From the editor’s desk

Help me in my unbelief

In a remarkable speech analysing the relationship between belief and non-belief, Archbishop Bruno Forte has spelt out the basis for a new type of engagement between Catholicism and the secular world. Speaking to the Catholic bishops of England and Wales at their autumn conference, the archbishop of Chieti-Vasto in Italy made a distinction between "indifferent" non-believers and those who still addressed the questions raised by religion, albeit without faith. His argument was that there is a close relationship between those non-believers who wrestle with the questions raised by non-belief, and those believers who wrestle with the questions raised by belief. (He has little time for those who do not wrestle at all but rest on the certainty of a truth received and possessed.) Indeed, he went so far as to say at one point that believers and non-believers were not necessarily different people.

"The non-believer is not outside believers, but within them: this insight leads to a particular understanding of the life of faith itself, lived now not presumptuously, as something possessed, but in humble awareness of the constant need to put oneself at the service of the truth ..." he declared. "True non-belief is not a facile denial, with little effect on the person concerned. Serious, thoughtful non-belief, which pays attention to the true questions of the world and of life, means suffering; it is a passion for truth that pays a personal price for the bitter courage of not believing."

It is an odd coincidence that 2007 has seen what looks almost like a torrent of anti-religious writings in books and articles, led by the media's favourite atheist, Professor Richard Dawkins. Various attempts have been made on behalf of religious belief to answer and refute these polemics - to show that belief in God is after all reasonable, for instance, or that the version of Christianity a particular writer is attacking is in fact a figment of his imagination and not the reality. It is clearly an argument nobody is about to win. What such controversialists have in common is that they are not indifferent to the issue: they are eager to give an account, to reverse St Paul, of the faith that is not in them. That they do so outspokenly and sometimes offensively may well be a mark of Archbishop Forte's "passion for truth", and therefore should be treated more as a plus than as a minus.

It would take some creative thinking by the bishops of England and Wales to translate Archbishop Forte's words into anything like a plan of action for dialogue with honest atheism, but he has indicated where its foundations may lie. In particular, to admit that faith is often accompanied by doubt may look like an admission of weakness, or even of scepticism, concerning core doctrines, and may require further explanation. But how constructive it would be if the bishops could admit, in the archbishop's words, that "believers are called to question their faith and rediscover the struggle with God as a part of their love for Him. The company that faith and non-belief keep one another in this way has its origins in the one human condition: when human beings ask the deepest questions about their vulnerability to pain and death, they do this not as people who have already arrived, but as searchers for the distant homeland ..."