling away at a view of life as an inalienable, infinitely precious good. The loss of the body’s significance, meanwhile, has led to perplexities and anguish that just decades ago would have seemed unthinkable. I happen to believe that a similar tendency accounts for the weakening, in many of our countries, of the body politic: if that body carries no meaning, has no intrinsic purpose, what is there to hold it together except crude dynamics of pleasure, fear, and gain.
In the midst of such chaos, the collect’s stress on ‘augmentation of religion’ takes on new importance. It invites us to seek an overview of things, to explore how they fit together, and how, together, they might be helped to thrive. For Catholics, this exercise in religion applies, too, to the balancing of different aspects of faith, lest we become so exclusively focused on combat for a single issue that we get distracted when iniquities in other areas occur. It is evident: ethical priorities are exploited by cynical political agents in search of votes, concessions, or a few turned blind eyes. While we try to be innocent as doves, we must not forget, in the present climate, that the Lord likewise counselled the cunning of serpents (Mt 10.16).
As Catholics we are well prepared for present struggles. We have a cogent, beautiful language with which to speak of life both as struggle and exultation. Our faith in the Body of Christ enables a perspective at once sublime and realistic on our own flesh. Our experience of communion shows us what society has the potential to become. We must simply train ourselves to see things for what they are and what they have the potential to become. What, in the logic of the collect, enables a true perspective on reality is ‘love of [the divine] name.’ That name, ineffably revealed to Moses as Presence in the Burning Bush, assumed flesh in our Saviour, Jesus, whose name means ‘God saves’. May consciousness that he does indeed, and that his saving will surrounds us now with every bit as much power and virtue as it ever did in the past, guide our deliberations this week and make them fruitful.
+fr Erik Varden
President of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference
