On Saturday night a patch of land outside Kraków became a field of light. From a distance, the field had a mellow glow. Up close, you could pick out individual faces, lit up from below by candles. In the Campus Misericordiae (“Field of Mercy”) stood 1.5 million young people: the hope of the Church in a turbulent and often dispiriting 21st century.
As you looked at that shining field, it was hard not to think back to events earlier that week in a village church in Normandy. Fr Jacques Hamel, an octogenarian priest, was slain at the altar by Islamists. He is said to have fallen backwards after his attackers slit his throat, so it is possible that the last thing he saw were the candles burning on the altar where he had just been celebrating Mass.
The killing of this humble country priest has sent shockwaves through Europe. Some argue that this is just the beginning: that there will be many other Fr Hamels before the century is over. Others believe we are nearing the end: that ISIS picked the softest of soft targets because it is facing annihilation on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. We should not have to wait long to find out who is right. Whatever the future holds, we should keep that image of the radiant field of young Catholics at the forefront of our minds. The youngsters show us how to respond to the hideous crime in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray: not with a torrent of words, but by letting the light of our faith burn brightly before others.
We must do this above all through our daily actions. This is one of Pope Francis’s great intuitions: that in our age Catholics must not only proclaim the faith verbally, but also in deeds. He is a master of the rich gesture: washing the feet of Muslim women prisoners; throwing a wreath into the deadly waters of Lampedusa; gently hugging a boy with cerebral palsy in St Peter’s Square.
Some say that Francis gained this insight from his friend Alberto Methol Ferré, a Uruguayan philosopher who died in 2009. Methol Ferré argued that Christianity in the West faces a climate of “libertine atheism”. This, he said, is not an ideology that can be demolished intellectually, but rather a way of life. “A practice,” he wrote, “must be opposed with another practice; a self-aware practice, of course, which means one that is equipped intellectually. Historically the Church is the only subject present on the stage of the contemporary world that can confront libertine atheism.”
If he were alive today, Methol Ferré might argue that the Church is also the only subject capable of offering a complete and compelling response to Islamism. He might regard Islamism above all as a “practice”, rather than an intellectual proposition, and suggest that the best response to it is “another practice”: the whole-hearted living out of the Catholic faith.
In a week that two teenagers committed a savage murder, the youngsters in Kraków presented the world with that true “practice”. They have lit up the path ahead.
The Pope has designated the former parish church of St Ignatius in Preston, Lancashire, as the new cathedral of the Syro-Malabar eparchy in Great Britain. This is Britain’s second eparchy and will provide for the pastoral needs of Syro-Malabar Catholics in this country, who number about 40,000.
The Syro-Malabar Church is one of 22 Oriental Churches in communion with Rome. As such, it has its own structures and canon law, and is thus called a Church sui iuris. The Syro-Malabar Church has about four million members, and is the second largest Eastern Catholic Church; the largest is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which already has an eparch for Great Britain, and a cathedral, dedicated to the Holy Family in Exile, in Mayfair, London. The Ukrainian eparch Bishop Hlib Lonchyna is a member of the Catholic bishops’ conferences, and he will now be joined by the Syro-Malabar eparch.
St John Paul II was particularly solicitous that the Church should breathe with both lungs, both the Western and the Eastern; indeed, both are needed for the Church to be a true witness to its universal nature. In many countries, Eastern Catholics can, and do, frequent Catholic churches of the Latin Rite, especially where there is no provision made for their own Rites. But it is clearly pastorally and ecclesially desirable for Syro-Malabar Catholics, mainly from Kerala, to have full access to their own liturgy and church life. Moreover, Latin Catholics in Britain will be enriched by the experience of meeting Syro-Malabar Catholics, and witnessing their liturgy.
The inauguration of a new eparchy in Britain should be an occasion for much celebration, as well as a practical reminder that the Catholic Church, so often misconceived as monolithic, is – though strongly united in faith and obedience to the Pope – diverse in its liturgy, laws and customs.
While the Latin Church is large, and the Oriental Churches much smaller, numbers alone are not decisive. We have much to learn from the experiences of the Eastern Catholics. Our Syro-Malabar brethren have plenty to teach us, particularly about prayer, devotion to the sacraments, and reverence in the Liturgy.
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