Opplyst liv
Faith in Times of Rearmament
This text is the address by which I opened the plenary spring session of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference this evening, at Maribo Kloster in Denmark.
We are in a jubilee year of hope. It was a grace that we could start it together on a joint pilgrimage to Rome. I have fond memories, not least of our audience with the Holy Father before he was taken into hospital. We were all aware of how unwell he was; yet he was generously present, and hospitable.
The memory that most often returns to me is of an early morning a few days before. Our Norwegian group was gathered to walk to the papal basilicas. The first was St Paul’s Outside the Walls. We arrived there just as the church was being opened to the public. Happening to be at the front of the queue, I snuck in and took up position by a pillar, touched by the beauty of that glorious space bathed in light. The emptiness was gradually filled by reverent, slow-moving, utterly silent Norwegians: no one said a word. There was no guide, yet all were quite naturally drawn to the apostle’s tomb as to a magnet.
Above the tomb is the elaborate ciborium surrounding the high altar; underneath is the chapel of relics where one can kneel before the chain that kept Paul bound in a Roman prison. Leo the Great spoke of that chain already at about the time of the Council of Chalcedon. By then, in the mid-fifth century, the Church was growing throughout the Empire. Shrines were being built, charities flourished, monasteries spread, sublime theological formulae were being chiselled out, the hierarchy enjoyed status and, increasingly, influence; yet Leo reminded people that the Church’s strength lies less in visible accomplishments than in a depth of faith that the apostles’ bones and the signs of their fidelity usque ad mortem render palpable.
What matters for a Christian is not to be admired, or even to be safe, but to say, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’ That was true when Paul wrote these words to the Galatians fifteen years after Christ’s resurrection; it was true when St Leo the Great bade Roman Christians venerate the chains of St Paul; and it is true today. Our pilgrims sensed that in Rome. It was moving and heartening to see it.
For when we look at the world we live in, who would doubt that a renewal of faith is called for? The Holy Father has advised us that we are living through an epochal change, one of those periods in which historical reality is being reconfigured as if by shifting tectonic plates and we are forced to rethink everything, or very nearly so.
There is certainly much shifting going on, so fast it is hard to keep up. The Transatlantic alliance that has been a mainstay of stability in Europe since WW2 is showing signs of breaking up. Everyone, of a sudden, is talking about rearmament. A major European war is kept raging by an aggressor that shares a long, a very long boundary with the region of our Conference. The challenge of migration requires engagement at once compassionate and rational. World-political discourse is seething. Astonished, we note that it is taking, here and there, a theological turn. The vice president of the US was recently pleased to expound his country’s current policy on migrants as an application of the Augustinian principle of the ordo amoris.
Faced with such a claim, we must do more than simply sigh heavenward. This point was made yesterday in a leading article in a major European broadsheet. The commentator urged Christians to sit up and frame a response that is not just moralising or self-justifying. If we, bashful, caught up in internal anxieties and conflicts, or just idly navel-gazing, relinquish our vocabulary, imagery, and stories to secular rhetoric, we shall see them decontextualised and weaponised. The consequences are grave. We shall find ourselves sidelined and muted while the message which is ours to proclaim, entrusted specifically to the apostles’ successors, is taken out of our hands and contorted. The name of the Lord will then pretty certainly, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, be taken in vain.
For quite a long time, it seems to me, the Church in Europe has been a bystander in society, either cornered or up against the wall, forced to answer for its insufficiencies or even betrayals. Such answers must be made in the name of justice, certainly. But they are not enough. If the pope is right: if our time is indeed a time of transition into a new epoch, it is also a time of immense opportunity. Whether the epoch on whose threshold we stand will be better or worse, hostile to God or in his service, depends in large measure on us. For we are, as Paul says, like it or not, ‘God’s collaborators’.
I weigh the words of the politician referred to above with caution. But I am grateful for a question he posed in Munich three weeks ago. Speaking of the need for Europe to up its capacity for self-defence, he noted that this point as such is uncontroversial. He added that it seems less clear ‘what exactly it is you’re defending yourselves for’.
No society, secular or sacred, is formed by reactive measures alone. It needs a purpose beyond fear, one that draws out the best in us: magnanimity, joy, creativity, humanity, our wish to live, and to live together. Europe is at a juncture at which such mobilisation is more essential still than the stocking of arms. In this work our Conference, conscious though we are of our poverty of means, has its role to play.
+fr Erik Varden OCSO
President of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference
Benedictine monks of St Paul’s Outside the Walls carry the chains of St Paul in procession.