From the editor’s desk

Finding the right balance

It is refreshing to have a bishop who unburdens his mind as candidly and comprehensively as Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue has done in his latest contribution to a series of papers he has been publishing on the state of his diocese, Lancaster. Most of the bishops play their cards so close to their chests that it is hard to know what they think. Indeed, this is one of his points. He says individual bishops should feel freer to speak out on issues of the day, in Church or society, without feeling that they have to defer to the appropriate department of the bishops' conference. In general he is right, and a more open Church would have a more lively exchange of opinion between the leaders and the led, to their mutual advantage. But the overall tenor of his document suggests that his real point lies elsewhere: he does not agree with a lot of what the bishops' conference says or does. The document is noticeably conservative in tone, while the bishops of England and Wales give a general impression of being moderately progressive.

But a broad Church is a healthy Church, and Bishop O'Donoghue's contribution is welcome - provided it is balanced by alternative viewpoints that put forward a less bleakly pessimistic portrait of the state of the Church and where it is heading. He is concerned, for instance, at the fall in Mass attendance; but there is not a lot he is offering that would entice people back. He blames the malaise in the Church since the Second Vatican Council on people misreading that event, seeing it as representing a discontinuity with the Church as it was before - the "year zero" interpretation. That indeed is a misreading; but it is not the reason people have stopped going to Mass. The causes of lapsing from faith are complex and numerous, and deserving of lengthy consideration not only by the hierarchy but parish priests and laity too.

Bishop O'Donoghue is much nearer the mark when he calls for greater appreciation of the riches of the council's teaching, and he does the Church a service by recalling the eternal truths that the council found new ways of talking about, in, for example, Gaudium et Spes (on the Church in the Modern World). He insists that the Church's teaching on social justice is not an optional extra but at the heart of the faith, as important as, for instance, weekly Mass attendance. This, and his emphasis on Vatican II overall, is not something conservative Catholics usually say, and in such respects he makes himself an unlikely hero for them. Nor is he an enthusiast for the extraordinary (Tridentine) rite of Mass, and he regards the liturgical reforms since the council as necessary and welcome.  

Bishop O'Donoghue is due to retire from Lancaster early next year - he has a coadjutor in place, Bishop Michael Campbell - and some would see this latest paper as a last hurrah, a final testament. He is circulating it to all other dioceses in England, so clearly he regards it as valid beyond the Lancaster   boundaries. But most bishops will find his line too hard. The right balance between continuity and change is not always easy to find. His insistence that the way forward is to go back to an older and stricter way of being Catholic sits rather uneasily with the view he also endorses - that Catholicism must evolve if it is to live.