COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE?

Fernandel as Don Camillo

Is Christianity no longer a religion for ordinary people?

 This sounds peculiar, I know; but it has been haunting me for a long time. There is, I admit, a splendid congruence between St Paul on the one hand and, say, Pope Francis on the other: both keep hammering away at the extraordinary nature of discipleship, the total availability expected of all followers of Christ, the complete scission beteen them and the “world”, the prodigies of charity we are called upon to perform, the complete solidarity we are expected to show at all times of day, week, or year with the world’s poor and miserable, the entire purity our motives and behaviour must exhibit, and the fact that, as disciples, everyone calling himself a Christian is expected to follow the Master to the Cross, to be nailed there like St Peter or stoned like St Stephen.

 This is the voice of the 21^st-century Church, faced with minority status, massive desertion, indifference on the part of both bond traders and jobless single mothers, and the loss of everything that gave its members simple joys and pleasures.

 Now go back to Giovannino Guareschi’s Don Camillo. Or to the Dutch novelist Aart van der Leeuw’s I and my Minstrel. They show a world – admittedly not in a mode of gritty naturalism – where a village can have a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor, where the former can discuss with the figure on the Cross, where a Sunday can begin with a Mass and end with a dance, where ordinary life (in other words) can be blessed by the priest’s holy water and where ordinary folk can be encouraged, shriven when penitent, and feel that their daily round, with all its difficulties, is regarded by a Father’s benevolent and smiling eye.

 Could it be – I sometimes wonder – that we have put the cart before the horse? That the changes in our Church are not, in fact, a reaction to its desertion by thousands but that said desertion is, on the contrary, at least in part a reaction to the changes?

 There were hundreds, if not thousands, that were touched, healed, fed by Jesus, all over Galilee and points South. There were twelve – count them, twelve – disciples, eleven of whom skedaddled on Good Friday; there were at most 72 apostles, sent to convert the planet. What about the others? What happened to the Roman officer, to the Samaritan woman, to the healed epileptic, to the diners at Emmaus, afterwards?

 To want to re-institute a Church that will bless daily life, expect confession but offer absolution, accompany ordinary people in their problems while projecting a timeless and benevolent authority, is nowadays to put oneself beyond the Pale. I find it deeply sad that not only the Anglican Eucharist but the Catholic Mass no longer offers absolution following the General Confession, giving the worshipper instead only the thin gruel of a conditional.

 The world does not consist only of wealthy financiers on the one hand and immigrant drug dealers in the housing projects on the other. The world mostly consists of simple people doing their best in difficulties ranging from indigence to Alzheimer’s. What they need from the Church is, among other things, a sense of stability, of visibility, of serenity, of being there for them – not (as Pope Francis said at the beginning of his Papacy but has largely negated since) as an activist NGO but as the father and mother they lack, as the kindly encouraging parent or grandparent missing in their world. Not the urgent and absolute love of a saint ready to be stoned for them: the comforting practical love of a family member ready to take them in for a meal, a song, a dance, and a good sleep. They need priests visible in cassocks, nuns visible in habits, timeless liturgies, and a blessing at the end of the day.  

P.S. The original of Guareschi's Don Camillo, Don Camillo Valota, was not only a parish priest but a fighter with the Partisans during World War II and a prisoner in two concentration camps.